going to go ahead and get started um welcome to day four and mcsweeney and atkinson team here up again thank you you guys are listening to everything that's going on at the county you'll be ready to serve at any time yeah appreciate appreciate your service and being here this morning not on the show maybe somebody up okay he gets no input on the sheriff's right here all right let's get started um health department so good morning mr chair chris rose office of management and budget uh dr cho is out today so he will not be presenting we have melissa van bruggen assistant director welcome uh and a couple of other folks from the health department in the audience all all supporting the effort so melissa sorry tony merrill is going to be presenting from my office first and then it will go over to the health department so tony the floor is yours good morning commissioners morning we're going to go ahead and just jump right in and start at page one of your documents with the department purpose following the department purpose we're going to look at the budget drivers in fiscal 20 fiscal year 27 the health department fund budget excluding transfers is increasing by 258 000 to 8.9 million reflecting a modest growth in operations that gross was based several weeks ago on a two percent assumption so it will be reviewed as we do every year um once we get the completed and the property tax the official property taxes the fund revenues are increasing primarily due to the higher ad valorem tax revenues along with gains and interest earnings and in excess fees by the tax collector the ad valorem revenues are increasing by 177 000 to 9.7 million while interest is increasing to 280 000 and tax collector excess fees are increasing to 66 000 the fiscal 27 expenditures excluding transfers are increasing by 256 000 to 8.2 million largely due to the higher grants and aids within core services we have cost decreases due to the completion of a 500 000 roof repair project while new investments include 156 000 for the saint pete assessment and also a 600 000 mid-county moisture mitigation which the department will be able to explain more about that to you total transfers from the health department fund increase by 2.6 million to 7.2 million bringing the total budget including transfers to 15.9 million the include increased transfers are intended to reserve funding for future capital infrastructure needs particularly ongoing improvements to the saint petersburg health department facility on page two you'll see a little bit about the user fee request the health department is asking to expand the use of their comprehensive emergency management plan review fee and also to add in a new biomedical waste licensing processing fee these fees are a function directly with the health department and the county has no control over these fees at this time i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to melissa who has a video or a powerpoint presentation and she's also going to speak a little bit about the department context and considerations and the fiscal 26 accomplishments melissa good morning everyone um as tony said i'm melissa van bergen i'm the assistant county health department director in pinellas so i'm going to start with um just telling you a little bit about our mission which is coming up here on the slide next so it is to protect promote and improve the health of all residents and visitors in pinellas county their integrated state county and community effort so the need for our integrated state and county partnership to meet public health needs is defined in florida statute chapter 154 which you can see up there so we do this through our core contract from pinellas county to deliver public health services so this is the funding we're talking about today our core contract funding i'm also just want to touch on our top health priorities so in our most recent community health assessment and improvement plan our community partners and residents identified these three areas up there as our top priorities health priorities and pinellas so mental health and substance use access to care and social services and health promotion and behaviors okay and as tony mentioned i'm going to talk a little bit about a couple things under context and considerations related to our upcoming budget so a couple things they're both related to capital projects which were referenced so the first one is with our st petersburg site um i think last year we talked a little bit about the need for looking at a new location for st petersburg a very aging building we're in a 1930s building and we're and we're sort of being surrounded by condos and having a little bit harder time reaching where our population who's moving to different parts of the county so we've been looking at st petersburg this year cbre came in and did a assessment looking at the conditions of our current facility looking at future space needs and requirements what a new facility would cost a kind of a complete financial analysis so they did find or made a recommendation for a new facility um and and with that they determined that or made an estimate that we could get our current property is worth 22 to 24 million dollars but we would need an additional 69 to 100 million for a new site in st petersburg so that's why you'll see some some additional funding in the capital projects fund to work toward a new st petersburg site which is going to be a long-term long-term plan um second item up there is related to our mid-county site the mid-county health department there has been moisture intrusion confirmed coming through the ground so we did have some engineers out who confirmed this and recommended we install a moisture barrier which is going to necessitate sort of taking out the whole first floor and replacing that flooring so the estimate on that right now is six hundred thousand dollars we are filing an insurance claim though so we hope to not use that six hundred thousand dollars toward this but potentially put that into that capital fund toward toward st petersburg as well but those are kind of two major items for the upcoming year all right so moving into the better stuff so let's talk about some of our accomplishments this year so our locations provided about 1.1 million services to about 120 000 residents this past year a couple of those are highlighted here we did over 20 000 sanitary sanitary and safety inspections we performed the highest number of sti services amongst all local health departments in the state of florida our maternal child health home visiting program saw about 2600 families and our wick breastfeeding team received the usda's wick breastfeeding gold award of excellence a couple more specifics we are continuing our work on opioid overdose prevention we continue to facilitate the pinellas county opioid task force we distributed almost 2 000 naloxone kits throughout pinellas county dr cho is participating in the opioid abatement funding advisory board and continuing to support the idea exchange and through these efforts and others in the community we are continuing to see a decline in opioid overdose death i'm next going to talk a little bit about school health nursing so we are continuing to contribute about 40 lpn positions to pinellas county schools these lpns do also help ensure that we have adequate nursing staffing to operate our special needs shelters and on this slide too you can see some of the accomplishments of these nurses this past year a big part of what they do is referrals for mental health and social services so from the year prior to this past year we saw an increase in those referrals of about 300 to 61 54 referrals this school year and they've also made great efforts to improve our physical screening rates you can see up there vision hearing bmi and scoliosis screening rates are all above 95 for the county they've also worked to improve our return to class rate so at our schools with these nurses we've increased from 88 to 90 percent return to class rate this school year next our dental sealant program so these are teams of of hygienists visited 53 title one elementary schools this school year they served about 6 800 students through their work doing screenings and oral hygiene instructions they performed 5600 cleanings applied a total of 8 500 sealants to 260 637 children i'm not up here but they also visited 14 head start locations and provided services to another 700 children talk a little bit about our funding now so this slide here is just an overall look at our resources for the health department so our entire budget is about 65 million so this just kind of shows where your contributions are going so we most of our budget about 65 percent is coming from the state and other local grants and contracts and then this this core contract is that light light kind of teal blue shade there about 12 percent of our entire budget is coming from this 8 million i'll move to the next one so you can see a little bit more on that so this is the 8 million in our core contract so you can see what that funds the vast majority of that about 51 percent is going toward our clinical services so these are those core public health clinical services um 25 is going to the school health nursing that we talked about um 8 to the dental sealant efforts about 8 to our environmental public health services and then you can see the smaller places there things like building improvements admin infrastructure performance improvement effort and then this is just kind of another look at those resources there so of our 8 million you can see our ad valorem tax rate um and of the 8 million about 6 000 is going again to those core public health services and then about 2 million to the school health nursing effort and then you can see the capital project amount there as well at just over 7 million with my last slide and can take any questions yes commissioner flowers please not a question but just a comment i've spoken with barry about this some time ago and also met with dr cho about new facility in st pete because that building is you all are really cramped um and it's very small and um i know that um and again nothing in stone it was just a conversation um the mayor did have a conversation with dr cho about um whether or not the city of st pete would be interested in purchasing that space and then there was some potential for other locations um so just wanted to put that out there i couldn't tell my other colleagues when i was having that conversation but um i was appreciative of at least the thought about it because you all do a wonderful job down there and i know it gets a little especially around the first school for inoculations and stuff like that it gets extremely you might huh no oh it gets extremely crowded down there for parking you know your parking space is over here you're right on 9th street but the good part is it's a bus line um and so persons who don't have vehicles can you know get there quickly so i like that but i've been down there in in the dental part in the back side in the wick side and and i really appreciate all the work that staff um is doing down there in the confined space i'm sorry did you i thought the chairman had a question for me the facility belongs to i was asking yeah okay so there are facilities um so we provide that different from other funds since the health department has a separate fund okay it's a separate levy they do carry reserve balance and they can but they also take care of their own capital that's the reason they've run a reserve capital fund in order to go towards future capital we've never really pulled together the financials of what a new building looks like where it would be and all those different pieces we're just now through the cbre analysis coming in to um to be able to have that type of conversation and so there'll be more to come on that it may be i was just texting staff while we were talking and it really may be a penny issue for the next penny you know and coming off the top before they do their distribution since they provide county-wide services um so you know those are things we've got to look at they they definitely need um a a new building um and it probably in and the services need to be closer uh to the people they serve um but we're just now getting into the analysis of that but that's the reason you see that seven uh point three million dollar reserve level that you don't see in other funds we we typically sweep those up because they're property tax based here you have a separate fund so we're able to do that thank you chair uh thank you for the presentation have we have we looked at like increasing some of these these fees at all like tattoo piercing i mean you know i have a real estate license and i have to pay like over two thousand dollars a year with association dues and all this other stuff and for someone to have a permit for like 50 bucks a year i mean seems a little cheap to operate a business yeah it is something we look at and we do try to stay in line with the region and the state and what other department of health locations are charging as well but it is something we look at and that i think the fees were mentioned so we did add biomedical waste additional fees there for example because we've seen um over 100 increase in the number of facilities needing those inspections so it is something we look at and try to make sure that our fees are comparable to other similar similar locations across the state and region yeah i mean i just think it would cost more than like 50 bucks if there's a complaint or something for the resources we have to use to like process it i mean is it like paying for itself barely i mean it's like yeah we and that's really what we try to do is make sure that based on the number of facilities and inspections we do that it's covering the cost of providing those services yeah and then do but taxpayer dollars go towards that as well or no for some of them yes yeah i mean so i would be in favor of like increasing the fees we can take a look at that so we don't have to use taxpayer money to offset that i would be that's i would be in favor of it but thank you oh just again for clarity this ad valorem tax thing we're talking about um that's that makes up the eight million most of it but where does this capital project number has been building is that what we're saying over so they carry a reserve level that goes towards capital um because it's a separate fund right so so it's not swept up at the end of the year understand so it's a carryover um then and and that it increases that's the reason you see at the levy amount it increases that reserve because then that reserve goes towards future capital and and they've always had looking at what would a future building look like and up until this point we really didn't know what that meant and your your comment or thought on the nursing program that's in the schools um doing well i mean i saw the numbers and such i it's all relative to me so if you could yes yes and we do look at those kind of the rates there versus other schools that don't aren't supported by the same level of nursing and and definitely those those rates are higher and these and we do like to highlight those referral numbers because it is we are in schools that are more of an at-risk student body so we do try to i think that's why one of the reasons we're in those particular schools and really focus on screenings and connecting them to needed services and making those referrals we know the percentage of our schools that have nurses now do we we have a sense of that so the 40 these 40 are in our like our title one element our title one schools but i i'd have to look into the the total number of schools with nursing so we don't have a nurse in every school every day but every school has a nurse at least some days of the week and what portion of that do you feel is going towards the mental health side sorry can you say that again number of call the number of interactions in the schools going towards mental health issues that are arising in schools that on the uptick it's kind of steady yeah i think so and i think i highlighted the yeah you can see the number of those so you can see it increased from 50 about 5800 to 6100 that was just the mental health that was for mental health and social services but i would say a large portion of that is mental health so we're definitely seeing an increase in that need okay anybody have any other questions i had a couple on the school health so the county contribution covers the school health nursing again this is a separate um fund the health department fund separate portion on your property tax so they they we increased that many years ago to cover the school nurses because it comes out of that fund it are our our contributions to the health fund prescribed by law or is it discretionary well we sent you a little uh uh thing from fac um a day before yesterday um the answer is a base level yes um not necessarily all the services that are provided school nursing school nurses are not required i just i brought it up because you know the school districts aren't impacted by the changes to the tax law i know so what does that program cost the nursing program just school nursing okay so you know that this is another example of um those things that you know should things change come november that we'll have to look at you know and because we lose two and a half million dollars um out of the health department fund um should that pass and so again we'll wait and see what the outcome of the voters say and make a decision at that time but that that would likely be something we would have to discuss thank you for asking that question and just a little history on that because i served on the school board when the request was being made um there were a number of medical concerns with children within the pinellas county school system and not having someone there at the school that could help administer medications if the child was on medicine because teachers couldn't do it it was you know they can't give them whatever the medicine was um and so there was a request that uh the pinellas county commission support and contribute towards um the original ask was a nurse in every school that's kind of what the name of the program was um and then the county commission bless their heart we appreciated it at the time made the decision to help us with uh the funding of nurses as was shared so some schools have a nurse for half a day so that nurse will be there half a day and then they go rotate to another school um it's about 27 title one schools so um some of the nurses were in some of those schools more of the time because of uh some referrals for um counseling and mental health services and things like that for the children especially if the child was on ritalin or anything of that nature um and so as barry said you know that was something that we asked it wasn't something that we had the money for at the time in the school district budget and i'm not sure how they'll work that out you know going forward but i just wanted to give you that little bit of history about how it how it came up and um it has proven to be very good but again as has been said it's one of the things we may have to look at saying to the school district they they may need to see how they can cover it if it comes down to it so i just wanted to share the background on that and the um 88 90 contract return to class rates uh kind of middle of the road good poor i mean i have again nothing to compare to yeah i don't have the exact number of the others i can certainly get that but it is it i know that it is higher than the average school for sure yeah 90 is a very good return to class rate yeah i think the discussion then between the school board and the commission was more about yeah we we all agreed that it was needed to some degree but at the time they needed the help to have make it happen and i think that was why there was a small millage increase in that in that fee but things you know today is different today so how how it gets paid maybe you know maybe different okay anything else oh you had something else i need nope and the school district partnered with a uh entity called preserve vision um and they go out to the title one schools they also provide the vision screenings on site and will do the prescriptions for the glasses for the children and then the family just needs to go get the glasses so that's a way that we were able to partner they were able to partner um and assist so that kids who may have missed their vision screening and whatnot um or were having difficulty and families maybe couldn't afford the glasses so there are some other partners in the community who have been trying to step up to help provide some of those services okay that's all right it's okay no appreciate your insight um all right thank you appreciate it thank you dr thog martin here yep dr thog martin's here behind the post all right come on up doctor so mr chair as dr thog martin and and uh rita come up uh tony merrill is going to be presenting again in fact she'll be sitting next to me for a while this morning so uh tony's going to start and then we'll hand the mic over so tony the floor is yours good morning again we'll start on page one with the department purpose and then we'll move on to the budget drivers the fiscal year 27 medical examiner budget increases by 311 000 to 9.8 million with the