8-4-26 Special Meeting @ 11 a.m. - Aug 04, 2026

It is August 4th, and I'd like to go ahead and call this special meeting of the Autra County Board of County Commissioners to order. This is our first meeting back from break. It's where we kick off our budget deliberations from the county book that was left with us when we went off on break. First of all, I want to welcome everyone back and let them know that, check this out, I got hearing aid. I can actually hear you now in this ear, which is a bonus. But the real bonus is, for the first time in two years, my right ear is not ringing. That is worthy of applause. That is, no, truly. We'll see if it holds. I hope I didn't jinx it. So, anyways, all right. So, before we get started, I need a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Second? Second. Got a second to approve the agenda. So, the big item is, again, the kickoff of the budget development. You have on your desk, this is kind of a cheat sheet. So, as we go through the items on the big book, if you want to refer to the big book. This is awesome. This is great. Thank you, Becky, and to the manager for providing that. All right. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak to the motion and add or delete anything on the agenda? Seeing none, back to the board. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion is unanimous. All right. We have an agenda. All right. So, Mr. Crosby, I think this is your major item, and you are recognized.

After a long break and all the relaxation, we want to make sure you all hit back and got some extremely exciting material, and the budget's always so exciting. So, we'll get started today, and we'll go through a PowerPoint presentation, basically just go through the slides. You should have in front of you a sheet that shows the page number in your book. We also printed out a separate packet for you to look at so you didn't have to flip through pages trying to find it in the book while we talk. So, you can go through those as you wish. First, we're just going to kind of talk about the county manager budget at a glance. The proposed budget is $948 million total budget. We have, and the board has, set a tentative millage of 7.2107 mills, which will be the 10th consecutive year of reducing millage rates. And the third time, we're going to the rollback rate in the general fund. So, it's being reduced from 7.6 to 7.2107, almost 0.4 mills in one year. It'll be the sixth consecutive year of no increase in the MS2 for law enforcement. It's at 3.5678. Property values have increased 7.52%. That is an adopted budget compared to the final taxable value from last year. And why I emphasize that point is there are two ways we've traditionally looked at comparisons. One is adopted budget to adopted budget, but as you are aware, during the year, there are appeals on people's taxable value, so that actual gap is bigger. Adopted budget to adopted budget is closer to 6.5%. We're definitely off of the peaks that we've been running years back. We knew that was coming. We've both been planning for this. But that is where we're at this year. I think we'll see a more normalized. I would anticipate next year very similar to somewhere in that five to six range as well. This year, we have no increase in the fire assessment. The values, they don't have Homestead or Save Our Homes on assessments. So, those increases in values are covering their increases in expenditures. No question any new units this year, anything like that. So, it's really just covering their agreed-upon union contract increases that are already established. This is the third year of the general unit contract. So, the 28th budget will be back at the table sometime probably in the first of the year to work with the general unit again for another extended contract, hopefully. So, stormwater, no increase in the stormwater assessment. Not that they probably couldn't spend the money to have projects identified that they could use it for, but right now, it's not the time to increase assessments, and we'll look again at 28th at that as well. That's what those needs look like and those costs to implement projects as well. Solid waste assessment is flat. We are able to do that this year. When you look through the package, you'll see, oh, theirs looks like a big net profit in solid waste. There's not. Remember, it is an enterprise fund, and a lot of those revenues are using fund balance to help that fund get along. The $2.6 million that the commission approved to pay back for the local land property purchase or infrastructure development, we paid that back from the general fund fund balance to solid waste. That is how they're really making it as a positive this coming year. So, we'll have to look at 28th. Also, you're aware of the discussions on transferring waste in the future years and what that's going to look like. We don't have that when that agreement ends with New River in a couple of years, what that looks like. We know there's going to be an increase of some type. We don't know much, but all that will go into a future calculation. But for this year, all the assessments are flat, and we are able to do that without degrading our fund balance to a concerned level. So, we're good there. And we're also maintaining our efforts onto all the board's initiatives that you laid out in your strategic guide and things that we've been doing in the past. We have asked for FTE in 26, so the board has worked on some things, moving parts and pieces around. So, we've been able to minimize any FTE needs or staffing needs in 27, if you will.

I would like to comment, Tommy, is every time I see the proposed budget number of 948, I would like to see in parentheses the general fund budget of $183 million. There's a lot of double counting and inter-fund transfers in that number, and it doesn't really truly reflect the fact that we are spending a billion – I mean, we are budgeting, but our general fund is $183 million.

So, in that regard, I definitely hear you loud and clear. On property tax. Yeah. So, I hear you loud and clear. We agree. When budgets were only 2% to 3% increases a year, it wasn't a big deal to be able to distinguish that. But now, with the last four or five years, what we went through economically, actually, April quickly loading her plate up, obviously, you can imagine. We have been talking about, even within the general fund, all of those transfers and things that are not really operational in nature, we want to give this board, and in our final budget hearing, we're going to make a presentation so you can see what an actual – what we've grown just operationally, operational revenues versus operational expenditures year-over-year, not all this fund balance, huge budget that's – really, that's creating a big chunk of it. All those ARPA funds that are still sitting out there, those one-time dollars we're finally getting rid of, but we haven't yet. We've still got another – probably this year will be $25 million, next year will be another $25 million. So we hear you loud and clear, we understand, we agree. So we're going to clean that up from a presentation so that it makes sense to the average person looking. These are the operational revenues coming in, whether they're property taxes, gas tax, CSST, PST, and then where are those going in terms of operational – where are they going out the door at?

Right.

So –

Exactly. Yeah, as I am, you know, talking to lots and lots of voters this time, it's become clear to me that the misinformation at the state level with regards to our top-line budget has confused a lot of people. And I think it's important that, at least locally, our constituents understand, you know, when they're asking me why we have a billion-dollar budget, you know, it's an explanation, which I don't mind giving. I just think that, in general, our general population needs to understand, you know, the general fund property taxes that are coming in and then the rest of the general fund operationally.

So I think what we did send out, and we sent out annually, the 10-year history trend, and those are the actual. And that's a better reflection of what actually happens. We'll do a better job of making that more concise because it is still a pretty big packet on legal-sized pages and all this. So we'll do a better job of consolidating that effort so that it's a – so the story is easier to tell. It's the same story. I hope you'll understand the truth, the truth picture. All right, next slide.

You're welcome.

You want to comment on it?

No, just that I need bigger font. Oh, yeah, I can't see. Oh, like this whole thing was so hard to read. It was so tiny. I know you were trying to say paper.

No, no, actually, we've gone to a new program. And so when it PDFs, for some reason, it shrinks the font. So we've reached out to the vendor so that the file will do – Just need a microphone magnifying glass. I was like – We'll supply one. There's nothing hidden in there. So if you'll be like me, if you'll get your big screen TV at home before you go peter into it, you can throw it up there, and you can see it. Then you can see it.

Okay. Setting millage rates. July 14th, we set millage rates. We just went over those. Final property values are $26.9 billion. 95% will generate about $183.9, $184 million. That's the property tax budget that we have. The general fund avalorative tax revenue is only increasing $1.25 million. So out of the entire budget, there's only an increase in general fund property taxes of $1.25 million. I think that's, in and of itself, the story that needs to be understood. MST for law enforcement, that has a $11 billion evaluation. It's up 7.73%. It is at 3.5678. It will generate $36, almost $37 million in avalorative taxes. That has increased $2 million. So your total countywide additional revenue coming in is $3.25 million. So that's a pretty good story to tell in this economy. And most of that's going to be off your new construction, your new ads, non-existing properties. So law enforcement, again, is funded at 54% MSTU and 46% from the general fund. That's just the law enforcement function only. So your taxable assessed values and millage rates. I think this shows that relationship we're talking about. The left is your general fund. You can see the millage rates are declining. We were at 8.27 mils. And now we're at 7.2 mils. So we have 8.46. Can we put that on presentation mode so we can actually see it better? Right now it's showing the slides on the left as well. Yeah. That one. There we go. Now we can see it easier.

That's it.

So on the left, 8.4 to 7.2, that is over a mill reduction in taxes. I think User Chestnut Prickly tries to remind people the time he's been here that it's been a focus for quite a while now. So that is something that we should always note. You can see the big dips are significant rollback rate times. Wow. Then the yellow lines are the taxable value increases. So the MST for law enforcement in 07 and then the 08 was the year we kind of migrated the dollars and started with a fire assessment and decreased the millage rate for the MST. So we actually did a rollback rate on the entirety of the funds that year. And 21. 21. I'm sorry. I said 07. That's how old I am. 07. So it rings a bell. We don't want to do that again. We don't want to do that again. Setting assessment, fire assessment. Again, flat 132.47 per partial and then the tier 2 is 7.28 per equivalent unit, which is $50,000 of value. The protection, sugar foot assessment is no change, $10 per month per household. Personally, I would like to really appreciate the fact the board noticed what that community has done for themselves at the meeting. And I'm always impressed that they're willing to do that to have a nicer community and to do some things in a community with sidewalks and lighting and some things like that. So we've done that a while. And if you go over there, it's paid off. I mean, nicer. Stormwater assessment charge stays at 60. Again, that's split 30 to stormwater and 30 to water quality. Solid waste assessment, there's no change. The tipping fee will remain $65 per ton. Residential and commercial rates stay the same for the MSBU they pay in that regard. So this is just the history of the budget actuals. As you can see, our actuals in 21 were higher in 22, 23 we bumped the assessment out to cover. And so we're maintaining property values and staying up with the need for expenditures. They're easing up a little high, but we do have enough fund balance over our 5% minimums that we're okay for this year. A lot of that in prior years, as you're well aware, has been the transition to Kelly Days, hiring, trying to get people hired, staying around. The former fire chief, the current interim chief, have both worked very diligently at ways to manage and get staff to stay and avoid some of those overtime costs. So that's been very helpful. And you'll start seeing that reflective as the units have come online and they're out of class and they're out of probation and they're out of training. And now they're permanently on shifts and covering the seats. It's just taken a while. Stormwater assessment. Again, we talked about that. It's going to generate about $181,000 more than it did last year. Again, it is split. It's about $1.6 million for stormwater and $1.6 million for water quality. Solid waste assessment. And I guess I should say the 1.6 is managed by public work for that stormwater. And the other 1.6 is managed by EPD for the work. Solid waste assessment. Tipping fees. Again, their rate change. Tipping fee revenues. Everything pays a tipping fee. So to understand, you pay your assessment if you're incorporated into a rule assessment

or you pay a commercial, whatever you are in town in the urbanized area, you pay assessment. Then that assessment pays the tipping fee as the trucks go across the scale. All trucks go across the scale.

So that's how it gets transferred from the assessment fund to the solid waste fund. That's how they pay their tipping fees so that we're charging it correctly. Tipping fees are estimated to be about $14 million, which is about a half a million dollar increase in the solid waste fund. Again, the collection center and waste management assessments remain the same. The collections at the centers are estimated to be about $1.6 million. That's a decrease of $300,000.

That we have a reason why we're seeing a decrease, but we are in rural collection centers. And then 27 waste management assessment is estimated to be $4 million, which is a slight decrease of about $100,000. So those assessments are flat, pretty flat. Some historical context. The last 10 years of the solid waste assessment. I'm assuming the 26th, the bump in the blue line is the 2.6. It's the 2.6 transfer that the board did to reimburse for the land page. The 148 is the assessment fund. The decrease of $729,000. Again, I don't have a good reason for you of why it's decreasing. It's just not being used as much. It's not assessed as much. And we can...

I'm monitoring that one.

We'll get what Gus and give you an answer of why it's actually decreasing. We just needed to analyze it. We haven't had a chance.

I think when Newberry comes online, that's probably going to go back up. It's been out west for quite some time.

Right. So we'll look at some revenues, countywide revenues. Again, from a countywide perspective, taxes is about $286 million. That's your... That's ad valorem taxes. That's both the MSTU and the general fund combined. Permit fees and assessments. The majority of those are going to be your assessments. And most of that's going to be your fire assessment. $108 million. Interlocal revenues are your sales tax, your state shared, your PST, your CST, all of those other taxes that we collect intergovernmentally, mostly through the state. Charges for services, $102 million. Largest of those is your ambulance fees. That's over $30 million now. That's the largest of your intergovernmental revenues. I mean, of your charges for services. Miscellaneous revenues are down. Those are mostly interest. A lot of that is interest. Some of that are other sources. You see $366 million. And this is where the budget grows, where it's not in reality. And I think this is the other story the board needs to be familiar with. As we have done a better job at building reserves and building fund balance to protect ourselves against whatever may come, hurricanes, amendments, whatever the case may be, as we build that fund balance, that builds your budget. That sits out there as a source of funds, if you will. It's reflective in the budget as a source of funds because you can spend it. So, $366 million in other sources, most of that which is fund balance in all of the funds combined, that's $366 million of that $948 billion budget you're talking about. I mean, that's right.

When you add those six bullet points above other sources, it's $580 million. When you take $948 minus the $366, it's $580 million. When I think about my budget, our budget, the accounting budget, I don't think of it as a billion dollars. I think of it as $580, $600 million.

And if you were a taxpayer at home, you wouldn't either. What you put over in your savings account as a set-aside for an emergency or for a future retirement fund or whatever, you don't count. If somebody said, what's your budget look like, you would talk about your operational budget. How much am I spending to pay my bills, pay my mortgage pay? So, they think of those terms. So, it's only natural. It's hard for them to reflect upon when we do a balanced budget. We have to build this in to balance the budget. This is the offset. And so, when you look at your personal checkbook, you're looking at, this is how much a paycheck is. This is how much I'm spending every month on my bills. This is what I have left over. And that's a plus or a minus. If I had a little bit of my checking account last year, I bring it forward. I can cover some over expenditures. If I don't, I need to make sure I don't spend so much. The difference is here, we take that bottom line and we shove it up into the revenue side so it looks equal. So, revenues equal expenses. And that's governmental nature, but governmental accounting. So, yes, that's a story that we need to do a better job of explaining and displaying.

Also, the fact that there's things that have been allocated already, spent, but haven't been spent. The report from prior years. The report from prior years is in there.

And those big ones are the $50 million in revenue recovery funds. The bigger ones are capital projects. We issue $80 million worth of bonds for our courthouse. And the courthouse is upbuilt, but the cash is there. It's going to be spent. Exactly. So, I think we will do a better job of reflecting that and explaining that going forward, especially in our final hearing. I think it's important.

I don't think you've done a bad job in the past. I think this is just now becoming more front and center because of the misinformation that has happened over the last year. So, I think it's really good that we continue to just stress the transparency and the reality of what the operational budget is.

But we do need to do a better job of making it concise and more understandable for everyone. So, we will. We'll work on that. Great.

Yeah. I mean, I think that revenue, and it may be, this is just a language thing, but for a layperson who's not an accountant, who's not a budget person, like when I hear the word revenue, to me, that's money that's being earned. Right. It's not money that's sitting in a bank account. So, maybe we need a better word. Revenues are the money, that operational money that's coming in. It's sources. There are sources. They're called other sources. That's how we call them. I know. Nobody ever calls them that.

I mean, nobody ever calls them that.

They're adding it in the revenue line as if it's new money. And so, if nobody's reading the fine print or the detail or gathering, they look at that top line revenue and they're like, why are they getting $900 million? And so, it's not a revenue. It's already come in. It's already sitting in a bank account. It's not like earned revenue, I guess. And so, I do think language matters for folks. And I know in accounting world, for you, it's a revenue because it's on the plus side. But for the public, maybe there's another word that we can use for our carry forward, for our fund balance, for our grants. Well, grants are revenue, but the fund balance.

In our world, we don't call it revenue either. Right. We just do it to try to make it understandable. In our world, it's other financing sources and the total is total available to spend. The revenue is the revenue coming in. Other sources are then total available. We just, because people don't understand total available. So, we've always used the term revenue. So, we just need to be careful. Well, I don't think that's to be total available.

Like, my savings is the total I am available, but I'm not spending it. Right.

And so, we're here.

And we agree.

Yeah, I mean, to Anna's point, if we just start thinking about how the taxpayer thinks, which is taxes, fees, taxes, fees, other sources. Right. Right. Because the fees includes the assessments and the non-application. Right.

And savings.

I mean, I think that's the, you know, right, other sources. But a taxpayer has already put that money in prior years. Right. Or it came in from grants or it came in from other sources and they're not having to pay it. Pay it. Yep.

All right.

We hear you. Good. We understand.

I have multiple charts.

And again, it tells the same story. 30 million, 30% of his budget is other sources. Right. So, that tells the same story. How they're spent. This is, and we categorize these. These are pretty traditional, understandable to a citizen. But other uses, again, is a different one. And we'll talk about that. So, the expense side of that equation that balances, $136 million in personal services. Operating is $268 million. Capital, $201 million.

There it is right there. Capital and other sources.

