Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

My goal is to show students that if they're passionate about something, they can absolutely make a career out of it, and they don't have to wait.

I've always loved editing also. When I was little, I would make little things on iMovie, like trailers just by myself on my mom's iPad. I've just always had a little passion for it. When I found out about Atherton, I saw that I could go into a program with it, and that just increased my love for it a lot more.

I was lucky to have Ava as a freshman in intro to media arts, and she was a great student from the beginning. Like, she was wanted to sit in the front. She was always raising her hand.

I learned, like, storyboarding. Production. I learned how to write professional emails, which was really good. And then I learned all the Adobe's, and it really strengthened my, like, video editing skills. And there is

a need for social media marketing. There's a need for people to be able to create content that looks good and sounds good, and our students know how to do that once they leave Atherton.

I was looking for a marketing internship, and Mr. Borch told me to reach out to Jay Smith. I did a little internship with them for a few months with social media marketing, and I absolutely sell in love.

Because I worked with her in the school program, I knew her, and I knew the quality of her work already. So that networking was much stronger just because I already knew the quality of her work.

We can't say enough good things about Jay. It's not just all about the technical side, like what kind of camera you're shooting on or what kind of programs. It's about being able to market yourself, and Jay has been

instrumental in helping us with that.

I've seen other business owners who have been engaged for several years, and it has completely changed their business.

It really taught me my love and passion for marketing, something that I wanna do when I was little. Video editing can actually be a job that I can go into.

The Iroquois High School Family Health Center has been so successful that the mayor and metro council have provided funding to expand the service to Pleasure Ridge Park High School.

Well, good morning, and welcome to Iroquois High School. We're here because just downstairs from where we're standing in the library at Iroquois High School is Family Health Center Clinic, and it's currently the only clinic of its kind throughout all of JCPS since its opening in January 2024. The Family Health Clinic here at Iroquois High School has cared for more than 1,800 students, staff, and their household members has had over 6,000 visits with Metro Council support. I allocated funding just a few months ago in our mid year budget to build another family health center at PRP High School, and we are so excited to help expand the health services that are gonna be provided to JCPS families next up at PRP High School.

Our students sometimes need help or they don't feel good, they have a disease or they have something, and they come down to our clinic to get checked out.

In a school where more than 80% of our students qualify for free reduced funds, in a school where we have about 40% or more of multilingual learners. This clinic breaks the barriers of students who need it most. The center provides primary care, behavioral health, dental services on-site, allowing us to keep our students healthy and supported and most importantly in seat so that they too can succeed and thrive because they now have access to health care within our schools. Thank you, mayor Greenberg. Thank you, family health centers.

History came to life at the Living Max Museum at Norton Commons Elementary.

Bringing that change, we must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try. Hi. I'm Frida Kahlo La Sada Espresso Agre. It means I paint my own reality. I love to paint. It's one of my most favorite things to do.

So you're at Norton Commons Elementary in our gymnasium, and we are proudly presenting our third grade wax museum where our students picked a historical figure whether it was somebody local from Louisville like Johnny Unitas or Muhammad Ali, and they researched that person, wrote a speech, and then today, they became that person.

Fate, dear Bridget, lies not within the stars, but within ourselves. I impacted history by writing about space and time. I also inspired people with my speeches. I will be known for changing how people thought about being the first. Hi. I'm Mabee Bridges, and I was the first black American to attend in all white school. In life, there's nothing to be afraid of, only many things to learn and many ways to help those in need. Hi. My name is Marie Curie, and I'm a French scientist. I discovered radian and coloniac. I'm still famous for movies and music. Like, I store my speech in my hat like how Abraham Lincoln did with his with his pay with his special papers.

They did phenomenal. I'm so proud of all of them. They did such a great job. And, yeah, I'm excited for everyone to see it.

Students from Muzik Middle School will represent JCPS at the national level. Muzik took the top spot in Kentucky's Math Counts.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the fifth day of the budget hearings. I am the vice chair of the budget committee, Marcus Winkler. We'll be joined momentarily by chairman Kevin Kramer, and we are joined in chambers by councilman Piagintini, councilman Parker, councilman Batshan, councilman Mavi Woolrich, councilman Lininger, and online by councilman Parish Wright, and we'll be joined, I'm sure, throughout the evening by multiple other members. This meeting is being held pursuant to KRS 61 dot eight two six and council rule five a. Our second hearing today is going to be with LMPD but our first hearing is with fleet and facilities and we're joined by many folks from the fleet and facilities team.

I'm going to turn it over to you in just a second. But colleagues as a reminder two reminders I'll give you. Number one, departments will not make opening comments and we'll begin immediately with council member questions. You're allowed to ask three questions at a time and then you'll need to go back in queue. Again I'll call on first time question askers if you're in queue and somebody hasn't asked a question I will call on them first.

Also a reminder that the mayor staff does not have the budget packets that are prepared by our staff. And so if we can just remember as we're framing questions, referencing things in our prepared packets, they're not going to have any knowledge of what page number and those sorts of things so just be cognizant of that. That said welcome Director Woods. The mayor is recommending a 61 and roughly $61,500,000 operating budget and about $40,500,000 in capital budget for the Fleet and Physilities Department. Let me start by asking you about your proposed reduction of almost 600,000 in utilities, custodial services, equipment rental and security services.

Can you talk about how you expect to realize those savings without reducing personnel?

Sean Woods, Director of Facilities and Fleet Management. We do have an attrited position, HVAC position. We've been unable to hire for several years. So that did reduce us by $93,000 As far as the reductions that you discussed, we have removed the Nea Center, LMPD fourth division and Fiscal Court buildings from our portfolio that saved us approximately $586,000 in operating expenses. We reduced our training budget by $46,000 due to lack of enough personnel to do another JCTC class.

It was very successful. Unfortunately, we didn't get enough people to do another class. So we figured we could get the savings there this year. And we reduced contract to custodial services at some facilities from five to two days per week and city hall guards after 5PM from three down to one.

Thank you very much. I'd like to so first of all, madam clerk, let the record reflect that we've been joined by chair Kramer who will be taking over the meeting here as soon as he gets signed in and also by councilwoman Chappell and that's it. And Councilman Joseph, thank you. Director, the just for clarity for the public, Fleet and Facilities manages all vehicles. So, in your budget includes the LMPD fleet, the Louisville fire fleet as well as other vehicles correct?

The capital replacement yes. Yes.

So I'd like to ask you a question related to those vehicles and if you don't have this information at the tip of your fingers that don't necessarily expect it but would be interested. Number one, how many Crown Victorias do we still have in the fleet for LMPD or if we have them in any other department I'd be curious.

38.

38, okay. And we would love to understand what the cost, first of all if any of those are scheduled to be replaced in this year's capital budget and if so or if not what the cost would be to replace all of them. Sure.

Matt do we have that or do we need to get back to you? Can we get back to you on that Matt? Have that detailed information we can provide.

Thank you. And then a directly related question across whether it's public works And maybe you can help clarify this. As I ask this question, tell me maybe this isn't so relevant. But I'd be curious to understand how many vehicles in the fleet have more than 200,000 miles, more than 150,000 miles. And if that's less relevant on something like a garbage truck because they're built like tanks and are meant to have a 500,000 mile, then you can exclude those.

But I don't know what sort of the functional life of heavy equipment versus a passenger vehicle. So if that's the wrong benchmark for that equipment or for a fire truck, I don't know if you want to speak to that. But but I'd be curious how many vehicles in total fall into those categories?

So yeah, I mean I don't have like all the data at my fingertips, but we have a fleet dashboard that does. You can drill down as far as into like every service ticket and every oil change that's been done on a vehicle and then that kind of data is compiled there. And it's going to be different as you expressed for different vehicles, different equipment and we track all of that. And so that interactive dashboard is the best way to find that. We'll certainly provide you the link to that.

Thank you very much. Councilman P. Izentini.

Thank you, Mr. Vice Chair. So a couple of things here. First, the Belvedere, 15,000,000 going to Belvedere. Number one, so this is one question in two parts. So hopefully, only get credit for one question. Will the $15,000,000 be used in fiscal year twenty twenty seven? And if not, could it be spread out over multiple years? Like is that plan to be actually spent next year?

So right now, 7,900,000 has been spent in total, 3,300,000 state funds cost review was due in February. We have 40,000,000 in state funds committed so far and more of that $26.28 state budget will be allocated out of that 90,000,000. We will start the plan is to start demolition this fall and some of that money will be spent. I can't speak to whether or not all of it will be because we haven't laid out a full schedule yet.

So I want to be hyper clear. How much money right now do you forget the $15,000,000.27 dollars because we haven't voted on it yet. How much money right now do you have in the, let's just call it the Belvidere budget, right, allocated to Belvidere state, local, private? How much money is allocated right now to Belvidere?

I really couldn't give you a specific figure on that, but I can send it to you.

Okay. Yeah, I think we need that. And because, I mean, I'll just tell you, I've heard it's over $100,000,000 that Spent? No. Committed is the word I want to use. Yes, committed, right? To your point, that includes, potentially money that have put into, you know, sort of these downtown redevelopment things that are state funds, which the mayor has some discretion over how much goes into which buckets. There was assumptions made there. And I think that also included the 15,000,000. But my understanding is even add this $15,000,000 in, we're over $100,000,000 barely on commitments to the project. So I'd like to get some validation of that.

I'd like to run the reports because it changes as we're designing and paying invoices so we can get a report to you.

Well, to be clear, again, that number, I think, made some assumptions on allocations the mayor will make on dollars that have been allocated to downtown redevelopment. We would need to have an accurate number. We would need to know what the mayor is committing out of those funds. But it sounds like either way, the $15,000,000 is not understood to be spent this year, at least all of it.

It's like I say, without a construction and demo schedule, it's hard to say. We will use some of it if construction or demo begins in the fall.

Got you. Thank you. If I'm reading this correctly, if I'm reading your budget documents correctly, there are you mentioned filled positions or average filled positions in that chart that has fiscal year general fund carry forward agency and other receipts total funding and then average filled positions, it says 176 as of 04/01/2026, very typical. We use that date to base us off of. But then I have a note that there's 194 funded positions. Is that true?

Potentially, yes. I don't know the exact figure, but that may be right.

Hi, Angela Dunn, CFO for Louisville Metro. So that 195 number that you're looking at that's in the funded column, that's a new report. So if you'll recall in the past we've sort of broken out positions into filled and unfilled. This year we're breaking them out into funded and unfunded. But there's still a little bit of work that needs to be done on breaking those numbers out. So in the funded column, and I believe we've shared some information on this, it's in the budget document but in that column that's basically pulling all positions from our PCR. Some have been identified as unfunded but we're still sort of auditing through those positions. So we can get you a clear number on that. It's not precise in this book.

So it would be incorrect right now to say that in addition to the 176 you have another 18 person funded vacant positions. That is incorrect or that is correct? We don't know.

I would say I'd like to reconcile it for you. On the spot I wouldn't want to say black and white yes or no.

Right, we don't know. We need to confirm. Okay, no problem. We'll come back to that when that's confirmed. Last question, there is projects, right? There's almost $30,000,000 it's like $29,000,000 $93,000 etcetera, balance in previously funded projects. So it's outstanding balance. And then there's another $40,000,000 in projects, almost $40,700,000 funded in this fiscal year. We have the confidence that we can execute what's now going to be a balance of $70,000,000 in projects? I mean I sort of have this question amongst multiple departments.

I mean Parks has like $120,000,000 of outstanding projects. So do you have the staffing and capabilities to execute this many projects this year?

Yes, We have all intention of spending that money.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilman. Councilwoman Mulvey Woolridge.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for being here. So a few questions here. So I understand the NEO Center was sold, not sure when that was sold. But in general, when real estate is sold, the proceeds are recorded. Is facilities and fleet allowed to spend the proceeds of that sale in your department? How does that work? Where do the proceeds go?