program continuing to be fully funded 100 funded by the general fund staffing remains stable at three full-time employees with a position reclassification this year to from a dna analyst to a dna analyst lead codis administrator under personnel services the personnel services decreased by eleven thousand dollars and to approximately 422 000 despite maintaining current staffing levels so they've been able to maintain those levels and reduce their personnel services this decrease reflects personal adjustments and a position reclassification rather than the work reductions to the workforce operating expenses are increasing by 315 000 to 9.3 million representing the largest driver of the overall budget increase the increase is primarily attributed to a 383 000 increase to the medical examiner's contract driven by higher personnel and supplier costs we'll now talk a little bit about the medical examiner's contract the contract increases to 9.2 million reflecting rising costs associated with providing forensic and medical examiner services some of the contract related cost growth is offset by delaying the bts pc replacements from fiscal year 27 to fiscal year 28 the medical examiner has 18 fees charged to non-planelis county jurisdictions and he's in pro he's proposing an increase to those 18 higher fee revenues will help to offset the professional service contract from the medical examiner's contract from the medical examiner and take a little bit of the financial burden off of the pinellas county taxpayers the ci portion cip portion topics governmental capital improvement projects associated with the medical examiner will be discussed later this afternoon future capital needs and project planning will be addressed through the county's broader cip review process and with that i'm going to turn it over to dr thog martin thanks rita so if during tony's presentation i'm almost sitting here looking at the remote thinking if i click forward i'd get get ahead of you all right um i guess it's different anyway um yes uh so we're at year 26 i suppose now it's amazing um our synthetic opioid thing that we were dealing with particularly 2020 2021 2022 really it kind of peaked in 2022 2023 and the it's kind of gone away um multifactorial but quite amazing and uh again we're thankful i hope we don't go through that again so our autopsy load ends up being about stable instead of going up like it was it was just boom boom boom going up now it's gone it went down since 2023 but looks like 2025 2026 is going to be right on par so we've reached a new a stability here i'm just waiting for some other brain candy to come out to be sold at your local gas station hopefully that doesn't happen um then uh you know our so emmy from an emmy standpoint basically we're talking about baseline maintenance no big surges or anything forensic laboratory still you know highly effective i'll let rita talk about that you know if you want um but they got some award again that foresight award again um they also um have a real fast turnaround time if just you know if we we had a case that involved hillsborough county recently and just they just did some of the workers that we have you know the turnaround time on getting those people identified then that recent big case was fantastic it was probably spoiled them a little bit i guess because most of the time you know hillsborough really doesn't interact with our lab you know on a regular basis just so happens that they were working a case that happened to be found in our county so we worked it we did the identification her rita's laboratory did fantastic work um and then um we're just continuing to experiment with different you know cost strategies just trying to sharpen the sword constantly so just so you get an idea i do this almost every year and i think it's really effective the green is this our office um our circuit that's and it's uh fiscal year 27 so it's what we're asking for so this is dollars per case and just to put us at a disadvantage you know a little handicap right i put next year's request 300 plus thousand higher um versus all the other offices their current record their current budget if i put our budget in our current budget in here on par we'd be even lower we're just less expensive um if you do it on a per autopsy basis again just across the board crazy less expensive and you know you asked me you know you may ask me you know how what is that well we it's become kind of funny when uh offices collapse like if there's an me office that collapse or a lab that collapses they tend to reach out and ask hey can you help us and basically my i'll be real simple anybody in finance if you have a column that's um twice as tall as my column and you ask me for help it's easy because i exploit the difference between that green column and the top of that blue column and it makes it real easy to do and we some of those offices if you look saying augustine tallahassee gainesville um daytona the little lower ones you know i can't talk about what happened since we left but those are offices that we blunted even jacksonville i mean we we've you know basically it's kind of like giving them the courage to stop doing dumb wasteful stuff and it just carries forward after we're gone violent death too or you know if you do it per violent death we you know our cost per violent actual non-natural death is lower as well now do you want me to talk about your stuff or you want to talk about yours okay so the forensic lab continues to uh to operate very efficiently um our cases we had a little bit of a decrease last year but the decrease was strictly in post-mortem toxicology as dr thogmartin said the fentanyl crisis tends to be ebbing there are new drugs on the horizon they've kind of hit as low as kentucky but they haven't hit here yet let's hope they don't because i think we'll see another spike if they do because that's what they're seeing up north um but because of that um we end up with a seven percent decrease in post-mortem toxicology cases we did eliminate a senior toxicology position through attrition um that we didn't replace uh based on that but in all of our other disciplines we're still seeing about the same amount of work dna sees drugs and um uh dui toxicology um that's about all i can say about it so there's an award called the foresight award foresight award sorry he didn't tell me i was talking until two seconds ago um the foresight award is presented by the american society prime laboratory directors and it is given to laboratories that perform at a um business and management efficiency so the biggest two factors they look at is the cost per case and the number of cases per analyst and for every laboratory that operates within at least 90 percent of what their um what they determine to be those milestones gets this award called the foresight award and we've we've got that award for five years straight and we actually for most of our services are over 100 percent on their efficiency base so we are very efficient in terms of the cost that we have per test and also um the number of tests the productivity of our analysts um and we actually are very proud of that work because it really does demonstrate that um we are as efficient as we can be with with um the funds that we receive main thing is it's bookmarked you know amongst other labs so they're just they just run better it's just all her you know um and this kind of gives you an idea you know if you look at you know their turnaround time they're always like you know if you talk about length of time i mean if you submit a sample you want the results back because it could actually save people's lives you know if you're talking about you know uh i don't know dna and stuff like that making sure that bad guy gets snatched off the street that's kind of important they're always quicker than everybody else um just turn around time in general even you know blood alcohol whatever it might be um and then uh the salary and benefits again the amount of salary you're paying for that work is less than other places but you're able to retain people so it goes like it i kind of like was explaining to some of my kids you know when you're looking for a job you've got the workplace environment and then you've got the salary and if your workplace environment is poor you've got up the salary but if the workplace environment is good you can pay a little bit more competitive a less competitive salary and still retain the people we we retain people she retains people forever i retain people forever the workplace we just try to make it a good place to work um last year we did do a salary adjustment um and based on these results because we um we're at the we're still lower obviously lower than the 25th percentile nationally but we did um a salary adjustment to make us more competitive with the other laboratories in the state um part of that reason was because hillsborough county was opening a laboratory manatee is getting ready to expand their laboratory and we have this great reputation i'm very proud of my staff and and and what they do and we were targets for to lose staff and if you lose an analyst a forensic analyst if somebody leaves today it's two years before they're effective once we get them so we hire them and then they're in training for 12 to 18 months before they're seeing case work so and you have somebody off the bench training them so the board um generously gave um a salary um funds for two years ago for salary adjustment so even though we're in lower percentile still nationally we actually are very close to the mean in the state and one of the reasons this number seems a little bit lower artificially not lower is because most of our employees are employees of dr thogmartin so they're not employees of the county and therefore they're not in the frs and in the state of florida the frs for forensic science is high risk so you can imagine what the the cost is for retirement if if this was a county department um so that kind of the the numbers that foresight collects is salary and benefits so while our salaries are actually much more comparable now um our benefits costs are still i think we're going about 28 percent per person as opposed to i think it's close to 40 percent for um like fdle and so forth um per person so that this number is just a little bit um artificial yeah it's part of my blue column thing some of the offices that are um me offices like if you don't talk about the labs talk about the me offices if they're county employees and i don't know why they would do that your doctors are special risk you're sending 32.79 of their gross annual salary to the state of florida at physician pay rates so the amount that they send is incredible it it's actually astounding and um anyway so basically we're just trying to um you know look for cost efficiencies grants she's getting grants um our emmy side is getting some toxicology grants um and just trying to explore their income i you know pasco county also gets a really good deal but every now that you know there's inflation i'm kind of hitting their fees every year just a little bit you know just giving them a little increase it's been i think this is my fourth or fifth year in a row giving them just a little tweak up in fees i have to and i show them the same column chart and you know you're getting a great deal now so even with the increase um a great job you always do a great job i think you're amazing and um so rita how many times have you won that award five years five years she's modest yeah yeah she is she's modest you guys just do an outstanding job so i haven't gotten a count on the opiate deaths and i know it's way low do you remember what they were last year and where we're on track for this year uh we were about 470 last year i'd say we're going to be pretty close to that this year as he said earlier we're leveling off so about four seven deaths about 470 70 on opiate deaths okay in in the county not in the district yeah in the county cut in half i mean basically almost yeah we were we were 600 three years in a row about six well two years in a row it was 600 um okay that's still higher than i thought it was but yeah you still end up with um you know there's certain people that still get them from regular sources right you know and they're still you know and they're not necessarily we're just not seeing the fentanyl fentanyl fentanyl all over and over again as much as we used to now we still see on the seized drug side it's not that it's fentanyl has gone away that's definitely not the case but what is out on the street is much more diluted so um where it was at 90 somebody injects 90 fentanyl especially it's our first time they're going to die um so now what we're seeing on the streets more 10 15 percent um so because of that you know they're diluting the product it's not quite as fatal and also narcan's available everywhere that's saving a lot of lives yeah i was talking to a narcotics undercover narcotics guy or a former undercover narcotics guy and i was so what's going on i'm just saying why would what well he said when he would do a buy as his you know undercover persona you know looking like a surfer or something right he said they would sell me fentanyl and then they'd give me a narc you got a narcan no here's one they give it to them you know i i makes logical sense right it does i don't want you to come back later i don't want you to die here's a narcan so i think it's it's supply is being squeezed dilution of product um just less product in general and then narcans everywhere so you may have the abuse but less death okay thanks so much thanks for the good work yes mr flowers i'm glad you brought that up because um as far as charging individuals if they can locate the person who sold the drugs to the individual and they die they charge them with their murder so i guess that's why they started trying to provide the narcan kits i don't know yeah i mean i wouldn't want to be yeah i've been involved in numerous cases with that very scenario and yeah they um it's done two different mostly i was kind of expecting bad stuff to happen like they dispose of bodies but no no that it seems to really it's um set an example right they're setting an example for a few drug dealers and they want to avoid that so i do have a question um when you shared that it takes about 18 months or so to get a new forensic an analyst up to speed is that someone new to your office so is it someone who let's say they worked in miami-dade and they moved up here so they have that experience but they just need to learn maybe our way of work does that 18-month timeline apply to them as well well they tend to run about nine months um they we still have to do all the same competency testing and written exams and mock trials are still a process but they have a lot of the the core background but they're expensive so um we tend to hire out of college one you don't have to break bad habits that way and you actually start with a lower base salary that you're moving on from um we have hired some experienced people over the years but we haven't found that overly successful and um commissioner peters you may know the answer to this or maybe them the the funds that we received through the the lawsuit for fentanyl are any of those funds used to help prop up the department for testing and and things like that since at one point you know we were way up high yeah no the funds are not going to that for that no okay they could but they currently are not are not okay no and i was just thinking of you know it wouldn't be a eternal fix of course but when you have as i hear we're leveling off at about 470 but if you have that influx i was just thinking that may be a way to pay for any potential overtime or additional cases and things like that that could help the off excuse me that could help the office um on that so thank you for sharing that and thank you for your service on that i i hope our goal will finally level off at like 150 instead of 400 it'd be better if it was like zero but uh i mean it wasn't that long ago we were only losing 200 people a year and then we just skyrocketed to 600 so yeah and um doctor uh i haven't been to visit your wonderful place your home um but you know we could make a deal here and say that we could give you what you're asking for if you change your mind about retirement it's going to be a long time i'll be here longer than a lot of people actually are chief so it's it's a long time yeah i know i'm just throwing it in there i just said that to make you laugh that's all that's good thank you mr chair anybody else sure thank you chair uh doctor and i appreciate all the hard work i don't know how you do all this with three employees i can't figure it out but no no no they have they have three's on the lab side okay yeah well i you know you'll just run a tight ship over there and i appreciate it but i did want you to know that if you need to charge pascal county more for your services you don't need my permission we encourage him to do that yeah i mean i'm just trying to make sure they stay on par with you that's really what the goal is that's the fair thing to do it helps us drive down our cost because obviously they're using our building and you know he does a good job of recovering forensics and without you they'd have to go to the state right and that takes forever they um well it's the circuit so the district six is the same as circuit six so pasco's in there same state attorney same public defender same medical examiner but they you know back in 03 when you guys built the building um they had a 20-year agreement i was kind of thinking well at 20 years um they will you know five years in let's say 15 years in they'd start planning and doing their own but once you do the math on your own building um it gets to where their costs are going to go crazy so what they're doing is i actually had a discussion with them about it recently the costs are just brutal and they're getting you know the part of the problem is they're not having their own building is we're doing giving them good turnaround time good service you got a lot more remote work the detectives don't necessarily have to drive down and watch autopsies they can get results quick they can get you know digital copies of the photograph so they really don't need to travel as much so things have changed and evolve i think due to technology and um you know maybe one day they're going to have to have their own building it's just no plan right at the moment now we also get fees from most of the law enforcement agencies outside of pinellas county um we do most of the unidentified human remains in the state of florida um and also um like the hillsborough case but like tampa pd hillsborough county sheriff pasco sheriff a lot of their major cases they will um have us do the work especially the dna work or the seized drug work if it's a a public safety issue they need an answer quickly so and we're raising all those fees as well we use um because the foresight um project actually gives us the cost per um test you you know breaks it all down with personnel it's an amazing amazing project um and then we add 20 that goes to pinellas county for every one of those analyses and that's actually been becoming an accidentally a source of income as well and those fees are going up as well great um yeah you guys have stayed pretty steady too in the number i was looking at the number of folks that you have you stay pretty steady in that as well well i had a doctor leave due to his spouse getting another job and i just didn't fill him i didn't i didn't replace him because we have fewer cases and then she lost a toxicologist you know not through any you know she's just attrition so we didn't fill her spot that's probably the best way of doing it i think and we just we have total flexibility in the positions that we have so you could make one get rid of one as you need and it just kind of blunts the uh you know when you want to keep your budget low it keeps you guys from you know paying more and i put that out because you'll notice in their budget so dr thogmartin put in a two percent um raise for uh his employees on that side we don't have that built in on read aside on the lab side whatever we decide with raises we'll adjust their budget accordingly okay yeah i'll just follow your lead what you guys do with the county employees i'll do with ours you run a tight ship and a really effective one so we always appreciate what both of you do and congrats on the award that's that's awesome five years honey i mean that's just beautiful unbelievable no other questions we're good thank you appreciate it all right human services once again good morning mr chair and commissioners tony merrill is going to stay right next to me she is the budget analyst for human services and karen yatcham and carrie visendu are already at the table so well done tony the floor is yours good morning again um human services we'll go ahead on page one and look at their department's purpose going past the department purpose you're going to see several tables these tables show that human service budget is broken up into four funds those funds being the general fund the drug abuse trust fund the opiate abatement fund and the local provider participation fund the human services total budget for all four funds is 481.8 million an increase largely driven by the growth of the hospital direct payment plan and