Yeah. Debt service, $14.2 million. Grants and aid, $26 million. And that's, most of that's in your revenue recovery fund. And then other uses. And this is the misnomer. And this is one of the things where, even as an accountant, we get frustrated with. And we're working with Todd on this. Not that he can report it differently. But the biggest part of that other uses is the transfers to the constitutional office, which includes the sheriff and public safety. So, it doesn't show up as a public safety line in our budget. It does in the expenditures because when Todd rolls them in, all those budgets, all those numbers roll into our actuals in the correct function. And all gets consolidated into one general fund for the entire county, including. So, all the sheriff, public safety, and all the judicial court system end up where they are reported correctly as public safety or court system. In our budget, it is not. It looks like a transfer out to some, where they're going, to the sheriff, to the tax collector, to the property appraiser. And so, we talk about this. And I'm not sure we can change how it formally is adopted in a budget. But we also need to understand what I would hope we can eventually do is that we have two sets of budgets. We have, not sets of budgets, but they're identified different ways. You have functional budgets, which are public safety, court services, cultural services. Then you have the object of what you spend money on. And that is personal services, capital, et cetera. This is a transfer, transfer. Transfer to the sheriff and the transfer outline is the object. If we could get one of those to reflect, this transfer is a public safety transfer. This transfer is a property appraiser transfer. That could help us. I mean, it's just presentation.

I mean, this grant, I mean, this chart, we can put anything we want in a pie chart. Like, instead of having other, I mean, I will say that, again, as a layperson before I became a commissioner, when I saw other uses, like, well, what are they hiding in there? Right. Right. Like, what's other uses? Like, that's what it looks like to me. Like, that's where they hide all the things they don't want us to know they're spending. Like, so it's like, instead of it saying other uses, even though that's how it's reported, like, there's ways to split that out and be like, this is the constitutional officers. This chunk is the carry for, this chunk is the fund balance or is reserves. I think it could be really helpful. Yep. Or just to parentheses under there, you know, saying who those things are.

And that's the other thing that we do. And I know it's impractical to ask somebody to read that budget book. But the fact is, there's so much information to answer all of those questions. There is. It just takes time to go through it. So all of that is explained and kind of really detailed out. But who's going to sit, I mean, unless you're having a hard time sleeping at night, who's going to take that home and, you know. I mean, I read it and it still took me like three or three times of doing this with you

before I fully got it.

But those questions are answered. It's just, you have to get into those weeds. And that's a lot to ask of people that have lives. That's why we do representative government. So I appreciate the fact that y'all are a very astute board and y'all do ask those questions and do look at it. Okay. So the first assistant county manager is Missy Daniels.

Missy Daniels.

And those are pages for those following along at home. So growth management is on page, on the website, it's on page 161. It's in section two on the webpage, number 62. That's growth management. Revenues are $4.8 million. Expenses is, expenses of $8 million.

There are no pages. They gave us page numbers on this thing, but there's no page numbers in our book. Just F that.

Yep, same thing with the final piece will come out with the page numbers. Plus we want people on the web.

Okay, Miss Daniels, go ahead.

Good morning. Yep, still. So I'm going to go over just the general numbers you have that you'll see in front of you for each department. If you have questions, just stop me. We also have directors in the room for each one if you have a specific question about their functions. But the departments under me are growth management. You've got about 47 FTEs in fiscal year 27 with revenues of $4.7 million and expenses of $8 million. Tourism and economic development, there are just under 15 employees in combined.

With growth management, you said 49 for FY26E or down two employees?

They're combining some vacant positions to create or have. They're in the process, I think, will be done by the time at the end of this budget. So there are 49, but two of them are vacant. And we have a temp-classified employee. And all of that is getting combined into that temp-classified employee's GIS position. And so the total at the end would be 47. We're not losing any people. Because I did remember us talking about, like, adding the GIS, like, more robustness. We're adding to GIS, but we had a couple of positions that were still in there that weren't being, since we've gotten online and done different things since COVID, just weren't being used. So just combining so the expenses aren't more, but so that's why the number's 47. It is 49 right now. So tourism and economic development has under 15. It's between 12 and 15. I'm not exactly sure of the number. Sean and I weren't sure of the final number. Revenues are 22 million. Expenses, 21 million. There were two FTEs requested at the Sports Event Center that haven't hired. So that request is being changed to one, combining those at a higher level. I have a question.

We have the economic development is split into economic development and economic environment in, like, sort of the lines of expenses. Can you talk, revenues and expenses, can you tell me the difference between economic environment and economic development?

I can't, but either Tony or Mo or Sean, maybe.

The economic development is the money that we pay for CRAs. That's CRA. Yeah. We separate that out.

Okay. So that's just, that's the only difference. The rest is just the general. Yes. Okay.

Community support services as of fiscal year 27 will have about 101 employees. That number kind of goes up and down depending on grants. So it's up a little probably from the number in your book for some grants that are coming on with positions with a total of revenues of 33.2 million and expenses of 62.4 million. And I'm going to add in here before she switches, codes is moving, as you know, to under a different ACM, eventually the public safety one. So it's a little bit later, but I'll go ahead and cover it. And you can see those numbers when we get down there. But we do have a new, I do have a couple of questions on community support services.

Oh, exactly. Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just. Well, that's what this is for. Okay. Yeah. I was just like, so I, I guess this is more for my colleagues, but like we have the choices. I know that we have a lot that goes into that, but you know, it's, it's, it's winding down and we have a number of indigent care and support care services that we provide through that fund right now. Um, and with the cuts in Medicare, um, and the changes to Medicare coverage, I just wanted to, it's not necessarily for now, but I think it's one of those conversations, you know, Tommy and I talked the other day and it was sort of like, now is the time to sort of have these conversations as they're planning for the future and as we're thinking about our priorities, like that information is in their minds and their hearts and in the director's minds and hearts for like how we prepare for the future. And I think one of the things that's flagged for me is that we have this choices budget that's, that's dwindling. We have five or six years left, I think maybe 2033, I think it is 233, projection.

Chair, we have Claudia Tech, director of community support services. OMB has been adding funds every year to that, it was a directive from this board several years ago. So we are trying to shore it up. We do have some other ideas we're going to be bringing forward to you with the cap and choices grant renewal next spring.

Great. Awesome. Yeah, I just wanted, that was really my big thing was like cap's been flat, choices is dwindling and we're seeing cuts in Medicare and in SNAP and we're going to see more need than ever in our community for a lot of those support services. Just an example I keep bringing up is MOC and OBGYN clinic. I think this year they're okay, they're only like maybe 50,000 short for those two services in what they're already providing, but they already have waiting lists out the wazoo for uninsured and underinsured people now and so their need is growing. And next year they fall off a cliff with support from a lack of federal funding. So just wanting to be mindful that they are our front line support for medical support for people who are uninsured and underinsured, especially in our rural areas. And BoardFocus brought that to light in such a huge way that I just want to flag those as future needs for continuing expanding support and look forward to those ideas. I remember when we see that $100,000 number, that's the number that the board put in to

try to build up that fund so that when choices ran out, we would have some funding. When that is expended from, you know, we always look at where we're adding, where are we going to subtract. I've always had in my mind that the biggest opportunity, and you may disagree with that. Well, I'm not even going to say it because it might not make sense from a revenue and expense standpoint, but that's where we put that money to add to it. And we have to look at what is the federal government funding, and if they are reducing that, we still have a huge need, then where are we going to get that money from? Right.

And I get that, and I think that some of the things that we see is that we continue. Like, I'm going to use a different example than social services because I think it fits into social services, and that is, you know, I know we're not a big city like Baltimore, but when you look at the investment that Baltimore's made in youth support services, in community centers and drop-in centers, in wraparound services for their communities, and community policing, and the change in the crime rates, and the change in the arrests, and the ability then to shift the money they were spending in law enforcement and jails to back into the community into social services. Like, it may not be money that's readily here because it is that root causes investment. It's changing the way you look at the services that you're providing and thinking about how do we shift away from probation into support for youth prevention, right? How do we shift money from, like, having to constantly renovate an aging jail because we have less people in that jail, and we're instead stopping them at stemming the tide of crime in our community by providing economic opportunity. So it's like, it is a major shift, and it's not like you're going to see the line item here or you're going to see the line item there at first. Still with root causes instead of symptoms.

Right.

Much like the central receiving facility, it's hard to quantify the savings. And the family resource centers. Yeah.

Family resource centers. It's a huge one. Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, I just wanted to flag that as something that I saw, I saw Medicaid on a list, and I saw, I think, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP, and I know those things are dwindling, and I don't see our state, you know, stepping up to do anything about it necessarily. So I think it's going to be on our local governments. I also had a question about the community stabilization program. Can you tell me what that is? And it's like really dwindled over time. Maybe I don't understand what that is.

Sure, Claudia Tuck. Community stabilization is what we usually work on through community engagement, and so we have one staff person in there now. We've moved funds around based on what services. Some have gone to housing, some social services, but that's mostly Satori Day's and her work with the Copeland community, her work with the preservation and enhancement district we talked about earlier. Okay. A lot of it is when things come up that the board has ideas. She's our person that we rely on. Yeah, she's amazing. Yeah. Don't cut her budget. Thank you. To make those happen and to actualize things. So it's really support to countywide. Okay.

Okay. I just didn't know why there's been, it seems like there's been like, like kind of a creeping decrease in, in that fund from an, from a expenses standpoint. And I didn't, it's just because it's shifting into other buckets. It's just shifting. There's been no cut.

Okay. The same kind of explanation for the decrease in Sunrise Inn, but the increase in permanent supportive housing. Because the permanent supportive housing is going up 400,000. Right.

I think that. Which is good. I thought that was a. Well, that's the capital. Construction.

Yeah. So that's moving the capital.

And now it's just operations. I believe so.

For the apartments, we're supplementing in case there's an emergency operation that needs to be addressed since we're the landlord and we don't want to delay in anything. So $100,000 was put into each of those apartments. The rent itself is covering the overall operations. In that respect. So that's the rest is for like renovations. Which we didn't have in the time. Right. If there was a, if a door got broken and we, right. It was, it would immediately take care of the problem and solve the problem and then we go from there. And we have, we will be setting up the separate fund for capital replacement. Right. That'll be in the 27 budget where we've allocated money, $100,000 for each of those in a capital to start to build that. So when we have to repave the parking lot or replace doors or air conditioners or things like that, we've got the money set aside for that. Okay.

Thank you. And then my only last question was the same thing with rapid rehousing. I saw it's like a $50,000 decrease in our rapid rehousing expenses. It looks like for 2027. I didn't know if that was just again, like a moving around of money, but it, you know, FY 26 was 497 and change and it's 430 and change now for rapid rehousing. And I know it seems like we have more than ever a need for those sorts of things.

So. Chair, I believe it is a moving around because you'll see there's also a budget enhancement request for additional funds because that, that has not been a fund increase since we started in 18, 19. Right.

Okay.

Okay. And that's in both salaries and rents are included in that. Right.

Are going up. So, okay. Well, thank you. That, that makes a lot of sense.

Appreciate you. Thank you, Claudia. So seat directors, that's how you get through it. All this stress. Right. Right. All right. Okay.

So, um, moving on, I'm going to talk about codes real quick, but it's a few slides later. We have nine people in codes. We just hired on July 20th. Our new co-director started, Shawnee Allman. I'll have her come up on Tuesday and get her introduced to everybody. She's out in the field today with one of the officers, but I'm glad to have her on and they're moving ahead. Revenues of 66,000 for codes. And that's primarily when we go to the magistrate, the fines and fees and liens and expenses of 1.1 million. Um, and we also are just beginning the new school zone cameras. So we don't have any information for you about budget or people doing it. So far, we've just, um, been getting, I think we have eight weeks worth of processing. One of our fiscal people processes the money out to the different groups that it comes into, um, through us and then through FNA. But we will start September. I'm not even sure September since we're already in the middle of August, but soon we'll start having the hearings with our magistrate for people challenging them. And that's what we're going to do. If you remember when we started this, we said, we'll look at six months work of working on this and seeing, can we handle it with the staff we have? Are we spending money that the program isn't making that kind of thing? So we'll have to come back to you. But right now we have the magistrate set up for that and our legal assistant. And the director will be handling those.

I can just say, like, if this, I mean, I, you know, I've not been a favor of surveillance or cameras. It's never been a thing that I support or think is a good idea. It's the sort of perpetuation and, like, increase of surveillance and cameras across our community. But I will also say that if this gets to the point where we start having to add FTEs, I would much rather add an FTE of a patrol person on the ground who can also support our community in other ways that can enforce speeds in those areas than hiring code enforcement to review camera footage to, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, for me, it was targeted on school zones and it was run by the sheriff.

And the sheriff is going to give us feedback on patrol versus targeted school zones.

And the sheriff does have the person who's watching the cameras. That isn't codes. The only thing codes will be doing is anyone that challenges it, they'll process those agendas and get them in front of the magistrate. Okay. So hopefully people will say, yeah, I'll pay. That should be recapped with your fees. Right. But we're going to watch it because…

I have something flagged that I, it was actually, it looks like it's actually community support services. I thought it was codes. But we have under the, like, performance measures. And I know we're in the process of revamping those performance measures. So I understand some of them, it's kind of maybe they're not the right question that we're asking. But we have the number of substandard homes repaired staying above 25. It's only at six again. And I, from two years in a row, it looks like. I guess I'm just wondering, we have SHIP funds. We do a lot of repairs. Is that just a function of what we're measuring under that specific performance measure or?

Chair, it's really, Claudia Tuck, it's really based on the number of applications we receive and how much funding is in each category for SHIP. Okay. So we spend the funds every year for SHIP and those are allocated over a three-year period. So it can go up and down. We want to do more, for sure.

So we have the money to do more, but we just don't get the applications?

We, we're spending the money we receive. So it may be in first-time home buyer assistance. Okay. It may be in modification repair. We're also in a new cycle for CDBG for home replacement. Right. We'll see over the next couple of years we'll be doing more homes under the CDBG funding as well.

Okay. Well, we, we have an odd target of staying above 25 substandard home repairs, but apparently we don't have enough budget to do 25 home repairs. So it seems like a silly target if we can't reach it ever. Right. So just something to flag was we're having those conversations about performance and what we actually measure and measuring things that we're actually funding or that are going to make a bigger, a big impact on community. But it reminds me of codes because we have these issues where these substandard homes sit in communities because people can't afford to repair them. So I don't know if there's any opportunity to coordinate with codes when there is substandard housing that needs repair, if there's already a line of communication with you all to ship funding that might be able to support them or that.

Chair, we do work with codes pretty closely when they identify homes and we go out and address some issues and, and we certainly have applications out there for homeowners to apply. We don't say identify a home by codes and then we can assist if it is an application that's competitive. Okay.

Thank you.

And that's an example directors of when you think it's over, it's not over. Not with this commission.

Thank you. Commissioner Wheeler. I just have a quick question too. The juvenile detention center that we pay in, is that what's required by the state?

Yes. We have to do that?

Yes, ma'am. Do we have any oversight at all?

No, ma'am. It's in our community, but, and we pay to have them here, but that's it. They identify the detainees from where the juveniles are from and they send us a bill based on their costs. It's an equivalent bill now.

Is it the same for every county?

Yes. So, well, the fiscally constrained counties, I think, have a different formulation, but the counties, all 67, I believe, jumped in a lawsuit years ago over this because of how they were charging us, and so there is a formula that we all agreed to accept as part of that, that's more distributed on a more equivalent basis rather than by individual who is in custody. But the reality is, it is the funding of a department that is a state department that is the juvenile equivalent of the Florida Department of Corrections.

Wow.

And we pay for the operation of that state as counties.

And they were also on our list of those state mandated items, unfunded mandates. This is one of those lists of about five or six things we shared that were pretty big. This is a big one.

I will say there's been, I've been coordinating a little bit with the sheriff's office and some of our service providers, like our literacy, working with peak literacy in particular, for example, to connect the dots with them and the new principal that's at the DJJ and trying to connect the dots so that we can get more supports for literacy in the DJJ as well as at our jail for our youth that are incarcerated or are being held there. So I'm trying to connect dots where we have funding so we can help support. It's not any kind of control or say over things, but it is like trying to get as many supports

as we can.

Good.

Good for you. I just, it worries me that we have juveniles in our community that we don't have any way to know how they're being treated. That's all. So thank you for doing that. Yeah.

Okay, Missy. Next one.

Okay. A few more here. Solid waste and resource recovery. Tommy talked to you about the assessments and the tipping fees and stuff already. There's about 63 employees across all the different branches of that department. And revenues at 47.2 million, expenses at 31.4 million, but as you'll remember Tommy said, don't think you have 60 million dollars there that's just extra. And some, I think some of, they're looking into the other numbers where everything was decreasing across the collection centers and everything else. Some of that decrease is just based on the estimates were high and then the actuals were lower. So it comes in estimates are getting right sized for this year and it lowers it a little bit.

