LEXINGTON, Ky. — Lexington has no retainer with seven of the eight private contractors it counts on when a major snowstorm overwhelms city plows — meaning nothing obligates them to clear public streets before their commercial clients' parking lots — and the city's acting public works commissioner told council members the arrangement likely won't change before this winter.

"If we were to get seven inches of snow and ice, there's no guarantee that they're going to clear our streets before they clear the Kroger parking lot. Is that right?" Council Member Amy Beasley asked at the council's quarterly Committee of the Whole meeting Aug. 27.

"Right," Acting Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works Charlie Martin answered. "The people who work for Kroger basically won't come to us in the first place." One landscaping contractor under contract with the grocer, he added, offered to plow a city route — but "only after he does his number one clients first."

The exchange came during Martin's progress report on the from-scratch rewrite of the city's snow and ice plan that Mayor Linda Gorton ordered after last winter's widely criticized storm response, which ended with the resignation of Commissioner Nancy Albright in March. The full plan — still in draft — is due before the council in October.

The contractor gap

Only one company is actually obligated to answer the city's call, Martin and city staff said: Red River Ranch, the Stanton-based hauler that serves as the city's primary snow contractor, whose equipment fit-up the city pays for. Beasley said she had asked Martin the same retainer question in April.

Putting the other seven contractors on retainer would require re-bidding the entire contract, Martin said, and "I don't think the budget would sustain that right now." He said he inherited the arrangement — "it was already flowing down the hill by the time I got here in March" — and that a fix would have to be planned for a future season.

Martin was blunt about what that means: the city does not have the people or the equipment to cover every street in town, and an event like last winter's would again require activating contractors and going "all hands on deck." In the meantime the city is recruiting backup drivers with commercial licenses from its own waste management division, so Streets and Roads crews can push farther down school bus routes and into neighborhoods.

What's changing

Much of the hourlong presentation detailed what will be different when the rewritten plan arrives in October, built around the after-action review of Winter Storm Fern led by emergency management director Robert Larkin, who interviewed more than 100 city employees. Martin's presentation cited four systemic failures from that review: no adaptable operational strategy, inconsistent execution of established plans, fragmented communication and limited use of a formal incident command structure.

Among the changes Martin described:

Simpler routes. The route ranking system shrinks from five priority tiers to three, merging the old 3s and 4s. "I never could really figure out what the 5s were," Martin said.

Tablets and heat maps. The city has purchased 75 truck-mounted tablets — a beta test this year — that will produce a heat map showing where plows have and haven't been. The public will see planned priorities and end-of-shift progress reports on the city's snow updates webpage, but not live truck locations: "We didn't want to get into a situation to where citizens were out chasing trucks," Martin said. The tablets do not yet track when a plow's blade is down or salt is being spread; Martin said this year's rollout will shape a software request in next year's budget.

311 only. All complaints and service requests will be funneled through 311 — including the ones council members receive. Martin acknowledged that during the last storm, staff fielding calls from constituents were "trying to skirt the system" instead of following protocol, which made problems impossible to track.

Scripted communications. A workgroup led by Council Member Whitney Elliott Baxter rewrote the communications plan around a standardized form that collects the same information from every department on a set schedule — salt used, areas covered, what's next — instead of public information officers hunting down answers by phone. Council Member Lisa Higgins-Hord led work on external partners, with contact lists verified for the state transportation cabinet, Lextran, the University of Kentucky and Fayette County Public Schools, which Martin said delivered its bus routes a week early this year.

Defined command. The plan sets a formal incident command structure — Martin as chief incident commander for typical events, escalating to the mayor's office when a storm crosses defined ice and snowfall thresholds, with response tables keyed to accumulation and the temperatures that follow.

What's not fixed

Beyond the contractor gap, Martin flagged other open items. Sidewalk clearing — a sore spot last winter, when the city spent more than $100,000 on a sidewalk contractor — is deferred to a later "part three" of the plan. One of the staffers who would share overnight storm-watch duty has turned in retirement papers effective the end of October. And a public frequently-asked-questions guide was actually drafted a year ago, Martin said, but "it never made it out there in the midst of all the drama."

One council member pressed Martin on whether the plan reflects that severe storms are no longer rare, saying the city had called her first winter's major storm abnormal and built its previous plan around a four-inch snowfall as the standard event. Martin said the new plan drops those labels entirely, setting escalating responses for accumulations under one inch, one to four inches, and more than four inches — with ice tables keyed to how long freezing temperatures persist. Another member suggested the city retire the words "normal" and "abnormal" altogether.

Martin, a 27-year city employee serving his fifth stint as acting commissioner, said the mantra driving the rewrite came from Larkin: "Write a plan, test the plan, exercise the plan." He plans driver training and tabletop exercises before the first flakes fall.

"This is the most in-depth evaluation of the snow plan that we've done since I've worked here," he said. "I'm anxious to get it finalized and tested to see if it works as good in reality as I feel like it works on paper."