On the NEO Center we do not own the NEO Center, the NEO Center is owned by Tark.

So do the proceeds go to Tark in that so? Correct. Okay so I guess a follow-up on that so for example so fire, little fire is an urban services department right? So if they were to sell a truck were the proceeds of that be earmarked and go to Louisville fire then?

Generally speaking no. Generally speaking those sorts of activities would come back into the general fund. Now when you're talking about urban services districts you know we obviously would make sure we're accounting for that appropriately. But generally speaking when a department sells an asset it doesn't, that money does not go back into the department's budget per se. It comes back into the general fund and then obviously the department receives their budget from the general fund.

What's the difference between the NEO Center and an asset like a truck?

The NEO Center isn't owned by metro government.

Okay. I'll follow-up on that later. Okay. My last question I have is you have a reduction in your services. So Public Works West, Outer Loop, Central and some of those other departments. What services in particular are being reduced?

It's custodial services.

Okay. Thank you.

Councilman Walridge was that your last question?

Yes thank you.

You bet. Councilman Lanninger.

Thank you mister Scherer. Thank you guys for being here. I want to come back to the Belvedere for a minute. With this 15,000,000 that is being requested in the budget does that close us out on the Belvedere or is there more money to come?

That would not complete the the Belvedere project in total.

Okay. How much then would still be in balance? I'd have to get a report to

you on that. I don't have an exact figure to give on that.

I'd I'd appreciate that. So the design phase is is complete then on the Belvedere?

Not a 100% complete. No. We're still

in design. Have a we construction demolition moving forward in the fall, we're not done with the design.

Yeah. The demolition and associated work that needs to be done to waterproof the garage is something that's gonna have to happen regardless of what we do on top so that work could begin. Okay.

It seems like it might be radically different needs depending on what we end up with because I know that some of the designs have been very different. But then my last question switching gears a little bit. Right now, we don't have anything in the budget for increasing the amount of solar energy that we are building into metro government per our clean energy resolution that metro government currently has on the books. How are we doing in terms of keeping our building construction, our retrofitting of buildings, repair of buildings in line with the idea that we want to make sure that our roofs are, for example, solar ready? Know, are does do we have is that part of what we've got here before us in the budget this year?

Solar projects they are not always the best use of funds as far as energy savings. So in our energy management fund, will try to pick what has the highest return on investment. But we do still do solar projects. We're actually looking at Bowman Field for a potential project now. And yes, we always evaluate our buildings. If the roof is a good candidate for solar. It's always something that we talk about as we move forward with projects. Do you want to speak to anything else on solar? Does that answer your

Yeah, might have more back in the queue but thank you.

Madam Clerk please cause the record reflect that we've been joined by Councilman Rena Weber. Councilman Parker you have floor.

Thank you Mr. Chair. I'd to like go back to the 18 person vacancies that Councilman Piagetini just brought up. If those positions are not filled and they're funded now so at the end of the budget cycle or mid year budget if they're not filled where does that money go? Does it go back to the general budget or does it stay in fleets?

It was similar to I mean, the vehicle question that Councilwoman Mulvey Rolveridge asked. And you said the money went back into the general budget. So I was wondering about filled positions that are vacant. If they're they're not if they stay in filled then what happens?

Well generally I guess I'm not sure if I'm following your question completely but I'll I'll try to answer and then if if I need to give more I will. The personnel budget is built based on what we've identified as funded, unfunded vacancies, number of filled positions at the time that we're developing the budget. Once that personnel budget is developed, it stays with the department for the year. So they could have fluctuations in their personnel depending on priorities and operational needs, positions as they are vacated or filled, not filled, what have you, there's some management discretion in terms of how that man that personnel budget is managed. So at the end of the year, you know, their their total personnel budget is is sort of gonna be all encompassed into their total budget at the end of the year and where their spend was.

I'm not sure what you say when you're asking if it goes back into the general fund. I'm not sure if I'm following that but it's at the end of the year we close out everybody's budgets whether you ended in a surplus or a deficit is accounted for and then we start over the next year with a new budget you know based on the needs of that agency for that year.

So if I may and I don't mean to cut you short Councilman you have the floor but just a immediate follow-up to that question about funded and unfunded. I get that there is movement within departments and people come and they find better positions or whatever. I think the real question here is and I think I don't answer the real question here is when you say funded and unfunded positions, when we put funded positions in the budget, whether that position is actually filled or not, the intent is that that position will be filled. So we are not putting positions in the budget and funding them without an expectation that those positions will be filled. And the question becomes, will be filled how quickly?

That's correct.

How quickly? Is the intent to hire people right away? And if we're not hiring them right away, then what's the high level?

Are you guys going to

be like built the budget around a delay? We wouldn't

have I'm asking I guess precisely, right. We built the budget to say we're going to fund x number of positions, which means we plan on filling them. If they're not filled today, the question is how long is it going to take us to fill them? We got a report from HR the other day that said they're down from one hundred and fifteen to thirty eight days. Is the anticipation in facilities that now that we have these positions funded and they're vacant, do we anticipate in thirty eight, forty, fifty days that those positions will be filled?

Yes, if we have a vacant funded position, we will post it and fill it. I mean we it can take some time to do the posting. We do interviews. We make recommendations. Sometimes people don't take the job. Sometimes they do. But our intention is if we have a funded open position to fill it. Great.

And that may answer your question. Councilman Winkler wants to follow my follow so we're coming right back I promise.

Yeah so Angie if I could just clarify because I believe historically when we have net new positions that we're creating then the budget impact of those has historically been counted from October and not from July 1 because you can't post the position until the budget's passed. You obviously are not going to fill a position on July 1. So are the funded positions in this budget assuming a salary from July 1 or from October 1 going forward?

They're existing positions, you made a good point that when you're talking about new positions, so budget is being added and new positions are being added to the budget, so these weren't existing. Then yes, there's usually, know, October 1 is is the date it's built around just from a hiring process standpoint. If you're talking about existing funded vacancies and that money is there and available.

Because you're actively trying to recruit for it as we speak and could fill it today, tomorrow or next Thursday right? Correct.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next question, is there any metro owned buildings that are planned for this fiscal year to go up for sale?

We conducted a space study fairly recently. Presented to this committee on March 19, I believe it was. And there are some possibilities of moving around some facilities, but we don't have solid plans on that yet. A lot of that will depend on how we backfill some leased spaces and but I don't have any to report on at this time.

Okay. So possibly leased but no sale.

We're just we're always looking at options for how to move people around in the most efficient way and operate the most efficiently.

Okay. And then last question was the increase in gas prices, was that budgeted for in this budget? Do you have any feelings about projections in that direction?

So our budget is based on historical usage. We budgeted FY '26 and are projected to come in a little bit under budget on that. So we have enough money to cover this year.

Is that because maybe you've got new vehicles that are more energy efficient?

It certainly helps. Our deferred vehicle maintenance total has gone down because of the investments that have been made over the last couple of years in vehicles and that certainly helps. We'll just have to we keep a very close watch on the fuel. And so if price increases are causing a budgetary problem, we may have to look and adjust. But we feel confident what we've projected for FY twenty seven at this point is good.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Chappell.

Hello, thank you for taking care of all of our metro properties. There's a lot to take care of. I probably had to jump back in the queue, but I'll start with these questions. There is $1,000,000 in the operating budget for green energy production. I'm assuming that's going to go towards maybe solar panels. But I'm just wondering how that money is going to be used and then also how much more money is it projected to cost in future budgets to support our 2030 and 2035 goals to be 100% clean energy? I see someone's chomping at the bit to answer.

Zach can speak to that very

well. The

Energy Innovation Fund, when that was designed, it was targeting what's the highest energy impact, net reduction and how much energy we're pulling from the grid per dollar invested. So initially, a lot of those funds have been prioritizing what is the quickest return on investment and biggest carbon impact. A lot of that has heavily skewed towards efficiency and conservation efforts because those projects can see quick returns on investment. We're typically targeting a six year ROI when we're scoping a project for energy fund investment. That being said, it is still designed to work towards that 2030 goal, and there's been a percentage of it each year we've always set specifically for rooftop solar projects.

That's typically targeting a minimum of 15% of the Energy Innovation Fund will go towards rooftop solar. There's been three projects done through solar so far, one that's in construction and one that's in scoping. I will add to that that the 2,030 goals will require some substantial planning and investment that goes beyond what a rooftop solar scope can accomplish. So while we've made progress on rooftop solar and it is a great place to start for having a return on investment, the solution to that will require utility scale solutions.

So do you have a number? Like if we were to fund it today to meet the 2,030 goal, do you have a number and how much that would be? Like, we talking 2,000,000, 200,000,000, 1,000,000,000?

The utility environment in Kentucky does not allow us to build our own project and meet the scale of of energy through our own generation plant. That requires that we do work with our utility provider. We have not received a proposal to date of a project that would meet that 2030 goal through our utility provider. We have received some proposals. Details of that are generally behind the NDA.

But the proposals we've seen are a small subset of our total consumption and they did not appear as cost effective as we would expect to see.

Given that 2030 is only about what? Four years away? Three years away? Are we on track to meeting that goal or is that kind of out the window?

We are not on track. I would not say it is out the window but there are difficult conversations that we need to happen around the methodology. There was a proposal last year brought to brought to Metric Council as far as a rec purchase. And I think that there's a lot of pros and cons to approaching the goal through that route. That is one of the few routes that would move quickly.

But as far as a capital build out with certain incentives that are phasing out and cost around panels, I think it would be very challenging without a lot of coordination with our utility provider.

Sure. It sounds like we may want to recirculate that report if at all possible. I'm going to consider that one question, I'll only ask one more, then I'll get back in the queue if that's reasonable instead of doing three. You're excused if you'd like unless you'd like to talk about LMPD's headquarters as he sits down quickly. So in this fiscal year twenty seven budget there might be more money but in your budget for deferred maintenance there's $20,000 for a new external gate enhancement for LMPD's headquarters.

When you were here a couple of weeks ago addressing one of our committees and providing an overview of all of the work that you all do, you had a slide about the headquarters and we've only we've demoed some, we've renovated the 4th Floor, we've got the 3rd Floor. But that isn't going to be complete until later this year. But that leaves us with the 1st Floor and the 2nd Floor. So my question is how much money is in this budget to support the headquarters and how much more money is needed? I believe we've been told $72,000,000 is the total cost for the headquarters.

So I'm just curious what we've spent to date and then how much we anticipate putting into this pot for future budgets going forward?

So today, we don't have anything planned for FY twenty seven to continue on the headquarters project at this time. To date, it's around $38,000,000 I could get you the exact number on that between Phases one and two. And yes, you're correct on the history of that. The initial scoping, I know there was some numbers thrown out there. I know you said $72,000,000 I don't know about the exact report, but I know that was done in 2022.

So escalation factors in. As far as finishing out the 1st And 2nd Floors, we can get estimates on that, that will continue to change as the market changes. And so escalation and things may cause that to increase. It's hard to say exactly how much until we we've done high level estimates. No bid packages have been submitted. We haven't done like a hard estimate on that. Those were high level estimates. And so when you get down and start doing more detailed estimates and you figure that was planned four years ago now. If we budget for that next year, that's five years of escalation that's going to be factored into that and those estimates.

Sure. It sounds like we need an estimate on the estimate.

Update.

I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilwoman Parish Wright.

Thank you. I emailed some questions. So I will yield most of my questions to those emails. My question is around just looking at the what is the criteria for employees to have a car? And I'm asking this in a budget related way just to see what's out there. And I've read about which department is using most of the vehicles. But also, you all are providing vehicles for one Louisville or it was LEDA too, right? They're on a part of your budget.