It's not really a decrease that you're seeing. On this one, I just wanted to flag our conversation yesterday for our other commissioners and again, for that flagging of things that are coming in the future, I think one is obviously the landfill conversation and the cost of our tipping fees, what we're doing there and the long-term viability of new reverse capacity if they don't build new cells. Although they have capacity to build new cells, so hopefully they would. I think there's still a really great landfill, the best we have around with the landfill gas recapture and the other things they do. And I think hopefully they'll be a good partner and we can find a way to negotiate with them.

But otherwise they're going to lose 70% of their budget. Right.

I do think though that, you know, that longer term conversation that Gus has kind of got going about what are our strategies regarding waste is something that we need to be thinking about in terms of funding for like outreach and communication in the community and doing engagement and thinking about those conversations as well as our economic plan. Because, you know, one of the things that our committee for water and climate brought up was, you know, we started talking about waste, waste reduction and the real need and importance in beginning to engage our community in better ways around our goals for waste reduction. And because we're seeing a decrease in recycling. We're seeing a decrease in those sorts of things in our community. And so how do we begin to increase? And I mean, there are two things that are kind of quote off track in our performance measures are number of public education events and number of outreach events. But I think we need to increase that level around what we're doing for our zero waste and waste reduction and circular economy initiatives to get our community more engaged. And in particular, I guess I wanted to bring up for this commission the idea that we kind of track very closely what the city is doing with their commercial and multifamily composting. And if it works well and it seems to be going okay to consider the expansion of that into the unincorporated area inside the urban services boundary. Yep. Because I'm kind of waiting to see how it goes there. Yeah, exactly. But keeping close eye on that and beginning to understand what that might look like for the county. And then just generally composting initiatives as a whole, because I think that could drastically, I mean, it's 30% of our waste room. If we can figure it out and crack that nut, that's a huge savings to us in terms of hauling potentially, or at least a cost-neutral opportunity if we can do it right.

We also currently have a pilot going for composting, right? Where they're picking it up from our rural collection centers.

Yeah. Okay. So moving on to public works.

Before you get there. So just to echo what Missy was saying in the earlier conversation, that number, somebody would look at the number and say, you have plenty of money and it's all the waste. That budget is, the budget is eating into about $16 million. We don't expect that to happen. If right now our projections into next year look like it would be 2.6 that we transferred over, that we should be about breakeven next year. That's our goal or use very, but we'll definitely, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a positive at the end of the day, but it's not going to eat into $16 million. So that is more how we build out our budget conservatively with fees, with personal services and all those kinds of things. But I just wanted to reflect that that's not, someone looks at that, I don't want to think they're over collecting in revenue in Solid Lakes. We are not. So that fund alone, the 400 fund, which is the main fund that takes all the trucks across, transports the waste, is eating about $5 million. So we just got to be cautious and I just don't want to give an inaccurate reflection of what's really happening. Okay.

Public Works. So Public Works, we've got about 137 employees spread across the different divisions and funding sources. Revenues are coming at 90.2 million and expenses at 121 million.

On Public Works, I mean, I'm sure that the response is we have the infrastructure surtax and that's what we're spending on road and bridge, but the road and bridge budget overall is down $3 million in this budget. So I thought that was odd considering how many road projects we have going on. It was just kind of a flag question for me more than anything else.

Um, same. This is, this was the big highlight for me.

Right. Like why is that down 3 million when we're in the middle of like all these major road projects and we have,

why is the,

the expense side of road and bridge? 14.3 to 10.4.

So those are,

okay. So we have an operational gas tax fund and we have infrastructure surtax. Um, we have been working on, um, using some of our infrastructure surtax. The board has allowed us to target some of the repair work and some of the other things that we're squeezing the gas tax fund dry. So when some of that's coming out of the infrastructure surtax down, which is a different. So it's not in this. Right. It doesn't reflect that in that department. So that's what you're saying. It's offset by the TIP 10 million.

Right. Right. Or the surtax roads at the bottom of 32. 32.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going to jump in real quick, because this is my only item here, but I, you know, I know Ramone has increased to four. Yes. Hothole. And from what I'm hearing again, maybe this is a campaign year and that's what I'm hearing. But I think we need six. I think we need more. And I know we gave direction at our last meeting that that's, if we're going to find additional money, not move around our TIP, but find additional money that the board is interested in that. And I don't know if anyone else feels the same way as I, but I, I, I think as we have started to ramp up the TIP, it's just become more and more important that we are maintaining as fast as we can when they get their service requests in. And you can see we're missing some targets here because they just don't have enough people. Um, and they don't have enough equipment. So I'm interested, all of the budget things we're going to talk about in August, this would be one where I would want to make an adjustment to what the manager proposed to increase resources. if there's a place to, I don't know where that is yet because we are at the beginning of that discussion, or today in August, but I, I want to give that feedback right now so that if my colleagues agree, they can say, and, um, and,

and we can work on that. And we are bringing that back at your request to have that discussion with you. So we can bring back what that looks like from a financial perspective.

We're going to have that discussion August 13th, uh, during the day, on the next Thursday with the CIP. Yep. Okay. Great. Because I think, but, but to give a little more prep for that, um, I think that everybody on staff agrees that, you know, there's some emergent, urgent issues that we need to be addressing. Um, what I mentioned at the, at the last board meeting, um, was the, it was very, very methodical approach to how we came up with the priority list and, and the order of projects, if you will. Um, and while it obviously be very frustrating if you're in the public and you're driving on some of these roads and you don't understand why, how earth could my road not be there? Um, there is a, an overarching county wide of how many roads, how many cars are going on this road? How many cars are impacted by this? How many pedestrians are impacted? I mean, all that goes into that equation. So while it's not just the level of the road, there's other things that go into why we need to do whichever road it is. So, um, Ramona has been very diligent trying to get that fourth one on the road. So that's twice as many as we did have. Um, if we want to go to six, that's good to know. If that's what we're hearing, we need to be prepared to have that discussion on the 13th. Um, but we need to start carving that out of the infrastructure sure tax funds and understand that these are, those are capital things that we can do. And, and another thing that April's worked very well on right out of the gate has been how we're accounting and budgeting for the, all the projects. So we're actually going to build out and you're going to see a pretty big number in the final budget. So we're going to, we're going to have those projects on our side, not necessarily all. We know the budget's going to come year over year, but as I mentioned in the past, if we get to a point to where, um, Hey, money is holding up roads. We can go borrow against infrastructure sure tax. We can get funding. Yeah. Actually the cost of dollars is cheaper than the cost of inflation. Totally. Oh, great. So as soon as he's ready to do that, we just need to plug in some of these other non-traditional road reconstruction. So if it's pothole repair, if it's patch jobs, if it's an overlay or whatever those, whatever those things are that I just told you everything I know about public works right there. Uh, whatever Ramon comes back and says, Hey, this is what we need to do to keep going, but also meet the immediate media needs that are out there. That's what we'll be prepared to do on the 13th.

I guess I, you know, just to respond, I'm with you on, on the idea of like, are some of our roads that have been neglected for so long, even though we are, we have in the thought of a way that we've invested what limited resources we have in repairing our roads. Some of our roads are completely failing regardless. Right. And they, they don't happen to be the ones in the list. And like, at the end of the day, like we have to, we're still responsible for this road. So what do we do? And I, I just don't know. I, I don't know that six crews funding, six crews going out and trying to pack roads that can't really be patched is the answer. I'm interested to hear Ramon respond to that, like on the 13th, because I don't know. I mean, if we have six teams and they're constantly patching the roads, maybe they get us through till we have the funding to, to actually pave them. But I, in some of the instances, these words, from what I hear from his emails, back and forth to the public is that they're too far gone. Right. They're already. And so I thought we bought that piece of equipment where we could like cut out sections of road and pave sections of road and things like that. Like maybe it's another one of those teams. I don't know what it is, but I'm with you on needing to. to try to limp along with the infrastructure that we have, and caring for the things that we need to care for, and having enough resources to do that. So, but I just don't know that that's the right answer.

Mr. Gavaret, you're going to have plenty of time to discuss this on the 13th, so just give us a preview of what you're thinking. And I have one other question, so don't move after that.

Ramon Gavaret,

the Pollywoods director. On the 13th, you're going to see a list of roadways that not one section of the roadways is included in the, in the current DCIP. You're also going to see a list of roadways that some sections are included in the DCIP. And the third list is going to be those sections in those roadways that are not included, with the dollar amount. That's going to tell you how much more money you need if you want to actually touch all the roads. As far as

That's the direction we gave it the last year.

Yeah. That's one thing. Yeah. You're going to get that on the 13th. Okay. As far as potholes, the good news is that this week we finally got the third trailer that got burnt. So yesterday, the asphalt manufacturers were not producing asphalt, so we could not have the patch crews out there yesterday, because it was a rain day for everybody. Yeah. Um, but today they are out there. We have three crews that are now rotating. Uh, we got the list, uh, a list going where we have rotating the three crews on, on the roadways that are usually the problematic ones. Um, and then we have the fourth crew, which is the pothole that the truck that requires a CDL drive that is going to be used just for, uh, there's a three foot pothole here, but the whole road is okay. So we're going to go catch that one. Uh, but the other three crews are going to be on a rotating basis. Uh, now what I, what I've been letting the commissioners know, and some members of the public is that that means that other things are not being done. Um, and I'm going to tell the board already right now, I expect phone calls of other things. I mean, maintenance wise that are probably going to go, uh, a little bit backwards.

Is that because of limited staffing?

Well, yeah, Commissioner. We, we are, we used to have two pothole crews out there. Now we have four. And at least three, three, three, three crew, three crew members per crew. So that's six totals that I have, at least that I had to remove from another, from, from other units. And before that, when we started this asphalt unit, now we actually, I actually remove a total of 16. employees from the other units to create this new unit, just for asshole. So we've been doing all this without getting any new FTEs. And I know the situation of the revenues. I know the situation of the budget, but something is going to get hurt by moving people more into, and emphasizing the asphalt issue. Yeah.

Yeah. And let me say this. It is not simply a function of lack of FTEs. It is also a function of lack of ability to hire staff to fill the positions. So we can create another 15 FTEs. That doesn't mean that they're going to be filled FTEs. So that also creates an issue. So I don't want to leave the impression that this is solely a function of lack of enough FTEs. And he's moving people around because we also have FTEs that we can't fill.

Well, we do have a reentry program and a lot of people moving through that need jobs. And so maybe there's a chance to work with our new reentry program on a training program that could get people ready. I know some of these jobs require more skill or more background, more like, I don't know. I don't know what these jobs require. And they might be something that requires more training than these individuals would have. But I'm just throwing that out there. We've got a lot of people in our community that need jobs. And we've got a lot of jobs. And somehow they're still not getting filled. I'm going to leave the HR discussions to HR.

But Michelle is absolutely correct. The good news is that right now we have six new employees going through the hiring process.

So we're going to, out of the 20-something vacants that we have, we're putting a little bit of a dent right now.

Would two more crews help?

Excuse me?

You had two more crews. Would that help?

Not if he's taking them from the same places.

I am right now, these are positions that actually should be more like doing more mowing, for example. And I have removed people already from these crews that were already hurting with personnel. Asphalt right now, the asphalt unit right now is 19 people total. So keep in mind, your total field employees in operations are about 72. So 19 of those are dedicated to asphalt now. And then you still have the mowing crew is the second largest crew, which used to be 16. I think it's down to 11 right now. And that includes, 11 includes some vacancies, by the way. So out there is probably the only line about mowing less and asphalting. No, I am not. And those are the things, that's a discussion we need to have to give him that direction.

If we're going to add, we need to add people because we can't keep robbing.

So if I may, I think that's a pretty good preview for the 13th. Yeah. I was going to say, we need to, we'll have a discussion of the vacancies too, because I think that's important.

I love Anna's idea. If we've got release, that's a pilot program and it's working well. If we have people that need jobs, let's give it to them and have them fill pottles. I love that idea.

Even if they're temp jobs, you know, to get to find out whether they can actually do the work.

Yes. I want all the at risk and the red boxes on these two pages addressed. You know, the off track and the at risk when it comes to pottles. This is where I see the big hole that if we're going to give direction on adjusting our budget or adding resources in certain areas, this is my priority this year for this cycle.

And I'm with you on addressing them. I just don't want to do it at the detriment of other components because then we start getting the calls on, my right-of-way is not mowed and my trees aren't trimmed and my, you know, this tree, this branch fell down on my car because it hadn't been trimmed the way. So it like feeds itself and, you know, more resources as necessary. And, you know, because that was my two other questions for you were the ditches and the, the ditches and the swales basically and the stormwater ponds like off track in terms of collecting, but we have stormwater fees that supposedly cover that work. Is it because we don't have enough people? Like, is it because that team is down or?

Commissioner, Mr. Chair, you have, I believe it's 13 people right now in the stormwater crew that are paid through the stormwater assessment. Currently we have, I believe, three vacancies in that crew. And that crew is solely for the maintenance of stormwater. Now, not just maintenance, they also get to construct new systems. You know, like when we have issues, for example, there's a current subdivision where there's a, has been a perennial flooding, very localized, it's basically one property. And that's gonna, that's gonna, that's taken all six, six FTEs right now to try to work that, on that this week and next week. So in addition to the maintenance, this crew actually put installs new culverts and replaces culverts with other things. But I want the commission to know is that thanks to the investment that we have done in the past few years, on the pumps and permanent installation of, of, of piping for the pumping system, we, I'm happy to say that that's probably one of my least worries right now. Yep. Because, frankly, as long as you keep those pumps PMs and, and energized and working.

Well, we also haven't had any rain, y'all. I know.

But believe me, like this past weekend, because I knew, I knew the forecast, uh, we've made sure that all the pumps were looked at on Thursday and Friday. And over the weekend, we have one, one, one, one employee going around to make sure that, that they were working. Good news is that we only pumped in one of the, in one of the locations over the weekend. But everything else still stays, stay dry. Yeah. That's great. Which is incredible with the amount of rain that we have. That's exactly right. But, Lord willing, we're going to get more rains, because we need them. But the, I'm not too concerned about the pumping stations and those rains. Now, localized, uh, little flooding because the culvert is plugged or because a ditch might be overgrown. Especially those ditches that are not like roadside, uh, internal ditches or those are something that we need to get more, more, more, more staffing. But I'm not too concerned about that. Okay.

I just know maybe, and maybe again, it's like when we start looking at the, like metrics and what we're performance vendors are tracking, like maybe they're the wrong things we're tracking. But it just seems like both of those were off and, you know, and yet we're seeing less flooding and more funding with the stormwater assessment. So I just didn't, I was sort of like, why are these off?

Thank you, Commissioner, Mr. Chair. I'm also not, I, I'm also not using stormwater dedicated personnel towards asphalt. Those are, that's, those are being funded through fund 146 stormwater and they're staying only in stormwater.

Okay.

Yeah, they have to. And then you already mentioned that you've pulled mowing crews off. So I guess that answers why we haven't been mowing as much on the, why that's off. But I will say, I mean, I know that's also a contract and I, so I didn't know if we were having issues with our contractor not doing.

There's also something called a small roundabout that was also just constructed. So there were also some crews dedicated to that for about four or six weeks. So that also is reflected in those measurements. That's done now. So we're back.

All right.

Thank you. Thank you, Ramon. I do want to remind the board that the business tax change impacted both halves of the penny by about 1.2.

2.8.

2.8 million total, 1.4 million. So that over 10 years, that's $14 million. Yeah. And just one's half. And the other half, $28 million total to the program, to all the programs. So remember that as well. Also, remember when we requested the public to consider the tax. Even then, we were aware that it was not going to be enough to fix all of the capital road problems, right? Yes. Okay. So what we're coming to now, three, four years in, is this awareness of, where's mine? Where's my road? I voted for this or I wanted, you know. And the reality is, is there's not going to be enough resources to fix every capital need road long term because of the backlog and because of the condition the roads got in before we implement it. Right. So what you're going to see when you save more resources. There are ways we can pre-fund some infrastructure surtax. We have some capacity in some of our gas tax, our nickel bond that we pay some of those old bonds off. So we have some capacity to build some initial capital money. What I would caution is, is that at the end of the 10-year cycle, when the infrastructure tax comes back up, there's still going to be a need out there. And I think is incumbent upon us to make sure we've been diligent with the resources we've currently been provided, doing as much as we can, as fast as we can. But the reality is, there's not going to be enough resources to fix every capital problem. And if the request is to address some of the urgent conditions with capital funds, and again, those resources will be adding FTE to the infrastructure surtax to do, whether it be patching or segments or whatever the case may be in-house, and not take them from the operational gas tax fund, which is what currently did to create the last one. So we're just going to restaff so we get the mowing and get all these other operational stuff continue to be done. That's fine, but understand, it doesn't mean the next project comes off the list or gets bumped. What it means is that one in 2033, that last one that was funded, that's the one that's not going to be funded enough. But that's just one of many out there that are not funded. So that's where the backlog starts happening. It starts coming off of that back end so that when we get into 2031, 2032, what you're going to hear is that the more we have spent on these types of urgency, situations or inflationary or legislative impact reduction of taxes, that's where you're going to see it reflected when we get to those budgets. You're just going to be, wait a minute, I thought this project was going to be done in 2032. It's going to be, well, there's not enough revenue sources there for now. So just as we talk this out, it's a much larger puzzle. And so we just need to keep that in mind. And absolutely, if the urgency is, we need to address more urgent situations. We can do that through the infrastructure surtax. Just know we need to minimize that. We need to weigh that against what it means to the plan overall.

