Board of Supervisors Regular Second Meeting   12/13/2023

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome.

It's my pleasure to call to order this last regularly scheduled meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors for 2023.

We're in Lane Auditorium at 1 o'clock p.m.

on December 13.

The supervisors who are present are Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District,

Supervisor and Vice Chair Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, and Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, along with myself, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District, and we do have a quorum present.

I'd also like to welcome and mention that we have on the dais our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Steve Rosenberg, our Clerk for the Board,

Ms.

Claudette Borgerson and our Senior Deputy Clerk, Mr. Travis Morris.

I would also like to welcome and introduce our Albemarle County Officers who are present today, Master Officer Dana Reeves and Master Officer Andy Muncy.

Thank you.

Board, we can now move to the adoption of the final agenda.

Let me first mention that item number 8.3, the VDOT monthly report, is being pulled from the consent agenda as it had not been received.

The draft report for item number 10, the fiscal year 2023 annual comprehensive financial report and audit results,

was added to the online meeting materials on December the 12th.

Item number 10 will actually be an action item and not a presentation item as it will require a vote to be accepted by the board.

and I'm not aware of any other proposed revisions.

So moved.

Alright, we have a motion from Supervisor Mallek and a second from Supervisor Andrews.

Ms.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

We can move to item number five, brief announcements by board members.

Yes, just a couple of things.

I want to reiterate the importance of everyone getting vaccines.

The flu vaccine right now is 85% effective this year, which is really great news.

So if you get your flu vaccine

you have a great chance

eligible for all these vaccines.

So that's the first thing.

The other thing I just want to let folks know, we, you know, have launched our MicroCat transit program and MicroCat is running now six vans

and they are a ride share service that is serving right now 29 North in the Pantops area in Albemarle County.

They are handicapped accessible and every ride is free.

So far the ridership has been learning about this program by word of mouth.

The first week, and this is what's exciting, the first week there were 142 riders.

Last week there were 364 riders, the goal being 600 riders weekly.

And our full marketing campaign will begin in earnest in January.

to help us reach the goal.

So that's pretty exciting.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I wanted to follow up on the end of the year for the Charlottesville band.

Chair Price did make the announcement, thankfully, for the holiday concert, which happened last Saturday at the Paramount, which was a wrap-up.

But in 2023, the full-born, full band, sorry, performed 10 concerts in our region.

Four of the five sites were in the county at PVCC Monticello, the center.

And since it's in the county,

John Paul Jones Arena.

We estimate the total number of attendees of county residents for these free concerts to be 6,000 or more.

Seven small ensembles played more than 30 performances, nearly a thousand people at events such as Special Olympics at Boar's Head, concerts at the Colonnades, the Center, the Blake, and the Lodge at Old Trail.

Last year we gave lesson scholarships.

The band gave lesson scholarships valued at $1200 each to nine middle school band students in the county schools and the kids performed with the band at the spring concert.

It was wonderful to see.

This 2023, the band expanded the number to 12, but still had the nine county residents, county students, and added three from other places.

And more than 50% of the band performers come from Amarillo County, and they just wanted us to know that so that they're entering their 102nd year in January, which is a very big deal.

Also wanted to invite people to attend the Reads Across America, which is at noon on this coming Saturday.

And at the same time,

military cemeteries and memorials all across the nation.

Wreaths are put down to commemorate our veterans who are lost in service.

And so beginning at noon, ceremony will be at the Dogwin Memorial at McIntyre Park.

We'll then adjourn.

to the memorial out in front of the county building and then to Oakley Memorial on Rio and then the VFW Memorial out in Earliesville.

Thank you.

Yes, last Friday a number of us attended the groundbreaking for the Diana Paul Manning Biotechnic Center that is on the grounds of UVA, the Fontaine Research Park.

This is really going to put this area on the map because it's going to address diseases Maybe some of which we don't even have even identified yet, but they will be doing research regarding diseases and This came about because Paula and Diane Manning had two sons that had visual impairment due to a rare disease

So this is something very good for our community because it's going to address diseases in the future using DNA biotechnology.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Price.