Matt Maskey, fleet administrator. Hi. The criteria for a take home assignment, there's three assignments. There's an A assignment which is take home unlimited use, B assignment to and from work, A c assignment remains at the workplace for the employee. It's a case by case basis on a assignment. The criteria is usually if there's a twenty four hour call out as in public works they have to respond to storms or snow or whatever it may be. But it's a case by case basis. We have a form you fill out. It has to be authorized before we do issue a vehicle as a take home vehicle.

And you authorize those forms? Or That's the

The fleet director as well as deputy mayor.

Okay.

Mhmm.

And then I know some of my colleagues touched on a lot of things I was concerned with as far as the Belvedere and gas and repairs. Did you answer anything around how are you looking to reduce those costs around gas, specifically gas and insurance? Know the insurance is hard to control.

It is. And so is the gas usage. I mean we have a no idle policy. We do have some EVs in our fleets. We're always looking to grow that. Those are really the best ways that we can control gas usage.

Okay. And my last question is well, you already talked about rooftop solar. So I'll let that be. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you.

Councilwoman, it is not at all uncommon that once a question's been asked, it will spur a follow-up question in another council member. Is it possible that you could summarize the questions that you've Emailed and share those now so that our colleagues would have a chance to ask follow-up questions if they would feel appropriate.

Okay. I don't have the counsel form, but I'll try to find those. I have them written down, but I don't have them here. But, yes, I can For do

future reference? Yeah. If if you don't if you wouldn't mind, that that gives all of us a chance to follow-up on your questions.

I copy the whole committee on it.

But it gives us a chance to ask those questions in the public setting.

And

quite honestly, a lot of us, we're in the moment. And so when you ask the question, it spurs a follow-up. And we may or may not see your direct question until it comes through Beth after they've answered and we're four days later.

Fair enough.

We might have missed the moment.

No, I respect that. Fair enough. But these questions I asked, there was another department in front of us, you all said to me that that's a question for fleet and facilities. So these were questions I actually did ask.

Okay, good.

But they couldn't be answered because they weren't here. So I just sent them by email.

I wonder if they have answers to those questions for us today. I'm guessing by the look on the director's face, probably not. But thank you for that. So we'll keep it on as we go forward. Councilwoman Joseph. I'm sorry. Councilman Joseph. The person above you happens to be a female. It's No. That's on me. I'll Sorry about that.

I'm sure anything around me.

Councilman Joseph, the floor

is yours.

How do different departments determine what kind of vehicles that they can get? For example, like at parks with like the Broncos that they have. Like how is it determined in that regard of who gets what and what type of vehicle, how new the vehicle is, all the way down to what kind of brand and whatnot?

Sure. I mean a lot of that's based on availability and then Matt works very closely with the departments to assess the need. I mean we basically are doing like one for one replacements unless the enhancement process has gone through which is a separate process. Do you want to speak to any details on that? I'll let Matt come up and kind of talk the details. He does it on a day to day basis.

Fleet administrator, what we do annually is we'll build a fleet replacement list, we'll meet with the departments, look at their priorities, then we'll go over the fleet dashboard, we'll look at the maintenance cost, the age, the mileage. At that point we'll determine what needs to be replaced. Based on that we'll build our replacement list for each department. As far as vehicle assignments, once we give the department the vehicle they will assign it internally unless it's a take home vehicle which we control. But as far as the size of the vehicle, we're always trying to downsize. I mean we have moved some vehicles from the large trucks to the small SUVs, things of that nature.

And are those vehicles when you buy them all used? No they're new purchases, yeah. My next question and it was Councilman Winkler brought up about the Crown VIX. What kind of constitutes or is there a phase out plan for the Crown VIX I guess might be a better question?

There is. I mean there like I said there's 38 left I think at the last count. They are what they do is they go through the shop if the repairs start to exceed the value of the vehicle or they're excessive or it's wrecked we'll put it on a replacement list

to be able And what would you say is probably at this point, I guess we can just say the Crown Vic is probably year wise roughly about the oldest that we have.

The oldest? Oh, wouldn't That's still functional and being used roughly. Maybe an old '5, 2005 model, somewhere around there. I'd have to look.

And would you say, would you be able, and I know this is a rough guesstimate question, but the average cop car right now, year wise?

I'd have

to Would there be, I mean are we talking like past five years? Like 2020 on is the average?

I think the last data I ran, the average overall fleet wise for LMPD was at eight years.

Okay.

I can get that accurate. Just curious about All right,

well thank you. That's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you. Madam Clerk please cause the record to reflect that we've been joined by Councilman Herndon. Next in the queue is Ms. Councilman Betcheln.

Thank you, Chair Kramer. I have one question. Thank you all for being here by the way. What is the number one change that caused the decrease in the turnover rate to be so well from FY twenty twenty three to now?

Well, they hired me. That was a good choice. Honestly, think we foster just a culture of just everybody having good teamwork and getting along. It doesn't matter if somebody's not there that day and something comes up that needs to be done. Everybody on our team just jumps in and helps. And I think that that's just really important to foster a sense of caring. Mean we have some really cool assets we get to take care of this building. We've got all kinds of stuff in our portfolio that everybody's really proud to showcase. And I feel like we give our staff the training and the tools to do their jobs well when they feel like they don't have it. We have quarterly staff meetings where we encourage all staff to speak up.

If they think something's going wrong, please bring it to the table, let us know, just fostering that culture of speak your mind and tell us what you're thinking and then listening and then responding appropriately. I like to think and it's a little subjective but. Thank you.

You. Councilman Winkler. Thank you.

I think my question is for Zach because I want to piggyback off of a couple of the solar questions that Councilman Lininger and Councilman Chappell asked. I think last year if I remember correctly we earmarked $05,000,000 of the energy innovation fund for solar. My question is and you mentioned that we have done some solar installations. My question is how much solar have we installed on roofs? How much money is has been earmarked but not spent?

And then you mentioned that you earmarked 15% of the fund annually anyway, there would be presumably another $150,000 So can you say how much is there, how much has been spent and how much is anticipated to be spent this next year?

So the spring of twenty twenty five, three solar projects were brought online. That was fire engine eight, Southwick Community Center, and Iroquois Library. And the sum of those was approximately 310,000. The project that is currently in construction is Fern Creek Library, and that is 340,000 that's being funded through the energy fund. And there is one additional in scoping that is appears it should fall around 150,000.

The Fern Creek Library is not placed in operation yet. That's still a few months out. But the others that have been in operation have been successful. They've been good projects. Been happy to do them.

Thank you. And then can you remind me, did we allocate money specifically for the LMPD headquarters getting rooftop solar? If so or if not, really doesn't matter. Is that building a good candidate and is that going to get rooftop solar?

I do not believe there is any money allocated for LMPD rooftop solar. The roof location solar exposure does make it a good candidate. However, the main challenge is with it being located in the downtown region, we are not currently permitted to interconnect rooftop solar systems on buildings that we own in the downtown region. There's been some there was a proposal for city hall a few years ago, and we learned that there's additional requirements on the distribution system from LG and E that essentially we were not going to get permission to place that onto their system. There were going to be changes needed on the distribution side that LG and E owns in order to accommodate even a small rooftop solar project.

So that's been an ongoing point of discussion because we do have properties we would like to install solar. And LG and E has approached this on one of their properties downtown. They're piloting a different method that they could safely inject into the downtown grid. And they have let me know that by next year, we should have answers as to a more streamlined pathway. And I would still like to see solar on LMPD headquarters among other downtown properties.

So there are a couple of follow ups that are solar specific. So I'm going to move to the follow ups and I'll get back into the queue. Councilman Petrol. Thank you, Chair.

Alex, in that innovation fund for green energy and solar, does the solar street lights that we've talked about, we piloted in the budget last year, is that qualify for moving things to the solar? The numbers I saw for the solar street lighting would not hit that six year ROI that we're typically targeting. It would still qualify for partial funding. If there's a project that is going to produce energy savings, we will still help cover some of that increasing cost for that efficiency within that six year ROI target. So that let's say for example there were an HVAC replacement and it might be a like for like replacement but a small increase in investment would get a much higher efficiency unit.

That increase in investment could qualify from the energy fund. And the same would be true for street lighting although my understanding is that had a separate funding source and that was not a topic of discussion.

To my knowledge we piloted a specific amount of money to pilot that program. But moving forward as it should have a great ROI and a good return and a good product, Can we use that innovation fund to put towards solar lights?

Yes. Do have interest in doing solar street lighting through the energy fund. The only caveat to that is that it would not qualify if it were additional lighting growth in energy consumption. We are taking

So we're replacing a light, we can do it. And I'm sure we can find plenty of those that we can do.

So

all right, sounds good. Thank you.

So two additional follow ups. The first is we projected out that there would be savings by doing this. And if I'm looking calculations correctly, we've projected that perhaps as much as $1,000,000 in savings. Where has that money gone? I mean, know it's savings since we didn't spend it. But ideally, we were going to save this money so that we could reinvest and reinvest. And yet, we're bonding this. So where in the general fund do we see that we saved enough money to make it worth doing what we're talking about doing? Because the the idea was that this would Yes. At some point, maybe not pay for itself, but it would certainly reduce the cost.

Yeah. So I cannot speak specifically to the bonding aspect of it. The savings, the cost avoidance that is realized would come through the utility line items in the budget. And that's not just strictly facilities. It would be any utility item that's that's a target of work we do.

The energy innovation fund and and the background on that and why some of the conservation efficiency projects were prioritized with that six year ROI is it was designed to function as a internal revolving loan fund. So the funding that goes to the energy innovation fund and that six year target was structured that way so that it should be self sustaining. So if you then the quarterly energy reports where we'll report out every quarter on what year to date and program to date utility cost savings are, they are aligned with and and the energy innovation proposed budget has a direct connection to those demonstrated utility cost avoidance.

So you would be able to demonstrate where we have saved this much money and you've put it back into future

That's correct. Projects

Generally speaking Which don't lend themselves to this project that needs $1,000,000 We're bonding a huge project in here. And I'm assuming we're bonding it because you did not you. Because our energy changes didn't generate enough revenue to cover the cost of this, and we need to do it, which means that the money we did save is spent somewhere else. And I'm asking, so you can show me where that money

was We are able to demonstrate where there's been a direct utility cost impact from the projects. The decision of how that capital fund is funded is not something

I can figure. Okay, I'm not getting the answer I was hoping I would get. So you can show me where we've had the cost savings, but you can't show me where we've used those cost savings for future cost savings.

The investment into the energy we have at each year the cost savings that we can tie to specific projects.

Got

that. That investment at the end of the year is what the proposed or requested budget is tied to. And it is requesting the energy innovation fund structure is requesting those savings returned to the fund. And we have kept up with those targets on the return on investment.

And then you're using those funds to do

the That is correct.

Do you still need a clarification?

Yes, I was just going to because I think you testified to this last year and so I just wanted to add one additional piece of clarification. The reason that we don't necessarily see overall utility costs going down is because it's not on a static base, correct? Because we've added square footage of buildings. So just for the public who's watching, you don't see a one for one reduction in our utility costs because that would assume everything else is staying even and we live in a dynamic environment where we add buildings, we subtract buildings, right? So you don't have a control.

That is correct. And if I might add, annual utility consumption that we have going back to our 2019 baseline, that was roughly 101,000,000 kilowatt hours. And the next four years subsequently were 93,000,000, 87,000,000 sorry, 89,000,000, 87,000,000 and in 2025, 78,000,000 kilowatt hours. So that is over a 20% reduction in our total utility reduction. We do not claim all of that as part of the energy program because some of it is square footage properties that are no longer in our portfolio that does not get counted in our energy savings.