I mean, and I'm with you 100%, Ken. I'll just say I'm not in favor of robbing any of the other surtaxes. Like that, and that's what worries me is that this conversation starts to drizzle into like other parts of our surtax moving into roads. And I'm not interested in that. Like I know we haven't spent any of the affordable housing funding or much of it at all. But I think there's a lot of projects now that are finally cooking that Ralston's been working on and that the community's now aware of how that funding's working. And so I just, I'm just, I get nervous when this conversation goes because it's like we have a lot of urgency in a lot of areas, right? Especially around housing, social services supports, as well as our crumbling infrastructure. And I just don't want to rob from Peter to pay Paul. Yeah.

And I guess what, and I don't either, what I would say is we're not going to fix four decades of neglect in four years. No, we're not. I get that. And I've been saying that. However, I have also been saying that I intend, if I happen to win my fourth term, to try to bring forward the renewal of this tax in 2030.

Yeah. Two years early. And so if that's the case, I want to make sure that we have shown real progress in the first eight years of this.

And if that means pulling from the tail end of this tax to get this done and to address the incredible amount of communication that this board gets and the public works gets to the rbmaintenance.atelastercanny.us on a daily basis, I think we need to do that. And I think we need to do that now, not wait until 2030. We need to do that in 2027 and 2028. I had that meeting on Southeast 15th Street. It went really great.

And, you know, the biggest discussion was, why do you guys keep fixing the potholes when you're replacing the road next year? And I was like, would you rather us not? Would you rather us not? And it was interesting because, and Ramon can share with you all how this went, but from the beginning of the meeting to the end of the meeting, it was like, okay, now I get it. I understand what you all are doing. You're not permanently fixing it, but you've got to get us to the point where we can now repave the road. And that's people, time, and resources. And that's dealing with an emergency situation after a weekend of rain. And he's probably getting it this week because we had, at least at my house, we had five inches in two hours. I don't know about the city of Gainesville. And then we had another storm on Friday. And when that happens, everything that they did that day, not all of it, but some of it gets washed out. And then we get the follow-on email of they were here, but they didn't fix, you know, seven, eight, nine of the 28 buttholes. And so they're constantly chasing their tail to try to serve our public. And if they had another crew or two, maybe they could split the county up into three sections and have two emergency crews. I don't know. I'm going to leave that to operations. I just want them to hear that, from my perspective, this is a big priority, and I want to find more resources for that department. Because they are repairing potholes in anticipation of a $100 million investment of permanently fixing roads. And so you could probably make a financial argument that if they didn't have to pay to fix people's cars, instead, you know, it's proactive. It's being proactive on that. And so that was, you know, for today's budget meeting, that was the point I wanted to make. I don't want to rob from here to pay Paul. I just want to say. Right. This is our priority. It is a priority, yeah. Okay. Missy, anything else on Public Works?

Nothing else on Public Works. The only other thing under Public Services and Community Development is UF-IFAS Ag Extension, but they've got that under General Government in a couple of slides.

Okay.

So we can get into it. Tommy can tell you the numbers when we get there. There it is. Okay. So revenues of $1,200 and expenses of $700.

We fund that. I mean, that was fine.

And I mean, honestly, like I will just say that they are getting ready to hire a new director. I don't know where we are. I did ask about how we are plugged into that and opportunity to meet the finalist candidates and at least give some input or feedback. I think counties changed a lot since the original director was hired and Cindy was an amazing leader for that organization. There's big shoes to fill. And I think with the urbanizing nature of Alachua County, in particular the core of Alachua County, there's, you know, that director might look different, you know, than what Cindy was like in terms of their skill set and having the ability to work on natural resources issues, stormwater issues, urban heat island issues, as well as ag issues and food systems issues. So I was interested to be a part of that and to say that that director may have different ideas about what their staff and complement of staff looks like. So I don't think they're going to be, like, coming to us asking for major changes in budget, but it is something to flag that when you have new leadership, sometimes priorities change and there may be some asks for, you know, a partial FTE or supports for programming that they want to do as that person comes on. So it's just something to know and think about for the future.

It could be in their advertising now and then when they get to that point they'll bring us in.

Yeah, and what I would say to that is actually we haven't asked for them. You know, we have a big initiative with food and feeding people and feeding people locally. And so hopefully they will have that focus as well when they come in.

And I did talk with Cindy about, like, some efforts that some of our local farmers have been talking about and asking about in terms of supports and needs. And she had a partial FTE that she was willing to offer up that could help with some of that work. So it's still just a matter of getting herding all the cats in the community and the farmers to, like, outline what that might look like for them. But, you know, they stand ready to provide support. Good.

I think. Good. Were you up to us involved? We'd do better. Great.

Thank you. Do you have anything for Missy? No, I just wanted to tell you, all of you all was at the 4-H. Yeah, it was a really nice event. And Cindy was very, I mean, I was there. We were covered. But Cindy looks great. You know, she looks like a, you know, a UF student herself. She's awesome. She's ready to go. She's ready for a change. All right, Tommy.

Next one. Sir, so the next area is Assistant County Manager Heather Ockton. Heather. Thank you.

I did not bring my entourage. You can only ask questions about IT.

Missy and Ramon, remember, this is this commission, so don't go anywhere. You never know. We might have to do a Claudia Tuck on you and bring your message. All right.

Okay. So the first department is Information and Telecommunication Services, 38 FTEs, revenue of $303,000, expenses of $11,347,000. Human Resources has 15 FTEs with a revenue of $5,000 and change and expenses of $2,230,000. Equal Opportunity, not bringing in any revenue, but they have 5.75 FTEs, expenses of $931,000. I don't know. I guess I'll announce this. Yeah, go ahead. Jackie's retiring. She's the only one that follows her budget.

Okay.

Jackie is retiring. I'm still trying to talk her out of it, so that's why I said, should I announce this? But she claims she is leaving in January. So we will be looking for a new Equal Opportunity Office Director very soon. Okay.

She is an amazing public service. That's going to be a hard to fill, but we have a lot of kids. You can't replace Jackie. No. You just have to find another person.

Do we have trouble with the name Equal Opportunity? No, not Equal Opportunity. That's not one of those that's… No, that is actually the law. People Opportunity is the law. Okay, good. Okay.

General government, which includes the county commission office and the county admin office, revenue of $200. We have two FTEs in the county commission office, but you all voted to add one FTE of an executive staff assistant and two FTE aides to commission services. So that's going to be added pretty soon. We are, in terms of the one FTE for executive staff assistant, that's already been posted and we are looking at the, at the referrals for the two Aides to commission services. We have not moved on that yet. We have, we're trying to figure out the structure, how that's going to work, how they report and all of that. And so I understand that the commissioners want to have some input on what we're looking for and we'll certainly get with you. We haven't written a job description or anything on that yet.

Will we have the opportunity to meet the finalists for the executive staff assistant? I understand that they outlive any individual commissioner, but they also run the day-to-day of our entire office. Sure. It would be great to at least meet the finalists.

Yeah, absolutely. We can do that. And under the county administration, we have accreditation and grants, the new community outreach, and the agenda office. And community outreach, she's been here six weeks and doing great, meeting all the departments and talking more about what we're doing. And really community outreach is trying to be a bridge between all the departments. There's some departments who are doing great at community outreach. They do it a lot. And some don't because they don't have anyone to do it and they don't know how to do it. And some don't even know they need to be doing it. So her role amongst many is to try and close those gaps and have some sort of cohesive approach to how we go to the community and be able to talk about our community events, tell us, report on how many community events we have, and also create some structure around community outreach. She attended an event with Commissioner Cornell and there's some structures that she thinks we could put in place to help get more feedback. So she came from the University of Florida, the SNAP program, and she's very eager and she's doing a great job so far. Thank you for coming to that. I didn't even see her. I do have a couple questions on that.

The big question I have is like, I think, or I guess it's more of a comment, like,

I'm really excited to have this mission. I think it's going to be great. I think our county has come leaps and bounds in the six years that I've been on the commission

from like almost no community.

I mean, I wouldn't say no community engagement. It wasn't a priority of the commission in the past, and it has really become one.

And I've really seen the staff embrace that in big ways, particularly with the Forged Focus Initiative,

with growth management projects. And so just impressed with what's already happened with that work and excited that you're here. And I think one of the things that I've been most impressed with EPD too, with the Climate Action Plan, is the nuanced approach that they take and like the kinds of audiences they're trying to reach and realizing meeting people where they are and that not every audience is the same and you can't reach the same audience in, you know, the same ways. And like it's maybe a lot easier to reach some audiences than others. And so I just have appreciated the unique approaches that our staff has been taking to try to get engagement. And one of the things that I'm realizing in some of the projects that are closer to my heart, like the local food systems, is that we use feedback that comes from lots of different places to inform the way that we're doing our work, which is good, because then we're not having to constantly ask the community, right? Like Board Focus gave us feedback and the growth management projects given us feedback and community support services gets feedback and it all feeds into the decisions and the ways in which we approach economic development, for example. But that's not always evident to the community, right? Because those pieces of feedback came from lots of different places. It wasn't like we asked a specific question about, for example, like, would you want a local food grocery store, right? It's like we asked that question in particular, but we asked about local food. We've had a lot of feedback about local food and farmers. We've had lots of feedback about needing a grocery store in unserved areas. We sort of join those things. We bring them forward. But I think somehow being able to aggregate the feedback that the community gives us and having some kind of way to show the community that we're listening and that we hear them and how we use that information in that aggregated way at some point is important because the community doesn't see it, right? Like the people who talk about local food at Newbury Extension Office didn't hear the stuff from Forward Focus on the east side, but a lot of them are saying the same things and being able to see that that feedback is coming in multiple areas and how we're using that to inform policy. I know that's a really big picture thing, but I just put that out there to you to think about and narrate on because I do think it's something the community asks a lot. Like, well, I wasn't at that meeting. I didn't. Nobody heard me about my roads. It's like, well, not my road. And it's like, well, we're taking all of these things into consideration, how we tell that story better. Yeah, it's really good. I did have two questions for you. One is on human resources, days to fill a position. I can't help but hammer on it a little bit just because I have seen how long it can take us to fill positions and how long it can be the process from, like, thinking about hiring someone to getting somebody in the job sometimes takes an insane amount of time, and it does mark as off track. So I just wanted to flag that, like, I don't know what we can do for efficiency in that regard because I know there's lots of hoops we have to go through as a government, but I hope our staff can think about ways we improve the hiring process.

Yeah, and let me just respond to that. The interesting thing about that measure is it's one that is really not mostly under the control of HR. So just let me explain the process. So someone applies for a position, HR is the one who screens the initial application and determines if they meet the minimum qualifications. If they meet the minimum qualifications, it is referred to the hiring manager. Our process stops, well, pauses right there. And so the hiring manager, so this is all part of the time to fill, okay? So the hiring manager creates other screening criteria, doesn't create screening criteria, sets up interviews. It could take two weeks. It could take two months. But that part is not under. At the department level. At the department level. That is not under HR's control. After they set up the interviews and do all of that, which could be two months or two weeks.

It could be under HR's control if they said, get it back to me in the next two days or you're not getting the person.

Well, I guess that's the thing. Okay. I don't know about that, but I do think that there's something to be said for like, and I don't know that this, I don't, this is a question for directors and an internal conversation probably more than it is a dias conversation. But there's probably something to be said for like HR being more, maybe not more involved in the hiring components process, but in like supporting those people and getting that work done. Right. Like, it's not like your job ends here and now it's your job. And when you get back to me, then it'll be my job again. It's more like they're a support service that's helping these departments to get good qualified people into those roles and like them thinking about themselves as a part of that whole process. Like they're just like they're waiting for their piece of paper to land back on their desk so that they can.

Yeah. And part of what they do is encourage the directors to move along or the hiring managers in the process. But at this point, we don't have a mechanism to do that. And if people want our help, they can certainly get our help, but people don't want our help. But yeah, we can, we can think about that. But we do try to encourage them mostly with the, if you don't move along with this is the good people are going to be out of the pool because the good people are looking for jobs. Right. And so the people who are left in the pool are probably not going to be the people you want. But yeah, that's part of the process. And yeah, so there, there are some, some issues with, with that. And we do encourage our directors to move a little faster, but I, I mean, I'll admit it. When I have an open position, even though I want it filled, sometimes things get in the way of it. I'm doing some daily work and some other things. And so sometimes I have to force myself. It's like Heather, get it together. And if we have a panel, we have four people's calendars that we have. So there are things, but I hear what you're saying. And that is, I mean, time to fill is very important. And frankly, I would like to control more of the process. So that would require more assistance. So I have been other places where HR really did control more of the process. And it does move faster because we're moving it along and it doesn't wait for anyone else. But that's something we would have to talk about.

And I'll just say like on the community engagement side, like I do think that the jobs we have available and like recruitment, like we do, I mean, I've noticed just in talking like just a minute ago, like we have challenging with recruitment and we have a lot of jobs available. And a lot of them don't like, I mean, a lot of public workshops, they don't require like a college degree. I don't think, you know, they're, they're pretty decent jobs for people who are looking for entry level work or who are looking for, you know, just getting their foot in the door, I would imagine. And so I think that's something we could do a better job of community, which is like spreading the word about our jobs. And I also think our advisory committees, like recruitment for advisory committees, are two things that I think we could plug into community engagement work as well as the general, like Mark doing his communication stuff and things like that. So I just wanted to flag both of those things. Thank you. You know, what we're, what we're looking at too, in terms of trying to fill positions,

especially with public works, if we are having a hard time pulling,

pulling applications for that, and you're talking about reentry needs, you know, at some point, you know, we could also look again at giving the opportunity to inmates to be able to work as long as we're paying them properly. I am a fan of fair pay for fair work. But if we're, we cut that out, you know, we said we're not doing that anymore.

Well, we weren't paying them.

We weren't paying them. And so this is where we need to have a discussion again. If we're having a hard time, because road cutting grasses and trees is not an everyday thing. They're more seasonal and more, you know, sporadic in terms of those needs. If we wanted then to institute a new program where we're paying people so that they have an account when they leave or they can pay their child support and that sort of thing. So we restructure the way that we are.

I'm happy to open that up again.

Okay. I'm happy to have the conversation. I think that again, I think that that's a lot of that comes down to like, I don't even know. It's something that I've been meaning to ask for sort of like how we're doing on our ban the box. Like, how are we doing at hiring people that have backgrounds? And what are our background requirements? And how are we doing at like making sure that we're both recruiting and hiring people, you know, into positions that have a background, like even just hiring people that already are out of jail and, you know, and giving them the chance to be a fair chance employer. Right. I mean, we say we're one and I know that we did that work, that heavy lift HR isn't going to look to change the way our applications and process and review works. Well, if they are working from the situation before they're released,

then that gives them an opportunity to try it on for size.

Right, like doing training programs inside the jail. It's like an application process where training on the job or whatever.

But it seems to me those jobs would be more temporary so they could be easily hired from, you know,

people who are about ready to be released or, you know, give them an opportunity to make some money to pay bills or to, you know, pay for their trucks or their, you know, their families, you know, that then when they come out, they have money in their pockets.

Yeah, I am 100% in favor of people who are currently being called at our jail, whether they're, they're incarcerated or whether they're awaiting trial to have the opportunity to continue with the job that they already have or to work in employment where they're actually earning the income that they should be earning and that it's going into account for them to determine how they use it. What I didn't like is, and I wasn't a part of that decision that you guys made, but what is people being forced to work and their wages being garnished? There was a lot, there were a lot of complaints from the community that we were responding to,

but I think if we've set it up so that we're paying people a fair wage that.

And they have the choice. And that's right, they would apply. Fair wage or living wage. That's right. And they can apply as they would at any job. So, thank you, Ms. Chair.

Anything else for me?

Yeah, I just wanted to respond on kind of the ban the box thing. I think that you all would be surprised at the people amongst you. The vast majority of people who have something on their background are hired, if they're qualified. I would say confidently. We keep that information so I can say anecdotally, and it's an individualized assessment. There's no bright line. We look at every background check personally. I used to do it when I was HR director to approve it, if there's anything on it. And so the vast majority of people who have something on their background get hired. There's very few things that are completely disqualifying. Very few things.

