Metro Council - Regular Meeting

Well, we're not gonna vote on, we're just going without objection. I mean, you're gonna be without objection.

Metro TV will start in 30 seconds. All right, this is a regular meeting of the Little Metro Council's Committee on Committees. Today is Tuesday, June 9th, 2026. The time is currently about 4.05 p.m. This meeting is being held pursuant to KRS 61.826 and Council Rule 5A. A roll call, Madam Clerk.

President Ackerson. Yep. Council Member Hawkins. Aye. Council Member Piagentini. Aye. Council Member Chappell. Aye. Council Member Batchan.

Aye.

Mr. President, you have four and a quorum.

All right. First item of business is going to be new business. The following legislation is being assigned to committees. Items 1 through 8 will be assigned to appropriations. Items 9 through 15 will be assigned to budget. Items 16 and 17 to the committee on committees. Items 18 through 29 to government oversight, audit, and appointments. Items 30 through 34 to labor and economic development. Item 35 to parks and sustainability. Items 36 through 38 to planning and zoning. Item 39 will be assigned to public safety. And items 40 through 44 will go to public works. Are there any questions or concerns, objections to those assignments?

One second. Did Jared speak to you or anyone?

Nope.

Jared, they had...

Mr. President, there was an item on the Budget Committee. He had asked if 0161, item 9, it is the debt service adjustment. It's about MSD, but he had wanted to know if we could move it to GOA. But if he has not spoken to you, then I think that we just leave it as it is for now.

Let's do this.

in budget right now. It's been heard in budget previously. I think it's because he's not a member and he wants to be available. Okay, one moment then.

An ounce of prevention is always worth a pound of cure.

Yeah, can we move on to something else?

We just will not officially adopt that until we hear from Jared and what they want to do. Let's see here. Pursuant to Council Rule 6.02, Councilwoman Craney has an NDF that she's petitioned to be added to new business. Any objection to that? Without objection, do I need to read that into the record?

I'm going to read the two titles, if you don't mind.

Perfect.

Roll with it. O-17126, an ordinance appropriating $175,000 from District 7 Neighborhood Development Funds through the Office of Management and Budget to the City of St. Matthews for costs associated with the installation of a pavilion at Warwick Park and associated improvements. And item 17226, an ordinance appropriating $1,000 from Neighborhood Development Funds in the following manner. $1,000 from District 15 through the Office of Management and Budget. to Louisville Independent Business Alliance Inc. for costs associated with the South points by local fair to be held July the 12th, 2026.

We accept if you're asking for it. There's no reason for you to address that. We give you the courtesy of adding an objection to adding that late. No objection that's added late. Do we need to assign that a number? No.

Those items will be assigned to the appropriation.

Okay. Agenda. The next one is, again, pursuant to Council Rule 6.02. Councilwoman Chappell has an NDF ordinance that she's petitioning to add late. Madam Clerk, a reading of that?

Okay. We've actually done that one already. We're going with Item 45.

I did them together. I cheated.

I did them at the same time.

So both have been added because there was an objection to either? Yes. So we're moving on. While we're moving on, we're going to get to Item 45, and you're going to be working on somebody getting a hold of Jared.

Yes, but I'm waiting to read the title and then I'm going to call him.

Perfect. Madam Clerk, reading item 45.

A resolution amending the rules of the Legislative Council of the Lower Jefferson County Metro Government regarding presiding officer at committee meetings. Right in full.

Items proper before us. This is coming from the two of you. Which two of you want to speak, or do both of you want to speak, or one of you want to speak? I'll kick things off. Yeah. Kick it away.