The energy savings that we qualify for buildings that we had during a baseline and buildings that we had post project and we can do a direct weather normalized comparison pre and post project. If it doesn't fit that such as newer buildings acquired where we have done some energy work, we're not reporting cost avoidance on that because we don't have a baseline to compare it to. So there are limitations to reporting and we have not to date wanted to rely on modeling. But there are demonstratable energy use reductions that are very substantial. And I will say in contrast, solar, rooftop solar is a good project.

I think it is worth pursuing. But with the investment that we do have in solar that we've done so far, it's been roughly 0.4% of our energy use that has been impacted. Zero point four percent? Zero point

four percent. Okay. That negates my next question. Councilman Beershund. Councilman Herndon.

Yes. I'm sorry. I sorry to interject here. If we could waive the our one get and install solar everywhere we wanted to, including the approval from LG and E and what what are the potential cost savings if we do everything? I mean, at wide, every building, everywhere, every light, what's the potential or do you have any idea what that would save us overall in a long term on an annual basis?

So our electricity costs are roughly between 12 to 13,000,000. Approximately 5,000,000 is city street lighting that's not metered and it would not qualify for any type of solar offset. So our building facility cost that could have a direct bill offset if we just had solar everywhere would be closer to 6 to 7,000,000 a year. This is not a firm number but some internal estimates to try to see what would be the maximum amount of our energy that we could offset if we put solar on every roof that could have it. It would be probably closer to 15% of our total energy usage if we were doing just rooftop solar.

Which is why we are going to need utility scale if we are building a project for that 2,030 target. The street lighting which is unmetered and does not qualify for direct offset of like a on-site solar or any type of contract, the only way that that could be credited for solar energy consumption would be via a wreck. There is no utility production contract that would allow us to apply that clean energy to a street lighting that is an unmetered asset.

Thank you. Councilman Biajatini.

Thank you. I'd just like to say that I'm totally vindicated on my vote related to that resolution. We had no plan. We're not gonna meet the date. And it's not for lack of trying.

It's just we had no plan and we're never gonna meet the date. And until we implement widespread nuclear power for our city, I don't think we have any chance whatsoever of hitting any kind of citywide green or clean energy goal. I do have a question related to the general fund related to your general fund appropriations that I've asked, again, of almost every department. If I were to do a 1% cut in your general fund appropriations, it's about a little over $05,000,000 like $5.80 some odd thousand dollars which year over year your budget's going up about 400. So it would like return you to last year's general fund appropriation plus another 100 ks.

What practically would you do to meet that? Sorry, go ahead.

That's fine. Yeah, so as personnel costs go up, supplies and that go up, even staying flat, it is still going to require a reduction somewhere. Two scenarios. One, regardless of a 1% budget cut with that space study and with the build out of LMPD headquarters third floor, we are already looking at where we can consolidate specifically some leases. And I think we'll be able to quickly realize like $140,000 And then I've got another like $05,000,000 that is potential. But we have to get with those departments, make sure that the space works. There will be like a one time move cost to make that happen. But that would be the first place I would look. Unfortunately, second place would be reduction in services. Just like this year, we reduced custodial from five days to two days at some locations.

That would really less services would be But you say

like specifically like off the top of your head, what would be a couple of $100,000 service that you would cut?

We'd do further probably custodial service Okay.

But I love the idea, by the way. Please continue to plan for whatever you can do moving forward. Mean, I'm not saying we're going to cut it. I'm just asking you a

little Sure. Yes, regardless of budget reductions, that space study, that was our plan anyway. That's great. So we'll continue forward with that.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Appreciate that.

So colleagues, we have seven minutes left. There are three people left in the queue. So I'm gonna ask that you just be aware there are seven minutes left. And I really do wanna give councilwoman Parrish Wright a chance to ask the questions. She has the questions today that she asked in a previous committee that were for facilities. So we would love to get those in the record. So Councilman Chappell you're next and then Councilwoman Parish Wright we're coming Okay, your

thank you.

I'll make it quick. How many radio shops do we have? One. We have one. And so in fiscal year twenty six and fiscal year twenty seven, we've invested a total of 5, almost $6,000,000 in that one radio shop. Is that correct?

I don't know the figure. I'd have to look.

Okay. For the police impound lot, there are two accounts that are present that still have money for them. Both of them are about 5 a half million dollars. One of those is going to remain open. The other one is going to be lapsed into this budget. And I'm just wondering could you talk quickly about the impound lot and why both of those accounts aren't staying open since there's always been a plan to relocate it?

I would probably defer to LMPD to speak. They manage the tow lot So that would really not be my place to speak on that I think.

Thank you. I don't know if I can add any more questions for my police hearing but I'll add that to the bottom.

Okay thank you.

Next and I guess last is what are the justifications for the reductions to Memorial Auditorium?

Memorial, oh yes. So we've always supported Memorial Auditorium. Two years ago Mayor Greenberg he allotted like $500,000 in our budget and their leadership committed to $1,000,000 match through private fundraising. To date the funds haven't been secured, but we haven't requested repayment of that investment. So we do expect them to still fulfill their commitment to that. And if they can demonstrate progress on that pledge, would be important in considering future funding amounts for that facility.

Thank you.

Councilwoman Parishwai.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. I want to be quick because I did ask these for Parks and Rec. But I think Councilman P Argentini touched on some of this. And Councilman Winkler, it was about the Belvedere. Basically, the broader why are we spending so much money on it? And then what is the end game for it? Yeah, I don't want to take up too much time. The other question was around with the Belvedere and the tens of millions of new capital projects, it was around minority and women owned businesses and what percentage are getting that. But my main question you don't have to answer those two.

The main question is, for the last two years, I've asked for a complete breakdown for the encampment clearings and how much it costs fleets and facilities. I've sent these questions several times, and I don't get an answer around the breakdown. I know that I also have this question for LNPD as well. We don't have a complete accounting of how much each one of these encampment costs, even though we're using the different departments to help do this. And there is a department thank you, Councilwoman Jenny Woolwich, who shared with me, there is a part that is specifically to fleets.

It's around the equipment, the staff, and what's happening when these encampment clearings are happening. I just want the true cost of them.

I I am sorry. Our department does not handle those.

Okay.

So, I'm I'm sorry. I don't have that data for you.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Councilman Linager.

Thank you, mister chair. And one more follow-up about solar roof application. Is it fair to say that the vast majority of our high quality potential rooftops for solar conversion are in the downtown area or at least disproportionate?

Right. Yeah, there's good candidates throughout the county. So yes and no.

Yes and no. But many good candidates down there.

Yes, there are good candidates there. But we also have other roofs that would be very good candidates for solar outside of that grid.

Sure.

Because that grid, it's not there's some things you might think are downtown that aren't necessarily on that grid that would be really good candidates too.

Okay, thank you. That's all I wanted to get in there.

Thanks. With the two minutes that are left, did have a couple of questions that I was hoping we could get to. The NEO center never belonged to us. Was Tark's, Tark's sold it. But a mirror of that, we purchased a piece of property that we are planning on fixing, a 70,000 square foot industrial building that was purchased for the electrical maintenance division in FY 2026.

Was this specifically budgeted somewhere? If it wasn't, where did the money come from to purchase that building? And then the reverse of that is when and if we sell properties, the expectation is that there will be this is a building that's for sale. It's been accessed by council. And then when it's sold, typically we see should see, I would think, the revenue from that. So I was hoping you could speak to that in general to this sale both when we purchase and when we sell. I'm curious like where does that show up in our

Economic property development does handle a lot of the property acquisition and disposition. That particular project is at Northwestern Parkway that is for public works electrical maintenance move. Should, we had to do obviously some construction work there. That should be completed in October. We plan to move them after they're done with light up Louisville and all that over the winter. And we will be working toward disposition of their current site and then speaking to the economics of where the money goes. I'd have to get back to you on that.

We purchase that property? Yes, Northwestern Parkway,

yes.

And where did the revenue come from to purchase that property? What, where did it, how did it came out economic development? Is that what I heard

you say?

No, it was a capital project allocated specifically for the need for a larger and different public works electrical facility.

So is there a line item in last year's budget?

We have two. We had a property acquisition that Okay. Was

That's my question. So there's a property acquisition line and it came out of that budget?

Yes. And there was a Okay.

You said it was in the land acquisition line. Okay.

Yeah.

I'll find

it there.

Thank you. And I think that was my last question. Any others from council members as we wrap up? That concludes our hearing with facilities. We will give the police a moment to take the chair and Metro TV a chance to make the transitions they need to make.

Colleagues, if you want to stay in chambers, it won't hurt my feelings. We will start back as soon as we can. Colleagues, if we can find a place that we can sit comfortably, I'm gonna go ahead and get started here in just a minute. Good afternoon. It is Wednesday, May 20.

It's about 04:10. I'm councilman Kevin Kramer, chair of the budget committee. I'm joined by the vice chair, councilman Winkler. I'm joined also in chambers by council members Parker, council member Betchaun, councilwoman Moby Woolrich, Councilman Piagintini, Councilwoman Chapel, Councilwoman Hawkins, Councilwoman Rui, Councilman Joseph, Councilman Lininger, Councilwoman Shamika Parish Wright, and Councilman Herndon is joining us online. There may be some others that wander back in. I know councilman Reno Weber was here. I believe he's on his way back in, so I will not recognize him when he comes in. I'll just say he's here. There we go. And with that said, I would ask please if the clerk would read the required notice for a virtual meeting.

This meeting is being held pursuant to KRS 61.826 in council rule five a read in full.

And as a reminder, departments will not make opening comments and we will begin immediately with council member questions. Council members, you are allowed to ask three questions at a time. After that, you need to get back in the queue. Also, I will call on first time questioners from council members before I call on those who have asked already. And so I wanted to go ahead and start off.

We just finished for those who have been viewing, we just finished a meeting with Fleet and Facilities. And there was a question for Fleet about money in the budget for tow lots. And just for a little historical reference for folks that this might be a new conversation. We ran into a problem some number of years ago. So this is not a new thing where the tow lot had filled up completely. We were trying to figure out how to move cars around in order to store the number of cars we had. We were looking for new property. I think the decision at that time was that we needed to buy more land. We needed to expand the tow lot. We needed an additional tow lot.

We put money aside for that. That never happened. We never found the land. Some of that money was spent on modifications to the current toll lot. We put more money in in another budget year, again, in the hopes that we would either modify or buy a new new property. That didn't happen either. We've entered into a contract with a private tow company who now does some of the towing on the city's behalf. And they store cars on their property, and they bill us for that. Not the best situation possible, but it's way better than what we had at the time. And so we are in a position today, and here goes, here's the question.

We are in a position today where there are different decisions being made about the tow lot. So there has to be some conversation around that. And as we carry on conversation about those different decisions about the way we run the toll lot, we need an answer to the question about these two pots of money that are set aside for the toll lot. What's one So of those accounts is being zeroed out, one is not. So what's the disposition of those funds? And at some point in the answer, if you could talk about what's going on at the tow lot today and what our hopes are for the not too distant future. That's a lot, but

Yeah. Need your assistant chief Corey Robinson over the administrative bureau for LMPD. To first address address the toll lot issues that we have, we still have the current toll lot on Frankfort Avenue. Some of the acreage of that tool lot is in a flood zone. So some of it's just not usable.

So we try to, maximize the use of that. We, we have actively been looking as of as of last year with facilities try to go out and find some property within Jefferson County that meets our that meets all the objectives that we need. We had we have not found anything whether it's because of cost or because the area wasn't zoned properly or just whatever hurdles came up. So we have not found anything, but we always defer to facilities in terms of the actual purchase of it. But we did jointly go out together on a couple of properties within the county.