I apologize for being late. It was the canvassing board meeting today. But I don't know if this is appropriate to this conversation or not, but it did come to my attention recently that we still in the county have a one-year period of probation, whereas the standard probation in most places is six months. And I know that we made that change during COVID. What are the pros and cons of keeping a one-year probation? And I feel like if we've spent a year training someone and putting that amount of resources into an employee, losing them at the end of a one-year probation, does it make sense to me? A six-year probation should be enough time to evaluate somebody? Or six months should be enough time to evaluate somebody?

Do you have a comment on that?

Do you want to hear it? I do.

My comment is... Oh, wait. Before you comment, because it was actually one of my comments. Okay. First of all, who's doing the performance measures? Who's in charge of that? Well, Donna's working on new ones. Okay. Donna Bradford, this is great, because it really highlighted your point, Commissioner Alford, that we were off track, but I think our performance measure is too low. Like, we have a performance measure that we maintain below 1% resignations of new probationary people, terminations in the first year, and we're at 1.26%. Like, that should probably be 2%. And then we're meeting it, because to hear that after a year we've only lost 1.26% of people we hire, that's really great, but we're off track. So I would say we should adjust that performance measure. And I would say, Commissioner Alford, to your point, if this were like 8%, I think that would be a bigger issue. But 1.26% of people, I mean, that's great.

I agree that's really good. I just, you know, wonder about the need for an entire year, because that...

Six months versus a year.

Because, you know, let me look at it from the employee's point of view, if I'm a new employee going for an entire year without having that job security, that's asking a lot, I think. You know, it...

I mean, I hear what you're saying, but I also think, like, one, like, they never have complete job security, because our budget changes from year to year, right? Obviously, right, right. And so we're always in, like, a place where you just, you know, even though, like, generally speaking, they have jobs. And I guess secondarily, like, it's... Once somebody's in a government-level position, it's very... It takes a lot of work to terminate somebody. And giving a director a full year to evaluate that person, because there may be things that only happen once a year. Right? Like, they may be hosting an event, and that event only happens in the spring, and they get hired in the fall, and then spring comes, and their six months has happened, and they run that event, and they crash and burn.

I guess my... So this all stems from an employee that I know that worked for just short of a year, had their evaluation, had an excellent evaluation, and the next week they got fired, and they really were not clear about why they got fired. And to me, that is... Or not fired, because it's not fired when you're on probation. They were just told they were not a good fit.

Like, they were not renewed.

Yeah, or whatever. But my issue is that if we are going to do that, if we are going to have a whole year of probation, then I feel like an employee should never not know what they weren't doing exactly right. You know, they need to walk away from that experience. It's a learning experience and a way to understand where they might fit into the county, and maybe another department, or whatever. I just feel like that was... Sacrament.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just want to understand that better. Okay. Well, I would say I don't know what that specific situation is, but I would agree. That's not fair. If an employee left, and they did not know the reason that they were not successful here, then we did fail in that regard, and that is not how it should work. In terms of probation, we encourage directors to give employees a chance to succeed or fail. Although we do turn people before six months, we usually are encouraging them if they come to us at three months and say, this person is going to work out. Unless it's really egregious, keep coaching. Keep trying. Let's see. So the year is important because sometimes it takes more time. The data shows that you're doing a great job. Yeah. Because 1.5 to 1.2 percent. Yeah. But in that specific circumstance, yes, what we are telling our employees, even on probation, is what they're doing well and what they need to improve upon. And if that didn't happen in that situation, shame on us because that should have happened, and they should not have been unaware of why. Now, when we get to the actual termination, we don't give them the reason. We say you have not successfully completed your probation. However, before that time, we have coached them. Or we should have. Right.

That was, I guess, my concern is that that seems to me more like a management training issue versus anything else. That would definitely not be appropriate.

Anything else?

Yeah. My other two, which is going to be with the new county manager at some point, but I'll talk about here, are court services, which has...

Before we get to that, I only had two items. The one was the one that Commissioner Alfred. Okay. My other one was the one that Commissioner Prizia brought up, which is I want to figure out a way to hire people quickly. I don't know how else to say it. 32, we're off track, and our target is 30 days, and I heard what you said. It's not really an HR thing, so I guess I'm talking to all the departments. If you put in a request to hire someone and you get candidates, let's get them hired. Let's not... We lose too many good candidates because it takes 45 days. There was even an additional comment. There were six vacancies that took more than 45 days from a candidate referral to the department until the job entered. That's a... I mean, it's only six comments, but for me, I would love for our target to be even lower than 30 days. Maybe that's not possible, and we were on track 28 and 26 days, but now we're at 32, and I don't know what will be at the end of September, but for me, to all the departments and HR, I agree with Commissioner Alford. I mean, Commissioner... Well, Commissioner Alford, I do agree with you, but also Commissioner Prizia, that when we're trying to hire somebody and we go through that effort and they're looking, we've got to make those decisions. We really do. We are competing with the public, with the private sector, and we can never compete on salary. We can compete on benefits and culture, and I think we've got a great culture at Alaska County, and I think that's where we win. And so when we get good candidates, I want to get them hired. But those are my only comments. Something that's changed, but... All right. Let's move on. Okay.

So, court services, 66 FTEs. As you know, we're in phase one of our reorg. We just... I just told the last person today, we are hiring that first level of division managers, which are the ones that...the positions we created, which are going to be instrumental in moving us forward. They're the ones who are going to now start working on new policies, SOPs, retraining, and moving forward. So those are...they're all internal.

And they're going to be starting 8, 10, so next Monday. Awesome.

And so we're excited about that. We have...not an RFP. What's the other thing? ITP for drug testing, because we were trying to outsource that. So we're changing our drug testing procedures. So we have that on the street. And we are working on accreditation. We have our assessors coming at the end of this month for the FCAC accreditation, which we are confident will go very well. In terms of...I know you all want to know what's going on with the director.

Well, nothing right now, but that's an FY27 hire. That is...we're going to be looking at this...court services will eventually move under the new public...I don't know what it's called...public service...what is it called? Public safety manager? Public safety. Yes. That is going to that ACM, but not right away, because we want to work through this reorg that we've been working on. And there is no director, so I...Claudia and I are the interim directors also. So we don't...so we're going to be posting that position soon, but we're not going to move court services immediately to there because I feel like it needs more hands-on oversight. And we've been doing it for three years. And so we need to shepherd this forward. It's a very important...some very important changes happening. And so we don't want to lose sight of that.

Well, I'll say I appreciate that. And I hope whoever we do hire as director understands the importance of continuing to coordinate with community support services and continuing to take the advice of the consultants and the work that you all have done seriously. And even continuing to look at ways in which we can, like I said, sort of shift the needle, right, from probation to prevention, from working with people after the fact to working with people ahead of the fact. And if that means that some of our probation offers become street outreach people or whatever that might look like, you know, I don't have the answers today or proposed to put something forward today. But I do think that we're on the right path now to working as a justice support services instead of court services. And I think that the focus, the shift in focus is going to give us opportunities. And I hope that the director that comes in is someone that has that mindset and has sort of a vision for how this department can help us empty our jail.

Right. And that's really why we wanted to wait until we have the rebranding. And by the way, the rebranding is going to be happening sometime in August. We want to have a little razzmatazz when we, when we push it out to say we're now justice support services because it's a different bet.

Sure. And we're budgeting enough money that it would make the job attractive. I mean, we are. I don't know. Tommy. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. That's just, you know, that we're paying attention. Not for these internal candidates here. Fine. Okay. I think so.

I think so.

I mean, I wasn't involved with the last search, but I think we have. Okay.

Competitive. Okay. My colleague inmate medical is on here. The inmate medical contract currently is held by the sheriff. I've reached out about having the conversation about the medical. This may be for the, this is for the hospital.

This is pre. Yeah.

This is pre. Yeah. That one is ours. Well, it just flags me. This is the pre, pre arrest. So this is our taking. The detainment. If they, if they're detained and they get hurt in detainment or they were hurt when they got arrested. But I, or begin before they're. Thanks. Correct. Before they're booked. Right. Correct. But it flags for me that their, their medical contract and their food service contract are up for bid. So far, it doesn't sound like we're going to be a part of the process of those contracts. If we're not a part of the process of those contracts, I'm interested in the possibility of those contracts running through the county again. Um, I, I really, I think that it's important that the public be able to have way in and give their feedback and former inmates and community be able to follow the process of those contracts carefully because those are providing services to family members of people who live in this community. And I don't think that it being behind the wall of the sheriff's office. And I don't think that our sheriff feels that way at all. This is not at all a comment on our sheriff or I believe he's working hard to make sure that our inmates are well cared for and, um, and is doing the very best that he can with a antiquated facility and contractors that he has to manage. But I do think that those bidding processes are important to be in the public eye at some level. And so I would like to see us be a part of that conversation. And, um, I don't, I just don't know where that sits right now because I know it is in their hands. Um, and I just wanted to put that out there to you all.

Yeah, I just, I wanted to follow up on exactly what you said because I've been very disappointed in both of those contracts based on what we heard in the presentations, um, when we, they were hired four years ago. Um, they made certain promises and made and implied they were going to do things in certain ways that we just haven't seen, whether it's mental health or whether it's fresh food access. Right.

You know, when we have an existing like good food purchasing commitment, we've done our staff, we put in the staff time to do the review. Part of doing that now is implementation. That needs to be in the contract because it wasn't in the last contract. It didn't get done. It needs to be in there. So it's those sorts of things too, to your point and performance that we need to hold them accountable for.

And, and I will say that the new hire at the jail, uh, does have a contracts management background, which I specifically asked. That's one of the questions I specifically asked. So I'm hoping that, um, we can work with them to leverage that background to get the, the changes that we need because, um, to me, uh, you know, um, putting things out to bid and getting a bid is just a very small part of the whole overall process of procurement, right? It's contract management and making sure that we get what we paid for. And, um, those are two very, very expensive contracts and we should definitely be getting what we paid for.

So what are those two contracts going out for procurement? This year.

Uh, they're under the sheriff's office and they're budgeted within the sheriff's office. Yep. And they are, um, executed by the sheriff's office, but I know that they're both about

this year.

Who got this?

This operating year? Yeah. They're going to be renewing them this year. Hopefully someone will communicate to the sheriff that we've got at least two commissioners

that. These two commissioners I think are doing a pretty good job at that, but yeah.

One quick question to talk on, is the release pilot program under the probation line set the line line? No. No.

Where is it? No. It's in, uh, Claudia's room. Yeah, from 997 to a million six last year and a million six to a million six eight this

year. I don't remember last year. Which one are you talking about? What the increase was.

Can you say that one more time?

I'm sorry. Probation.

3620.

Probation.

Probation. If you all know, we increased the number of FTEs and probation. Is that why the increase in?

I mean, all the targets are being met. They're on track. It's amazing that we are doing so well in this department without a department director. And those to Claudia who won't leave because we asked her not to leave this meeting. And to talk on. But I just don't remember. I don't remember last year what that increase was.

I thought it was the tracking devices or something.

Um, that should be under, um, GPS. That's pre-trial. Yeah. Although we do have some probation clients who are on GPS. Sorry, Tommy. I know I'm asking about last year. No, no, no, you're good. I don't know the answer to that, but since you brought that up, and we had talked about it in other meetings, we do have, um, an RFP out for, um, ankle monitors. We're looking at different devices. Great. A lighter weight when the hope.

Yeah. There are different ones.

There are different ways of doing it now. So we haven't gone out to the market for a long time. Technology has vastly improved since those. Yeah.

I still don't understand why we have mic monitors when everybody has cell phones and cell phones have tracking devices and cameras.

They can be given out. So they're looking for that. But I just, animal resources, last but certainly not least.

Most of that is contract on, uh, drug testing. Drug testing.

Drug testing.

That will probably go back down. April intervention.

I hope so.

A new contract.

A lot of that is that. And a lot more of it we're doing. Judges are doing a lot more. Do your contract?

But that's changing.

Yes. Like, and we're, and we have a bid out for it, right? We do. So it may drop in.

Yeah. We do have a bid out for it. That's the main part of that increase.

Got it. Thank you.

Okay. Animal resources. 42, um, FTEs, revenues of 435,000, expenses of north of 5 million. And, um, we're moving along. Um, Diane, who's our interim, who's doing. Thank you, Diane. Fabulously is unfortunately not here today, but, um, we just had, um, an advisory committee meeting as we were asked to do to kind of talk about, uh, the investigation and some other issues. And what I can say about the advisory committee is that they're committed. They're invested in the success of animal resources. And so we appreciate that. Thank you. Any questions for me?

Okay.

Commissioner Brizia.

I guess I'll say thank you for being steadfast. I know this has been a slog. It is not an easy one, like, of all of the things that we're dealing with. Besides the jail, I think this program is one of the hardest. Um, and we have a lot of really passionate people on all sides of this issue. And, um, and I think I'm looking forward to having sort of the overall audit and opportunity to kind of revisit some of our policies and SOPs and that are a little potentially out of date. And one of those is I wanted to bring up because we have two performance measures based on it. Um, the number of animals, uh, received at the shelter and the percent of animal releases at the live releases at the shelter. And I really think that we might be asking the wrong question in those modes. And I think that the data, the research and the new practice that was pointed out to us in the investigative report really shows that we need to rethink those measures. And, um, so I'm looking forward to that. Um, those that feedback from whoever we hire, um, to come in and take a look at that to give us some new potential performance metrics that make more sense, both for the humane treatment of the animals and for our staff to not feel under the pressure of this constant live release rate. Um, so I just wanted to point that out that while we're on track for them, it's not necessarily the right question we're asking. Right. Um, but on the, um, licensed issues, the licenses issued, that is a contract. So I'm confused why we're still off track on it.

Um, we actually just had an audit from the clerk's office. Um, the reason we're off track, unfortunately, we have found out is that we, we used to do this internally. We used to manage that. And there was one FTE who did that. We, for cost reasons, a few years ago, we outsourced it to someone and apparently they are not doing as good a job as keeping up with the reporting. We just found this out through the audit. So there are licenses that are out, out there that we currently are not accounted for. I'll say that. Okay. And so we're trying to work through that process. Um, okay. We have, we were not getting, okay, again, what we contracted for, we were not getting. And you know, our responsibility is we weren't asking for it. We didn't know that we weren't getting what we contracted for because they were not regularly reporting to us. Okay. Licenses and tags. Cause they're all out there. They're at vet's offices. And when we controlled it, we, and the clerk said this, cause they look back when you controlled it, you knew to the tag and now that's not the case. So that is, that's what's happening with that.

Well, I know I was one of the ones that was in favor of the potential of contracting this because it would mean that we could track it better and that we might get more compliance and we'd have more resources and funding coming in because more people would be doing it. Right. But it sounds like we just have the wrong contract. Yes. Perhaps. Wasn't working out. Were they supposed to be contacting, uh, animal owners for renewal of.

Yeah.

They do it. Thank you.

I have seven animals. I have not gotten a single renewal. I believe they're supposed to be. I believe they're supposed to be.

Ready to contact Commissioner. How.

How. Get your tag for it. Commissioner Alpert. We'll get that on. And send her a bill. Yes. Send her a bill. Commissioner Wheeler. It's an awkward system too.

It's out of Texas. I get those things regularly.

It's, you have to, you have to prove, you have to show the paperwork, show that it's awkward. And, and people are frustrated because they're sending their money to Texas. Yes. They don't understand the connection. Okay. And it's a lot harder to do it than go to your vet, have the shots done, and then the vet gives you the tag. Yep. And so that's the problem. That is the problem. It has it. The way that the contractor. So we. We. It's not. Okay. It's not working. Okay. Because I have not. But we'll do. We'll do. Both of y'all. We'll do.

Okay. Somebody please contact Commissioner Wheeler and Biller. I'm glad to give it to the shelter. I just don't want to put it in an envelope. With all. I think, I think what you're hearing is let's bring that back in house or get a local.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

We will look at that. That's, that is part of the review that's going to be done. That's part of the scope. Gotcha. And I'll be looking for a job next year.

If you want to put me in that position. My.

My.

My.

My.

My. My.

My. My.

My.

My other just quick thing was just a flag more of like a hey is like we're off track on grants. And I think there are a lot of funding availability out there and opportunities out there for funding. And I just hope that our grant writer now that we have one can help like support. the possibility of exploring those and doing a better job on that. That was just sort of a like I know there's money out there so. Yes. For sure. And our staff deserve it. And so. I mean the big point that I got is we went from spending 2.9 million to 5.8 so we are

that was this year.

And we are continuing that investment. So. Yeah. But the shelters. Well if we ever get it.