So thank you, Mr. President, and thank you to the majority caucus chair, Councilman Hawkins, as well, for partnering on this. So first of all, what we're doing here is amending the rules related to when there's a virtual meeting and how the virtual meeting is conducted in chambers if the chair and then ultimately also the vice chair are virtual. The rules already allow a procedure for if the chair is absent, the vice chair is absent. If the chair is actually totally absent, they're not here, they're not online, it goes to the vice chair. If the vice chair is totally absent and the chair is totally absent, then the committee votes on somebody to represent that committee for that meeting. What we're doing, we added language, first of all, under section 4.06 of conduct of committee meetings. We added a language that says accept as provided in rule 5A03 related to running the meetings. And then we added the following language. It says, I'm gonna read the language in and then I'll explain it, right? The language starting with letter E says, the presiding officer of a committee meeting conducted pursuant to Rule 5A shall be determined as follows. Sub one, if the committee chair is attending virtually and the committee vice chair is present in person, the vice chair shall preside over the meeting. Sub two, if both the committee chair and the committee vice chair are attending virtually, they shall designate a committee member present in person to preside over the meeting. Sub three, if the committee meeting is a fully virtual meeting, then the presiding officer shall be determined according to rules 4.01 and 4.06, which basically means it defaults back to the chair and the vice chair. So let me run backwards through the scenarios. It's very simple, if we are 100% virtual, then the regular leadership applies. The chair runs the meeting, the vice chair is back up, et cetera. If the chair is virtual, so they're still in the meeting, but they're virtual, and the vice chair is in chambers, the vice chair will automatically run the meeting. It does not mean that the chair is not recognized or the chair can't control speakers or the chair has lost any of their authority. It simply means that in chambers, the meeting will now be conducted by the vice chair. And then if both the chair and vice chair are virtual but the committee is being held in chambers, then they will designate another member of the committee to, let's just call it, facilitate the meeting. The reason for this, I want to be super clear, is not related to any one person or one meeting. This has actually happened multiple times over the last several years. It happened again recently. I thought it was already a rule. We found out it wasn't a rule. So we have been doing this, and we recently did it at a budget hearing. At a budget hearing, Chair Cramer was absent, Vice Chair Winkler was present but virtual, and they asked me to facilitate the meeting. So it's something we have done but not formalized in rules, and we wanted to formalize that process to eliminate confusion. And the chief reason why this becomes an issue is kind of twofold. Number one, if the person running the meeting is virtual, they cannot see either the speaker's podium or the gallery very well. So what we ran into was hard to like who's speaking or who's up there or acknowledging people to speak and this type of thing. The other part, which happened years ago, was if there's a disturbance in the gallery, the chair or whoever's facilitating the meeting has the ability to gavel and maintain decorum during the meeting related to the public that's in the room. There was a meeting where the chair who was presiding was virtual. and there was a disturbance in the gallery and it was confusing as to how to enforce that rule because the chair didn't know what was going on and the people in the room didn't have the authority to enforce the rule. So that is why this rule is being created. It eliminates the confusion on something we were largely already doing. and also make sure that in chambers we have a clear person who is running the meeting and can maintain order and our normal process. So I'd appreciate everybody's vote, and then once we vote it out here, when it does go to the floor as a reminder, we will need a two-thirds majority to pass this and to adopt it under the rules. Thank you, Mr. President. Councilman Hawkins, anything to say?

My colleague, you know, he just totally said absolutely everything. I don't really have much to say other than that I echo everything that he did say. I'm a firm believer that when you run meetings, you should be present. It's just more professional, you know, and it's just getting business done. So I want to say that I will be supporting this, and thank you.

One could say you said everything and a bag of chips. Anybody else with any discussion on this? This is a resolution that requires a voice vote. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposition? Any opposition? That passes. It will go to old business because it will require two-thirds of the council to approve. All right, before we get on to the last item being a discussion, we're gonna go back, and as far as new business, we're gonna be amending what we discussed earlier. We're gonna be pulling item nine, which initially we were gonna assign to the Budget Committee, and we are now gonna assign it to the Government Oversight and Audits and Appointments Committee. Any objection to that or any of the other assignments on new business? No objections, and they're so assigned. All right, the last item that we have today is a special discussion from the County Attorney's Office regarding Louisville Metro Code of Ordinances Title III. Ladies, identify yourself on the record. You have the floor.

Holly Hopkins, Jefferson County Attorney's Office.

Amanda Baker, Jefferson County Attorney's Office.

I'm going to just set the table a little bit. You all may remember we were here a couple of months ago, three months ago, to tell you about the comprehensive ordinance review project, tell you how we were going to approach it. and which sections we were gonna go through first, which is title three of the legislation. Amanda Baker has taken the lead on doing this yeoman's work. to go through Title III in accordance with the KRS statutory standard and review the provisions in accordance with that and has forwarded to you all documents that outline those changes and a great flow chart to explain them to you. I'm going to turn this over to her now to go into a little more detail.