the opiate abatement settlement the department is budgeted for 100 ftes and that is unchanged next on page two you'll see the efficiencies and cost savings measures human services achieved 261 000 in personnel savings through staffing efficiencies while maintaining service levels the department recommends a 400 000 reduction to the pharmacy program budget due to improved vendor agreements and stronger internal management there are also savings and efficiencies for fiscal 26 and fiscal 25 and you'll see those in your document and in the attachments if you go down to page three we're going to look at your budget drivers and that's going to start with the general fund the general fund revenues are projected to decrease by 330 000 in fiscal 27 this is primarily due to the lower federal care grant capital funding this is the capital grant for the new health vehicle general fund expenditures are decreasing by one point not 1.2 million to 65 million personnel cost increase by 261 due to staffing turnover operating expenses decrease by 330 000 primarily due to eliminating the pinellas community empowerment team funding state mandated costs are increasing while the juvenile detention cost remains this remains the same in this document until we get those updates state mandated programs account for 31 percent of the department's budget and grant support 8.1 percent of expenditures capital outlay is decreasing by 440 000 and that is for the care grant vehicle costs and those are split between fiscal 26 and fiscal 27 grants and aids are decreasing by 159 000 due to the removal of a prior year non-recurring allocation now we'll look at the drug abuse trust fund and this drug abuse trust fund supports local drug treatment and education programs with resources increasing to 58 000 on page four we have the opiate abatement settlement fund fund revenues are projected to increase by 8 million due to the opiate settlement proceeds and investment savings earnings earnings i'm sorry fund expenditures increased by 8 million to expand professional and contractual services the local provider participation fund this is a state administered and this is a what's the word it's a it's a mandate but it's also it's a pass-through that's what i was it's a pass-through with the fiscal 27 funding levels pending update as we have not gotten that state information yet human services did request one decision package and this is a request for reoccurring funding for the suncoast center sexual assault program to sustain 24 7 victim advocacy forensic exams and crisis response services the county administrator is recommending this decision package the decision package is for the 159 310 and that will bring the reoccurring amount up to 340 120 the department did not propose any changes to their user fees for fiscal 27 and at this time i'm going to turn it over to karen who's going to speak more about the context and consideration her accomplishments work plans and performance measures so first i'm going to speak real briefly commissioners um as we talk about human services and it's within your packet but again we have 20 million dollars of unfunded state mandates just right off the top you know in in so when we're talking about budget challenges and we're talking about you know reducing funding this this is what we face that you know so they you know we we look at 14 million dollars for a medicaid match 1.7 million for behavioral health um you know that that doesn't even include the juvenile detention portion that again they're going to give us the number that we have to provide um as the juvenile um detention cost that's a shared cost between the state and us so 20 million dollars or plus right right here um i'm going to ask that you know karen gets into the whole um sexual assault issue and the funding for that because there's different pieces to that and i know you know commissioner shear brought up the issue with hospitals um and so i want her to address that because it's real it's a it's a pertinent discussion we had that last year commissioner uh latvala brought that um up and you know we addressed that as a gap funding but there's different funding pieces to that so i do want to have more discussion i'd like karen uh to kind of outline that but i i didn't want to go this we we gloss over you know some of this and this is an area where we we just get fund continuously get unfunded mandates they up the amount each and every year and then we just have to pay the bill so good morning commissioners karen yatcham um human services director and with me i carry visit do our business services director um so a little bit more detail about the sexual assault services in the decision package so we recommended the 159 310 last year to close the gap for sunco center since then we've been meeting with them extensively there still remains a gap of 176 000 to make their program whole in doing a lot of the work i've met extensively with the state credentialing body which is the florida council against sexual violence and have learned that really this is a hospital it's a hospital requirement so hospitals are statutorily required to provide and or coordinate for the sexual assault exam services and so in meeting with the ceo of sunco center we really we i encouraged him to meet with every hospital that has an emergency room in our county to have the conversation about how the hospitals can contribute to this program and they could know they would no longer rely on on county general fund and so while he is doing that work our proposal was to increase our allocation as a recurring amount but have all of our funding so the entire 340 moved to the payer of last resort so he would have to demonstrate that fundraising grants hospital contributions all of that is applied to the program prior to utilizing any of the county funding and commissioner is this so first off the 175 that's because they lost a grant correct correct so you know it wasn't even the base funding they lost a grant that was helping support their operation well our policy is we don't supplant a a state or federal you know grant cut because we have hundreds of millions of dollars out there we just can't go down that path but as we learn more about really it being a hospital responsibility you know we've treated our hospitals very well you authorize the hospital direct payment program that generates hundreds of millions of dollars that the hospitals benefit from that is not a mandate we don't have to do that but they're the recipients of those funds we simply act as a pass through and take a very small administrative fee to do that so they they we've treated them very well this is their responsibility i think that we need to push back hard that they assume this cost the full cost of this program um and that's something that we can talk about as part of our final recommendation but i'll stop it all right i'm going to go ahead and move on to the department context and considerations so as barry mentioned mandates was one of the first areas that i wanted to touch on and so the 20 million dollar mandates that includes a few other items in addition to the medicaid mandate the djj mandate and the behavioral health mandate we are required to fund child protection team assessments for children who are abused abandon abandoned or neglected we are also required to fund the health care responsibility act so if someone receives emergency care outside of our county there is a mechanism for us to pay for them if they are considered indigent we are also required for the article 5 for legal aid and the guardian ad litem so in total that's 20 million dollars and it's one-third of the human services general allocation which means one-third just comes off the top before we're able to execute on any prioritized local programs the second area i'd like to touch on is a shift from general fund pressure onto the opioid settlement funds and so we are proposing next week to shift all of the funds for care about me to the opioid settlement fund this is the city and county allocation so it's within this board's control it does not go through the opioid abatement funding advisory board and so as we discussed at the most recent work session our plan for the hybrid approach was really to lower the cost in total but this would shift the planned 1.4 million off of the general fund onto the opioid settlement fund making our budget really come in about 2.6 lower this year than what we had anticipated for general fund the third area that i'd like to touch on is the pinellas county health program so last year we discussed executing the evaluation of that program that evaluation was completed we are reviewing that report from the consultant and our goal is to bring that to the board in august to make recommendations as a reminder the firm was looking at access to care for our indigent population in pinellas county effectiveness and operational efficiency of the services that are being provided a review of the county's investment financial performance of the program and then funding opportunities for the future and so in august that firm will come and make those recommendations and that may have significant impact on human services priorities and funding in the future years next i'd like to talk about our accomplishments and work plan and so as you've heard already the first accomplishment i'd like to really showcase is the reduction in overall overdose deaths and suicide deaths for our residents and so in 2025 there were 266 drug-related deaths and that's the lowest that we have experienced in pinellas county in 10 years and just for reference in 2022 we lost 597 individuals so that's a significant reduction and much of that can be attributed to increased access to care naloxone saturation stronger federal controls and increased law enforcement presence we've also had a decrease in suicide deaths and so in 2025 we closed the year with 174 deaths related to suicide and that's the lowest that we have had since 2013 and much of that can be attributed to the work that has been done in community so increased access to care through the coordinated access model the jwb children's mental health initiative county-wide training on mental health first aid overall increased conversation about accessing that level of care health care and just community community increase increase to care throughout the community typically i share more accomplishments about programs that we fund but this year i really wanted to take a minute and talk about the programs that we deliver so these are services that human services county staff deliver in the community and they're not really contract related so you don't you don't get to hear about them at board of county commissioners meetings but we truly are making an impact on penniless county residents so i'd like to start off with our veteran services division under the leadership of michael swanger so this is a mighty team of eight staff and this past year they brought in over nine million dollars of economic impact to our veterans and their families and i'd just like to share a little story about one veteran that came and requested services from this team so this past year a vietnam veteran facing severe cardiovascular complications caused by herbicide exposure turned to the pinellas county veteran services office for help during the most difficult times of his life his health was declining he was experiencing dementia and added a tremendous strain to both him and his family in march our team submitted a supplemental review request that not only reaffirmed his cardiovascular issues as service connected but it also successfully established his dementia as secondary to those presumptive conditions in june the va granted the appeal because of the work of our team transforming his situation his monthly compensation increased from three hundred and forty dollars to eleven thousand dollars a month reflecting the true severity of his disabilities he also received a retroactive payment of one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars because of the work of our team the outcome brought long overdue support dignity and relief to a veteran whose service and sacrifice had profoundly shaped his life yes and it's nine million dollars that that team generated for veterans in our community thank you another accomplishment i would like to share is our disability advocacy team so this is a team of seven staff under the leadership of danielle green this team works with residents on compiling all of the documentation needed for social security disability applications they meet with residents in their home in community they obtain all of their medical documentation submit the application and even attend the hearing with our residents this past year the team secured benefits for 35 residents who were all able to transition off of the pinellas county health program onto social security disability in addition they were able to generate over 500 000 in social security disability income for residents and back payments this is life-changing for residents who need ongoing medical care and social security disability income our consumer protection team also generates economic impact for our residents in this past year they generated 1.7 million in refunds and restitution for residents who had been harmed or victimized and lastly i could not close out without without talking about the tremendous work we have done over the past year working with with bts on our arpa funded systems and so we have implemented or implementing three new systems within our department one is a contract life cycle management system the second is a new electronic health record and the third is a new case management system that will really capture all of the work that we do as a department this has been tremendous and i would say at a minimum for the contract life cycle system it has transformed the way that we do business it has transformed the way that we work with our vendors and has really moved us into a really efficient and effective process for this next year the following work plan items are going to be prioritized and so we're going to be looking at a production of an annual performance report so a roll up of all of the services that we provide we have lots of dashboards and reports for individual programs but to date we have never really done an annual report showcasing all of the investments and impact on residents throughout the department we're also going to continue our work of expanding the panels matters program our goal remains to expand into one to two hospitals per year until we are in every hospital we are currently at bayfront and north side hospital and are continuing efforts to move into largo medical center advent hospital and hopefully bay care hospitals as well we're also going to be working on implementing the health program evaluation recommendations after this board makes those policy decisions this year we also want to engage our pinellas county communications team to really showcase the impact so some of the stories that i share i've shared with you today being able to have a veteran or someone speak about the work that the team does i really will help people understand what pinellas county human services does for our residents and lastly we would like to develop an ai fraud prevention campaign ai is moving very very quickly and there are some really bad actors that are targeting lots and lots of residents or systems and so we're going to be developing a fraud awareness campaign to give our residents tools onto how to combat that that work and i just want to close out by thanking my team i have a tremendous staff a hundred staff that show up each and every day to work with our residents and to provide the best care possible thank you great report thank you so much uh thank you all your folks as well for the work that they've done uh questions commissioner i just had a comment and i wanted to publicly thank uh miss yacham for the help and assistance she's given me uh recently uh as y'all know because i may have complained about it once or twice i serve on jwb which is the most dysfunctional board and experience i have had in my life because we have a few uh board members that should probably not be on there um but karen has uh given me invaluable advice uh not uh related to the ceo stuff that we're dealing with in the ceo search but more along the lines of some of the providers uh that we're that we work with and and have issues with and i just wanted to publicly thank her uh with uh for that so thank you question great work thank you appreciate it all right animal services so commissioners as director renner comes up to the table with department administrative manager kelly kopla we've got shira hegday here next to me she is the budget analyst for animal services you've seen her already this week and she's got a one more after this today so um with that shira i'm going to turn the microphone over to you thank you chris and good morning commissioners thank you for having me i'll be presenting the fiscal year 27 budget for animal services starting at the top of page one we have the department purpose next we have the budget summary tables animal services is supported by the general fund and the animal welfare trust fund moving to efficiencies and cost savings in the middle of page two focusing on fy 27 a projected annual efficiency of 62 000 from expanding the online pet licensing portal and a 62 000 reduction in professional services costs driven by filling a second full-time veterinarian position and eliminating contracted relief veterinary services we also have details on efficiencies and cost savings for fy 26 and fy 25 at the bottom of page two the fy 27 general fund budget increases by 174 000 to 6.6 million this is due to adding back 174 000 in personnel lapse savings from the fy 26 budget as the negative amount was originally budgeted for a vacant veterinarian physician that has now been filled fte remains flat at 58 the animal welfare trust fund budget in the middle of page three increases by 22 000 to 240 000 in order to cover any potential overages in the general fund the animal welfare trust fund is supported by revenues from contributions which consists of donations to specifically benefit the animals personnel services stays flat at 50 25 000 and fte remains flat at 0.5 reserves decreases by 118 000 to 480 000 moving to decision packages the department does not have any decision packages for fy 27 next we're on user fees the department is requesting an increase in several user fees all of the details are available on pages three and four of the document as well as the attachment six on page 17 most notably the dog and cat licenses license fees are increasing the one year license fee is increasing by one dollar from twenty three dollars to twenty four dollars and the three-year license fee is increasing by two dollars from forty six dollars to forty eight dollars and these incremental increases are to keep pace with market rates now we're in the middle of page four cip which will be presented later today this concludes own b's portion i would like to now turn it over to director jennifer runner thank you good morning commissioners with me today is kelly coppola our department administrative manager kelly's been a dedicated member of the team for 25 years now and an integral part of our budget development process so i'm happy to have her here today with us to put into context some of the challenges that we encounter at animal services when we're developing our budget some of them are unique some of them are not but the most significant is absorbing the cost of the increase of goods and services especially related to veterinary medical services so we are seeing an increase in vaccines and diagnostic testing anywhere from 10 to 40 percent we're seeing an increase in our contract prices for essential items such as cat litter pet food and oxygen as high as 20 percent and so that is difficult for our budget to absorb and then when you compound that with the more unpredictable nature of the work that we do not just the number of animals coming into the shelter but the diversity of the species we might encounter you might walk into our cat building and find a goat some chickens maybe a duck there's a very a variety of snakes in our enforcement department right now bearded dragons and exotic birds so when you when you combine that unpredictability and helping with sick and injured wildlife and our law enforcement offices too it does magnify that challenge of absorbing those costs moving on to our accomplishments i wanted to start by of course once again thanking you the commissioners for assisting us with our canines and commissioners initiative it's been very successful in driving more traffic to our website and increasing adoptions i'm happy that we continue to do that again this year and it's something our staff certainly looks forward to seeing and helps with their morale as well we to highlight our enforcement department we conducted more than 10 000 field visits this year our animal control officers are the boots on the ground out in the community building trust and educating on responsible pet ownership and so we're very thankful for the work that they do in the field for the shelter we also expanded access to affordable veterinary care through our voucher program and thank you to you chair eggers last year for