I mean that's you know this my concern too is it's yes Diane is doing a good job but we've got staff out there that are holding fire regardless of who is in charge. Right. We have people who've gone through two or three different operational directors and formats. The thing is there are people out there that are really doing the best to stand to hold on. And to make sure that everything is functioning well. And and and this and I told Michelle this. And I don't know if I've got Tommy yet yet. But if it's going to take us three years to get a shelter in place. There's money out there that we need to invest in the people who are working at that means giving those people raises putting them up to a living wage. Not just a fair wage but a living wage to your point. Then we need to up the salary of those people who are there and experienced and are doing the job of a director. Each individual person is taking its own responsibility. I've been out there regularly. My family's fostering. I was there at 11 o'clock one night when the sheriff came in the deputy brought a dog that had been hit by a car so I know the range of work that's going on out there. It's highly stressful. It's it's part is as or more stressful than working with human beings that are in jail who can communicate animals can't communicate so the interpretation that's come the interpreters are the people who are working there's what I'm saying. And they need to be given every professional consideration possible and if that means raising their salary to something more significant then I would be in favor of that especially if they're not going to have a nice place to work for another three years until that shelter is up and running. Money's got to go somewhere. It might as well go to the people who are dedicated and been there all along. The end. Thank you. Thank you.

Heather you have anything else?

Thank you. Oh well I wanted to bring up that we are we started this last year the classification study with Siegel our consultant. Yes. Yes we are still doing that. Great. And we're going through every classification and we are looking at that Commissioner Wheeler to make sure that we are.

It wasn't a compensation study but they're giving us some feedback in compensation? Yes. Is that okay? Yes. Yeah. So that is going on. Okay thank you.

Great. When will that when will we have the results of that? Oh at least probably at least six more months.

Okay. So the new year. And that will come back to us with the recommendations of places we need to change classifications or compensation packages. Yes. Great. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you.

Tommy next. General Government. General Government we have communications. Mark's office is about a million dollars. County Attorney's office 2.4 million dollars. Next. Any questions here Commissioner? Go back up. Go back up.

I did have one little thing and that is just like I think that we this is like a more of an us conversation but I didn't want to put a whole like conversation about it like in one of those meetings before the meetings. But that is like I you know you recently had your town hall with Commissioner Duncan Walker to talk about issues and I do think that us being able to do some of those with our PIO like in our individual districts to be able to have if there's issues if there's things that are coming up if there's community level conversations that you want to have either with your district or with the county as a whole.

Like being able to lean on the PIO to support those things I think is a good thing and yeah I think it's less about districts and more about issues like I would feel really great for you to do the one on food.

Right like I would really like to do one on local food systems and we've got a lot of work that we've been doing. I think their community is wants to have has had some really great input through the work that the staff have done but I think there's more that could be done in terms of just like a general understanding of where we're going with this. I'd love to be able to do that but in the past we've sort of I think had this sort of like individual commissioners don't do those things and I don't know if that was that would be on the communication that would be under communications. I would imagine and community outreach working together potentially. Yes Jeannie and Mark like Mark's office to support just. I support that.

I mean it was a we had 13 county staffers at that meeting that was very well received. It took a situation that was a cauldron and it informed the public as to all the things the county were doing and and any one of us could have done it. It just happened to be me because I got 17 calls that weekend.

Well and if it's in your district and it's a district issue like a road I mean it makes sense that it would be you anyway. Well you're right any of us.

So yes and no like like people said that at the meeting like this is your district and I said yes it is and it's my five four colleagues districts as well. It is all of our districts.

Yeah I agree.

Yeah but but I was close to that because of Commissioner Duncan and I have been working with a number of churches on that particular road and also the obviously the legacy project things that that I've been really interested in. Right. So but I think and I'll let Jeannie Necessary kind of tell you all how it went I think it was a real success not because I was there but because our staff was there and our staff actually made the presentations and then the commissioner was supporting the staff speaking for the whole board as to the priorities that this board put into roads. And you at the canvassing board to thank you but we had a 30-minute conversation about roads I'd ask you to go back and watch it and it's going to come back to us on August 13th.

Okay good but I do I agree though that I think that you know like a road summit in the southwest part of the county because I don't know if you track the emails and the roads but we are getting an awful lot of emails including some in your district my district. Right.

So I mean it's like if you wanted a local food is something I wanted but I think having a budget a small budget and at least being able for each of us at least once a year to be able to do kind of a town hall public meeting with a topic of our choice you know that like is related to issues that the commission is working on. Yeah so the city I think has like a $5,000 per commission budget for those kinds of things. Right.

So it's a nominal amount but it's actually to.

And with our aides we'll have additional support to be able to work on this project.

So I envisioned after that meeting that an aide would be the liaison with all of the departments and it's necessary for that. Yeah. Okay. Anything else on that? All right.

Go ahead Tommy. Okay. So the art tag council we kind of skipped over that it's only 52,000 that's right now that Gina used to do that directly and right now that's being managed by someone in Jessica's shop. That's the actually just the tag license from the tag. Last thing we have is fire EMS and Chief Taylor is here today if you have any questions. Revenues of 71 million expenses of 93. The revenues include the assessment on the fire side as well as ambulance fees on the general fund side. 93 million of expenses obviously that is finally implementation of Kelly days. Full staffing finally through the training process. Some of those things after probably for fiscal year 28 initiative. We will be discussing a lot more about ambulance fees. We have we don't have enough data yet. The board did did just approve to go up to two times Medicaid rate on billing. Obviously time you go up you have more write offs from people who can't afford it. And you have write down for Medicare and write down from insurance companies those kind of things. But we're looking at what is what is an appropriate subsidized amount. In other words how much is the taxpayer paying for ambulance service. And how much are the people that are getting the service. There are arguments on both sides of the equation. There are people say that's a government responsibility. There's people that say no that's just like you go to the doctor. That's your responsibility. So you know what is the appropriate subsidies. Things we I used to talk to you about quite a bit. We'll talk to Taylor more. But that's kind of where that balance is on the ableist side. Again we talked about the fire side. Right now the assessments are covering. Current assessments are covering fire costs. But as we move forward. What programs end up in that in that fire around the training tower. Some of the operations some of those things that are fire costs. And what does that look like long term. And what is that balance of. What is appropriate assessment versus the level of service you're supplying. And making sure that's always adequate and appropriate. And that the board understands. This is this is what someone's paying in a home to have this protection. And you know the correct value that we believe that's correct level of service etc. So those are things we look at the future. We are in last year of our general unit contract again. We'll be negotiating the fiscal year 28 probably in January. We want to do it earlier this year. We want to look at there's a new contract. So we want to get into the details cleaned up. A lot of those things that we've been discussing. In the use that we've had that we need to memorialize on the contract. All this kind of thing. So we have quite a bit of work to do on a contract this year. That's your prison. Yeah.

I mean I guess I just want to say a couple of things on that front. And that is one that I never want somebody to be making the decision on whether they're going to call 9-1-1 for an emergency transport. Based on how much it's going to cost their family. That really scares me. You know and I think they already are really expensive. And they're really expensive to the insurance. And the co-pays are really expensive already even with what we currently charge. And so I just want to be careful when we start talking about how much we're going to shift to the private sector to pay versus what we pay. Because we also make the decision about the quality of vehicles we're going to have. The number of the amount of technology that's going to be in the vehicles. And I've been really proud of the investments that we've made in upgrading those things. And having the stroke vehicle. And having extra equipment on those vehicles. And getting the bigger ones so there's more room in the back. All of those things. But those are decisions that we're making so that we have quality services. But if we shift the cost that that's costing us in terms of how much it costs to pick that person up. Because now we have this fancier stuff. And shifting that to them that does feel unfair to me. So I just want to put it out there that I want to make sure that we at least if we are going to have to shift more of that cost. Or as the costs continue to go up. That we are also thinking about having funding to support indigent, uninsured, underinsured individuals. We write off a lot of that. We do write off a lot of that. But we also chase a lot of those people. And that's not a point at her only because she has to do that work. But like, you know, the people who aren't paying their ambulance bills.

We also write off a lot of difference that we get between what insurance and Medicaid will pay and what the actual cost is. So that does not, that write off does not always just reflect what an indigent person isn't paying. It's the difference between what Medicaid will, so. Will pay, right. I think the point here, Tommy, is when that comes back to us, I think it's important for us to show what we're billing.

Right. Versus what we're writing off and collecting. And if that were to change, how would you project that? Right. And making sure we still have the funds. My guess is our write-offs would say the same, but our billings would go off. I don't think people would stop calling the ambulance when they need it. I think it would just get written off.

One of the discussions we, and Chief Taylor can correct me if he thinks differently, and when Chief Theus was here, we talked a lot about that, about, and he would always say, we have trained people well to call 9-1-1. Yeah. They do not hesitate to call 9-1-1. Right. So they don't think about, right now they're thinking about, I need to get to a hospital and I need care. So I think we're a far cry from that being a thought consideration when it's time to dial the phone. We have trained them well. And by our numbers of transports, you can see that that's the case. And I think...

But you don't want to break somebody financially because they need that call. So that's a different decision.

That's a decision of who we prosecute versus who we don't. And so I think that's the revenue side. I think that's more on the prosecutatory side. They have a hardship and they can prove the hardship that perhaps we don't pursue it.

We haven't been doing that. We haven't been hard pursuing ambulance.

Yeah, no. Not... So, Mr. Chair, a lot of the ones we bring to you, if not all of them, have to do with probate.

So there's a probate that's opened and we put our own payment for our own. Yeah.

It's nothing to do with it. We don't often get paid. Commissioner Alford? I just wanted to ask, so when we do charge for ambulance services and there isn't an insurance

company or Medicare or Medicaid bill, is that fee based purely on the service they received? It's not like the hospital where they're trying to recoup money that they don't get from

Medicare, Medicaid. You know what I'm saying? We have a second.

So why don't you go, Chief?

Yeah. You've got all our feet at this time.

You've been running operations a while now.

We're calling 911 right now.

Good afternoon.

Jeff Taylor, interim fire chief for seven whole weeks. Before I answer that question, I heard Commissioner say she was looking for a job. We'd be happy to recruit. Thank you. I'll reach out. I'll talk to you later. Absolutely. So I think what Tommy said is correct. We are trying to be in the middle of the payment structure. We're not trying to be the highest. We're trying not to be the lowest as well in the state. I think we've done a good job over the years of being kind of middle ground.

We do have a lot of Medicare, Medicaid write-offs. And so we have a consultant that we have used in the past who kind of guides us in what we should set our rates at in order to make sure that we're getting the appropriate amount from both insurance, Medicare, Medicaid. When we do have hardships, we do an awful lot of write-offs. We work with the county attorney's office to do that. And Tommy's also correct. We have trained people very well to call 911. So I don't think that's a concern of ours right now. But we certainly understand the concern that you would have. And I don't think we're trying to increase the level of service and get fancier stuff. We're trying to make sure that we're providing the very best care that we can for anyone that calls 911, regardless of their ability to pay.

Can I jump in and say something? Sure. I experienced over the past year 911 services for my brother three separate times. And I want to commend all of your staff, both our fire rescue as well as the electric county sheriff's department for their professional and helpful situation. And, you know, my brother was one of his hardship cases because he had been applying for Medicaid and because he could no longer work due to his medical issues and had not received it yet. But that he got approved three weeks after he died. But that's, you know, that's the kind of hardship cases that I assume that you're routinely writing off. But I did. I wanted to thank you guys for your excellent service.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you for saying so. So just to put in perspective, be aware, we write and we write downs and write offs are low difference. Or write downs are the Medicaid insurance. We write down about $9 million worth of bills currently. And we write off $5 million of that debt currently. I just think those numbers are going to go up if we increase the cost is all I'm saying. I don't know that we'll see a lot more revenue. They won't go up 100%. But they will.

They'll go up. But they will because also the reality is insurance is only going to pay so much. Medicare and Medicaid is only going to pay so much. So even outside of the self pays. Exactly. You're still limited on what the reimbursement, what they're willing to reimburse from those. Right.

And so, but those are going up. And if you've been to any other part of your insurance claim where doctors and those, those allowed billable allowed amounts are going up. So that's why. So that's kind of where we're at with that. I just want to keep it in global perspective. The reason we bring it up is that because we have this conversation. We're very cognizant of this conversation. We have need to keep that conversation about what we're talking about what it costs to provide services. So the things you just mentioned, to have that higher level of customer service. Right. That isn't for you either. So we have to keep that balance of what is a taxpayer subsidized piece, what is a fee-based subsidized piece, and then what's a cost piece. Yeah. So all those are kind of going to stay together.

Any other questions for Chief?

Good job.

Great job. I only have one, Chief. Yes, sir. How's the conversations about wait time coming with our partners?

We met with some of our partners a few weeks ago. And we are working through a process that both sides would find to be fair. The biggest issue that we see is when do we start and when do we stop? There's obviously a need for increased service in our community. We're very regionalized hospital system. You know, beds can't be built in a day, just like roads. And so we're working really closely with them to identify ways that we can get trucks off the road. We have a shared goal. We don't want to charge them for wait time, and they don't want to pay us for wait time. So we have to find the process that works for both sides to get us in and out of the hospital as quickly as we can.

Yeah. Well, I would say to UF Health and to HCA, I appreciate working with them. We really need our ambulances once they arrive to get back into service. So whatever they can do to help us with that.

Absolutely.

We appreciate it. To that end, you know, I know this has been an ongoing conversation, our sort of like time to response, right, our time to response. And I know that we've done a lot to put stations in the right places and increase the number of crews and units. We still seem to be at risk. So, again, on those performance measures, not a criticism of the at risk or us not doing it. Because I think we've done everything we can do to do a better job of response times. But maybe our performance measure isn't the right performance measure, again, like in terms of six minutes or less, maybe an unrealistic expectation.

Well, I think maybe we're not measuring it properly. One of the things that we've taken a look at is the performance measure says time from dispatch to a rescue arriving. We have a lot of agreements with local fire agencies to provide first response ALS care. And so we may need to measure. I think the intent of the measurement is to see how fast we're getting medical care to the scene. And I think that is we're meeting that much more than what that shows. That's showing our ambulance. And so when we have wait times. That's what that's. That's driving. I got to get them out of the hospital back on the road. Right. So that's one of the things we'd like to look at is maybe we need to measure when our first arriving medical truck arrives and starts delivering that care.

Ms. Bradbrook, do you have anything to add on that?

Hi. Yes. Donna Bradbrook, Budget and Fiscal Services. I just wanted to add that that response measure that's in the budget book is actually also concurrently in the comprehensive plan as it currently exists. So if we're going to look at changing that performance measure for budget reporting, we also want to make sure that we make the corresponding change.

Good thing we're in the EAR process. I mean, I think it's I think it's more what the chief said.

It's how we measure it, not that it's changed the measure. I like the measure.

It's just that we're not getting credit because Gainesville Fire Rescue got there.

They got there in four minutes. We're sitting trying to get our rescue unit out of the hospital. And so we're getting the service. We're just that's how we measure it.

Yeah.

Yeah. We'll let we'll let staff look at that and bring back. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, chief. All right. Thank you, Donna. Okay.

Can we talk about emergency management? Sure.

Perhaps. Again, seven weeks in. I haven't dug into everything, but I'm going to do my best to help.

When I was at NACO, one of the conversations that was had in one of the meetings that I was in and one of the committees I'm on was we all have emergency management plans that are not available to the public. They have information there that we really don't need the public to have because it talks about sensitive issues. But there was a discussion about the need to have a public facing emergency management document to show that there was, you know, that we've thought through all the different kinds of things that can happen in our community and doing something like that. And I know that would be an endeavor. But I was curious if that had been something that staff had discussed in the past. Apparently, it's not a common thing, but it's a sort of a moving, you know, a coming best practice that people are talking about.

Yeah, I have to get with the EM director, Ms. Grice, to see where her staff is with that. They'll soon be moved out from under fire. So I would allow her to answer that in future meetings. But I'm not aware of anything like that other than what we already put out publicly.

Right. Okay.

All right. Thank you. So our Alachua County comprehensive emergency management plan is on the emergency management website, as well as our local mitigation strategy.

Right. And I think they were looking at a document that was, I guess, a little more user-friendly. More and more. Like an extension, you know, like our central pamphlet document that talks about the things

we consider, how we make decisions. Yeah.

I mean, extension could probably do an EDIS document on emergency management in partnership

with Jen Grice. I mean, that's work that they do.

I think we can give it to Mark Sexton. He's not here today. Can you give it to Mark, too?

Give it to extension and Mark. They can do it together. I promise you. He's watching. I know. He's probably watching. That's why I said it.

Really? I actually talked to him before the meeting.

He's working on a vacation. I was like, oh. I know.

Come in.

We're going to give you some stuff to do since you're out.

I think that's really what you're talking about, right? You're talking about simplifying. Right, right. But it's just like, you know, here, because people think that our emergency management here

in Electric County is just hurricanes.

And they don't recognize that we have thought through all of these other things that can happen. And I think that that was sort of the thought process. But anyway, I just wanted to throw it out there. All right.

Anything else for Chief? Just that I guess it's more of a Tommy question. But I know, you know, one of our big things was with emergency management was debris. Yeah. And those challenges. I'm assuming we've figured out a process, a better process for debris management and funding. Yeah, I know that.

