Just this on top of everything, it's almost like maybe getting a get a break.

Western Kentucky town hit by severe weather for the second time in less than two years.

I am so excited to announce that our chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department is and will continue to be, Jacquelyn Gwin.

Laurel.

Louisville's top cop can drop the word interim, but we're going to do things better than Ohio.

We usually do.

Sports betting is headed to Kentucky, but will Kentucky be ready if the fish is agitated?

The silver carp literally takes flight and will jump out of the water and it can collide with people causing injury.

And how these flying fish are wreaking havoc on Kentucky's waterways.

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions, the Leonard Press Endowment for Public Affairs, and the KET Millennium Fund.

Good evening and welcome to Kentucky Edition for this Thursday, July the 20th.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Thank you for winding down your Thursday with us.

Cleanup and recovery continue today in western Kentucky after a record setting rainfall flooded roads, water rescues and wind damage.

Our Laura Rogers takes us to Grays County, a county hit by 11 inches of rain in just 24 hours.

We've never seen anything like this.

It's never been in the shop.

It's just never been this hard, this fast for sure.

In my 30 years I've been here, I've not seen it this bad.

John Alford owns an electrical contracting business in Mayfield.

He arrived Wednesday to find it surrounded by a foot of water.

I knew this little area here would have some water like it always does.

But when I got here at seven this morning, same water all the way to the building kind of shocked me.

He says he did lose some materials, but managed to save some important paperwork.

I've spent all day here just trying to keep water out of our office.

The electricians providing their services.

Affected by flooded roads.

By the time that we wrap things up, we had to take, I don't know, probably five or six miles out of our way down backroads just to even get back to the shop, because I didn't close the roads and I'd washed out every little road.

We tried to go down like it was covered.

We ended up driving about four or five miles away just to get to this location.

We live eight miles away.

Barry Irvin has a farmer's market across the road from John Alford's business saying, We've been here.

This is as high as the water has ever got.

This is a backwater for the red curry.

Ervin says he did have crops damaged by both the floods and high winds.

We sweet corn.

We got our acre and a half lying flat on the ground right now.

Plus we got flood waters backed up into our fields.

It's unaffected by hurricanes.

I let it be it and some tomatoes.

The Graves County Extension Office says it will take a few weeks to know the extent of the damage to local farms.

They say any crops that already had an edible portion on the plant now under water will be unable to be harvested.

Everything's flooded all around a new elementary school over there.

It's flooded pretty bad.

That's where he's about to start school.

It comes as Mayfield is still rebuilding.

A year and a half after an EF four tornado caused death and destruction.

You know, with the tornado being I mean, it hit our house pretty hard and we haven't recovered from it yet.

And then just like many others, but just this on top of everything, it's almost like Mayfield can't even get a break.

I've seen the tornado affect a lot of families, many a family.

The flooding, I imagine it'll do the same affect families, the community.

Alfred says the floodwaters should have limited impact on his customers.

Thankfully, most everything we do is out on actual jobsite.

I know there's one job I can't get to until they rebuild the road, so that's my only hangup at the moment.

He's now waiting for the water to recede so he can tackle clean up in his storage building.

It's just a process I wouldn't want to go through again.

For Kentucky Edition.

That's for sure.

I'm Laura Rogers.

Thank you, Laura.

Our thoughts are with them.

Graves County Emergency Management says drone footage taken yesterday showed close to 180 homes surrounded by water.

Governor Andy Beshear is scheduled to visit Mayfield tomorrow afternoon.

State Auditor Mike Harman's office will conduct a special audit of the team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund and the team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund.

After a request by the co-chairs of the Legislative Oversight and Investigations Committee in Frankfort, Representative Adam Bowling and Senator Brandon Storm.

Those are the relief funds set up after the two.

Whether emergencies.

Governor Bashir says his administration will cooperate.

He says both funds have been transparent from the start.

And the governor says an audit by the Republican state auditor three and a half months before an election, quote, is just politics less than the state auditor has.

A conflict theory was out.

Daniel Cameron's announcement of his lieutenant governor yesterday.

I believe that their audit would not meet the auditing standards that are out there that require that you are impartial.

We don't see that here unless we'll provide the documents to anybody.

Absolutely anyone.

Every transaction, every decision, every place.

A check was mailed, every place that received it.

That's what is available, not just to the legislature or an auditor, but to each and every Kentuckian.

But let me stop and say.

To attack something like this for politics is really wrong.

It's paid for the funeral of every family we lost in tornadoes and floods.

It provided millions of dollars to people in their time of greatest need.

This rebuilding hundreds of homes that otherwise wouldn't have the funding to rebuild It helped out farmers in western Kentucky that lost their granary.

These are not tax dollars yet.

We weren't able to ask for them.