None of those none of those passed passed all the all the all the checks that we needed. Back to the tow lot, however, the the area that was not usable and and is still not because it's in a floodplain. We didn't really know how to address that other than just keep putting more cars there and kinda cramming cars in. So last August, we went into partnership with Vehicle Management Solutions. They go by VMS, by their acronym VMS. They're in over 17 major cities around the country. Very reputable company. Have a lot of major cities. Most recently, right before us, they had signed on Memphis. I had some rapport with Memphis.

I was able to call there and just get their feedback on them. They do an excellent job of, they do everything from managing tow service to even managing your impound. Since we already have tow drivers and we have lot attendants, we needed someone to bet to increase our effectiveness and efficiency on the impound side of things. We brought them on in August of last year on a pilot program. It's been, everything that they said they would do and then some.

Some of the issues we had prior to them coming were slow response times from our lot drivers just because we weren't as efficient as we should be as far as getting cars dropped and getting back out. So that's one of the things we've increased. We don't get the complaints from officers that, as far as response times for the tows. The lot itself, they, they came out and added they added a loader with their own dime. So, to help cars get in and out more effectively.

They brought in some other equipment like forklift rentals, just some heavy equipment that we just didn't have the means to even purchase. Some golf carts to to allow for citizens to get and, traverse around the lot more effectively. 650 tons of gravel. So about 20 loads of gravel that was, around $15,000 on their own dime. And what that did, we were running 95 or so percent, at capacity.

They they alleviated a lot of capacity. So now we're around 1,400 or so cars that we can get on there. And we've even, since that time, even lowered our, our hold volume. So it allows us to take more cars in as as as the long and short of it. So they have, they've given us room to have more cars. And they've even brought some containers in for large debris. They've just made more land usable for what we had, and they've even, like, reorganized cars. I understand you and some of your team were out there Friday to see it firsthand. It's very very neatly done, very organized. It's something we're very proud of.

Great. Thank you. Councilman Winkler.

Thank you. Assistant Chief, we're going to stay on the tow lot so don't go anywhere. Okay?

Yes, sir.

So, if I understood you correctly, you have about 1,400 spots give or take available in total, Yes, What percentage of those are currently used?

You have to define used.

So like how full are we in terms of being able to tow vehicles and put them in the impound lot?

So that number it fluctuates on a weekly basis. We have roughly I don't have the exact number, but it's gonna be around in the seven hundreds or so on cars that are on some type of hold. Whether it's for investigative purposes or we've been court ordered to hold that car. So frankly, that car is just it's gonna be there until it gets released otherwise. Some cars we brought in just on a because it was illegally parked or it was in a bad area or from a traffic accident waiting for the person to come pick it up. So those cars are there on a short term basis. So it the lots capacity can fluctuate on a daily basis. And then of course when we have auctions, we try to have those on monthly cadence as well. Then it goes up and down after auctions.

Yes. So you actually touched on my second question, which was going to be what percentage of cars are there on evidentiary holds. Sounds like about half of our capacity at any given time is evidentiary holds, correct?

Yes sir.

Some of them could be dating back decades, right? Because if you have an unsolved case, you have to hold the vehicle

In some cases that could be forty years, right?

So I guess and I understand you can't give me an exact number, right? But on any given day, do we have space to tow 50 cars, 100 cars, 200? And again, understanding that it varies, but like roughly, are we totally full? Are we over full? Is it a barrier to us towing cars? Like that that's what I'm trying to figure out.

It's a barrier towing cars more so when we have special events. We're just coming out of, like, a Derby season season, for instance. So when we have, like, tag and tow details or areas like where we're trying to clear an area for the for the races that we just had or marathons. At times like that, we're gonna see a we do have capacity issues because of the influx of cars at one given time. For the most part, we're able to maintain daily operations with the exception of those one offs where you have like the influx of cars during special events.

I think the follow-up to that is, and I don't need an exact number, but just a generalization. How many cars are being held by a private company on our behalf? I believe the company is suburban, but I don't know if I want to

put that out there. It is suburban. That number fluctuates as well, but it's typically no more than maybe under 100 or so cars at any given time that are actually holding. We try and defer to our lot if we're going to have some investigative hold. We would rather that come to our lot. We typically don't defer to suburban as it relates to holds.

So just so folks because your question is spot on. So much of our tow lot is held cars. We're holding them because there's an investigation. But there are cars that are not being held for investigation. They were abandoned on the side of the road. And that one, we just need to get it off the expressway. And so that car very well may end up at Suburban. And it will stay on Suburban's lot until the owner reclaims it or we reach is it forty five days, I think?

Yes, sir.

That we can is it sixty? Until Okay. Until it reaches the point that we can claim ownership, and then we would auction it or sell it. So there is some all the time that's on Suburban's lot. There are some cars there all the time that Suburban has that they picked up on our behalf.

That is accurate. One

of the hopes with this pilot project that we're working on is that we will be able to reduce the number of vehicles on that private lot. And that revenue will come back to us instead of going out. Sir. Does that make sense? And I don't want to spend too much more time here, but I'm happy for the answers. Thank you. I think I heard you say that as far as the pots of money, those are in facilities. That's You really guys don't. It's there for the tow lot. You're aware of it. You've been out looking for spaces. But the money's actually in facilities, and you guys aren't the ones that would zero that out. That's a facility's decision. 100%. Yes.

So we will follow back up with and I know facilities kind of tossed it to the police. And I'm happy that the police got a chance to talk about this. This is an issue that a bunch of us here have been really pushing hard for a long time. So this is great news. Thank you. But we still need a resolution to where that money is what we intend to do with those two pots of money. So we'll follow that up with fleets. Thank you. I really appreciate your being here. My pleasure. Councilman Piazzottini.

Thank you. I don't have any questions about the tow lot. So I do want to start with tech. Generally we've been continuing to fund tech needs for LFPD which I 100% support. There's no way we're going to miraculously get another 150, 200 officers on the street.

And I think that technology is the way that we resolve that, get more efficient with the officers we have in order to continue a high level of effectiveness with the sworn staff that we have at our disposal. First question is with the GPS pursuit management system or managed system or whatever this thing is called, STAR system, I think I've heard, will there be potential cost savings even if what I'll call soft savings like the potential reduction in lawsuits, insurance claims against when you do a pursuit, the potential damage to life and property, can you talk about how that will be used, implemented and what the potential savings could be either to your budget directly or to other areas of the city's budget.

Yes, sir. I appreciate that. The system that we've looked at is called StarChase. StarChase. StarChase. StarChase. It's kind of all over the place. But effectively, what that allows us to do, it's both pursuit management and apprehension of vehicles that we otherwise wouldn't chase. So we've had the conversations about us not pursuing felony vehicles that are wanted for nonviolent felonies. We don't pursue those vehicles.

That gives us another option to be able to track and capture those vehicles as well. But generally, not to put a specific number on it, but about a quarter of pursuits and then some kind of property damage, whether that's to a police car, private car. That's part of the reason why we want to reduce pursuits as much as possible is because we know they are they can be costly, not to mention the danger side of it. That's the primary concern. So right now what we're doing is we're exploring kind of two things is one, what would be the policy surrounding the usage of it?

And then how are we going to manage the deployment and the rollout? So right now, this will be a test phase. We're gonna deploy about 16, so average of two per division. And what we're gonna do is work with the majors of the divisions, look at those those high productivity officers where it's gonna be most useful where we can get the best data for whether or not it's a system we want to keep or a system we

want to expand come next fiscal year. Thank you. I've asked this of or no, next one is the use not the use of force. There was a study that we've been, I think, fairly delayed on related to measuring what type the size of our force, particularly sworn force, how they should be distributed, all of this other information, which has been updated in quite some time you know look 90 I just took a look at it 90% of your budget is personnel yes so you know there's a real impact of the budget to know how many people we should have and where they should be Do we I'm making sure there's a tie back to the budget here. Do you know when we're gonna have this study or what the delay is at this point?

So that study has been completed, and I believe it should have been distributed to council earlier this week. If not, I will I will make sure that happens. I've distributed it to the agency, and I thought it got to council as well. But I will correct that. But effectively, right now, we're just over a thousand officers. That staffing study says that we should be at about 1,137 officers compared to the thousand sworn that we have right now. So that study doesn't come with any commitments, obviously, but that's something that between the agency, the mayor's office, and counsel, we're going to have to make decisions on what advice from that study we take and what advice we think is not practical.

Makes sense. Thank you. And then I've asked this of every other department. It doesn't mean I think we should do it. And for example, I'll juxtapose Fleet's budget, which actually after I looked at their budget, was a little disappointed in their answer retrospectively.

Because fleet has a budget of $61,000,000 total of which 25 are personnel services, 50% are contractual services, and another 25% is supplies give or take 1% here or there. So I asked them if we cut their budget by 1%, the general fund budget would be about $500,000 what would they do? Of course, they had some ideas about cost savings but then said they'd have to reduce services or personnel. Your budget is very different than that. Your budget is just a level set for the public $269,000,000 of which $238,000,000 almost $240,000,000 is personnel.

90% is people, is the human being sitting here and all of them that walking a beat right now. So to be consistent, I would ask what would you do if we had to cut 1% from your general fund budget? That would be a little over $2,000,000. I have an assumption what you would have to do, but what would you practically do if we did do that?

Well, the thing that we never want to do is cut personnel if we can avoid it. So that loss of service would be somewhere in the area of delays in replacing or outfitting different technology as we just talked about. Much of our, I think about 8.5% of the rest of that are already in contracts that we've already committed to. So you would be taking money from a very small part of discretionary funds. So that would reduce either the amount of time that we use for supplemental patrols, investigative time, obviously be the overtime budget as well. And so there would be a direct impact on services in some way.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, mean the way I look at your budget, I mean more than just about any other budget I can look at, it's almost all people. It's just human beings on the streets doing what they do and protecting this community. So yeah, I I I don't see an opportunity there versus others that have a little more discretionary funds around contractual services and all of this where you really don't have that much here. But thank you for the answer. Appreciate you exploring with me. Appreciate it, mister chair. Councilman Winkler.

Thank you Mr. Chair. Chief, I've asked this question of a couple of other departments and really it's around overtime. Okay and the continued and ongoing growth of overtime across departments. So this is not an LMPD specific question but this is a challenge we're experiencing in many other departments.

Can you speak to your overtime budget And number one, do we have the op what would happen if we were to make a reduction in the amount of authorized overtime that you have? Is all of the overtime that's there absolutely necessary? And is our contract structured in a way that maximizes the returns on overtime or can it also incentivize behavior where you know maybe we're adding overtime unnecessarily?

Right. And so just for a point of reference on our overtime, the vast majority of our overtime is spent in three places. One that's gonna be patrol shortage overtime where we have fewer people working to beat. So we make sure that we are not going without enough people being able to answer 911 calls. The number one place that we spend overtime is on major crimes investigations.

Those are obviously very time consuming, require call outs and those types of things. The other is in narcotics and violent crime investigations. And so that is the huge part of our overtime is it's patrol and investigations when it comes to those types of call outs. As far as I'm sure there's always some places to be able to cut some fat. We are doing a few things in in how we're managing that over time.

One of the things that we've done is we've reduced our jail detail. So that was a voluntary detail where we put two extra officers at the jail so that they could take prisoners so that officers on patrol were not tied up at the jail for extended periods of time when we had officers coming in. Well, that's several $100,000 in overtime that we're just officers are just gonna have to bite the bullet and and take the prisoners from each other while awaiting for them to be processed into the jail. One of the other things that we're trying to work on, which I think alleviate a lot of things for officers as far as the stressors of filling in on the beat, filling in for extra details as we're working with the FOP right now on a solid letter of agreement to hire part time officers. So hire retired officers who don't wanna they don't necessarily wanna put in forty, fifty, sixty hours a week, but they're willing to put in some work.