I know that's between Gus and Ramon, they've been working on some of the things that we discussed during the last time. I know we put out another solicitation. I don't have a lot of information on it. It's out right now. Okay. But yes, staging areas and how we get things moved really quickly. I think one of the challenges we faced were no matter what we put out up front, people's commitment to following through with their agreement. If they think they can make more money somewhere else becomes a challenge. If they're going to put resources, you know, depending on what kind of storm comes through, where it hits and what it looks like. Also, just to bring up, you know, you're considering something on the next agenda to talk about some action and just remember how much we get back from reimbursement we got from storms. That's a pretty big chunk of our federal dollars that comes back to be reimbursed currently as it sits right now. So, fortunately, we haven't had a couple exactly. But that's, you know, that's one of those five in a year or none kind of sometimes that's the case because the circumstances of weather conditions are such to where they just start coming in time after time. So, and when it does, we're looking to FEMA, we're looking for disaster recovery dollars to help us get out of that hole. Anything else for Chief?

All right, Tommy, I do have one question for you. Yes, sir. Thank you, Chief. If we could go back to the countywide revenue slide at the very beginning and the countywide expenses slide. And I'm just thinking of how we talked about public safety. So, on the revenue side, those three departments for fire, EMS, and E911 are approximately 75 million. Where is that number coming out on the 948 million? Yeah, on the revenue side. Where is that, that's coming out of, right there, the 108? All these three. So, the set, yeah. Taxes, too. So, the set, yeah. Taxes, too. Taxes, too.

Taxes, too. Taxes, too. Taxes, too.

Almost 40 million in charge for services of our ambulance. Okay. On your assessments, what's the fire assessment? If ever, let's see, fire assessment is about. 23 million. 23 million. In the fire assessment.

Then the balance is tax.

The balance.

The communication service tax. 60.

Some CST, some sales tax. Go to distribute over there in the ballot. So.

Of the 90, of the 75 million of revenue. I'm sorry? Of the 75 million of revenue, you got 23 for assessments, 40 million for charges for services. That's 63. Where's the rest?

And the rest is property tax.

Taxes, right. Okay. And then on the expense side.

Yes, sir.

On the expense side of 96 million.

93 million. 93 plus the 2 million.

Right.

That's personnel and operating. Right. And grant aid. Yeah.

And our costs for medical equipment and the ambulance maintenance and those costs are up there too. So.

And radio.

Let me look at the, I can tell you real quick what the personnel service side of our ambulance is whose service is just for the salary component.

Yes, that's 45 million and then.

45 million for personal services just for fire EMS. 16.6 million for operating and 13.9 for capital. Okay.

Let me write that down again. So personnel you said is 45. 45.1.

That's for fire and EMS. Just fire and EMS. That's fire and EMS vote. Okay.

And then capital outlay was? 13.9. Yep. 16.6 for operating.

Yep.

And 18.1 for other uses.

Well, that's debt. So we're paying some share of the debt on the fire stations. Okay. Thank you. Transfer out. Transfer out.

Okay. Commissioner Prisgaard. Oh, I was just saying, I mean, that was actually a question. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

I don't know where I put it. I didn't have it in this book, but that was, it was the radio system. I know, you know, we were looking at the potential of like acquiring some of the sites or some of the towers. I don't remember the conversation. 3.6 million dollars for the truck radio system.

Okay.

In the capital. We'll talk about that during CIP. No, that we built that in.

Or that's operating. That's in the operating budgets. That's part of the operating budgets. Yeah. I saw that part.

I guess I was thinking about future capital outlay that we were going to need for new equipment. Or the purchase of towers or sites that.

Every time we have those initial meetings, I go run and hide. Okay. It's their big numbers that. And they're going up.

And they're going up. Yeah. That was another thing we discussed in one of my meetings is other counties that operate their systems are talking about how rapidly those prices are rising.

So our costs, our costs in that area, our constant challenges is the level of dependency on the system and to make sure it doesn't go down. And those start costing more than you can imagine because there are a lot of ways to communicate on a regular daily basis that whenever a hurricane is coming through or when systems are down to make sure you still allow or you have an emergency in a school or anything like that to make sure that system is still working. Because you remember the biggest user is the sheriff's office, not the fire department. And they are actually managing the system. And I believe the current chief, I know the former chief is pretty happy with how they were managing the system. And I think we probably a long term solution need to look at is that a lot of places lies with the sheriff's office just because of the nature of public safety and that they are such the largest user of the system, if you will. So we've been talking to them a lot, bringing them to the table a lot more in our conversations. But unfortunately, unfortunately or not, the whole transition from GRE to us just requires so much of Chief Theus' time and effort to look after the county's commission's interest. So, but over time, I think when you look at the users of the system and we have the board set up to manage it and the oversight administrative bodies. But yes, the next iteration of upgrades will be expensive. And we'll probably need to look at debt financing and not trying to come out of just our bottom line. We are trying to move off a couple of towers, some lease towers that are very expensive. And I know that's something we've been looking at is moving, migrating to some other options besides existing.

Is that a 28 conversation or?

Probably during the year, this year conversation.

I feel like the radio is one of those things that always ends up coming in the middle of the budget year. It does. We had this massive new expense that wasn't in the budget, but suddenly we're thinking about it. And it's one of the things that was completely off my radar seven weeks ago. You're thinking about it.

We actually are waiting on Motorola to send us the latest contract that we've negotiated. I think we negotiated pretty hard. We got more than a million dollars off of a six year agreement for SUAs. And so we'll have a six year agreement. I think in two or three years, all of the users are going to come back up because we had the agreement. So they're not in line. I think we have the ability to kind of look at the SUA agreements midway to kind of align those. But that's our hope is that we can kind of get all of those things in one plan. System user agreement. System user agreement. Yeah. And we just did a lot of upgrades to a geo prime site. And so, you know, we really are digging in hard on the maintenance part. Mm hmm. Yeah. So we've done a lot of work over the past few weeks to try to get us set up for success. And so.

Mr. Alford.

Well, I just want to quickly want to say I heard something about the possibility of shifting the sheriff. I understand the sheriff's the primary user. But I guess I just want to say I continue to remain in favor of the county commission and holding on to the contracts and services and bids as much as possible because we have to do all of our budgeting in the public eye. And we have to deliberate over contracts and grants and things like that. Whereas the sheriff's office does not. And so it's not a comment on the sheriff. It's just a comment on how public taxes get spent and process and the people being able to see where the money is being spent, how the money is being spent, and have the opportunity to weigh in on deliberations and the users to come to a public meeting and weigh in if they're having challenges. And I think that that's important if we're going to continue to be a user agreement service type oriented thing versus it being something that just happens, you know, all kind of behind the scenes, if you will. So I just put that out there because I do think it's important for us to continue to keep as much of the public tax dollars in the public frame as we can. Totally agree.

Yeah.

And to that point at some level, are we, when it's time to do an upgrade, are we locked in technology wise to Motorola or will we be able to consider other providers?

I think we can always consider other providers when the time is right. All the radios out there. Right.

I was going to say, there has to be at least interoperability or we would have to invest in an all new. Right.

And that's why I'm asking about like, you know, in terms of a long term plan, because one of the huge expenses in a lot of these systems is the proprietary nature of the technology. And so, you know, I feel like in order to keep companies like Motorola honest, we need to look at all of the options that are out there. Thanks. Yeah.

So. Tommy, go ahead. To not keep it in a, that we don't keep it in a shell. We did that budget. It has increased quite a bit this year in the budget. So we are planning for some of those increased costs that we're talking about. Okay. I think the big one is going to be the new contract with all the new service agreements. I think that's the one, we just don't know what that number is to put in the budget. Right. Right.

And that's going to be the big one.

Okay. Thank you. And I will tell, really, Commissioner Frizzi, because one of the committees the chair sits on is the CCC committee, which is the mayor, the sheriff, and the chair. And the county commission chair chairs those meetings. And we did two meetings, one in May and one in July, to agree to bring on Alachua in dispatch. They requested to bring them on board. So I think there's a real good relationship with the city of Alachua right now. And so the CCC is working on that. And that will fall under you next year. We also brought the school board on.

And the school board. That's right. So they're purchasing radios for their dispatch and buses. That's fantastic.

Yeah. So it's fantastic work, Chief, and to the sheriff. Yeah. And chief.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

No, it's yours now, Chief. Sorry. You want to give them credit. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So just a reminder, September 8th is coming. We are something different. We'll stay on the course we are as far as taxation goes, millage rates go. We're not going to retrim, Tommy. We're going to have to make the budget work. Thank you. We appreciate it. I haven't heard anything today that gives me pause. The next meeting will be August 6th at 11 a.m. We'll mainly be going over. You. My shop.

EPD. Huh? You, EPD, and judicial.

Me, EPD, and the constitutionals. Where we are. All right.

So we'll do finance, EPD, constitutionals on Thursday. Same time, 11 to whenever we're done.

Yes. And then the 13th will be review of the capital. We did approve a capital plan that we put in the preliminary. But we have done quite a bit of work since then. Some of those holes that we're missing in the future years. Yep. That we're looking at. So we will be better prepared to talk about long-term capital.

Okay. And I saw on our calendar, August 20th. Is that a, that's a meeting, a whole meeting if we need it? Whole meeting if we need it. Okay. That's correct. All right. Any questions for Tommy or the manager or any of the beautiful people that have stayed with us before we?

Thank you. And one. Do you, I saw that we had, I texted what had happened in Tallahassee in terms of having a day in court for the. Oh yeah. For that. I just wondered if you guys are getting any sense of what's coming out of Tallahassee at this, at this point.

Assume the worst and hope for the best.

Okay. So everything is still full steam ahead.

So it's still going to be on the ballot, even though they're questioning the. They can't get it off the ballot. They're questioning the title though.

The language. The language.

So Ms. Torres, do you want to give an update? They have 10 days to change that? Sure.

Yeah. So the, the judge has found the language to be with the statutes. Um, and unconstitutional. What he did was he bounced it out. The attorney general has 10 days to submit new language. Um, the judges said he does not have the authority to keep it off the ballot.

I see. I see. Okay. So if it does pass in November, will we meet again? Or will you all meet again then to readjust this budget? Or is it? No, that, that would affect my budget October 1st of 27th to 28th. I got it. Okay.

So we're good. At this point, we're good to go with this. We, we are, we are, we have not put, pulled the trigger on any long-term commitments debt or, um, commitments at this point, um, because we don't know what's coming. So, for example, we, we will see in the next agenda a contract for pre-construction work on animal resources. That is just to get the A&E done, but we are not pulling the trigger on the actual construction manager, um, because that would require us to, um, to borrow the debt on the new animal shelter. We're not going to do that right now because we may not be able to make that payment. So, um, if, if this were to pass, we don't know whether we could or couldn't. So we're not pulling the trigger on things like that. Uh, things like the courthouse too far down, down the road, um, to put a stop to it. Um, at this point, we have parts of it that have already been constructed. So we are going to continue to move forward with that, um, project, but where we can and, and, and encouraging us not to enter into things like five-year contracts and three-year contracts. I know, uh, the city, we've got one coming up that we used to do every five years. That's not going to be every year at their request for a similar reason. So we are, um, you know, we're taking a look at all those, but we're being very cautious. We're not stopping the ball. We're just slowing it down and being mindful and not jumping on to long-term commitments in anything. Okay. All right.

Anything else on this agenda item? I'm going to open up to the public. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak to anything that they heard on this before we get to the next agenda? So once or twice? All right. Let's move on. Tommy, Local Government Area of Opportunity Funding. Yes, sir. The recommended is to authorize and approve the chair to sign the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, Local Government Area of Opportunity Funding in support of the Royal Park Seniors Housing Development.

Yes, sir. Raulston is here, too.

Your recommendation.

Welcome. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Raulston is on the agenda. Community Supported Services. So before I introduce Alex Kiss with Bain Development Group, I just wanted to give a little bit of background. This is for the Royal Park Seniors Development that the board already approved last November for infrastructure sort of tax funding for housing. And so this is just an update on the required form that the state requires for the county to commit the funding as part of the local government area of opportunity of $460,000, which is going to be part of the $2.8 million IST loan.

In the past, this has not really happened like this. And we've just approved it. And then we win the lottery. And then we decide not to do the lottery. So thank you for bringing this ahead of time. And this is a signature of a local government commitment, which would then put them in a position to win a lottery. Is that a good frame?

Yes, Mr. Chair. For this cycle, we believe it's – well, first of all, it's very – it's highly competitive. But we believe Bain is submitting a very strong proposal application to the state as they are partnering with a nonprofit. And they also are meeting some of the goals that Florida Housing has established. And so the LGO commitment is really critical because without it, their project would have no chance.

And we also already – have already voted to move forward with the funding from the infrastructure tax loan as a part of this capital stack as well, correct? That is correct.

And the affordable housing? Advisory Committee.

Yes. Very much in favor of this. In fact, it's like – All right. Do you want to go through it or do we want to motion? Thank you.

Mr. Chair, it's up to you. There's a brief presentation – Do you guys want to hear it? Yeah.

No, I don't – Because I don't – Yeah, let's go.

All right, let's do it. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. You saw it, but it's been a minute. Because we approved it when it came through the first time around.

November 4th, 2025.

But it has matured a good bit since we talked about it.

Indeed, yeah. And I just want to thank the board for the approval of the funding. And since then, we have moved forward with permitting. And I'm going to head over to the city of Gainesville and pick up the permit-ready form from them here on our way back. So –

Who has the ability to forward your – That's me, right? Okay, great.

So my name is Alexander Kiss, managing partner of Banyan Development Group. Let's see. We are – the project is a limited partnership where we'll bring in an investor that will utilize the tax credits and tax losses. So we garner the income tax credits, federal income tax credits, and then pass those through. And they provide equity financing for the development to help us fund everything. In addition to the loan, the first mortgage loan and your second mortgage loan, if it's a 9% deal, and we're looking at it as a sale deal as well, it's a little tighter. And then in that case, there'd be a first mortgage. The second mortgage would be the state's sale loan, and then you'd be in third position. But the primary goal is to do the 9% deal as it works a lot better. So just a brief background on our organization. We've developed about 2,000 units since we formed in 2016. And so this development, Royal Park Seniors, we're bringing in a nonprofit, Treehouse Affordable Housing, to be the general partner that will help us qualify for one of the goals in this year's 9% application. And they also – the sister organization, Treehouse Foundation, will provide a host of resident services above and beyond what's required for Florida housing. And those have been really rewarding, I think, and a really good story.

So will Treehouse Affordable Housing and their partner organization be the – they'll be case management, and will they be the managing partners of the actual facility, or will your company be managing that?

They will be sort of the front for the partnership. And we will be special limited partners, in addition to the investor limited partners. And so we will have the ability to manage the process. And then they will have input, ongoing, and will be integral in the services and things of that nature. But when it comes to the compliance and the development and all that sort of stuff, we will still remain in control and have the ability to execute everything that needs to happen with the development. And we could replace Treehouse if there was a reason to. So we still have control, but they will be the general partner for the – Operations. You know, in mostly name. For the application.

Yeah.

So it's a pretty common structure. So who will be the on-the-ground operating partner, like management on the ground? It'll be what's – it's called BDG Royal Park Seniors GP LLC, which is our organization with the four principles of Bannion Development Group.

Okay. And the other 2,000 units that you have, you also do management on?

We do all of those as well. We've developed all those. And then our partners – so Scott Zimmerman and Lou Vaught are owners of the property manager AGPM, which also has managed about 13,000 units. I think they're down to about 8,000 now. They've divested some of those. But owned and managed many units throughout the southeast and now the northeast and the northwest. So, yeah, we will still retain all of the management. It'll just be a partnership with where Treehouse will get some – they'll get some income to support the services and they'll be able to help us. And so that's probably the meat of us.

Where's Treehouse based out of?

They're based out of Orlando. So the development name, 6.9 acres here. Royal Park Apartments is just to the north here. We developed that in 2019, 2022. And that's been well received by the city. They are very proud of that. And we are as well. And it's functioning great. And so this was sort of an out parcel that we were able to use live local zoning or preemption of zoning to develop on the mixed use portion. There's a big conservation portion. 3.6 of the 6.2 is actually conservation. And so we're retaining a lot of green space and buffer to the neighbors to the east. And in the west is the Royal Park Plaza where there's a movie theater and commercial. There's Ballyhoo restaurants and lots of amenities for the seniors there. There's another view from the northwest looking southeast. The red outline is us. The development here is Royal Park Apartments. So it'll be five-story mid-rise concrete block. So, you know, should last some time. 50 years of affordability. So critical withstand hurricanes. 86 units. 49 ones. 37 two bedrooms. There's a preliminary look at actual renderings. Elevations, I should say. Here's the building on the site. North is to the right. Coming in from Royal Park Apartments. Here's Fifth Avenue. Royal Park Plaza over here. Green space. Buffer. Stormwater pond. Leasing. And clubhouse here. Mostly leasing at the front. We'll have an integrated clubhouse and porch here on the north side of the building where there's more green space.