And through the generosity of people all over the country and the world, we were able to provide services for our people that otherwise would not have been there.

So in other weather related news, a new drought map is out for Kentucky.

This was completed Tuesday and released today.

So it does not take into account the big rain in western Kentucky yesterday.

Now the yellow you see means abnormally dry.

The light orange is moderate drought.

The darker orange, which you see in western Kentucky, means severe drought.

But expect that to change with the next report.

Louisville has its permanent police chief and it's not a new name.

Mayor Craig Greenburg today announced who's getting the job.

He says this is one of the most important decisions he will make as mayor.

That's because lives depend on this higher on this leaders experience, perspective, integrity and judgment.

That's true of any police chief in any city at any time.

But it's especially true in Louisville right now.

This is a big job.

This is a challenging job.

And over the last few months, it's become very clear that the best person to do this work is already on the job.

And so I am so excited to announce that our chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department is and will continue to be, Jacquelyn Gwen DeLauro, out.

I acknowledge the hard work that the community is doing every day to to help us to bridge that gap of mistrust.

And I'm solely each truly committed that L.A.P.D.

will continue to build upon those platforms that we've already started.

But we need your help.

And we're going to ask and we intend and all about what we do on an everyday basis.

This agency will continue to strive and and try to reach out to those individuals that sometimes are still on that line.

And it cuts or they just don't know and it just uncertain.

But it's our job in order to make sure that we bridge those relationships by opening the door, the doors are open.

The Courier Journal reports more than 20 people applied for the chief's job.

Chief Gwen Broadwell was an assistant chief under Chief Erika Shields, who resigned as Mayor Greenburg took office back in January.

Talks are set to began again between ups and the Teamsters Union less than two weeks before a possible strike.

The Teamsters represent 340,000 UPS workers and there are thousands of UPS employees here in Kentucky.

The two sides haven't talked since an impasse over the July 4th weekend.

CNN reports the two sides will begin negotiations again next week.

Part time or pay is one of the big issues on the table.

Without a deal, a strike could begin at the end of the month.

And there are concerns a strike would slow deliveries and disrupt America's supply chain.

Sports betting is now legal in Kentucky, although bets can't be made until later this year.

Lawmakers received an update on the implementation of the newly enacted legislation in Frankfort yesterday.

House Bill 551 is expected to bring in more than $20 million a year.

It charges the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission with overseeing sports betting operations, both at the state's licensed horse racing facilities and through third party online vendors.

During a meeting yesterday, the head of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission was asked if the agency will have enough staff on hand to handle a substantial uptick in wagering in the Commonwealth.

I've heard numbers thrown around anywhere from a couple of thousand to maybe as many as 100 people to handle regulation and enforcement is potentially necessary.

Obviously, you testified to 14.

Is 14 going to be an adequate number?

We feel very confident with the number of 14.

We do have a growth set in for down the road that would add another 10 to 11 positions, but nowhere near the 100 that you mentioned at the beginning.

You know, we've been regulating potential wagering as senator there, pointed out, for over 100 years.

Most recently, there was over $8 billion wagering in our state, and we manage that perfectly with a team of two.

So I think 14 is going to be good.

I'd point out that in Ohio they have professional sports teams, they have casinos, they have racing nose at racetracks, a lot more locations, a lot more volume, a lot more population.

But we're going to do things better than Ohio.

We usually do.

So I have no doubt in this case that that's going to happen.

The state will begin accepting sports wagers in person on September the seventh.

Online wagering can begin September 28th.

Now, turning now to Washington.

U.S.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky says Congress should stay out of the U.S. Supreme Court's business.

There have been calls for new ethics rules for Supreme Court justices after news that some of them took vacations with billionaires and enjoyed other perks.

Here's Senator McConnell on the U.S. Senate floor.

We've been told we should be outraged that the justices dare to buy and sell property and take vacations, that they speak at universities and write children's books and that their spouses dare to pursue careers of their own.

As I've said before, I believe in the integrity and honesty of each member of the court and the justices and their family should continue to ignore desperate attacks peddled by Democrats and organs of yellow journalism.

McConnell says this is an attempt by the left to intimidate the court in the 1960s and seventies for species of carp were brought to the U.S. to help create a better water environment for catfish.

Now, fast forward to today, and the carp are now causing problems in Kentucky.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife is now working with Murray State University on ways to get the carp under control.

Some of the impacts from invasive carp is due to the level of feeding.

They do such a low trophic level, they compete with other species and they also can impact human health by collision.

As we've seen today, if the fish is agitated, the silver carp literally takes flight and will jump out of the water and it can collide with people causing injury when they spawn.

The fertilized egg needs a huge distance, 100 miles or so, so the egg can drift at semi buoyant, so it has to actually float through open waterway.