increasing that amount and really emphasizing and prioritizing spay and neuter this year it's been very successful last year we helped nearly a thousand pets receive free preventative care and spay neuter through that voucher program and it's something that we wouldn't be able to do without the help of our veterinary partners in the community as well understanding we've seen increases in veterinary costs i know they have two and their fees you know necessarily need to increase but through this program we're able to help our pet families and then finally thank you again to you for your support and guidance as we modernize and strengthen chapter 14 right at the end of the year last year that we couldn't have done it without you and we appreciate your support there and of course um i don't have any work plans right now but our lobby roof is being replaced currently uh last during hurricane milton the roof did have some damage and so shout out to my staff right now who is working in a makeshift lobby and also outside as we're continuing to just really um channel that flow of residents through our shelter and help to adopt continue to adopt out the animals in our care thank you questions i just have a comment um i just want to you know kudos to you i know we talked about just a second earlier you know there were some issues um with intake with some animals and it was brought to your attention and your staff have done a really good job at responding very quickly and coming up with a better solution i think that's going to help lead to more and more adoptions and people finding their lost pets so thank you to you and your staff for doing a good job i appreciate it and keep it up thanks commissioner just a question and if you all have already shared the answer i apologize um for like the the bearded dragon and snakes and other things like that do we partner with maybe lower park zoo or some other place if they can't be adopted perhaps they can become apartment dwellers with the zoo or something like that where you know we we haven't thankfully risen to the level that we need to call in help and support from a zoo i'm i'm hopeful that that won't happen um at this point we do have exotic rescue partners that assist with all of those animals we generally have an outlet for just about anything yeah because you know a goat we do have a farm in pinellas park we do and i don't know if you work with the farm and patty's patty's farm yes lots of people take the bearded dragons oh they do they're very popular yeah my daughter has one if you have not been to patty's farm i have not been to patty's it is a beautiful beautiful farm and they put up a gorgeous barn for events and the schools are now doing field trips there it's what a great honor uh to to really remember patty uh johnson i will make sure and it's definitely worth a visit to the farm and i know they would take that goat in a heartbeat and the ducks and the chickens probably um and it's really it's beautiful what a great asset to have in our county i'll i'll put that on my counticle visit thank you you're welcome thank you um great work um i know there is a lot going on in your facility do you have a sense or feeling on that spay and neuter program and by the way the money we spent uh that we allocated for that is it did it was it enough to get through the year or do we need to look at that number how did that look on the spay and neuter program it has absolutely extended our ability to offer those vouchers we just now paused that program um we're we're reaching the cap of the funding but we still have quite a few vouchers out there that we're waiting for those to be um submitted and reimbursed uh and if they're not then we will offer continue to offer more through the end of the year we are offering up some wellness money for preventative care but if we have emergencies coming in we will absolutely divert that to spay neuter as well how does the it's hard to put a number on with your partners in the community and yourself pet i guess pet increasing uh that are coming into the shelters are we still on the rise um and it's a kind of a big problem and we need to look at that even harder on the on the van neuter program or are we being aggressive enough with it that's a big deal i think we're making a much higher impact with with not only the voucher program but also tnvr we are seeing a decrease of the trap neuter release program we are seeing a decrease in like for instance it's kitten season so we're seeing a decrease in the amount of kittens coming in every year because we are reaching a hot it is reaching a higher impact level we are seeing an increase in shelter intakes some owner surrenders but we are also really creating a more robust safety net program so we have a handout that we give anybody coming to our shelter that includes behavior resources uh low-cost clinics um it's got everything the voucher programs also available to our veterans and so when someone comes in and they want to surrender their pet we're going to sit down and have a conversation and see what resources we might have out there in the community to help them and that has diverted a significant amount of surrenders i would think that you know there's a definite group of folks out there that would because i always think about the older dogs or the older cats having a hard time finding a home um but there's a there's a match out there there is you know we yeah keep up that great work excuse me sorry chair eggers we we have a an excellent team of volunteers who pride themselves in the matchmaking process and quite a few seniors that are looking for seniors yeah so looking for a senior pet to just you know live a comfortable life on their couch so as far as this budget coming to us to this year you feel comfortable with the budget as far as addressing some of the issues that we've talked about spay and neutering is the thing that always is front and center to me because if we're not doing that if we're not getting ahead or trying to get ahead or less less further behind i guess or um we're losing the battle yeah i think i think what we did last year to increase that funding has made a huge impact and i think um as we move forward into next year we do have flexibility in that allocation where we can move funds if we need to so if if we need more spay neuter we can do less with the preventative side with the vaccines but i will say we're not um doing one and giving up another we are offering that preventative care package with the spay and neuter as well so they are receiving everything when they're getting spayed neutered and and vaccinated so we're protecting continuing to protect animal welfare our public health and public safety in the changes to chapter 14 um making positive effects uh even with our commercial friends that are you know selling selling animals yes definitely we are seeing um positivity out in the community with our pet dealers and um you know our hobby breeders as well and and certainly with our with our community when dealing with public nuisances we're seeing a overall positive effects i mean it's been pretty quiet so i would feel that's a good thing so a great work yeah thank you appreciate it commissioner shears yeah thank you chair uh jennifer thank you for all that you do and your staff for taking care of our furry friends appreciate it very much i i did have some questions um you have 58 full-time employees or do you have some part-time employees and they're all counted together you have any part-time employees we have one part-time employee uh that employee is funded through our animal welfare trust fund do you have a program for uh veterinary students to come in work part-time and then maybe go full-time or we have a very robust internship program we have um veterinarians that are just graduating their veterinary school and they come in and work with our veterinarians uh animal sheltering is a unique environment so you they learn high quality high volume spay neuter with us and we also have our veterinary technician program actually works inside the same building as our new medical building and um so we're able to mentor and coach those students as well so the internship program is very popular do you have a volunteer outreach for people who just want would like to come and volunteer for our animal shelter yes we have a dedicated community outreach team and we had just last month we had 118 volunteers on site who contributed over 2400 hours and then we also have foster families over 100 foster families that take in the kittens the medical cases we have some very passionate volunteers that we're very proud of and thankful to i'm glad to hear you're tapping into volunteers thank you very much you're welcome thank you all of the cats that are out there that you know they're kind of we try to trap them and neuter them and they have colonies and that kind of thing how do how do they get taken care of just one you know just one just a couple minutes about that we have two amazing non-profit partners and we have more than two but two of the two of the larger non-profit partners friends of strays and cat trap fever who last year trapped neutered vaccinated returned over 4 600 cats and at that level that's that high impact level that i mentioned we are starting to see that community cat population stabilize and as it stabilizes eventually it will also decrease and so and we're also keeping it healthier by vaccinating those cats protecting them against rabies and future outbreaks so our non-profit partners are just working around the clock they're out there trapping i don't think they sleep and i actually went to hillsborough county to the pet resource center to work with cat trap fever on a sunday last month we brought in 142 cats in a matter of eight hours were all spayed neutered and vaccinated and it was with the help of two veterinarians and just this dedicated team a well-oiled machine bringing those cats through so i was i was really excited to see that and i'd like to bring some of that to pinellas county eventually through some grants that we're going to work on that's great awesome any other questions comments okay thank you appreciate it business technology so mr chair as as jeff and brian come to the table we're bringing john androvic back next to me here uh you've seen him a couple times over the last few days john will be presenting first and then he will turn the microphone over to jeff at that point so john the floor is yours thank you good morning bts is fully supported by intergovernmental allocations and customer service revenues from bcc departments and non-bcc departments and also customer i.t services of various constitutionals and appointed authorities the bts is supported by two funds mainly the business technology services fund and it does receive funding through the american rescue plan act which is arpa excluding transfers and reserves the fy 27 budget for for the bts is decreasing by 87 000 to 68.5 million personnel services is decreasing 939 000 to 26 million this is due to five fte being reduced in their budget to a number of 174 for the year bts does budget for contras and it's a one-on-one contra with safety emergency services for their staff time operating expenditures increases 260 000 to 32.5 million they have experienced contracted services expenditures this includes a 1.5 million increase and this is a 6.4 percent inflationary increase to those contracts and it's driven by market-wide escalation and software licensing cloud services cyber security tools and telecommunication contracts their capital expenditures has increased 1.4 million to 10 million and this is due to rebudgeting unspent funds and the the second year appropriations for the erp project there's also a slight reduction in the realignment of resources within bts cip of 137 000. under the arpa fund it is decreasing by three point decreasing 3.1 million and this is due to arpa projects being completed bottom of page three we're going to talk about the decision packages bts has submitted two decision packages the first one is civil serve it's a 329 780 request it's 152 600 for the implementation one-time implementation and then a recurring charge of 177 180. this one the county administrator has not had a recommendation for the decision package at this time further discussion is needed and what civil serve is is a specialized public safety and civil process management software that was developed by tyler technologies it's used by law enforcement agencies to manage the civil warrants subpoenas evictions and the service of process the second decision package is for the cat system county application tracking system it is also in the bts fund it's 429 700 it's a one-time implementation of 334 000 with a first year recurring of 95 000 and the cat system supports the tracking and the resolution of pinellas county residents the concern and issues that present to the county commissioner and the county administration this decision package has been recommended by the county administrator the business technology services does not have any user fees and at this point i'll turn it over to jeff and before jeff gets going just commissioners on these you know one of the things i think we really have to look at as we invest in technology is show me the efficiency so if you're going to improve the process let me see a vacancy be eliminated and give me an efficiency in the use of the technology we always get the request and then we all then without any return on that investment so i'm going to look hard at those before i make a recommendation on any of these technology solutions okay hi good morning and thank you for the time this morning jeff roars chief information officer for business technology services and with me is brian zumball chief technology officer for business technology services i wanted to start off by just saying you know there's a lot of accomplishments that bts makes every year but i think one of the metrics that can encapsulate that is the percentage of our portfolio that is modernized and i wanted to point out that today through through the last several years we have been modernizing and systematically going through and upgrading our applications and investing in our software portfolio and today we're about 80 percent modernized and with the workday project and some of the other projects that are in flight we expect to be nearly a hundred percent modernized in the next two years and that puts us in a very healthy position where our applications are no longer 20 30 years old um you know when we when we looked at this we really had a technical debt of many applications that were 20 years old plus uh now they're they're modern and they have features that meet the business needs and hopefully create efficiencies as as the county administrator just mentioned um second i would like to mention that you know we've been experiencing about a six percent inflationary factor on our iit contracts year over year and we've been absorbing that through either efficiencies or good contract negotiation or even shifting products and services if needed to try to keep that down but that represents a pretty big inflationary factor for bts and then in addition every year we inherit new software and this year is no different in fy27 we're inheriting 1.3 million dollars worth of new software and and that's unfunded software so we have to figure out how to squeeze it into a flat budget target and that creates a challenge and then going forward we expect that we won't be able to do that anymore we'll need to make sure everything takes a pause and comes before this commission for consideration and funding so that we we don't have to absorb those new software programs so investments in new software and ai really need to be vetted and brought forward you know for consideration and appropriation um and then lastly i would be remiss if i didn't mention that this budget submittal that is before you is not consistent with the official bts board submittal approved by the bts board um i would have to mention that that this is really more of the county administrator's recommended budget for you all to consider and with that i would open it up to questions bts board recommended five additional positions that they reduced in order to meet their budgetary targets and that will be the position that i recommend sorry can you repeat that so in order to meet their budgetary targets they reduce five vacancies um okay in order to meet their budgetary targets the bts board voted to add those back in but they don't have to balance the checkbook at the end of the day um so my recommendation is that we absorb that they can handle it and through the efficiencies that they've done they've done an amazing job with that but okay but we they all have to be held to that same uh standard that we find efficiency so i will be recommending without those five positions okay that's what i just want to make sure i was clear on that yeah um and then the other question i have um uh because i'm not on bts anymore and i'm sorry i don't know i know there was a lot of work going into um working through uh the different systems that have to talk to each other between the clerk's office the uh judges and all of that so has all of that been i know because that was really causing some additional work from staff on the back end and if you could have gotten that through that would have given some additional efficiencies not just for your department but for theirs as well have you all been able to work through that or you're close to because it was a complicated system with about 40 or so different programs yes absolutely and we did complete the enterprise justice upgrade which was i think what you're referencing where we were upgrading the system and we needed to make sure that we interface but the justice community is experiencing a lot of growth right now with a new stack web program in the public defender and state attorneys area um that needs to be interfaced and properly connected in so that we create those efficiencies um and then we're in the middle of implementing enterprise supervision for um probation and and supervision of of uh releases and then as as the county administrator mentioned there is a decision package in here for civil service which um is an attempt to automate um a lot of the manual processes around serving um and some some key figures here um currently today um we serve approximately 10 000 warrants a year uh 6300 injunction or risk protection orders uh 70 uh 3700 writs and 57 000 subpoenas a year and all of that is really very manual today um and so the effort that you have in front of you as a decision package is to automate that process and as the county administrator mentioned we would hope that there's efficiencies in the uh sheriff and clerk areas in the judicial areas because now we're going to have an electronic process to eliminate that manual process so for the um stack system um the state attorney did talk to us about that and i fully agree with the automation of that and then keeping that data digitally so that it can be recalled when needed whether it's for court hearings and then the length of time i wish that data has to be stored so my question is and forgive me if it's somewhere in here because this was a lot to read from when we got it to you know these couple of days is that so is that cost for the that system being born solely by the state attorney's office or because there are several other other constitutionals plus your office is that cost being spread out across so it's shared and not for the stack web it is actually funded out of the state attorney and public defender's office however the other half of that is the connection to our enterprise justice system which we then need to make the modifications on and we we um we uh own that piece of it so obviously on if you have two systems talking to each other uh the stack web system and they're handling that side and we're handling the enterprise justice side commissioner on to your to your point um you provided the funding for both the public defender and the state's attorney for that stack system yeah and so that does come out of the general fund and then one additional thing is that uh as part of this budget bts is transferring one of their positions over to um the courts correct for the coordination and implementation of all of that okay so that's why i was asking how how is that correlating so that it's not thank you very much i appreciate and i do miss y'all thank you commissioner yes thank you chair uh thank you for the presentation um and one of the slides or parts it said fiscal year 27 there could be no additional savings i think it said in in one of them um but i'm looking at like the traveling per diem um i mean it's 230 000 though we only spent twelve thousand dollars in 25 so i mean i guess could you provide some more context on why it's but we're budgeting 230 000 for traveling per diem even though we only spent twelve thousand dollars in 25 we'd have to look into why it's showing that it's underspent because we typically spend a hundred or even a hundred plus percent of that every year and that 250 000 in 2026 230 and uh is actually uh cut in half from the previous years where we actually reduced that in half um and so we've actually already made about as much of a reduction as we would like there um i've always said that if you