Thank you, Holly. And I would like to thank the county attorney's office, because a lot of the lion's share of the work was done before I got to join. A wish list of mine for a while is to get into the code sections and clean up what needs to be cleaned up. A couple of just high level things I want to point out is as you're looking at this proposed legislation, you'll see a lot of references to leaving sections as reserved. And you might be thinking, why would we leave these many sections as reserved? Isn't this going to look like a massive gap in the code? And for a short term, yes, but it's actually less of a financial investment to do those updates when you have these codified. And the thought process being once you get through the entire code section, then you start working on your renumbering. So now would not be the time to necessarily renumber sections as our office recommends sections be repealed, whether it's because they're inconsistent with state law or some other reason. So you'll see a reference that large portions of certain chapters will be recommended to be repealed and replaced with reserved. Just a reminder on the standard that we have to meet. At least once every five years, Kentucky law under 83A-060 requires that you review your code of ordinances for consistency with state law, consistency within the code itself, and revise to eliminate items that are maybe redundant, obsolete, or inconsistent. So in preparing this legislation, it was helpful to do sort of a flow chart or like an Excel spreadsheet with an itemization of what the changes are and a high level recommendation of what the changes that is proposed and that was attached to the correspondence that went to this committee. And I'm prepared to either walk through all those changes today with this group or answer questions if you have them, whichever is your preference.

Really, just a quick question. I don't think we need to go through all of them. You've given them to us. They're loaded into the system so people can review them. Most of them look very consistent with the goal of all of this. And again, you've probably already said this, but I just want to make sure I understand. This is just the review of Title III, which I was just looking it up, is like the administrative section of LMCO.

That's correct.

Right. So there will be, we will see more like next we're going to title this and title that. And so this could be a wave of these coming out over a period of time.

Yes. So the thought process is to do these in chunks. Nothing says that you have to do it all at once. And I think that that would be a large lift for anybody to review.

So I think it's a fine way to do it. Zero issue. I just wanted to make sure I was a hundred percent clear that this is not like the whole comprehensive review. This is on title three though.

That's correct.

I mean, I reviewed the changes. I didn't have any questions on those. So thank you for your work. I really appreciate this. I know this is not easy because, yeah, you're looking at the LMCO and looking at KRS, and good luck figuring all of this out. Although I do want to say, A lot of politicians, but a lot of attorneys wrote this stuff. So if there's issues here, maybe we need to take it up with the legal profession on how we keep this all together moving forward. But anyway, I do want to say how much I appreciate your work, because I know this is not an easy task. Thank you so much. Councilwoman Chappell.

I was just going to echo that. Thank you for providing this document. And I think it's very thorough. I mean, in one, there's a technical correction that a section is mistakenly called a refers to a section when it should refer to a chapter. I mean, somebody has really gotten or a few people have really gotten in the weeds into this. So just appreciate this cleanup happening. And if you could remind us. There was a presentation you all gave and you're starting with the middle because it's kind of low hanging fruit or like maybe the the foundation of the cleanup and then you expressed that over the next five years, like every quarter we're going to be rolling out this. Can you remind me was that in this meeting or.

Yes, this was, we had a special discussion item, I think it was in January, perhaps, that we came and spoke in this committee.

Okay, I'm just wondering, I don't think I want to reference it, but in case anybody does and wants to kind of, you pretty clearly laid out the schedule, so I was just wanting to relate to the public who's eagerly watching at home and wanting to know how they can learn more, where they could find that information, so thank you.

I don't know who's at home eagerly waiting to find out more about this stuff. If you could point them out to me, I want to send them a special thank you. Other than that, I'm not hearing any other questions or concerns. Anything else that we need to talk about?

I don't think so. Other than I'm probably the only person in the universe who was, like, wildly excited about doing this.

Then we'll turn to you to find out who that one person out there is very interested in seeing this move forward. But other than that, the only thing that we're going to do here real quickly is on the rule change, I was going to send it to old business with the attitude of requiring two-thirds of counsel. I'm going to send it to consent calendar with the attitude being if somebody has an objection to it, they can pull it off. If there's not objection, then the presumption is that it carries the day with everybody. And so... If one of our colleagues has an objection and wants to log a no vote on it, they can add the committee of the whole, have it withdrawn, and then at that point we'll do the vote. But for now, we're going to send it to consent calendar. Anything else for the committee? If not, we stand adjourned. Holly.

Just one quick comment. Thank you all for your attention today and for looking so closely at the great flowchart that Amanda put together. And this was special discussion today. This was filed yesterday for new business, so it'll be heard substantively at the next Committee on Committees meeting. And I know there's also another piece of legislation on for the next Committee on Committees. So you won't have to come back together just for this, but we will be on your formal agenda for the subject matter next time.

Fantastic. Anything else? If not we stand adjourned.

The people that introduce everyone that comes from outside of J-Town. The J-Town regulars are that community. Like they love their space. They love telling people where they should go and what they should see. To me, that is really how you build, right? You build from the inside and those folks will keep coming back. And they love meeting new people as well. J-Town's a very welcoming city. And Greg, you've been nice enough to spend time with us and talk about this. So tell everyone about your other location, the one in Crestwood. Yes, we have a second location.