The Paducah Board of Commissioners met on February 24, 2026, for a regular meeting. The agenda included a presentation from the Tree Advisory Board, adoption of two ordinances (rental occupancy and mid-year budget amendment), introduction of two ordinances (911 parcel fee amendment and Lumos Fiber telecommunications franchise), and an executive session. All votes were unanimous.
Everybody and welcome. Um I'll go ahead and call this meeting to order on February twenty-fourth, twenty twenty twenty twenty-sixth, and ask the city clerk to please call role. Commissioner Henderson. Present. Here. Commissioner Thomas. Present. Commissioner Wilson. Present. Mayor Bray. Here. So I would ask Commissioner Wilson, please to do the invocation, and then we'll remain standing for the pledge of leaders afterwards. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank you on behalf of all of us who are together here for the many blessings that we have. Please grant us wisdom and be with us as we make decisions on behalf of our city and our community and our citizens. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. Okay, first up, we have a uh presentation from Jonathan Perkins Junior. Uh and he's going to give us an uh an update on the tree advisory board, which uh we reformulated this last year and of which uh Jonathan is the chairman. All right. Thanks for being here, Jonathan. Well, thank you all for for hosting me, even though I'm now required by ordinance to to present an update to you. So um so I'm Jonathan Perkins. I am the chairman of Paducah Tree Advisory Board. Um one of my fellow uh board members, Bonnie Koblitz is here, and then Amy Clark is also our liaison, I guess, to the city is her title for that. Um but we're just here to update you on kind of what the tree board has been doing, what it's challenged to do and what we would like to do in the near future. So um you're able to hear this well. So again, our board is made up of of uh six members, including Amy Clark and Bonnie. Um we have a utility representative who is here, or excuse me, who is on our board um from Paducah Power Service, and he is a great liaison for us to what happens in our town with respect to utility overhead utility pruning. So he's he's a good resource to have on there. Um Jenny McCormick and Tyler Sanderson, who are citizen members of the board, and um Tyler is a new addition this year. Um according to our ordinance, this was one of those things that was updated and amended this year. Um we've been given basically eight tasks. Um one of the most important and probably the biggest thing that puts me in front of you all today is that we are as a board challenged to promote urban forestry. So that being our entire ecosystem for lack of better words of the trees, any of the plant material, even technically you break it down to wildlife and things like that that are around us and ours and and throughout our community, but we predominantly think of trees when we think of our urban forest. So it's the very big and obvious sign of what we got. Um looking at what we're doing and hope to do, you know, it was pointed out to me that you know, really I need to think about your all's commission priorities, and um, so digging into that a little bit. There were two that really stood out that we really fit into, in my opinion. That would be the quality of life and the continuous improvement priorities. Um, that being uh quality of life being with respect to trees and how they affect our communities, how they affect us both socially, emotionally, uh physically, and then also on the continuous improvement priority side, trees affect storm water, which a lot of people don't think about, but um, if we didn't have the trees that we have, we'd have a lot more water running across our land, running in our sewer systems, overcharging our our existing infrastructure, and so trees are one of those things that continue as they get older and bigger, they actually increase in their value as a resource and as a uh form of infrastructure, so very important. 2026, we've kind of uh tried to establish a list of goals that we've never really thought about in the past. Um, usually we've kind of kind of had some really informal thoughts on things that we might like to do. Some things are are some of these goals are things that we have uh participated in in the past that we'd like to continue to participate in. Um but uh there were seven goals that we identified specifically for this, and it's in your handout too. But um goal number one, and as it relates to our commission priorities here, is not really recreating but reinstating and and creating new content for an informational newsletter that we've tried to put out. Uh Pam Spencer has worked with us in the past. We did one newsletter or uh service announcement, if you will. I think it was in 2025, it may have been the end of 2024. Um, but we'd like to look at doing more of those for the public on topics like I've listed some examples that we'd like to explore, but things like responding to lightning damage.