aren't investing in your i.t staff and keeping them current you're dying on the vine and that's one area where i'd really be looking to protect as best as i can but we've already cut it in half and we do traditionally spend over a hundred percent yeah i don't know i mean i'm just looking at the line item and it says 23 to 25 average is six thousand dollars and the actual for 25 was only 12 000 so maybe we'd have to look into the error there it's definitely an error okay yeah i mean definitely yeah i was about to say that's a big number uh to jump but uh commissioner we budget travel in one line and then it breaks down into other uh places so it might be travel it might be a registration for a conference but they all get budgeted up in the travel line so we're gonna have to roll some up so that you can see it yeah because i mean if i have you know some of my constituents saying we only spent six thousand dollars and 25 why are you spending 230 000 you you know i just want that clarification yes sir we can do that thank you commissioner wiki good question anything else anybody else all good thank you thank you very much so commissioner kevin mcandrew department director of bdrs and andrew nielsen deputy director are coming to the table so welcome gentlemen and thank you and shira hegday is back next to me uh here she is the budget analyst for bdrs building and development review services and with that shira i'm going to turn it over to you thank you for having me back starting at the top of page one we have the department purpose next we have the budget summary tables bdrs is supported by the general fund the building services fund and the construction's construction license board fund i'll discuss the numbers momentarily moving to the middle of page two efficiencies and cost savings the department's fy26 operations remain focused on storm recovery while implementing structural efficiencies that will be fully realized in fy27 this includes a reduction of 5.0 fte achieved through integrating the contractor licensing unit into bdrs and consolidating the customer operations permitting unit both made possible by ongoing cross-training of personnel we also have some details on efficiencies and cost savings for fy26 and fy25 moving to the middle of page three budget drivers starting with the general fund the fy27 general fund budget decreases by 310 000 to 6.9 million staffing decreases to 59.4 fte which is due to the division reorganization which eliminates 2.5 fte positions personnel services decrease by 287 000 to 6.1 million and operating expenses decrease 23 000 to 793 000 on the top of page four the building services fund the department projects a 2.8 million decrease in permit revenue primarily driven by house bill 803 new state legislation that exempts certain non-structural single-family homework from permitting requirements which is expected to reduce permit revenue while increasing unlicensed contractor activity and unpermitted work the bill also expands private provider authority limits municipal oversight and will require updates to the county's acela permitting system to comply with the july 2027 deadline for uniform statewide permit permit applications on the expenditure side the fy27 budget for the building building building services fund excluding reserves increases by 1.3 million to 10.1 million and this is due to appropriating 1.6 million for third-party contractors supporting substantial damage permitting compliance and enforcement for storm recovery damages staffing decreases by 0.5 fte to 60.2 fte and this is due to division reorganization personnel services decrease by 114 000 to 6.1 million and operating expenditures increases by 1.4 million to 4.0 million and again this is due to substantial damage storm recovery expenses the building fund maintains total reserves of 8.8 million and this is primarily driven by 2.6 million in additional revenues in fy25 moving to the constructions license board fund the department projects a decrease in revenue of 366 000 and this is due to legislative changes that restricts its enforcement authority on the expenditure side the fy27 budget for the construction's license board fund excluding reserves decrease by 37 000 to 1.1 million staffing decreases to 5.5 fte which includes the elimination of 2.0 fte positions due to division reorganization personnel services decreases by 48 000 to 522 000 and operating expenditures increase by 11 000 to 562 000 and this is due to the increase in full cost allocations moving to the top of page five decision packages the department has submitted to the decision packages the first one we have is for third party consulting services for 130 000 in the building fund and the second one is for three code enforcement vehicles for 104 000 in the general fund both of these decision packages have been recommended by the county administrator moving to user fees the department is proposing the third of a three-year fee increase in for development review services all of the details are outlined in this document as well as attachment seven starting on page 33 this concludes omby's portion i'd like to now hand it over to director kevin mccandier thank you thank you sharon good morning morning mr chair commissioners uh my first of two operational considerations will be highlighting building permitting demand including a high-level trending update comparing 2026 to 2023 and 2024 and then speaking specifically to 2025 which was heavily influenced by storm recovery for context purposes on average building services issues between 25 000 to 29 000 permits annually approximately 75 of those or 20 000 plus of this total volume is issued same day or next day through our express building permits process the balance which would be typically referred to as multi-trade permits and more complex um is split 80 20 80 being residential 20 commercial calendar year 23 26 200 permits calendar year 24 29 300 so we saw an 11 and a half percent increase in volume between 23 and 24. when we look at where we are five months through 26 and projected out through the balance of this year it computes to 29 000 so right on pace matching 2024 when i speak to 2025 we had a spike of over 4500 permits over 34 000 permits um issued almost exclusively due to storm recovery repair for an eight-month period in 2025 our staff were issuing double the number of permits uh per month uh associated with residential storm recovery this also in turn translated to a huge uh surge in next day inspection we typically do 70 to 72 next day inspections per year in 2025 we did over 91 000 uh inspections and and we have relied on third party consultants to to meet that demand uh and to maintain that level of service to date our team has issued over 5 800 kevin you said 91 000 inspections in 25 yes and how much is how in 24 what what's the typically typically we hover right around 70 to 72 000 so over over 25 increase thank you sorry to interrupt go ahead not a problem just we issued 5 800 storm recovery permits to date um what i want to tie into with all of this data is our staff leveraging the county's investment in microsoft's power bi platform you've heard references to this this has been now just an incredibly useful tool for our team to have access to live data in easily um analyzing it utilizing it to identify stress points to look to see when we need third party assistance um and to make improvements moving forward um and staying with uh the concept of leveraging technology which has been a constant for bdrs building upon this year after year my second um operational consideration is the role of artificial intelligence uh for bdrs to what extent can operational efficiencies and customer service enhancements be realized and what does the business model look like what kind of return on investment can we expect to see integrating artificial intelligence we will be piloting um two ai um phases through the full building permit cycle uh partnering with our permitting platform acela the time frame on this it kicks off the first phase next month through the balance of of this calendar year into 2027 the first pilot uh will focus on the customer side of filing a building permit and this is not to be underestimated uh we get hundreds if not thousands of incomplete applications wrong applications that there's time spent on frustration experience by the customer so we're confident that we're going to see a lot of enhancement from ai in in assisting the customer whether a homeowner whether a contractor in filing uh in filing a building permit the second phase um of the ai will focus on automated plan review and as to what degree can this support our plan reviewers in in um improving efficiency as well as potentially gaining capacity uh to handle a greater volume i want to also um express that the ai will go beyond just the permitting cycle you just heard from bts and we're really excited about an initiative that bts will be uh taking on creating what what we're going to refer to as an omni channel ai agent and to put a little context to this we manage approximately a hundred thousand support phone calls a year in bdrs as well as 5 000 or so website chats which puts a significant strain it it equates to about five to six full-time ftes companies that manage this customer support side uh within our division so we're really really enthusiastic about uh this is likely going to be a multi-phased ai agent rollout uh but we think there's really significant benefit uh to be realized in that i want to quickly touch upon three accomplishments for the department the first is a public facing uh building review dashboard that launched in december um this is on our on our web page i'd like to refer to it as a performance scorecard for the department but i think equally important it sets an expectation for our customers uh and predictability when filing a building permit we have a 14-day kpi for first review for residential 21 day for commercial and you can track our performance on that dashboard um and this is one that uh again we'll be expanding that uh through other divisions but we want that kind of transparency uh with our with our performance we uh we implemented three priority land development code updates last year the noise ordinance the tree ordinance which was a very significant uh update uh simplifying and introducing flexibility uh within that code and we also moved forward to fireworks ordinance uh the last accomplishment just to briefly hit on is acting on lessons learned uh from from storm recovery starting at the top of of that experience is having qualified resources in place on call following an event so um bdrs led uh and coordinated a procurement um the board to prove this um for a on-call professional services contract that's customizable has the capacity and manpower to not only serve unincorporated county but all 24 municipalities uh following following an event so this was a really important initiative that was moved forward it was modeled after the debris management contract um and again it uh it has those resources in place now uh with with any of the municipalities able to exercise that also one of our biggest just for clarification the municipalities can jump on to that contract it's a contract though between the municipality and that vendor yes yes well just for clarification that they can't automatically they're not automatically included it's made available for them the way we did that they're responsible for the administration and uh and any any costs associated with that the the other real stress point um that that occurred and and there was several of them but probably at the top of that list also was trying to navigate the the fema substantial damage estimator tool and we've moved on from that the county has entered into a contractor with forerunner uh they are really the preeminent floodplain manager serving communities across the country um and they're actively right now building out that platform integrated with our acela a permitting platform and so that will be in place um in fact if necessary which it won't be um it will be in place to to to to deploy under work plan initiatives i'm just going to quickly highlight a few um we will be back with the land development code before the end of the year you can look to see additional flexibilities um brought forward with regard to mobile home parks again another area that we've learned a lot of lessons through recovery um i'm going to also touch upon two what i call quick wins you know it's great to roll out these multi-year mega work plan initiatives but the quick wins can can have easily have just the same result and and two of them is uh promoting water conservation through the building permit process staff very quickly uh partnered and collaborated with tampa bay water and swift mud uh on the water wise and water star programs um we've now uh deployed within our building permitting process every permit on intake receives an email back that includes links to these two programs promotes water conservation um and and provides information on the rebates i'm proud to say that when we when we worked with uh both tampa bay water and swift mud uh they said that no other municipality has taken this proactive approach so we are taking the lead and in looking to integrate this within our building permitting process and another real simple one was um realizing a savings of probably 25 to 30 thousand dollars a year our lpa and boa board members have still been receiving paper um application packets every month before hearings depending on applications these can be hundreds of pages printed every single hearing uh within the next month or two will be fully digital they'll be working with tablets um as they should have been probably several years ago but we'll have that in place and realize the savings of probably 25 thousand dollars a year i'm going to hit two performance metrics one short-term rentals we're we're approaching the first full year of the program we're on track to hit 80 percent compliance for our registration we have a goal of 85 percent in 27 and 90 and 28 with that said with all of our new programs and initiatives we're we're constantly monitoring them for potential refinement and improvement and we are looking at improved enforcement processes within short-term rentals there's been an uptick in complaints um so i'm confident that we'll be making some some updates and refinements uh to improve our enforcement side and and on virtual inspections um we're going to have a significant launch next month broadening where they can be used um we're projecting about 7 500 virtual inspections next year as many as 20 000 in fy 28 which is going to bring significant efficiencies to our department but also tremendous convenience to the contractor and homeowners community so i want to conclude by thanking this board and administration uh for your continued support in giving us the tools and resources to do our best effort uh with storm recovery um and i want to recognize staff uh for their sustained efforts uh and really embracing a whatever it takes mentality to over the last 20 months to be where we are and to also over this past year re-engage in continuous improvements um fy 26 been an important transitional year for the department uh shira mentioned that uh we've aggressively looked at cross-training to realize operational efficiencies and we have uh moving forward as part of this budget realized uh a reduction of five ftes in the department we're going to continue to promote that approach uh across our departments and uh look forward to bringing that back with you next year so thank you for the opportunity any questions had a couple um permits and fees that we charge um too high too low are we competitive are we doing what others are doing we are competitive and in some cases we're less uh depending on if you're looking within drs fees um but we're absolutely competitive again kudos on the storm response i mean we did you learned our lesson a little bit from from down south but uh certainly you know it's still a tough process to go through to implement ourselves and again having heard you know a number of complaints obviously certainly in the um mobile home community and in that whole area um and even in the normal process by and large you still get pretty good feedback and on that front do we have a way to get anonymous feedback from our contractors because let me tell you the ones that i run into are never shy about sharing their feelings about any building department much less our own but you know maybe not so excited about putting their name out there publicly because then you guys might hold it against them or something not that i believe you would but is there a way to get anonymous feedback from these really high level there's a way to get feedback it goes back probably two years ago we did have door hanger surveys uh that we um that inspectors were leaving behind that we we got feedback it was more targeted towards uh their satisfaction of um of their interactions with our inspectors but um we can look at we can look at that type of deployment to get to get some more feedback well i mean to to some degree there they're going to be some really constructive thoughts from really good people we have that that group that we rely on to get professional feedback but you know it's nice to get those folks that are out in the field every day and some of them are going to complain no matter what but a lot of them are really good i'd like to capture that somehow but anyway thank you for completely completely agree uh constructive feedback is welcome and dcag has continued to provide that to us and um uh we well we welcome that um overall over the last five years continued improvements i mean i remember we talking way back then saying culture is a big deal changing the culture of the organization and making it better more for you know again i don't want to define what that means but how do you see the department evolving generally well like i i use this the term that i that i just stated which is um staff has um to me clearly demonstrated a whatever it takes mentality uh with customer first um approach um there's always there's always more room for improvement but um there's been i think very steady progress made on that front i know we're restricted by a lot of the codes that we have in place and all of that but i always like the idea of like finding trying to find a solution to a problem and that kind of attitude sometimes it's hard to engender because of all the rules and regs that we have to follow but i mean that's really a big deal sometimes especially if residents come in there that are struggling with how to navigate the system contractors even some contractors um you know more hand the more hand holding the better you know um they have their jobs to do and we should be working side by side kind of attitude as opposed to a contrary attitude and i mean it it's subtle but you you can feel it and so that kind of improvements are i'm glad to see some of that because i'm hearing it also so well our project management team is um has been a big part of uh being able to assist we don't differentiate whether it's a homeowner or a contractor you know a national developer we welcome them from from the time that they interact with us from early assistance right through the building permit process and co if that's the kind of assistance they're looking for so it's a it's an awesome tool to to be able to utilize yeah well you guys i mean the amount of things you guys went through last year it's just unbelievable probably should have had those uh animal service dogs at your place too to give you guys some relief because the amount of stuff that you've had to deal with and all of your staff uh is kudos is not enough but uh both of you i know have had a lot going on there so thank you anybody else okay thank you guys okay i guess for our smallest department coming up public works yes as director kelly levy comes up and good and we have belinda amundsen next to me she is the budget analyst you've seen her a couple of times this week and uh welcome as soon as she is ready i will i'll let you catch your breath though and paul good to see you as well sir so so belinda the floor is yours thank you chris and good morning again commissioners we'll be reviewing both the public works and the street lighting districts today um so we'll first run through the public works we'll include all of your questions and comments and get through all of that and then when we're done with that we'll do a very brief review of the street lighting um so you have two documents the first one is public works and the second one is the street lighting districts so today i will begin at the top of page four with efficiencies and cost saving measures in fy 27 the department reduced their expenditures by 497 000 and completed projects that totaled 7.4 million reductions in fy 26 totaled 902 000 with 1.9 million in completed projects and fy 25 reductions which are at the top of page five they total 1.2 million with 619 000 in completed projects and now we move to the budget drivers in the middle of page five public works is supported by several funds and i need to point out that this first statement is incorrect excluding reserves the department's budget actually decreases 7 million so moving to the individual funds general fund reserves decrease 702 000 to 3 million