Is there laundry in the units?

There'll be hookups. And so they'll have the ability to put a washer dryer in the units. But no laundry facility. At all? Well, every unit will have a hookup.

Yeah, but there are affordable houses for seniors. I mean, they don't have money to go and buy a washer and dryer. It's part of the reason why they need affordable housing. Well, we do lease them.

The washers and dryers.

The washers and dryers. As a separate fee.

It's around $50. So here's nearby amenities and services. Michael Center. Two miles. Parks. Royal Park Plaza we just discussed. Public CVS. Bus stops out front. Forested. Open space. Conservation land. Clubhouse with computer room. Meeting rooms. And that's where a lot of the services will take place with Treehouse. We'll get into those. I'll list those later. Fitness center. Watch and fire hookups.

Is there parking for the unit or is parking also LSD? No parking.

There's no other trees.

No other trees.

So here's a brief synopsis of what Treehouse does. And there are a lot of other services they provide and they're growing constantly. For a second, there's financial literacy, digital literacy, resource navigation that'll help you find services for housekeeping, grocery shopping, laundry assistance, in-home services, and food assistance. So I guess this company, Bread of the Mighty Food Bank, is one of the newer ones. But we've provided basically food assistance where we brought food in. It was donated and folks have been able to take advantage of that. So Treehouse has facilitated that. Health and wellness programming through various Alachua County service providers, resource coordination. What do you mean?

Like you'll have transport to the senior center? Those are senior center programs.

I think they'll mostly connect the residents with the services and help them coordinate, utilizing their services that are provided by Alachua County. So income mix, 30% AMI units. Half of those are also, they're the special needs and disabled units that essentially hold for 30 days when the unit comes available. And then we have a referral agency that refers candidates. And then we keep those potential referrals from them. And then both of them at 60% and then 70%, with the average of the units being at the 60% 86 total units. So the link units, these are the special needs units, percent, and they'd be special needs set aside. They'd pay water, sewer, trash, and hot water. A tenant would pay electricity.

Your hot water is a, a large boiler system for the whole building. It is.

Common boiler. It works really well. It's gas powered, super efficient.

So I, so, but the water is, is still metered?

No. The, well, no, the, um, the cold water, we still, we pay. Cold and hot water.

I, I, my concern is of course, water conservation. And of course, when there's unlimited waters.

We do have some green features, low flow fixtures and toilets. That helps. And we do monitor the water usage with our own. And if there's excessive water use, we talk to them to try and understand it.

Gotcha. So as long as you're monitoring it. So if you have a leaking toilet, things like that with some types of older population, they might miss a running toilet because they don't hear it or things like that.

So about when we were conceptually planning it, we did some neighborhood meetings. We notified the public with signs and in newspaper, held a couple of meetings. I think we had about 13 people come, some interested, um, and some asking questions. I think, you know, the, I'd say the topic of the day was stormwater management. University.

I'd say it was the biggest topic of conversation.

FDOT's maintenance of drainage ditches.

So not, you know, surprisingly nice. Um, I would say feedback from most people, you know, very cordial interest as well. And, and, and renting to kind of senior rec center was going to keep folks apprised of timing. We set up there. Uh, so permitting, like I mentioned, and then see the scoring advantage of the permit readiness, but that's, um, still critical. We have the LGAO so that we can meet the goals so that then we can then use the permit readiness as a tiebreaker, but we still gotta meet the, still gotta qualify for a goal. So that's where the LGAO comes in handy. It'll give us two, um, bites at the apple. If we don't get funded this year, next year, if it's a repeat LGAO, we'll get four bites at the apple. We'll qualify for four, uh, goals. So it's, um, it's critical that this LGAO is, uh, form assigned so that we become essentially the de facto first choice of the county. You can't sign more than one LGAO. The non-profit goal, we actually will qualify for that as well, but that would be the only may not be a goal next year. Green construction features, um, I'd say that the highlights are the gas boiler, um, Energy Star appliances, 40 yards of neighborhoods, landscaping, drought, drought tolerant, essentially.

I, I have a quick question about that. So again, I used to own an A&E firm, so sorry, firms. But, so one thing with, uh, housing for older, older folks is, um, basic maintenance issues, such as changing filters on air conditioning, even changing light bulbs. Do you have a program to help residents with those kinds of...

We're, we're there 24-7 to receive, you know, any, any urgent issues. We'll be there.

Well, that's an urgent issue, but in terms of, like, maintaining low, long-term lower costs, you know, a dirty air filter...

We will replace the air filter.

Well, you will, but I mean, my question is, is there a regular maintenance schedule for that?

Well, I, I don't, I couldn't tell you exactly when they would replace them, when they would replace them, but, but we have, you know, very attentive, qualified maintenance staff, not only on this site, but on the northern site. Oh, I'm sure you do.

I mean, all apartments do, they want to protect their investments, but I, I'm, I'm thinking about the utility bills for folks that are, um, you know, in affordable housing and maintaining lower utility bills in a city that has a reputation for having high. So I, I, what I was going to suggest or recommend is perhaps, um, including some classes with the, um, Community Weatherization Coalition, which is a local nonprofit here in Gainesville that is, uh, committed to keep paying people's utility bills lower. That's great. I think that might be a way to help residents maintain, maintain that schedule of, of doing the regular maintenance they need to do. And they might even be willing to work with you to do some of that work. Who runs community?

I'm on their board.

But, but it's, it's, uh, wait, the county actually, uh, contracts for their services. That's enough. You can talk to Ralston about it, but they're really, really good local resource for, and, and that might work well with you. And I don't know if your green construction features will help you in your competitiveness with, at all with the state. It's a shame that it doesn't. But, um, that, I, I think that that partnership would be good for your residents, good for you guys in terms of, um, you know, long-term maintenance of your equipment. I mean, that's a great list right there. Oh, it's, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's a, it's a pretty good list, so, um, Pretty good list.

I think it's a great list. We're all, we're always looking for new ideas, so.

My main idea is give them, give them the washer and dryer. Okay. I mean, I just gotta say, it's like $50 a month for somebody who's on a limited ink fixed income is a lot of money. And, you know, going to a laundromat may or may not even be in the carts for them to be able to carry the weight of that laundry. And, you know, at $6 a wash, a laundromat, maybe if that's, you know, that's still eight laundry loads before they've made the 50 bucks and they had to travel there. And it's an old person who probably don't want to have that many loads of laundry. So I just, you know, I understand that it's an expense, but really if there's any way to figure in the washer and dryer into the cost of this thing. And just in general, as somebody who does affordable housing, giving people the dignity of being able to wash their own clothes in their own apartment.

We have actually, most people rent them. And it's not only the, you know, the providing it, you know, moving it in and out, maintaining it and all that kind of thing has its own value. Right? Yeah. Well, just value to the resident and having us handle all that. Yeah. Yeah. But I hear what you're saying. We're very conscious. They're paying all the expenses.

You're paying all the expenses, right?

Except for the electric. Except for the electric. Except for the electric.

Which is good. Yeah.

Out of your washer and dryer does change the whole thing. You'll rent them all out the first month.

Yeah. I mean, really. Hopefully they'll rent them all out anyway because it's affordable. Yes or no.

But I mean, to your point, you, it's a good upfront investment if you can do it.

Yeah. We try to provide that service. Yeah. Similar completed developments. This is Fern Road. It's another. It's a four-story block in Orlando. Senior, I should say. This is a four-story wood frame, actually, in Altamont Springs near the Sun Rail. This is apartments next door. This is a four-story wood, senior in Deland. So, okay. So 86 units. Total project approximately 34 million. We've got approximately 23, 24 million in tax credit equity. We're hoping to get, although pricing is going down. So it's definitely. First mortgage, approximate as well. County loan. Thank you for that. And then approximation of deferred developer fees that we would essentially be put a project to build it. There's no AM, but it's 1% interest only is what I think we finalized Ralston. And then 15-year term, coterminous, or six months after the termination of the firm debt, if it's a Freddie or Fannie.

You're deferring the developer fee for.

It's just the last plug. It's the last source when the costs are over sourced. It's the last. It pays themselves.

Yeah. Got it. So a $36 million project. 34 plus the developer is $36 million. All right. Questions?

No, the 33 would include the developer. It does.

Got it. I would move the authorization for the chair to sign the Florida Housing Finance Corporation local government area of opportunity funding form. Second. Motion.

We have two seconds. It's a good sign. All right. Any discussion? Mr. Chair.

This is exactly what we've been looking for.

Yeah. I mean, Commissioner Wheeler just kind of nailed it on the head. So we're talking about making a loan. We're going to get the money back. We're using 10% of our infrastructure for sale tax funds, providing 86 units, leveraging $3 million to get a $34 million project for affordable housing. It's exactly, I think, what we're looking for. And we really appreciate the work that you put in with our staff and across the street. I feel good about, from what I've heard at the state, that we'll score favorably. And if not this year, definitely next year. So thanks for hanging with us and for working with us. Anyone?

Mr. Chair. Yeah. Sorry. Some clarification items from staff. So since the form is prepared, it's $460,000, which is the minimum required for the LGO, we will need to submit an additional form at the request of the developer for the difference of the $2.8 million loan. And so that's for the whole deal for the application. Yeah. For the 2.88 loan. Yeah. Or you could just do the LGO. You can amend my motion to include both.

Yeah. So it includes basically the steel sheet and the 460 authorization plus the match.

Just so you know, you can put the 2.8 on the LGO. It wouldn't matter either way. Right. But you guys didn't want to.

And we're committing to that.

Yeah.

Either way. Whatever makes sense for our finance, accounting, tracking, and staff management.

Convy Crosby, Sista County Manager. The only thing that I want to make sure is that word the chair just used. Committed. So as long as throughout the, yeah. Committed now and in the future and for when it comes back.

Until they don't apply next year or anything else.

Well, the form, correct me wrong, is only good for 12 months. And so that's why we have to submit the other. The LGO is good for nine. Yes.

And they'll have to come back to us next year. As long as the board's committed. Exactly. Throughout the process.

Through the. Any rezoning process? Any other process? Any.

I mean, I think. I hear you. And I know what you're saying. But I think, I mean, in this one it's a very different project. And you know, I think it's exactly what we're looking for. Getting more diversified income housing on the western side of our county. On a major corridor with lots of amenities nearby, public transportation nearby, jobs nearby for those seniors that do want to work and can walk down and work at Talbot's or movie theater. I don't know, but you know, this is, this is the kind of project that we need in this community.

Appreciate it. And just to clarify, it would be cleaner for the application to have one form, one less thing for someone to scrutinize and a competitor to challenge, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can just, I know you signed the LGC form before with the 2.8 for last year's app. If this year you signed the LGAO at 2.8, I think it would just be cleaner and less variables to manage in the application process. Because it is a gotcha. There's no cures. That's what this motion does.

I'm okay.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm giving staff authority to put it in the LGAO. That is what makes the most sense for the application process and the forms that need to get filled out. Claudia, you okay with that?

She's looking at Tommy. She's looking at Tommy. Tommy just said, okay, what the board wants. Yeah. Yes. Those of you all remember. I remember. I think this is what we want. Okay. Commissioner Wheeler.

I just want to say, too, one of the things I feel compelled to tell all of the developers that come in here to find some way to screen in an area. If you have a community, because the electric goes off here, the storms, you know, and people don't always have a way to open windows or get anything that has a balcony, screen it, or a common room downstairs. Right. Because, you know, we have insects, varmints, and from the weather, but we also have storms that knock out through electric. We are building a generator. You are?

We are.

Okay. Well. Yeah. And there aren't about them, but we will have a comments back.

It won't. Maybe, you know, just a big screened area. And a port. And a port. Yeah. That would be nice. Just so that people can be outside in the evening without having to swatch dinghy fever stuff. It's, it was just, you know, it's just, I just asked people to do it. It's not a requirement, but, you know, we do have storms. It looks like that.

Okay. So, any other discussion? Tommy, what's the, what's the hesitancy? We're approving the 2.8 conditional award loan and the 460. You're good?

We have it.

Yeah. Money's in the bank. It's not a cash flow issue. It's strictly a, as we go through this process and they get approved and the next line gets approved and what are they going to do with their permit? What are they going to do with any zoning? This board says yes. We're going to keep saying, keep saying yes. That's what Tommy says. Yes.

I will make sure I'm going to keep saying yes. Don't worry.

We're not going to buy another piece of property. Thank you. That's all I'm asking.

All right. So we've got a motion. We've got a second. We've got a lot of discussion. Anyone from the public wish to talk us out of or tell us to support this motion? Going once, going twice. Back to the board. Any further discussion on this? All right. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion is unanimous. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Kiss, thank you. Have fun across the street. All right. Thank you. And we said thank you, too, for expediting your place. They've been very friendly.

Ralston, while you're here, I did want to share with my – not related to this question, but I did want to share with my colleagues. I don't know if you all got to meet, but I did get to meet with Adrian Hayes Santos and the LDG developers who are interested in doing some affordable housing. I met with them, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I forwarded them over to them to have conversations about our infrastructure sure tax, but I had the opportunity to visit one of their properties. So I was in New Orleans for Mexico and they have a property there. So I was able to go and visit that property and I was really impressed with the quality of the property, the management, the staff, and the amenities. I just wanted to put that out there that I actually laid my eyes on one of their properties and I was really impressed with the quality of it. Yeah. Very good. So just one. Good group. They come back around. I'm sure they have a whole big process to go through if they decide to come for us for money. But I just thought I'd share that.

Okay.

Thank you. Yeah. If I may, Mr. Chair, so we did link them to our HFA underwriter and they did request the application. So they do plan to submit, you know, for funding for both IST and HFA bond financing.

Fantastic.

Great. Okay. That's great. Thank you all. All right. Moving to closing comments. Anyone from the public would speak to the board? All right. Commissioner comments. Chuck, do you have anything? Nope.

Anna? Just that I see this letter of support. I am working with one of our community partners. He has a contract with us through the gun violence grant. His name is Jarrell Whitehead. He does street outreach with youth that are involved, that have been involved in gun violence or are at risk of that. He does a lot of supports and programming for them, also with job employment placement, keeping them busy. And he is working with the sheriff's office and swag and some others who apply for a COC street outreach grant. That is through, I think, I think it's that money that's a pass through, right? To see it. No, it's not. She could tell us what it is. Anyway, I, I've been working with him to get him, help him try to be prepared to apply for that funding because he's one of the few organizations in our community that really would qualify and be able to do something positive with it. But he may need a letter of support from the county for that grant application. So, and it's due the 15th. So with the type, I just wanted to bring that up, but I may be asking for that letter of support. Claudia.

Chair, Claudia Tuck, Director of Community Support Services. There are several funding opportunities out there. One is the street outreach, that's a direct application to HUD, not, and then it's passed through the COC, but they actually go in and enter it themselves. Right. In the database. That's what I was been like navigating him to get support to do all of those applications

because he's never applied through one of those federal grants.

So Jacob's been helping, I think, and the sheriff's. I want to let him report from the county help. It may.

I don't know how much HUD. So this was from Dance Alive. They had requested and told him I'd bring it up today. Yeah. So if you want to make a motion.

Sure. Move letters of support as relevant from Dance Alive National Ballet to the, it's to the state. Yeah. Department of Cultural Affairs and for strong-minded mentors for their HUD application for street outreach.

Second.

Question and second to a couple of letters of support for grant applications.

Any discussion? Back to the board. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? I have motions in the application. Thank you. Anything else, Commissioner? Okay. Commissioner Alfred, do you have anything?

I just wanted to note that we all coordinated our outfits very well today. It's all involved. It's in a picture. Where's Mark? Oh, yeah. You got the memo.

Sylvie and I did not get the memo.

Do we have a motion for the commissioners to all wear blue on Thursday? Okay. Okay. Do you have anything to add? Just very quickly, we had a citizen come yesterday to our climate advisory council and the concerns about the trees that were cut for the fire station over the city fire station. What we asked them to do in the future is to take back the idea that anything that joins the county, the city at the county line city line that we'd be included in a conversation about how it's going to move forward. Because we were county citizens that butt right up to the city and those decisions happen without us knowing and they didn't understand. Anyway, James Engel was going to take it back to his board and I think we need to. I know Harvey called me on that and I talked to him. Good. So we just need that. We did need to collaborate a little bit where they.

He apologized and said that they're going to put some things in place over across the street. Okay, good.

Good. And it should work both ways. I did encourage the city staff that was there to get with our birth ministry staff to at least look at our new and improved tree ordinances and tree protections, consider adoption of them. I don't know if they will or not, but that was a recommendation. Particularly that part where we hold ourselves accountable.

Okay. Michelle, you have anything else? We'll see you all on Thursday, same time, same format.

Mr. Chair, I may be an hour late. I may not. I may be here okay, but I may be an hour late. And there is not a canvassing board meeting.

We will have a forum then. We will be good. And with that, we're adjourned. Okay. All right.