So those fish, even though they may be spawning here, their offspring are way further down.

And so they build up populations and they kind of keep moving up the river systems and pushing further and further north.

When you think about Asian carp moving through fairly open waterways, thousands of connected miles of waterways, it's really important to have a large effort of trying to answer these questions.

And so a lot of these partnerships, they are key to understanding and actually being able to control and suppress invasive carp.

Murray State University, while having always worked with the Department Fish and Wildlife on the biological side and on the ecology side, etc., we have we have an additional service here by working with the College of Business.

There are a couple of different ways to approach it.

One is from the governmental approach of elimination with our shocking boats, and we will actually go in there and will shock for the purpose of actually capturing every silver carp we can find and removing it from the system.

In addition, we actually have contract commercial fishermen and they basically go out there from October through May and they'll coordinate efforts to set up GILLNETS in certain tributaries and actually fish.

Last year, their efforts resulted in about £1,000,000 of Asian carp were removed through that effort.

Another approach would be to create a market for it.

And if we create a market for it and there's a demand for the product, then there'll be that financial incentive to get the fish.

It is, I think, one of those that it's a slow process to build a market for them.

I have personally tried the silver carp.

It to me tastes like anything you want to put with it.

It kind of reminds me of white fish.

But when you start talking about certain areas, there is a comfort level with the type of fish that people in developing markets as a process, not an event.

And this one seems to be taking its time, but there is a market in the area of human consumption.

Believe it or not, this fish and I'm told this is some of the highest protein, healthiest fish that you can eat.

The incentives typically in this space are in either the processors and then there are incentives for the fishers.

Ultimately, what what one would want is for the incentives to go away, that the market makes this profitable for everyone in the chain.

We don't know how many fish are actually out there, so we don't know if we move remove £1,000,000 in five months.

Is that enough?

It's a big deal when you look at how many states and how many state agencies have resources dedicated to this.

The impact is to commercial fisheries, fish that go to market.

So right now we're looking at removing, you know, Asian carp, but those carp are impacting everything else in the system.

Could be paddlefish, it could be catfish.

So it could be affecting you would come down to on your plate.

The cost is something at a restaurant that you eat.

There's also something about having the integrity of an ecosystem.

What we're contributing to is sort of more of a larger goal, which is to protect the Great Lakes.

And while we're doing that as agents of Kentucky, we're also protecting our inland waters.

What we need is feedback from the public and feedback from business owners ideas, you know, what can what else could be working, what's working elsewhere.

This is an issue, like so many other issues that we all deal with, is it's going to take a team and it's going to be a process going forward.

I see nothing but a stronger, more robust sort of framework for preventing, controlling and managing aquatic invasive species.

Kentuckians can do their part by being able to identify Asian carp from other fish and being careful not to move them to other waterways.

If you do see these species of carp while out on the water, get in touch with the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Kentucky State Police are going for the three peat.

KSP hopes to win the best looking cruiser.

For the third straight year, the winner goes on the cover of the American Association of State Troopers calendar.

Voting began Monday at Survey Montcalm.

It lasts until Friday, July 31st at 8 a.m. Eastern time.

At last check, Kentucky led in the voting.

So let's keep it going.

On the topic of transportation, thanks to the EPA's clean school bus program.

60 electric school busses are coming to the Commonwealth and 23 of them are headed to the Carter County School District.

The districts were selected through a lottery by the EPA.

The EPA wanted to ensure that each state received funding, so they allotted each state an amount and then did a lottery for all of those that were eligible within the state.

We always look at things from a from a dollar amount, and by winning 23 new busses, regardless if they were diesel or electric or hybrid or whatever, I mean, that's a huge impact.

I mean, new busses.

But on top of that, you know, with the busses, you get the infrastructure, so we get the charging stations and then, you know, the financial implications of saving all of the funds that would be traditionally used for diesel busses and diesel fuel.

That's going to be a significant savings to the district.

We have about 56 bus routes.

We run daily and we're average about 36 miles a day.

So, you know, probably on the average bus running around 50 miles a day, we have run some may run 70, 75.

Others may run 20, 25.

But, you know, about 37 miles a day, 107 days a year.

So quite a few miles of the electric busses.

We're getting to 120, 250 miles per full charge.

So, you know, in perfect conditions, most of our routes could go more in an afternoon out without having to charge the bus.

Now, you know, you got to take in off the heels, the incline, whether things like that may may vary on some of those.

But I do believe with 23 busses, for the most part, we should be pretty good on run a more in afternoon route and not have to do a charge till the end of day.

I'm not sure if every district will benefit from an electric school bus.

We haven't done any type of evaluation to to prove whether it will or it won't.

Each district is currently determining on their own whether or not it will benefit them and what the costs are for them.

Infrastructure is a huge cost.