and that's due to the completion of grant funded activities overall expenditures for the general fund decreases 2.3 million to 19.9 million and this is primarily due to personnel service decreases 822 000 and operating expenditures decreases of 1.4 million primarily due to the completion of the vulnerability assessment phase two project moving to the county transportation trust fund at the top of page six revenues decrease 1.1 million to 74.6 total expenditures less reserves decrease 6.2 million to 76.2 million and this is primarily primarily due to capital outlay decreases of 5.5 million for the atms implementation project which is expected to end in fy 26 the fund's reserves increase 2.5 million to 31.4 million next is the air quality tag fee fund in the middle of page six revenues are increasing 85 000 to 1.3 million total expenditures minus reserves decrease 80 000 to 1.2 million and this is primarily driven by a decrease of 79 000 for personnel services due to the addition of lap savings reserves increase 425 000 to 601 000 and we move to the surface water utility fund which is at the top of page seven revenue increases 319 000 to 23.7 million from grant funding total expenditures less reserves increase 822 000 to 28.0 million and this is primarily due to an increase of 923 000 in capital outlay for increases in the planned capital expenses for corrugated metal pipelining reserves increase 5.3 million to 13.2 million and lastly the public works portion of the tree bank fund which is in the middle of page 7 decreases a small amount to 25 000 the department has two decision packages which are outlined at the bottom of page seven the first is for operating expenses associated with three capital improvement projects and the second is for median maintenance at the top of page eight we have some proposed increases to user fees the department overall is proposing multi-year increases to several user fees including mangrove trimming water navigation permits air quality and certain drs related permits altogether the proposed changes are expected to generate approximately 151 000 in additional revenue cip will be discussed in a little bit and now we come to the department context and consideration towards the middle of page eight and i will now pass the conversation over to kelly just real quick i'm sorry before before you get started kelly um remind me what we did in 26 we started seeing these big numbers for reserves what we did to fund those and from an expense standpoint and then the they were getting a nine million dollar increase there could you just somebody speak to that what that change in approach is in terms of so well i know a lot of the increases in a lot of these funds is due to we obtained more revenues than expected and had fewer expenditures and more revenues being outside revenues or our own like grants and that kind of some of both partially grants partially just we the revenues came in better than we thought they were so some of both commissioner so instead of it essentially sweeping the account at the end we were keeping the funds there um parking them there what's the yeah yeah on the surface water utility fee um we did have some under execution especially in 2025 so if you if you look at our capital expenditures and the surface water utility fund in fiscal year 25 it's very low we had planned for 2.4 million dollars in corrugated metal pipe replacement as well as an additional 2 million in open channel maintenance and we spent the first quarter of that fiscal year in storm response and it also bled into the second quarter so even our personnel services were not coming out of the surface water utility fee as they normally would have they they went to storm recovery and therefore were reimbursed through a different account so that those activities there that under execution plus the storm impacts storm work that offset our personnel services cost led to more funds going into that reserve but it's still going it needs to go towards maintenance that needs to be done and and corrugated metal pipe replacement that we have to complete i don't understand i'm just trying to figure out maybe a better way to look at that stuff on on our information i mean i know it's technically reserves but some of it it's not really reserves it's kind of capital projects that weren't accomplished that you're you're moving forward we you know carry forwards it will be spent yeah so so again i mean these are dramatic i mean we don't see them in 23 24 25 zeros and then we see 36 million in 26 and 30 45 million in 27 so there's obviously a change in how we're dealing with those excess funds at the end of the year and one of them was that that amount of money that we put in from general fund uh lap savings for the transportation uh we put it in the transportation trust fund for the the light uh the lighting program what's it called kelly i'm drawing you're talking about the street lighting no the um the 18 million oh sorry atms yeah atms thank you so we put 18 million in knowing we would spend six million of it a year so you'll be seeing that spend down over time in the transportation showing up in the reserve yes even though it's really spoken for in a capital project yes sir so i don't look at it necessarily the reserve way so correct it's it's been a little bit um i don't want to call it alarming but it is something that you know kind of jumps out so i don't know how we can show it differently but anyway yeah well maybe you can just define it within the reserve about because it's really it's really a planned capital project versus a reserve and so maybe we can break that down better so it better it goes to zero right then goes into the reserve for the general fund and or and then you have to redo the project and re get it you know let us let us take a look at defining that in the final budget recommendation so in the new capital budget then things that weren't used will they be identified in the new capital budget and that's how it'll that part will be funded instead of the general fund for that particular year no for those those will those will stay that's the reason they're staying within the capital fund will be appropriated to do the metal piping okay and it's it's just a surface water utility fund and the transportation trust obviously we don't have a departmental reserve in the general fund it's right those since they're separate funds that's how they keep a reserve otherwise any of the other funds it would be swept back into but all these are capital driven so commissioner one other thing is you won't see reserves get spent in prior years you don't you don't buy a reserve right so you spend it in other areas right but you budget reserves going forward so you'll see zeros in those prior years but in a budget that's when we budget for a reserve i'm not sure i got that explanation but yeah so you won't you won't see actuals in the three years that are prior there is no actual reserve that's all so you set aside in 25 that much well we set aside an amount but it would be spent in other lines so you won't see it down in the actual it'll zero out is what yes sir that's correct it's kind of a moving but yeah so maybe a little more description in the you know talks about what those reserves why we have that number in there why there's an increase i mean i know you did speak to that a little bit okay all right thanks kelly sorry about that go ahead no no thank you thank you for the opportunity to present our department budget context for the upcoming fiscal year and and keeping in mind that the county's fiscal direction we've prepared a budget that holds our our expenditures our work consistent across the board and as we do so it i do feel it's important to outline some of the service level changes that that will result as we move forward so contractual services across our general fund transportation trust fund and surface water utility fund are continuing to increase beyond our ability to just absorb them without adjusting some of our service levels so at this point we're planning on reducing our right-of-way mowing from 16 cycles a year down to 15 cycles a year to account for the cpi adjustment that will occur in our right-of-way mowing contract keeping that keeping that funding that we have in the right-of-way mowing program consistent unfortunately in our drawbridge maintenance we saw a 20 percent cost increase with a recent contract that came in in um you know so that that will have to we will have to meet that because maintaining our our drawbridges um and keeping them functional as a federal requirement we have to be able to open them on demand as directed by the coast guard so that is something we will pull from other other areas to offset um our resurfacing costs when we started um you know and looking back to 2024 uh we were at about 131 thousand dollars per lane mile uh today currently we are at about 150 thousand dollars per lane mile so we're seeing uh obviously um asphalt is very closely tied to the cost of oil so as those price prices fluctuate we're seeing um significant uh increases in that per lane mile cost and that will ultimately impact the number of lane miles that we complete on an annual basis and we are continuing to see those types of pressures emerging across our program areas whether it be chemicals uh lining those corrugated metal pipes our pavement markings signage and other essential maintenance contracts that we do have um one of the other uh areas that we're really highly focused on is uh workforce competitiveness and we've i think we've talked about this um over the last few years um some of our more technical positions like engineering have continued to be a challenge um but this year we've really had a challenge with filling labor positions um the labor market is they are offering a higher salaries than than we are in those entry-level positions that we're talking about the folks that that repair our pipes that fill our potholes that mow our grass um that trim our trees and we're we're really struggling in some of those areas to remain competitive and be able to bring folks into into the department um kelly on those front do we have issues uh on the on the benefit side or just the salary side and they tend to that becomes more important than it is you know um you know with younger employees uh you know sometimes they see themselves as invincible and i don't need that insurance um so it really is the that that hourly rate that they're looking for um you know just a little perspective because i've heard you guys talk about the alice report before and i've spent some time digging into that report as well because a lot of those people are in public works and when i look at the alice report the most recent one you know the um the poverty level for just one a single person no children in pinellas county is about forty four thousand four hundred and thirty dollars i have a hundred employees who don't make that so that goes into the challenge of of being competitive in some of these areas four well i just saw the recent alice report that was just completed by united way so the numbers are staggering even with a family of four you're estimated to have to make about a hundred and forty four thousand dollars a year but um i want to ask or share perhaps you already know i know you all may be tapping into the public works department for recruitment out of pinellas technical college um but the city of st petersburg also formed its own training department which is hands-on training they don't necessarily hire and not because it's anything wrong with them it's just whether or not they have the positions available so if you didn't know about that that may be a way also to tap into individuals in um entry level um roles and positions um dr tonja williams was talking about expanding her technical trade programs through st petersburg college um and partnering to kind of do that to make sure that they're providing the wraparound support services as well as the hands-on training so um you are right that that income level is very low and when you factor in 30 percent of the income that's supposed to go towards housing it is a challenge especially when you have private firms that may be hired to do some work that we may contract with they're getting paid more to work for them um uh then we can pay them so you may be aware of those programs but just wanted to share those are some other avenues they just graduated the class snatch them up and see if that'll help some you know some kind of way for recruitment yeah we just we did just participate with the human resources department in their job fair a week ago and like 500 people came in and the public works desk was very busy um we had them applying on the spot um so we'll see what comes out of that um we have staff that are are reaching out to those individuals who were very interested and um we will we continue to attend those job fairs and and work with the public works academy um as well but it just it it has this particular year we have struggled with these labor positions and i'm gonna get the other thing i want to share too is and i don't know where the county may stand on this if they'd be interested the city incorporated a component of that program for persons who may have some less than tender backgrounds because those individuals were finding it difficult to get jobs even manual labor jobs so they created that program to help a number of people but for those who have what i call those tender backgrounds who are trying to become employed but because of different departments or government rules and regulations when it comes to background checks it was hindering them from being employed based on that so that's a whole nother conversation for a whole nother time but um that's one of the reasons why they did that and they're getting persons in there they're there they're working hard some have been promoted you know so that's another i'm sorry sir you're going to ask me a question no just a question on the alice report which i should know the answer uh on the single person 44 000 does that include an allocation for benefits or is that just no that was just straight salary straight that well they have other components within that report and i'll email it to you if you desire but that was just straight looking at salary what the median salary range was and it compared it gave the the five uh highest highest cost of living communities to live in we came in number two okay well i think to your point you said they don't seem to look at that aspect on the on when they're looking for a job but i was just curious if that yeah it's strictly on salary not anything including those are those are significant dollars but they may to your they may not see the value yeah i mean when i when i tell you how close it is i mean we are we may be able to offer somebody 21 an hour and they're gonna they're taking a job over here for 23 an hour so i'm not talking about this huge number i'm talking about it just a few dollars per hour makes the difference and you're not sure whether they're getting a comparable package completely no no they're not but that doesn't matter yeah yeah okay uh did you have something yeah i mean it's something we need to address commissioners because i i didn't plan on speaking to this but kelly kelly brought it up you know we're constantly trying to be cognizant of our tax rate and we've reduced that for the past past five years but when we that's at the expense of you know trying to address competing challenges our wages have fallen behind there's there's no question and we need to do better by our employees we've seen fire departments give 20 percent increases under contracts we've seen we've updated the sheriff um but and we've done a lot with our current employees we've brought that wage up from 12.50 an hour in the last six years to 18 dollars i think 1836 what is it 1836 19 30 18 18 36 um you know and so that's the entry level and then we've created career ladders to where they get bumps based upon skill sets um so so we've done a lot but it hasn't kept pace and you know and and so let's just take the reality is under frs rules we don't have a choice but to participate in that that cost us whatever 13 percent i believe but you're not really worried about retirement if you can't pay the mortgage you know or rent you know in this county and and you know especially if you're younger you're not really concerned about a cadillac um you know health care plan so it is something we need to address we have to see what happens in november but i just put that as a place marker because it it's something we we have to um put some serious effort into you know following you know that and i do intend on setting aside money in the budget depending upon the outcome i mean if we lose 184 million well then you know i think we have to relook at that but if if that doesn't pass i think we've really got to address salaries for our employees yes thank you chair kelly of the 100 positions uh the labor positions you were talking about are any of them available for part-time employees that do not want full of a full benefits package there are plenty of people who want to work part-time in the world and you could actually even offer them more per hour without benefits and it would be a big savings or any do we have a part-time program in your department at all we in the past i mean we utilize uh contract labor uh through what's called psp it's a contract through the human resources department um and we have used temps uh for for for work um they're typically not county employees um but we have used contract work again it um but they they charge a fee and that reduces the amount of money that goes to the actual employee yeah so this is kind of what i've been asking about part-time employees every chance i get is because i believe we have lots of opportunities in the county to there are lots of people in this county that do not want to work full-time that could be uh working part-time for us in different capacities like the labor maybe they just work 25 hours a week we could pay them more per hour and they don't need full benefits some of them might be even retired already and they already have benefits packages so we really need to like i said at the beginning of the budget hearings i think we should look at uh introducing some kind of program county-wide that allows for part-time employees that don't require full-time uh benefits because a lot of people don't need them and we're not even looking at that labor pool that we could utilize and you know like i said home depot does it ups does it um staples has a plan so you just pay them a little more and then they don't need they you know they just don't want to work full-time so anyway well it's it's meeting the market that's what people are looking for i i don't know again what we're competing with are they uh do they have to provide some level of benefits these other organizations or are they under a certain number of hours a week like to your point of part-time job maybe it's 30 hours whatever that level is that defines part-time but it does provide that opportunity to maybe bump your your rates a little bit especially for folks that don't you know it so we we do have policies regarding part-time employees so that's all governed through the ups and so it defines when we pay benefits when we don't and all things like that um different people have had different experiences with part-time employees um for instance you know the sheriff's tried that out like at the courts you know you got a rush in the morning and by afternoon you know not so much you spend you have to hire two or three hr people because of the constant turnover in the part-time people um and so he gave it up because it just wasn't effective by the time you train them etc and stuff so it depends upon the nature of the work um you know and and and especially at like a fixed location versus field work where they go out and so it's a it's a great idea and it's something we we can pursue more but people have had experiences with it in the past and again it depends on the particular nature somewhere like parks is more effective definitely at animal you know services as you heard so you know it's something we can pursue but different different types of jobs have had different experiences with it we really need reliability we can't have somebody not showing up well i don't know why you would automatically assume somebody that wanted part-time work would be unreliable no we've had and what's i'm saying is we've even through psp we've had contracted part-time employees and sometimes they just literally don't show up at all and then we're calling psp and saying can you please let us know what's going on and they decided not to come back right but that's what that's what the labor company that you call and i asked for send some send somebody i i i've used a lot of that myself in construction and you know i need help for a week and i'll call some of the people that they say they're going to show say no never show up but i'm talking more about uh permanent part-time somebody's like hey yeah i'd love to work for the county for the next four or five years part-time i don't need i've already i'm out of the military i've got full benefits what i need those benefits for i don't you know just you know military people yeah my son's no i i was looking at a bill back there