And so hopefully that is something that we can get done some point and be able to present that to you and save some money within this fiscal year as well.

Councilman Bechon.

Thank you, chair. Thanks, chief. Thanks, everybody for being here. Appreciate it. Everything you do in your service. I'm going to ask a question related to the proposed grants that we will receive in FY twenty seven. What are those grants going to go towards and how are they dispersed throughout the entire department division specific or crime unit specific? How does that?

I'm sorry, is there a specific grant you're referring to? Most of the grants that we have are going to be continuous grants that we've received in the past. There are a few grants that we've applied for that are new. A couple of them we know we already haven't gotten and then the others are pending for approval. Those primarily being the response to human trafficking grant through the Bureau of Justice Administration. And that will be specific to human trafficking and being able to prosecute those crimes and investigate those crimes. And then a CGIC unit with the ATF. So that's crime gun intelligence. And those are those investigations into how we are prosecuting and investigating crimes involving weapons, illegal weapons.

Thank you. I would I I guess I would tailor that specific to technology and any grants that we may be receiving in regards to enhancing the infrastructure for either the patrol guys or the detectives to to to do their job better, whether it's iPads or I I don't know. Anything special especially related to detective use to investigate things quicker.

Right. And so I wouldn't say that would be off of grant funding that would be in our operational cost of all of the technology that we've invested in to this point. When you think about something like the ALPRs that's been become a huge investigative tool as well as we've requested and the mayor is expanding the drone as first responder program which is giving us more eyes in the sky as well as the drones in our patrol.

Which I

think is

awesome, What's by the that?

I think is awesome, by

the way.

Oh, yeah, they are. They've been a game changer. But as far as specific grants going to those types of things, There are none new that are proposed.

W. Chief Emily McKinley, if I can add a little bit more to that. We are always looking for new grant opportunities and we have a grant writer within our department that is constantly applying for grants. I know there is one that she is looking to apply for or starting to apply for that is related to our real time crime center. And then, like, the the two that he spoke, the chief spoke about with human trafficking and the CGIC grant, those have we've have applied for and are waiting responses on those. But we are always looking for additional grant opportunities whether at the state or federal level for just the things that you discussed.

Thank you. Mr. Chair, can I have a okay? I'm gonna shift gears a little bit to discretionary funds. I think you mentioned that earlier. Does every division have a certain set amount of discretionary funds or or how is that like, for example, our offices have x amount of dollars for discretionary funds to do things within the community. Do do you all have anything like that, whether it's for additional equipment, radios that I don't know. Whatever you all need.

No, sir. Each individual division, their budgets are mostly towards office supplies and those types of things. As far as technology, that would come through tech services and kind of be distributed in a centralized way. Special requests can be made and that will come through our financial office up through the chain of command. Okay.

I appreciate that. I'm gonna shift to training facility for a moment. We are, I guess, got the green light to go on building a new first responder training facility. To my understanding, we're gonna start with the track. Is that sufficient enough? How do you all feel about that? Give me maybe some insight or take on on that, please.

So we just had a meeting with facilities this week, actually. And so part of what we were waiting on is obviously, I think you've seen the overall big picture plans that if if we had everything available to us for all first responders, what we what we would do. Now that we have a a number that we know we're working within, we've we've met with facilities. We've also talked with Middletown Police about what their plans are with that state money so that we make sure that within the county we are making sure that we are complementing the available facility. So now that we have that that number, we are trying to get a new estimate for what can we do in phase one and stay within that aligned budget so that we don't go over that those funds.

With that state money, which we're super grateful for, and it being divided between Middletown and and Jefferson County, does that put a hindrance on you by by having to do one thing here and one thing here? So we won't have any control over what Middletown does, obviously. And so we've tried

to be in contact with them to know what they're doing. But we are gonna try to work with facilities to make sure that we design what we do in the first phase so that if and when more funds become available down the road, it can we're already set to just take the next step.

Sounds good. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Councilwoman Mulvi Walridge.

Thank you, Sheriff, and thank you for being here. A few questions here. I'm going to go back to your staffing. So I know that you all need to eliminate 15 funded vacancies. I think there were 13 retired positions and two layoff positions. How does that affect your operations?

So just want to make a correction. It actually ended up being 14. One of those layoffs, we did not do. The other layoff is a position that had overlapping duties with our grant writer. We had two separate grant managers and that was duplicative duties. And the others are positions that are vacant and not filled. So we wouldn't be taking away from any particular unit at this point.

Okay. Thank you. My other question is going to go back to your staffing. I know you talked about the staffing that you have and what you need. So I know right now crime is down. So thank you for the staff and your officers and everyone for doing that. And then go back to what Councilman Piazzantini said, under the technology and partner with that helps with that. But you mentioned you're currently just over 1,000 officers needing I think a little over 1,100. I think it was eleven thirty something. How many do you currently intend to fill in twenty twenty seven of that gap?

So what we would like to get to is obviously we would love to be up to full staff. But the way that we have it set is that we would get up to we're ten fifty now so that we can get up to eleven thirty one is what we're trying to get to shortly.

And one more question, chair. Thank you. So again, talk about the crime being down. So I want to kind of shift a little bit to how LMPD works with metro departments like Public Health and Office of Violence Prevention. So appreciate that partnership and how you partner with some of those other divisions on not only runs but throughout the city. So can you talk about a little bit about that partnership?

Yes. So this has actually worked out pretty well based on our crime plan that we have and our sustained focus improvements as well as the Mayor's Safe Global Plan. And so we coordinate very closely with a lot of those other metro agencies, particularly Office of Violence Prevention, Health Department. And so they get together on a regular basis to talk about what is going on in each of these neighborhoods that we're focusing on and make sure that our efforts are helping each other out. So much so that what you've seen is a lot of proactivity by those other agencies in those areas from from works to parks.

Because everybody feels like we're all part of the same team as opposed to working in silos in different areas of metro government. We're all we all have the same thing to focus on. And so it's been it's been a a really amazing project to to see kinda flourish.

I love to hear. And like I said, you can see the the benefit of that and the outcome of that and that reduction in crime. So thank you all for that, for having that forward thinking attitude.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilman Lininger.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good to see you guys again. Coming back to a previous question from councilman Winkler, vice chair Winkler. I didn't really hear an answer about the structural issues in the FOP contract and overtime.

You know, that's been a topic in the news the last couple of weeks that we we calculate overtime very differently for LMPD than we do any other department in Louisville Metro government. Overtime has been consistently about, you know, $22,000,000 in our budget. It's what we're looking at again this year. What would be the savings? What's the delta if we if we had a contract with FOP that calculated overtime like we do for every other department versus what we're doing right now? How much would we save?

Can you give me some details on how how it is different? I mean, I can guess, but I don't wanna

what we what

are we doing differently that It's

the holiday hours and things. I can the can you can you speak to it? Or Like,

how holiday pay? So we the way

that we

calculate overtime is very different from LMPD. I guess we can take this to email and follow ups, but this it it's it's a huge difference. That's why that's what's been the basis of the reporting that's come out.

You're you're talking about the the double overtime?

Yes.

Okay. So double overtime kicks in once an officer reaches a certain level of certain number of hours worked with within a pay period. I don't think we actually had that much double overtime. It's straight overtime primarily for personnel shortages, investigations and things like that. Are you talking about the vacation days counting as days worked?

Yeah. This this is all part of this it feeds into a problem that is you know, I guess there were some eye popping numbers in the news and we can talk about this more in detail outside of a hearing and maybe get some begin email chain going back and forth about it. But, you know, we're talking about you know, in other departments when we talk about these 1% cuts, you know, we're moving relatively small amounts of money around. We when we talk about what we might need to do to tighten up on the budget, the budget overall spending is down this year. We we're spending a lot less than in other departments because some departments don't have a cut.

In fact, we're spending more in. LMPD, we're spending more in. And so when we think about, you know, how we are gonna, you know, sit around the table and figure out how we're sharing that pain, I I do wanna know what the difference would be if we were calculating overtime and things like that with LNPD the same way we do with

our other

contracts. Coming back to our salaries in personnel, which again is, you know, the vast majority of what we calculate for the budget for LMPD as far as the LMPD line item. You know, there's, of course, a lot of money spent in LMPD that isn't in the line item because of fleet and facilities, not other projects. We have, again, pretty consistently budgeted an amount on salaries and then do not hit it in our actual year spending. You know we floated you know like last year we proposed a 115,000,000 thereabouts and then that's about what may you know we may we hit the exact same amount in what actually was passed, and then in that fiscal year spent 92,000,000.

This year so that's 92,000,000 was the previous year spending. We're at $745,000,000 for current spending. I don't think we're gonna get the 115 for this fiscal year. And then for f y twenty seven, we're up to a 121,000,000.

Where are we at? These are salaries?

Yes. And so my question is, do we anticipate that we're going to get over the hump that that extra 30,000,000 that we have not yet spent in any previous budgets that we are putting into salaries in the budget, but we're never spending it. And if not you know, because that that ends up being this you know, we're playing games a little bit in our midyear adjustments where we've allocated this money into LMPD and salaries. We're never gonna spend it. That means we can't do programmatic things in the budget.

It turns the midyear adjustment into sort of pork bell pork barrel spending in the city. Are are we legitimately gonna get over to spending that amount of money this year? I mean

Aaron Jackson with OMB. I think, councilman, what you're looking at is that one specific salary biweekly line. And when we build our budget, we build our budget based on the total salaries. And, of course, throughout the course of the year as people use sick leave, vacation leave, holiday pay, various other expenses associated with that, it gets broken out. So I think you would need to combine all of those sources to compare it to the budget to get apples to apples comparison.

Okay. But we are pretty consistently not filling positions and not not, you know, spending money in LMPD that we do budget, and that is a significant portion of the midyear adjustment. That is correct.

I'm not sure if it's a significant portion of the midyear adjustment, but they have been filling a lot of positions over the course of the year. And they could probably speak to that a little more than I can.

Not gonna lie, I'm having a little trouble tracking your question.

It's okay. We can we can take this one for follow ups too. I don't wanna take up everybody's time. I I know that I do that a lot.

I'm sorry. No.

You're fine.

Councilman. Councilman, if I might. So he's some of the questions he's asking are that you compare your contract to other contracts. And it puts us in this it puts the police department in a weird place where you guys don't necessarily know what other contracts are or any of how that works. This is a question that we probably could have asked of HR. I think we might have even asked it of HR, honestly. I think they referred it to police, right? So I am going to take your suggestion from earlier that we'll go ahead and form this into an email to HR. Because I think it feels like, given your questioning today, it feels like that's really kind of where it belongs. And perhaps we could have gotten a different answer from HR.

So we'll seek that answer. I'm not trying to shortchange you at all. I just I know we're probably not going to get where you were hoping to get with the police here. And then Councilman Winkler had a follow-up.

Yeah. So I believe that's specific to the overtime, And Councilman Ledger not to clarify your own question right but I believe your question to Aaron and the chief relates to basically we have the budget at 1,300 officers but we know we only have a thousand so you're basically you're funding the full 1,300 throughout the course of the year. And then in December you haven't filled those 300 positions and so you've got all of that money which moves into the mid year. I think that is the premise of your question if I'm not mistaken.

For the second question.

Aaron that's the question to you is are we funding 300 positions on July 1 that we know we are not and will not fill only to put that money back in the budget in December?

It's a similar question to what we ask fleet and facilities. The difference is it takes a recruit class to fill those positions, whereas fleet would be able to hire people as they fill. So again, not to clarify too much because I think Councilman Lindinger asked the right question.