Some of our districts, especially in the rural areas, just do not have the infrastructure to be able to put in an electric charging station station because of where they're located.

I'm sure there'll be things that we haven't, you know, thought about or encountered yet, but we've really tried to think it through ahead of time and hopefully not have too many hiccups when we get started.

A lot of the country's moving toward electric automobiles and vehicles is further for that environmental, you know, impact and, you know, we're fortunate and glad to be a part of that movement to try to make our world a better place.

We also know that the world's looking forward and we want to be part of that movement into the future.

And we feel like this is the step.

And if we can implement this program and show how it can be a successful program, we feel like that we're going to do a great service to to to help others and show them that this is this is this is the future and this is the way we can move.

Ten Kentucky school districts in total will get electric school busses.

Carter County hopes to have their is in operation by the start of the fall semester.

Goodwill and one Lexington, which is a program that coordinates resources to address gun violence in the city, are working with people ages 18 to 24 to keep them on the right side of the law and out of jail by connecting them with employers, providing financial assistance and getting them back in school.

A lot of people come up in conditions.

There's generational trauma that they're dealing with that leads to certain choices that they make that may send them down the wrong path.

And so they just need a second chance.

They need an opportunity.

A lot of them have never seen an alternative path, so they don't know what it looks like.

And I think today is an opportunity to show them that this is a job fair, an opportunity connection for the youth.

We're really young adults who have been system involved.

We got a lot of programing in the city for our youth ages 13 to 17, 18.

But what we've seen is there's not a lot of program in a lot of services for young adults who have been system involved.

And so this opportunity today helps them to find an alternative pathway.

I think a lot of people who've been involved in the system feel outcast or they feel the community looks at them a certain way or they feel there's no way that I can come back from the mistakes that I've made.

And so events like this that celebrate them trying to find that alternative pathway, I definitely think it makes them feel good, gives them a motivation and inspiration to just keep going forward.

The importance of having employment when it comes to reentry, there's a number of things.

So if you look at the reasons why a lot of young people do get themselves into the system and collect charges, it has a lot to do with them trying to overcome barriers and get things that they need.

So if we can provide them the skills and the education to work good jobs and take care of themselves that way, it is a great tool to reduce recidivism.

We partner with Bluegrass, Community and Technical College to give them a trade school credential for free.

It's just one semester long and that will help them enter the workforce with a living wage, benefits and high hours.

All of our students that enroll in BCT, Do you get paid a training stipend?

So the reason for this is that they may need to lessen their work hours or take some days off of work to go to class.

So we're going to be paying them $8 an hour just for class time.

So that is not a lot, but it is something to supplement them while they're in school and can't be a full time employee.

We also do an enrollment bonus of $150.

So we have a ton of clients that are ready to work, that are looking for work, that are working really hard to build their skills to be a good, solid employee.

This is a great opportunity for employers and businesses around Lexington to dip their toes into second chance hiring, second Chance employees are some of the most dedicated, hard working and driven people that I've come into contact with.

And so we're going to give them a second chance, a third or fourth chance.

It doesn't matter.

We want them to come in.

Talk to the staff.

And our team is just really focused.

A lot of our staff even have a background themselves, so they understand they have gone through all the roadblocks themselves.

They can understand and share that with the people we are serving in our center.

But goodwill is all about giving that hand up, not a handout.

I just want them to know that that we're out here, we care, and we're ready to help.

A great program.

Indeed.

They hope to get 50 to 100 people signed up and want to have more events in their future.

That said, people can still sign up at the Goodwill Opportunity Center on New Circle Road in Lexington.

The 2023 women's FIFA World Cup, hosted by Australia and New Zealand, kicks off today and there is a local connection.

The United States team, led by leg Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan and rising star Sophia Smith and Eliza Thompson, is heavily favored to win a record third consecutive title.

The Americans are the only four time World Cup winners claiming titles in 91, 99, 2015 and 2019.

The US begins a group stage play against Vietnam on Saturday and Savannah DeMello, who plays for Louisville FC, is on this year's team.

Good luck to her and the rest of Team USA.

Before we go tonight, we remember an out of this world event from 54 years ago.

If you were alive on July 20th, 1969, you were probably watching this.

Today is the anniversary of the first moon landing as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on the lunar surface.

It's estimated that 600 million people were watching the moon landing as it happened.

That was one fifth of the world's population at the time.

Well, tomorrow on Kentucky audition, our usual Friday check of the week's political news, this time with our pundits Bob Babbage and Trey Grayson.

It's been a big week with Daniel Cameron picking Senator Rob Mills as his running mate.

So our political experts will talk about the choice and how it could affect the race.

That and much more coming up tomorrow night at 630 Eastern, 530 Central on Kentucky Edition.

I sure hope to see you then.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Have a great night.