but there's lots of people commissioner it's something we can look at it we can talk to our department heads about and let us report back to you okay great you know uh some of the accomplishments um for this year of course you are obviously aware of of the completion of the beach renourishment project as well as the agreement that was signed with the court to move us forward um this past year we also did a lot of work out in our communities uh with our tree bank money uh planting 250 street trees distributing a thousand trees to our community and we just received a state award um we'll accept that next month for a project that we did in lealman um specifically uh focused on that neighborhood and increasing uh the tree canopy there um on private property um we have about over 200 uh lane miles of roads um being resurfaced this year uh we worked with the parks department to deliver their rainiery and dansville community parks projects and completed key safe routes to school sidewalk connections um and another uh really big one that i i feel we need to highlight here is the over 50 million dollars in grant funding that we brought in for resilience and transportation initiatives um that really help um you know help spread the penny out gives us a little bit more robust um transportation you heard tom uh talk about the um the atms update and he brought brought up the fdot ipad pass and attain grants that we received that's going to allow us to take that 18 million dollars and even do more with it um and with that we are also retiming signals across 12 corridors which encompasses 129 signals and installed three 130 enhanced video analytics systems for our work plan um as with some other departments we did a strategic plan update this past year um after you completed your work and identified your priorities we re-evaluated our plan and shifted priorities we made sure that we were aligned with your direction um and so some of our work plan priorities are really focused around the transportation system and addressing congestion and transportation safety and the ability to move people from place to place more efficiently um again the work on our unincorporated um stormwater assets and addressing the deficient corrugated metal pipes by 2029 we still have a lot of work to do with the army corps we still have easements to acquire which means working with the residents on language that uh where we can get to yes and we also plan on requesting design funding from the core for the next nourishment cycle which is expected to start in 2030 as well as publishing a capital improvement project delivery dashboard so with that we remain committed to delivering our essential services as efficiently as we can and providing the board with clear visibility on our operations through our dashboards our focus does continue to be on long-term infrastructure resilience public safety protection enhancement of our natural environment and responsible stewardship of the county resources thank you just had a couple kelly um just real quickly can you uh reconstruction costs for a lane mile versus just paving what's a what's the rough comparison you have a if you don't have it don't actually if i'm going to step up here and put something on the uh on the overhead it's a lot i'm sure somebody in the back is somebody in the back turn on the overhead please well if i don't get to go to lunch you don't get to go to lunch two more minutes till lunch time it wouldn't be the first time on that so this is uh same chart that i've i've had in other presentations it's not new i keep it handy as it comes up so the board approved the current board approved level of service for our pavement is our arterial roads and our collector roads roads the goal is a 60 uh which is good in our neighborhood um we are our focus our our goal is a 50 which is fair and above um so you can see that 50 right about the 15 year mark um you can start that curve starts to go down at that 50 pavement condition index and above that you know we we are very reasonable in our resurfacing costs but as we trend down that curve we start to see for every dollar we spend prevent and prevention we're we're up six to ten dollars to uh repair restore reconstruct so it is always better to try and and prevent damage uh to the base to prevent damage to the overall structure of the the asphalt surface than it is to try to fix it after it's in really poor condition and that to the point of you you know we're going to talk about those three millages that we've used to catch up correct you know and how that if we start to let it go then there's a trade-off right there's a huge trade it is a this is this shows you the cost effectiveness of maintaining your roads versus having to reconstruct a road it is much more cost effective but we always talk about pavement i don't want us to lose you know because that this is where you see the most but bridges you know and culverts and the other parts of their infrastructure also go hand in hand um those are less visible but it's the same thing yeah obviously both all of it important well first of all kudos to you guys and you kelly specifically on the beach renourishment we've said that but anytime there's a public meeting it's good to maybe a few more people listen or hear about it uh thank you for all that work and i know we still have work to do but um you and uh your team and everybody that past chairman up here that have been involved in staff and all the groups secondly i just wanted to say publicly i think we have a really great relationship with fdot and i really appreciate their leadership from our district secretary all the way down to the person who i think it's julie oskowski who leads up pinellas county and her her willingness to meet to talk about specific projects she meets monthly on projects that i complain about and she gives me a lot of air time and i mean it's really helpful because residents want to ask and i i don't know the answers she's been wonderful and i just really wanted to say publicly thank you for that really and and what tom washburn and his team have cultivated over the years i mean that just that's a professional relationship between them um and poor tom he hears from me all the time about different things including huge huge bump with on some of the work that they were doing on a road and i called him and he said i'll take care of it and that afternoon they'd come out and they'd smoothed it off and it just meant it was about a drop about like this i thought my whole car was going to fall apart but anyway little things to big things they've been a great partner um and then um yeah that's i think i wanted to talk about the lane miles which we just did but uh appreciate all the work thank you so much and you get others commissioners we had a i saw an email from a resident of a contractor work the other night and um and kelly responded late you know and said we'll get on it and by that at the next afternoon the contractor was out making repairs and stuff so yeah there's a lot of issues that that that doesn't rise to your level they do a great job of repairing those agreed okay thanks kelly thank you all you got the street lighting district real quick oh street lighting yes sorry thank you yes uh so we'll move on to street lighting districts and we're going to start with budget drivers and we're going to stay in the middle of page one on the budget drivers so for fy 27 revenues are increasing 19 000 to 6 million excluding reserves expenditures increased 27 000 to 1.6 million and reserves decrease a small amount to 38 000 these budget numbers assume a three percent rise in duke energy utility rates which omb is evaluating across the entire uh budget and this assumption does not result in any increase to customer assessments at this time thank you and kudos to um downtown palm harbor uh businesses and residents they all voted enough to uh to assume the responsibility of the new lighting district should be coming online soon and kind of light up downtown palm harbor i mean maybe it's a different lighting district and these are fully paid for the rate ongoing rates by um by the by those businesses and and owners thought it was important to mention in the spirit of lighting districts um anything on your end that that was the only thing i was going to mention was that was the new street lighting district coming online with regard to this budget was the downtown palm harbor and i know that that work is done so great news for the community yeah there are a lot of self i mean we go through the special districts all over our county that have voted themselves to pay more money to make sure that they get the services that they want whether it's library lighting recreation etc so thank you all right thank you all appreciate it okay commissioners you have um we have two um final items we have the uh capital budget so spend a little time on the capital budgeting you probably got hours talking about the board of commissioners budget um how many hours um whatever questions you have but i did have them set up lunch so it's up to you if you want to yeah we'll start back at 12 30 we'll hit those two and then call it a week okay great thank you tom um barry lead the way all right um so first you know i one on behalf of all of the departments agencies and constitutionals i want to thank the commission for giving us the time these past four days it's a lot of time um but they've spent months trying to develop a budget that reflects your the budget guidance you gave back in march um it's also important you know i think for you to see firsthand the effort that they've taken to try to minimize their costs to try to find efficiencies and to try to bring you a budget that provides good service at the lowest possible cost to our residents um and you can see that in real time department by department agency by agency where they come in under you know and and absorbed cost increases so that didn't occur without a significant amount of effort and i and i really want to thank all the agencies and departments but i also want to thank and most importantly our budget staff and our omb staff they've they've met with them for months upon months trying to find that trying to push that trying to challenge you know the department to do something different or come in and and try something or looking at fees those go you're seeing the outcome of many months of work and so i just wanted to take time to thank them thank chris and the entire team uh for for their efforts that brought us here for us to have this type of discussion today yeah well thanks for saying that barry and i think on behalf of the entire commission we feel the same way i mean about your folks and how hard they work to bring and to deliver what we're getting to see this week um and i think it's important to hear accomplishments but also that new plan uh going forward i mean and it's a i mean i think the last three or four years we've tried to go down that path of being you know very careful with our dollars and residents dollars and and now this is an extra step this year to kind of make sure that we're kind of getting in line with you know the pressures of the day so to speak but good good job and uh to staff and the budget staff thank you okay so we got two two final issues we've got the capital budget and then the commissioner's budget um but i wanted to start off commissioner nowiecki brought up something to you um and he may have to leave before we get to the commissioner's uh budget so i want to have an opportunity for him to to mention that and that's a thousand dollars that he had mentioned to you before uh for the uh youth uh group about a scholarship and so i'll leave it for your discussion yeah i just um you know briefly brought up to barry and chris you know i'm happy to you know reduce you know my office budget by a thousand dollars um you know for a scholarship for yak and you know let uh you know jp or the students and barry or chris you know work out um you know some scholarship requirements and um guidelines on how it would be given uh but i just you know wanted to bring it in front of the board to see if there's any interest if you know we wanted to you know subtract like a hundred and some odd dollars from everybody's office budget if not you know i'm willing to reduce mine by a thousand to cover it or what was the thought behind the thousand well i think the um like recruitment and involvement of the yak was down um and so to go to schools and other youth organizations to say hey join yak there'd be an opportunity to get that you know thousand dollar scholarship to go towards your books or a college semester um would be a good way to bump up recruitment okay i was just curious if a thousand and a lot of them drop off yeah yeah yeah commissioner flower thank you um i think it's a good idea i'm happy to to pitch in a thousand um from uh my um office budget um as the incoming president for the florida league of cities um i have um i had at my discretion twenty five hundred dollars to do a twenty five hundred scholarship the first thing i asked staff with fac was could i include the yak members um when it comes to the application because they had it was certain criteria they had to fill out an application and whatnot um and legal did look it over and they and i couldn't even include the constitutional officers children children of employees um and so that was the key thing they had to be children of employees of the county so i wanted to help you talk about it the fact the fact yes so i wanted to to do that for fact because they put in a lot of time and work and effort um but i couldn't do it that way but that amount was 2500 books now can run you 250 to 300 per book um and then if you have a class that has books plus your lab fees plus the pointer and all that stuff you see up um it's far more than that so um i i support the idea anything that we can do to try to help our youth and they do put in a lot of time working effort when they could be somewhere else maybe working a part-time job or something like that but they come in to us by the way i did select somebody it's an employee of um and y'all will find out they're going to come to orlando and i'm presenting them their check there he's the young man his check there um so i support it i think it's a good idea um not all kids get scholarships not all kids families can't afford to pay and um this could mean the difference between somebody going to school and not being able to go to school i don't know if legal needs to look at it more to see if it's an allowable expense and all that other good stuff um and even and if something's wrong legitimately there i would even support if um if we had um if we partnered with some companies or entities or whatever that would uh collaborate with us on presenting a scholarship for one of the yake members um if you want to look at criteria i'm happy to share with you the application that fac uses because it has very specific criteria um and and certainly just as a guidepost if we decide to do this happy to share that now the spirit in the spirit of like uh crawling before we run kind of thing we could step it up a little bit over the years maybe do five thousand as a total and we could see how that or a thousand as a whatever the number is kind of well she was talking about a thousand from her office and so it's like let's just kind of you know figure that out with commissioner you had a thank you mr chair and the chairman's in for a thousand as well um one thing that i have noticed is not in the last couple years of being involved in yak is not only do the numbers decrease as the year goes on is that also not a lot of seniors are involved and i think this will be a way to get more seniors involved uh in yak so i am supportive uh however we uh whatever the scholarship number is and my office will contribute as well um is the thinking for the ifa staff to select the scholarship recipient or the commissioner who oversees yak to um i mean i was thinking more of the the staff um and maybe in tangent with like the kids voting amongst themselves of like who's most worthy or you know because i think they're pretty like honest from you know you've obviously been on it for a couple years but my short time it seemed like the kids were pretty honest and holding each other accountable like hey you're not showing up and um so you know i think it would be a good way for them to continue to have that real world experience of making decisions so um no i my thought process was having not having a commissioner or this body you know determine who would get that award it would be more staff and and the students was kind of my thought process but did you like your experience on yet yeah i had a great time with with your leadership so that means you're not going anywhere and and and if the board's in favor i mean i'm happy to you know reach out to a couple um like community like stakeholders um to see if they're willing to to sponsor it you know but i just didn't want to operate without you know this board's approval or you know talking without talking to barry and staff first so um if you know this board's okay i'm happy to to you know like we raise money for the for the flagpole you know we i raise money for a flagpole to go in and so um you know if this board you know i'm i'm happy to do either so um just wanted to run it all by you first yes and and if we're doing a sizable dollar amount maybe let's say five thousand maybe you do two for twenty five hundred and maybe the um one of the criteria could be a certain field that is affiliated or associated with government work like engineering or stormwater where she is kelly gone stormwater engineering or you know a field where we're looking for forensic science or something like that just throwing some stuff out and that gets to the evaluation uh-huh we've heard two different things one how they perform during the the class but the other was doing an application that may be based on you know needing a little help yeah they can write an essay it's all kind of it's all kind of ways you can do it yeah but it's all kind of ways you could do it but if we get you know if if persons really agree and we get a nice sum you know maybe give two to graduating persons and anyway i'm sorry well i'm happy to to contribute seven hundred fourteen dollars and 28 cents to the five thousand dollars how much would that be seven hundred fourteen dollars and 28 cents to give us five thousand whatever it turns out to be i'm into yeah i think we're heading toward maybe five thousand for the group right um but let's get more details in terms of how we're gonna yeah we don't evaluate that kind of thing we don't have to decide it today i mean but if you want i can work with commissioner in the wiki on kind of formulating this and bring it back for the august you know and i do uh think that if we decide it we should use it as part of the advertising in schools to get more kids signed up oh we can have 30 what if they did not yeah which is good but okay great well then we've got that we'll work on that bring it back good idea when we have our budget all right with that then we'll move on to our capital budget and turn it over to drew thank you commissioners my name is andrew brown i am your capital budget manager with me today i have the cip team or at least two of the three cip analysts i have kristen pitman and james lewis at home on maternity leave is gabriella gonzalez but the three of them are the the folks that put together the packet before you today we also have department staff in the audience major thanks to them it's a huge collaborative effort to to put all this together and and summarize it all for you so thanks to them um so today we're going to talk about the capital improvement program specifically governmental capital improvement projects so what that is is non-enterprise the enterprise departments have been presented to you so airport utilities and solid waste are excluded what it does include is the tourist development tax for your beach nourishment projects and we'll touch on each of these categories it includes your atms projects funded by the ninth cent local option fuel tax it includes county-wide investments so that penny that's set aside off off the top of the penny and then finally we have county penny funded projects that we'll talk about so just a reminder it's a six-year plan we update it annually the first year fy 27 must be balanced per state statute the outer years are just a plan and again we'll focus on penny projects in a couple slides first we have coastal management there is two decision packages the aggregate of which is a decrease of 25 million kelly previously mentioned to you that sankey has completed and so it's going to return 25 million to fund balance for coastal management projects which is good because there's five new projects that we want to add to the plan you can see them listed there they are the majority of them are scheduled to begin in fy 30 and they do reflect the uses agreement so it does anticipate a cost share those amounts and i'm happy to report that the program is balanced atms program is also balanced there's no new projects no new decision packages next we have our county-wide investments aka the penny set asides so per inter local agreement starting with penny four off the top 11.3 percent is taken before anyone gets a piece of