So the the answer is no. We when we when we develop our budget it's more so on a rolling average assuming they have you know 11 or 1,300 employees that are filled on any given fiscal year. And that's how the budget is developed for the future year that we adjust it for our recruit classes and other expansion requests that are approved or proposed by the mayor. So to answer the question, if there are 200 or 300 officers short, we're not accounting for those 300 when we propose the budget.

I understand that we're not accounting for the full amount, but we are also, in the past several budgets, not hitting the numbers in the budgets. That's that's that's what I'm saying. Is that still even though I I I understand because we asked this we went through this last year. And I understand that we're not budgeting for, you know, full employment, you know, of LNPD as per the study, but we are also not spending the money that is budgeted. And that does end up being, you know what we look at in the mid year. And we're we're not getting over those humps. And so I'm asking will this be the year that we're gonna spend the money that's been allocated or we're come back again in December?

So I'm going from memory but the last couple of years they haven't turned in funds. They've been in deficits, which means they have spent what was budgeted and in this case exceeded that. So I don't know if that answers your question, but they have been, you know filling positions and exceeding the budget some years.

Alright thank you. Okay thank you. Councilwoman Chappell.

I'm gonna continue to make our brains a little bit wavy with this. Alright as of 04/01/2025 there were fourteen fifteen positions that were within LMPD that were filled. As of 04/01/2026, so very recently, there were 1,439 positions filled. That means that 24 positions were added in the last year. The staffing report from April 2026, which I have access to and is a whopping 254 pages long, it states that the suggested sworn officers are 1,136.

Currently we only have 1,004 sworn officers. That means we are 132 officers, sworn officers short. Okay. But given that we're a 132 officers short does that number account for the 24 positions that were added in fiscal year twenty six which if not then we're actually only 108 sworn officers short as of 05/20/2026.

So that 24 is included in that first number, that 1,002.

Great. So we're 132 sworn officers short as we sit here today.

Yes, ma'am. I believe so.

Okay. The fiscal year twenty seven budget includes 1,068 funded positions. This would mean that you're adding 29 positions in fiscal year twenty seven. Is that correct?

Right. So that would be our projected hiring of recruit classes along with the offset of projected separations.

So of those 1,468 funded positions, how many will be sworn officers? I guess if you wanted to look at it a different way, of those 29 positions that are being funded this year, how many of those will take away from that 132 officer deficit, if any at all?

So

if you add 29 positions this year, how many of those are anticipated to be sworn officers?

They should all be sworn.

So they should all be sworn. We've budgeted for and Erin can correct me if I'm wrong. But we budgeted for three classes of 20 officers that would graduate. If you look at the average recruit class graduation, that's what we have budgeted for and planned for three classes to graduate of 20 officers. And then also, like the chief said, this takes into account the consideration of projected retirements and separations of sworn officers.

Okay. These are hard numbers to track, right? Like they're constantly in motion. There's retirements. There's a lot of things to consider, but we're we're really just trying to get an idea of what your personal

The the other thing that if we have we currently have 51 recruits in our academy. 24 will graduate on Friday. So now those 24 will be switched to Swarren. So yes, numb the numbers as far as Swarren are constantly fluctuating with retirements, recruits, and Swarren hires.

And I'll have to go back and watch it, but it sounds like from the 60 that you plan to add plus the 20 that are coming in from the academy, that's 80. So it sounds like we're really well on our way to getting towards our hiring goals, assumptively.

Well, let's hope we exceed those hiring goals. And we have to have that conversation instead.

Are you all still marketing? Is there money for marketing within this budget? And does all of that marketing go towards recruitment efforts? If so, what is the cost per acquisition per hire?

So we still do have a contract with RedTag for all of our marketing and that marketing does go towards recruitment. As far as the cost per recruit in the seat, we'd have to follow-up with you on that one.

And how much for red tag are we paying in It's

180,000.

180,000. Recently someone pointed out that the overtime paid within three years for LMPD total $66,000,000 I just want to make note that that's $2,000,000 short of our annual public works budget just an interesting little factoid. But many professionals that are typically high that serve in high risk fatigue sensitive positions require a mandatory rest period between shifts such as pilots air traffic control nurses doctors and emergency services personnel there's no cap on overtime within LMPD and only the union rules require minimum rest between shifts. Recent reports have shown that many LMPD officers work 80 a week. I can empathize, but I don't carry a gun.

What is the amount of time between shifts that is stipulated by FOP? Who oversees those hours within LMPD? And is there an intention of LMPD to adopt their own overtime policy?

So in patrol, it's eight hours between shifts. So you're at you're out you're out your officers that are out riding the beat taking calls for service, they have to have eight hours off between shifts. And while that's a contractual rule, that is a rule that was put into the contract for safety reasons to make sure that there were rest periods. And so a lot of what you have seen in those officers working that much overtime are officers who work their their off days. So they work twelve hour shifts, they'll come in and they'll work the next day after an eight hour rest period when they otherwise would have been off.

And who oversees those hours to make sure the logs?

Each so it's kept obviously in the the HR software system in in Workday. That comes through HR but every individual division major is responsible for making sure that the overtime within their divisions and their personnel are approved the proper way.

So there's someone within LMPD that oversees that those workday entries or data. Is that what I just heard? I'm so

So from each division, it's approved through the through the division command staff. So I'll I'll the major of that division ultimately. But HR is the final overseer once it comes through for making sure that it's all checked for the entire department.

And then this is not a question, but I'll leave and get back in the queue. It is a request though. I don't believe we've ever received a breakdown of overtime by division and a breakdown of distribution of officer activity within their overtime hours. I would really love to see that for fiscal year twenty six at least and then also overtime by specialty unit. Thank you. Yes, ma'am.

Councilwoman Parker.

Thank you. First, I would like to say in the matter of public opinion, at least in my world, I'm hearing our chiefs are doing such a great job. So shout out there. And you just answered one of my questions, so I only have two now.

You

mentioned utilizing retired officers as part time to help fill in the gap for overtime. So how are they paid? Are they paid like on a peer and hourly basis or they paid at their rate when they left plus benefits?

So we have two separate things. So we have rehires that are on a year to year contract. They're full time employees, and they they come back being paid in accordance to the years of service that they that they have. So if an officer retires at twenty years and comes back as a full time employee on a year to year contract, they get paid as a twenty year officer. As far as part time officers, we we have zero. And that is something we're in the early stages of working on with the FOP to try to figure out how to make sure we can do that and actually hire some people to be part time and get that work out of them while making sure we adhere to all the HR rules of what constitutes part time versus full time.

Okay. I'll just say that coming from a medical background, when we would do that, we would call those people PRN and they didn't really get a lot of benefits per se but they got a decent hourly rate if it was just small amount of hours. That probably wouldn't work through the union, but, you know, but that's just something to think about. I mean, I'm generally not opposed to overtime because I feel like it's actually a lot less expensive as long as the officers want it. It's not mandatory, which I don't know. Is your overtime mandatory or is it voluntary?

The majority of our overtime is voluntary. Mandatory overtime is details like, you know, derby and things like that where we have all workdays.

Yeah. Okay. So generally, I've seen that it's actually cheaper than, know, adding staff with, not to say that we don't need that extra staff but you're not paying at all extra benefits to those employees. So my other question is what is the major item that's causing the large increase in your general fund appropriation?

So there's primarily a few things that have caused that increase. One is the regular salary increase that has come in. Two, there's a couple of contracts that came over. Mark 43, which is our reporting software system, was within SIOP Metro IT and we have taken on that contract now. And so that is now hitting our budget as an operational cost. The other thing that was in a capital cost was the flock contract with for ALPRs for the license plate readers. That previously had been done as a capital purchase every year and it's moved over into our operational cost since it's an ongoing cost.

Okay. Thank you.

Yes, ma'am. So Chief, just a real quick follow-up. Just suggested that part of the bump in operating was because of the salary adjustment for officers. Yes. Can you speak a little bit to what that salary adjustment does for Metro Louisville in comparison to some of the suburban police departments? Even I think, didn't the state of Kentucky raise their state trooper salary to a point that we were actually losing officers to the state. So how does it compare

is my question. I'm happy to report that we've actually stolen some officers from the state. They're actually coming to work for us partially because of the salary. I don't have the direct comparisons to the other agencies in front of me but I can tell you we are very comparable and competitive right now. And we have seen an effect of that.

So anecdotally we know it's working.

Yes. The other thing that we did was we also increased the recruit pay to be more congruent with a first year officer, closer to a first year officer. So that officers who come in as recruits aren't getting paid at such a low rate, below what kind of the standard is in

the region. Great. Thank you. I think that answers some of your questions as well. Councilman Reno Weber.

Thank you so much for being here. And I just want to start by saying part of our work is the work of actually getting things done. And we can clearly see some of the results in the crime stats that are happening here, and that's great. But the other part of that work is communicating about what we're doing. So first, I want to commend you, and I want to commend Major Brown, who was a guest at the Louisville Forum the other day, talking about the investments that have been made and the real successes that we've had along some of the entertainment corridors.

So I know public speaking is not his favorite thing in the world, but he did a fantastic job. And communicating our successes and being honest about our failures is really important. Can you talk a little bit about your broader communication strategy, both how you are communicating as a deterrent for crime, but also how you're communicating what we are doing afterwards?

So obviously, I think everybody agrees that communication is key to how we get things done. And so internally, we have to communicate to know exactly what's going on. So having people like Major Brown communicating at from the ground level what is going on in in those particular divisions and those units. But being able to message that to the public. So for instance, we've talked a lot recently about our summer task force.

And that does contribute to what you're talking about. So we've had obviously, we know that issues come in the warm weather, school's about to get out. So we wanna make sure that those entertainment areas, those high areas of visibility where people are constantly, particularly during the summer, they know that there are going to be officers out there. We're not out there, hopefully not for enforcement, but for presence so that people feel safe, know they're safe, and it prevents the problems from happening in the first place. You know, one of the things that we've communicated with officers who are riding in the in the Highlands area is understand that we want people out.

We want people at at Waterfront Park. We want we don't want them to feel like they are being policed to stay away. We want people to go to those places, enjoy those places, spend money, and celebrate being in Louisville, whether they're tourists or locals, without feeling like the police are there as a burden just to keep them safe and being good ambassadors to the city. So it's multifaceted in being able to get that message out.

I appreciate that. I mean, you know, especially as we're getting into the summer, this is not a space where anything goes. If we switch a little bit, I'd love to talk about some of the work that you're doing with CIT. I feel like this is just a moment where history has its eyes on You know, can you talk a little bit about where your your CIT approach and how we are doing some intersecting work with, you mentioned earlier, some of the the Office of Violence Prevention, but also in that moment, thinking about training, what percentage of your officers are CIT trained? What kind of responses are you getting? That'd be great.

Well, are at a really neat time when we get to be in the room where it happens and make all these new things. And obviously you all know that we train every officer in crisis intervention. And we've talked about co responder programs and what could be the benefit, how can we do that logistically. One of the things that we are in the early stages of is how we use technology to help in that. We know that one of the problems with a co responder program is scale.

It works very well in small cities where it's not as spread out geographically or as far as the volume of work. And so how can we use technology to maximize that? So one of the things that deputy chief McKinley as well as doctor Lederman have have been working on is how can we have a crisis triage worker that normally would be sitting in Metro Safe handling some of those things over the phone, maybe be able to live view what an officer is seeing and be able to give real time feedback to those officers in those situations that might be too dangerous for a a crisis worker to go into, but it gives another perspective where we can get some advice in real time on how to better handle those. It's my understanding that nothing like that's been done across the country. And so to be the first to to I wouldn't even think about it, but then to start to try to implement that, I think, is is pretty neat.

And last one. Do you think there are resources that you need or partnerships that you would need so that we don't miss our shot at this?