their pie 8.3 percent is set aside for economic development capital projects and housing and a previous board resolution determined to split that equally between those two categories and then three percent is set aside for jail and courts facilities we do have three new jail and court facility projects that we're recommending you can see them there on the screen that comes out of the three percent that is not impacting county penny and there is enough balance to fund those and then finally i'll just say that the county-wide investment programs are balanced what's the annual amount at two million a year that's what we're getting in the penny what's the amount that we would have allocated just for which category for the jail and courts 68 million 68 okay 68 million for jill total for the 10 year yeah so 6.8 million per year 6.8 million so we're going over a little bit for this year uh those those are those are multi-year amounts that's your total project this is a six year yeah okay yeah excuse me go ahead and again those those programs are balanced so that takes us to county penny so just a reminder for the folks watching at home county penny or penny for pinellas is a one percent local option infrastructure sales surtax it's been in effect since 1990 most recently renewed in 2017 with 83 percent of the vote for a decade january 1st 2020 through december 31st 2029 that is why we call it penny for it is the fourth decade and then once the county-wide investments are taken off the top you can see the distributions on the screen county gets 51.75 percent city gets 48.25 percent and that's based on population so county penny there are decision packages included in your backup the aggregate of the increases is 36.6 million that includes grant funding though that is not a net impact a penny that includes grant funding and then the aggregate of the decreases is 30.4 million increases and decreases outlined above are incorporated into the county penny forecast that i'm about to show you we do have a couple new project requests most of which are not impacting county penny so the first is a public safety campus hvac new supply well back in 2024 this board allocated about eight million dollars to facility improvements those projects have completed under budget and there's about a million dollars in laps that we can reappropriate to this facility project and so that's our recommendation there's also a 500 ton air cooled chiller addition for 1.2 million at the public safety campus there's actually a general government facilities program we're going to ask them to take it from that penny that's already in the plan instead of asking for a new penny let's eat up the penny that's in the plan for facilities before we come asking for a new penny so again no net impact the penny fred howard park causeway concrete slope improvements same story there is a park program project for park improvements we're going to eat up that penny that's already outlined in the plan and then finally we have a new project request that we're actually going to take back out and revisit uh fire response water tanker vehicles this presentation was put together back in may some things have unfolded and we just want another opportunity to look at it and commissioners on that particular one what they these are old water tankers that they support all the different fire agencies one in north one in south we're going to relook at the ems fund and the fund balance that's in there um that's really what it support is in the ems area so we'll look at that we'll bring it back as part of our final budget and just a reminder these new project requests are incorporated into the county penny forecast so just a reminder revenue projections have been updated expenditures have been updated includes new projects the capital projects fund is balanced through fy30 but that's not the whole story let's take a look at county penny penny specifically so when we look at that program county penny revenues versus county penny expenditures last year we reported that we were 44 million upside down or four percent 212.031 business rental sales tax was repealed effective october 1st 2025 estimated impact is 50 million dollars to our revenue through the end of the decade we're reporting today that we are upside down 94 million dollars so we've remained relatively flat but we did take an impact to our revenues and you can see it there on the screen just a couple considerations included in the plan we still do have the needon causeway programmed in at 50 million in county penny penny revenue estimates are a little conservative and also we also program fy27 in at 95 county projects and interlocal agreements are trending below budget so hopefully hopefully things will come in under budget and our interlocal agreements will complete with some lap savings and then finally 320 million in penny for construction is planned for fy29 through 32 not awarded so we do have time to take a look and reprioritize our plan finally back in 2017 we advertised to the public or educated the public what we thought that the penny categories would be spent on so you can see the 2017 column 45 on roads bridges trails you can see the percentages there 2026 this is what we anticipate to spend on those categories now we're remaining true to the original 2017 categories and their allocations with two exceptions roads bridges and trails and community vitality i'm sorry just uh going back to that the balancing yes sir comment you made if we we have what technically four years we're 95 four million 95 million shy on the remaining four years correct yeah yeah so i mean it's about say 20 some million per year what are we estimating right now on it that we're getting in the county piece are we getting still in that 90 to 100 so fy25 was actually 111 million uh fy26 estimated to be 102 million because of the repeal of that that law okay so it's significant what we're short is what i'm getting at it's about 25 of what we're yeah the the impact will be five percent of the total penny for the decade 50 million dollars your total penny for the decade the revenue is anticipated to be 1.04 billion i'm talking about what's left yeah yeah is that what's left because it's about 2 billion overall for the 10 years so what's left is about what yeah you you anticipate an additional 400 million through the rest of the decade and so that that 50 would be yeah two yeah so we're just trying to get a scope of what that shortfall is yeah that's what i was trying to get so if we can let's zero in on on a project you've been heavily involved in is the is just deciding what we're doing with the dean causeway i mean that right there is a major piece that we always knew was out there we always said with the 44 million upside down we were really balanced because we know in our heart of hearts we're never going to get the money to be able to do to need causeway it's it won't compete on state or federal grant cycles just because of the volume so we're working with the florida department of transportation on options when we when we solve that that potentially has a major impact on um how much we're out of balance and so now we're talking about making up the difference let's just say that it's 50 million we're talking about making up the difference in increased revenue because they're conservative on the revenue estimates and or projects at the end okay and that 50 that would be in that case left would be about 12 12 a year yeah something like that yeah and and what you would do is you would just take and and you've done this at each penny you take projects at the end and you'd reprioritize them over to be the first projects in the next penny all right thank you go ahead and so again i just want to re-emphasize that we are still spending on these various categories and honoring the 2017 list we're spending more on roads and bridges and trails because this board has decided to allocate lapse funding in previous years for community vitality so it's not that you're not spending on community vitality it's just it's being spent it's being funded via penny and other sources so finally fy 27 is balanced required per state statute capital projects fund is balanced through fy 30 the various programs are balanced through fy 30 with the exception of county penny which is balanced through fy 29 and that's my presentation where's the workforce housing is that under community vitality one more time i apologize workforce housing uh the affordable housing is actually not under community vitality it's off the top above the line above the line the county-wide investments right here okay yeah before we this is all our money that we're getting okay yeah community vitality would include a lot of vertical construction so south county service center the acquisition of that would have been categorized as community vitality any questions and and i don't know if this has anything to do with it are we still looking at selling the office on first and fifth and saint pete 501 yes okay at the right time at the right time okay because that was going to be my question like you know are we looking at that right now would that be a potential revenue generated resource that we could bring back into we're going to try to package that with all of our bond issuance new campus okay all of that and look at the funding sources and the timing of those that one requires us to work with the elections and make sure they have a a new home and everything's seamless to where they don't it doesn't impact uh their election because that's that is the hub for early voting okay i was just thinking like do we have money from there we we need to put all these in a nice package you know for you to where you know we can have those types of discussions and financial impacts but i will also caution us that's one-time money so it doesn't doesn't recur doesn't help balance the budget really but okay but it does help maybe pay towards one-time things yes it will absolutely help us with our new center yeah and we just got to get you know and that's part of the reason like with the lease with saint pete wanted some space i don't even know if they took the space but we had it continued upon listen this is a gap right okay because at some point but we've been working with supervisor of elections making sure all the different pieces are aligned and we're all in agreement any other questions are you guys done yep all right thank you okay so commissioners as you know i am your budget analyst i don't delegate that to anybody else in my staff i do every year though have one one analyst one member of the office help me because in all candor i'm the weakest link with our technology in the office so rufus barfield here next to me has helped me put your budget together uh and uh and we've been we've been working on it for a while now so thank you rufus appreciate it hey you know every budget deserves a dollar so yeah so i know they're going to get it up on the screen here in a minute but i'm going to go ahead and get going you can see that you commissioner leading the way in having a budget smaller in 27 than it was in 26 now there's a reason for that when we put the 26 budget together we thought that the salaries that the state requires and mandates were going to go up faster and higher than they actually did we also thought that your frs contributions for elected officials were going to go up faster and higher than they did so we're reaping the benefit of that this year and we've got a smaller budget for you this year so the budget also includes a retirement payout that we know of somebody retiring we do this commonly in other departments as well when we know of a position retiring we'll set that money aside if it happens when we don't know when it happens mid-year that's when sometimes we just have to absorb that in those department budgets but we know one's coming for you and it's built in number of positions remains flat 14 seven and seven seven elected seven aides and like all departments this budget does not have salaries built in neither for the elected officials salary salary increases excuse me it does have salaries in there but it does not have the salary increases for either elected nor non-elected in your offices also just like last year each office budget is remaining flat right now at eleven thousand four hundred and forty dollars per office budget we will talk about at some point how much we we notched that back to cover the scholarship we just talked about and in with one exception that is district seven we had an additional three thousand five hundred dollars built into district five for the last two years we have it in next year's budget as well for travel associated with florida association of counties so but i'm requesting that that amount be removed because as the president for the florida association of counties fac covers um quite a few of my costs um and so the nominal things that i would be paying for i would be able to cover out of what everyone gets so um i am very thankful for commissioner latvala even bringing it up about two years ago um to increase and that did allow me to go to a lot of um activities and functions as the second vp first vp and president-elect so thank you so much for that i really appreciate it but i i don't think it would be right for me to have fac you know paying for those costs and then i have that extra in the budget yes ma'am well it's my contribution back to it's small but it's my contribution back yes ma'am i still expect you to go to tallahassee so i don't have to go yes if i have to ride my grandson's scooter you know so if you see me on the interstate like this you know just wave and make sure i'm okay but i do really appreciate you guys supporting me in that because um it was a lot going on and it allowed me to be where i needed to be when i needed to be there um it wasn't anything over and above board you guys that are listening in it was just to get me where i needed to go so i do appreciate that but i think um it wouldn't be fair to to keep that appreciate yeah all the work you did but also taking that back because yeah like i said they will wait until my my term to do all this stuff you know i may need about thirty five hundred dollars in aspirin just kidding but so that'll be coming out sir aspirin is in the office budget so you're good so uh one last thing for everybody in the very last page you can see some uh actual user fees that are tagged to the board of county commissioners and that's because they're common to all of the departments that report to you all uh they are the dishonored check fee how we treat credit card charges and uh charges for public records requests so rather than have those in each and in every department we put them in y'all's department honestly my department keeps track of it for you but that's that's what that is and i just want to make sure i got a chance to educate you on that and with that commissioners i'll turn it back over to the chair uh no no capital uh computer stuff this year right correct none none in the office this year just checking yes commissioner so when persons make public records requests we have the ability to charge them or the staff time as well as per copy yes ma'am so why are we including that as an expense i'm just asking this is to give all of the departments the authority to charge those so it's not a budget it's a user fee if we didn't put it somewhere we wouldn't be allowed to charge it so this is where we put it so that it it relates to every department that answers through the board of county commissioners okay any other questions anything from you uh as we end the week that's all commissioners i we were again from staff standpoint we really appreciate the time um i hope it was helpful and informative um and it'll help us when we get to our budgets here in august like hearing from staff it's good um so we'll be back tuesday for a commission meeting in the morning yep and then wednesday and thursday we we do not need those days you have those back those were backup days those those were backup days if we if you got in and you had a lot of questions that we needed to follow up on we had those days to be able to come back and discuss those items absent that okay no this is it wednesday and thursday we're giving them back to you if you're unless you want to come and meet staff happy to come in if you want but uh one o'clock on a friday we're finished that's uh that's good joel i don't think is going to make it commissioner flowers um i just want to say this for the good of the public that may be looking um i don't know if um and i didn't do it for this reason i just thought about it but just to share with the public we commissioners we actually go through and read all of this information so that we are prepared for presentations and then we're prepared to have the actual dialogue that we have to go ahead and finalize a budget that has to be ready to go and in place by october 1 um and so sometimes uh i think residents think that we don't you know we aren't doing this it is a lot of work that goes into it from staff and then once we get it um it's a lot of backup and reading that we have to do so we can try to know as much as possible about the budget and ask good solid questions about the budget and make decisions based off of that so i just wanted to share because um i had someone ask me and i said hey i actually i like to look at it online but i also like to write notes i said and i have it printed out if you want to see how much um is uh uh entailed here so i'm thankful to staff thank you for getting it to us i know it it's still a work in progress because we don't know what's going to happen as it relates to the um referendum on the ballot but um thank you all for the work that you did i i know it's kind of hard with a little with some ifs and ands and buts but it's just as hard for us because the community is asking us about the ifs and ands and buts so um just want to say thank you all for that thank you um maybe just take 10 seconds or so to just let the public know what the next dates are as far as budget goes the end the only meeting we have in july we set the maximum knowledge so july the 21st yes so july 21st we'll ask you to set the maximum millages which will be the current tax rate um and then we will present a balanced budget to you on august the 11th um that so between now and then we've got to go to the basement and print up 21 million dollars um plus so we'll work with our departments to close that gap and um that's how and then i'll i'll be talking with you individually but um that's the date that we'll present the budget recommendation meeting in august that's first commission meeting in august and i'll be presenting the budget at that time you'll then have the remainder of august and september for your deliberation changes modifications alternatives and then pass a budget and in in september and so uh residents responding to that proposed budget that is coming they can come to the commission meeting the second commission meeting in august they're welcome to come and hear the recommendation it'll be posted it'll be online and and it'll be the 11th we also have um a commission meeting on august the 25th and then our two public hearings on the budget will occur on um what the 10th 10th and 24th 24th yes and yeah and they certainly can come there but by that time it seems almost like you're almost getting correct the fait accompli it's not like it's going to be major changes but if they want some input they can start to get when will that copy of that proposed budget be available the 11th you'll have it posted before the 11th um we were going to post it on the 11th because we want them to hear it first but okay but we can do that okay okay so the first opportunity they'll get is really the the fifth the 25th 20 yes 20 um so there's a workshop on august 20th and then a commission meeting on august 25th 25th you're correct okay so we have a workshop on the 20th okay we can talk about that whether we want to allow any public comments on the budget only for that meeting maybe the 25th oh 25th for sure okay 25th for sure workshop workshop the thursday before um and then and then obviously you know okay so and again commissioners you know we we have these as dates you know if if as we get into this and and and look at this if if you want to do something different um additional dates it's always hard with your schedules but um okay these are the dates we work from we can always do something different all right so the 11th will be presented the 20th we'll have a workshop the 25th we'll have a commission meeting the commission meeting they can certainly take their time to you know uh and yes and we'll talk about that 20th opening up comments if we want to see any comments or listen to any comments from residents on the budget only you can do that okay we'll talk about that maybe at the commission on the 11th okay all right yes sir uh just one thing chair i was going to look at the calendar i was going to suggest you know that we might look at november and maybe pencil in a strategic planning day it should the tax amendments pass oh yeah because i think february january february we need to get a head start on that one if it passes just an idea yes okay that will be yeah some beginning of some adjustments yes okay all right we're adjourned thank you have a good weekend oh yes yes salad