Well, would never throw a shot at something like this. And so the continued investment, one, in technology but two, in those other parts of metro government that are building those resources. Frankly, know, seven counties isn't metro government, but they need more qualified social workers as well. Think there's a dearth of social workers in the city and people who are qualified to do that type of work. And so the more support we can give to those nongovernmental entities and those those wraparound services to help in situations like that before it ever gets to us will be very beneficial as well. Thank you so much.

Councilwoman Parish Wright.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for being here. I just have a couple of questions around one of the things I asked former chief Villarreal was about the residency incentive program that was created as a part of the Breonna Taylor settlement. And just wanted to see I know we've allotted money in the budget for that.

And then she reported when she came that it was underused. And I just wanted to see if you have what that total amount was budgeted for, If it's been spent, how it's been spent, and just wanna see how it's being paired with the technology and the community trust initiative that it was supposed to be used for.

We have not had any officers utilize that fund, ma'am.

So how much is sitting there?

Yeah. I don't I don't think that's a fund that is sitting with money in it. It's my understanding.

From previous budgets, there was 500,000 allotted, then there was a million dollars allotted. I don't know what the total is now. If it's been totally eliminated, then that's fine. But I I haven't seen any updates about it.

Alright. It's my understanding that that money went into our budget a few years ago. But when it wasn't utilized, it was returned back to the general fund and never reallocated.

Okay. And there's no other program like that that you all are operating to help build more relationships and community?

As far as housing incentives? Yes. No, ma'am.

Okay. And then this I'll make this the last question. What's the current percentage of grant funding? I I know you had you you talked about having the grant writers, chief McKinley. What is the percentage of grant funding for the LMPD budget?

So 2,600,000 is what's anticipated in our grant funding, so that'd be right around 1%.

Okay. And mister chair, just so you know, I did email the other questions that were about the derby about basically like security procurement overtime that some of those things touched on.

Okay. Thank you. And once we get a response,

Beth will share that with the rest of the council. Thanks. Councilman Winkler.

You. Chief, I want to pivot back to some of the technology questions that Councilman Piagetini asked, but I'm going to ask them with a different spin. So my first question, not directly budget related, but will lead to a budget question. Can you give us a sense for like of a typical officer, what percentage of their day is spent doing administrative tasks?

I believe that they gave an estimate on that in the staffing study and so I don't want, not knowing that number off the top of my head, I don't want to misquote that. But there's a decent amount of time doing administrative tasks spent by officers. Not insignificant. Not a non insignificant portion of their time, yes.

So I asked this question of HR and they sort of punted because it's not totally there, they sort of said it's the division responsibility. Can you speak to what, who on your staff has responsibility for looking at AI tools and how you know because when we think about the staffing challenges that we've got, one option certainly and a desirable option is to hire more officers. Another option is to take the officers that we have and make them more efficient. And one way to make them more efficient is if we can eliminate or significantly reduce the administrative burden they can be more productive in sort of the other aspects of their job. And one of the ways to reduce that administrative burden would be through the use of technology.

So my question is who has responsibility for identifying that technology, implementing that technology and do we have a roadmap for how that is being used at LMPD whether that's related to reviewing body cam footage or filling out police reports or any other administrative tasks that either the officer or any other member of staff has to conduct?

Yes, sir. So big question. I'll try to break it into parts. Generally, those types of things would fall under chief Robinson and the admin bureau. They deal with all of the tech and things like that. We are doing several things in the AI realm. But the warning for us is that we deal with people's civil rights. So I we are very careful to never defer anything that could be civil rights related or have a civil rights impact to AI. That needs to be a human being that is responsible for that. That said, some of the things we are doing is, for instance, we're working with Mark 43, our report writing system, to pre fill incident reports.

So an officer goes on a run that is currently being piloted in both the third division and the fourth division. So how can we make sure that all of those incidental pieces of information are pre filled and it cuts down the amount of time that it takes to complete an incident report. How can we use the technology through our through our body cameras to pre audit videos? And so things like that, we are currently working on and continuing to explore. I wouldn't say there's necessarily one person that's responsible for all

of that

but generally that's going to come through the admin bureau.

Thank you. I do think it would be interesting in three months, six months to get some sort of update whether it's to the budget committee or the public safety committee just of where we see the roadmap of technology. I know there are companies that pitch AI tools for police forces specifically. I know some of those have come under conflict because of potential inaccuracies and the impacts that come with that. I'm just curious of that landscape, how much can we use that technology again to overall increase our capacity? Other than would love an update when reasonable sometime this year.

So I'll just add on. I agree with you and I think AI technology is advancing at an extremely rapid pace. What I would like to see in the future in the near future would be some sort of AI agent that would live on the MDT or laptop that would know what type of run the officer was on, would know our policies and required forms for this particular type of run. The officer would be able to input or scan the ID of victims or suspects or whomever they're dealing with would be able to generate some sort of brief narrative. That AI agent then would know what forms that is required to fill out for this particular type of run and the forms would instantly be filled out.

Same for traffic accidents that here's the traffic accident, it would know exactly where I was, what occurred, here's the people that are involved, and the form is instantly filled out. And so I think we are very close to that happening that would reduce the number of administrative hours that officers spend.

Fantastic. Thank you. And I would like to ask just one other question completely pivoting from technology. And this goes back to you know the unfortunate incident we had with the woman who was shot, had the mental health crisis was locked in her bathroom. The mayor spoke to the expansion of potentially the co responder model. I know Chief you touched on this a little bit through the technology piece. But looking at expanding the co responder model to other types of calls is there does that fall under your budget or a different budget? And is there anything in this budget overall that looks to that expansion? Or would that be a question for Aaron or a different department?

So for the deflection program, as it's commonly referred to, a co responder model would fall under, that's technically through MetroSafe and EMA. But obviously, that's done in conjunction and consult with us. And so we are very open to exploring how that can be done.

But the question of whether there's money in the budget for that would be a question then for EMA. Yes. Okay. Thank you.

One of the things, I know he touched on it briefly earlier. And I don't I don't know if you fully understood, our body cameras you can live view from anywhere what is going on in an officer from an officer's body cam video from their perspective. And so trying to find ways to use what we have now without increasing the budget of hey can someone sitting somewhere live you and then give feedback and some sort of advice to the officers or the supervisors on scene. I think that is something that we could do now that wouldn't require a budget increase at all.

Thank you. Councilwoman Hawkins.

Thanks. Thanks for being here today. Definitely appreciate you know, you guys putting your lives on the line every day. I do believe in competitive wages. I do have a huge concern about the overtime, but more or less a lot of my questions was answered. But I wanna know what kinda determines the overtime. Like, from divisions, like, if from the second division to the eighth division, what determines the overtime?

Yes, ma'am. So each division has a recommended level of staffing and they they don't go below that. And so if for whatever reason they're going to be below that, the major approves that they can put out a request for people to work those overtime shifts. And so we move manpower around based on the need of those particular divisions. The other sets of overtime, the non patrol overtime would be investigative related.

Okay. So my next question is back when Villarillo was here, one of the things that we touched on was a gang task force. Have you all utilized any of those funds? And if so, we're at in the budget because I really didn't see anything. I've been saying for the last three to four years that we have a huge gang issue in the city.

I just really don't and that doesn't mean that we don't have a task force. They just may not be as visual as probably I would like to see. So do do we have one? Or what are we doing with with the gangs?

So within our criminal interdiction unit we don't have a unit that is called a gang task force. We have a violent crime unit and they probably operate what you're imagining as a gang task force which they they drive unmarked cars. They are generally plainclothes officers and are doing street level investigations of violent offenders often involved with gang violence. We also have our prohibited firearms possessor program which is a unit of officers that take firearm data. So any arrests that are related to firearms that are from convicted felons or people who should not legally possess a firearm, that unit takes those cases and investigates those.

They work very closely with our violent crime unit, and they also work very closely with our GBI program, so group violence intervention program that is housed now within our CID unit. So all three of those working together is doing a lot of gang work. So we don't necessarily have a unit that is called a gang task force, but they are doing the work that believe you would envision a gang task force of doing.

Alright thanks I appreciate that. And then lastly I want to say that as far as the community engagement this is definitely something that I would want to support. You know, I did visit the simulator. I wanna say thank you for allowing me to do that. After I did that, several of my colleagues and several community members was asking how would they be able to to have that experience.

I think that that would be something that would be a huge tool for LMPD to use for community engagement. I think that it would give the community a level a better level of understanding about things that happen when calls do come in. So I think I would really love to see a simulator, one that could go in anybody's district so our constituents would be able to have that experiences on how every day you put your lives on the line, and you don't know in the event of someone pulling something out of a box. You know, it's just levels. And at each level, depending on the call, the nature of the call, things change leading up to when you get to where you're going.

I just think that it would give the community a better level of understanding if they're put in that situation at that time. So I would really like to see something like that. I think that it would have a huge impact on what our city would need to see.

I I appreciate you participating in that. One one of the things I would encourage is our citizen police academy programs. We're in two of those a year as well as many of our other academies. So we have a a Latino academy. We have a LGBTQ academy. We have a college academy where citizens can come in and learn about the department, what we do, why we do the things that we do, and take part in the simulator as well. Thank you.

Thank you. So if we could put a budget spin on that, what would be the expense of trying to bring folks to that simulator or to take a simulator like that one out to the public? I'm assuming we don't have a mobile simulator, so that's probably out of the question.

So we've a mobile simulator in the past that was, I believe it was actually funded by the police foundation that we used to use fairly frequently. The simulator that we have set up at the training academy is almost 360 degrees. I believe it's like 250, 220 degrees surround. So it's not it's not mobile. So any cost associated with that would be manpower cost of being able to staff it and have people come in during non academy hours. And what is the status of the mobile one that we had granted it's not as effective but what's the status of that one? I would have to check on that.

Okay. Thank you. I think that sounds okay. Great. Thanks. Councilwoman Mobi Walrich.

Thank you. Two questions. So I know we've had a lot of conversations about overtime. So just coming back to budget, and I know some people were asking about some questions. So just to level set for them on budgets that may or may not be pertinent for this year. First, I just want to make sure that we all remember that right now we are short staffed, so overtime is inevitable, right? We have to remember that not every person is going to be able to or willing to work the overtime. Thank goodness we have the technology that we can come back to, to help some of that. But at what point right now are we in contract negotiations? And when does that contract expire currently with the FOP?

And before you answer that, I do want to say thank you for LNPD and the FOP and the partnership that you all have together.

Yes, ma'am. So the contract is getting through next year. And so we are being in the process of starting probably in the next few months of we've already talked about putting our team together and where are the places that we already know that we're gonna be in alignment with our priorities going into the next contract year. And that's our set of contract negotiations and that's something that I would expect to hear from this council as well.

Thank you. My other question, one of our colleagues was on the line earlier and unfortunately is at the airport. So had messaged me a question, Councilman Herndon. So when we look at the training facility, I know right now you're having to budget out using different thing, whether it be the track or the ranges and such. Is this going to be something where other agencies will be able to pay in to use that facility?

So it it depends on the model that we go with over time. But right now, with with the stipulations of the state funding towards a track, we will have to open that up and make it a a regional use facility. But that's that's what we're accounting for.

Okay. So just as we look to the future, if it's funds that we as a council or city provide, is it if it's something that we will be opening up for a fee, if we can just look at what that budget would be revenue coming back in. So I know you may not have that right now, but if we can look at that give and take.

Yes, ma'am. And that is something that we talked about several years ago when we first started working on this project.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Councilman, who would you expect to be paying that fee?

Other agencies? It's just other agencies.

Suburban fire, EMS, I mean?

It could be other departments like J Town. If J Town Police Department wanted to come in and use it or others other rural agencies who needed to come in, may they not may not have a training facility and they may need to come in and use it.

So specifically, we are looking at external to Metro Louisville. So we're talking about our own agency.

That's correct.