I just wanted to acknowledge with great sadness the passing of Will Ritchie, a local business owner.

At several restaurants here, I have personal connections to a handful of folks that are employed at his place at one of his establishments.

I know that he was incredibly well regarded by his employees.

And it's just so sad for somebody to lose their life at such a young age, but also for just to acknowledge the fact that he his whole purpose was to bring people together for good food, good times and some good community.

So my thoughts and prayers go out to his family and to all of the employees who continue to work for the places that he had opened and ran.

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Galloway.

I also want to just follow up a little bit with both Supervisor Mallek and Supervisor Andrews and LaPisto-Kirtley's comments.

You know, the Supervisor Mallek and I were at the free holiday concert by the Seaville Band.

And for those of us who have lived in really big cities where anything you want to do is really expensive and takes a lot of time to be able to do it,

We live in a community that provides us an almost unlimited source of free, low-cost, and readily available events to attend individually as couples, as families, and people really need to just take advantage of that and enjoy what we've got here.

And with regard to the Fontaine Research Park ground opening for the Manning Biotech Research Facility, that ties in so closely with Rivanna Station Futures and our project enable in terms of the type of industry that we're looking to build and bring here and create this hub of technologically connected

industries that are the industries of the future.

And so they were both really good events, very different.

Yes, a little bit unusual, but thank you.

I want to acknowledge and recognize that this is our chair on Price's last meeting on the board.

And as vice chair, it's been a special privilege to work with you for the past year.

and over the past two years to share committee assignments with the Albemarle Broadband Authority, the Solid Waste Alternatives Advisory Committee, and the 5th and Avon CAC.

You took over the chair as I came on board.

We're adept and masterful from the start and have only gotten better in my opinion.

with the, I think, perhaps some of the strongest evidence of that is just last week when you were not only chairing our meeting, but chairing a joint meeting with the Planning Commission, members of the economic, of the development community, nonprofit and for-profit, and then another meeting with the school board, and then another meeting with our legislators and delegate elects.

And so all of these were done

Masterfully, your public speaking has been impressive from the get-go.

You've always something to say that I wish I'd said.

And so we each have remarks, and I'm just sort of kicking it off, and I'll turn it over to Supervisor McKeel.

Yes.

And just to add, Jim is correct.

Very often when you make your remarks or give a speech, I think, doggone it, why didn't I think about it?

Why couldn't I have thought of that?

you have really been a wonderful member of the board and a wonderful chair, Donna.

And I want to express my appreciation.

I also would like to give you a card, which you can open later on behalf of the board.

Thank you.

We all wrote a little note to you.

But I really want to just recognize your leadership as a Navy veteran.

We heard a lot about your, I recognize that, and we tease you about it, but we really did appreciate it because it made a lot, what you were saying and your connections made a lot of sense.

But in thinking about it, the Navy's leadership competency model is defined through five competencies.

Accomplishing the mission, leading people,

leading change, working with people in resource stewardship.

And I think you have accomplished each one of those competencies ultimately perfectly for us.

And we really do appreciate what you've done for the board in moving us forward.

The other thing that I'd like to recognize is I want to thank you for your leadership again

in being a role model.

You've been a role model for all of us, and you've also been a positive LGBTQ plus role model for the community.

And I just would say visible role models help build bridges where there are barriers and misconceptions.

and they can inspire others to be open about themselves, to work if they want, where they want to work, where they want to be and role models encourage everyone to achieve great things and you've done that.

Thank you very much.

My comments are, I think, echoing what others have already said, but also from the citizen's point of view, the way you have truly represented all the different segments of your population, especially in the Scottsville District, but across the county, be they rich or poor.

whatever their job is wherever they live the end of the gravel road at the end of the gravel road as well as the people in the fancy neighborhoods and to me that is what the true service is all about and I really appreciate your also calm leadership and what I think about from the comments is oh my she's

made so much more coherent the things I was trying to say.

So I always appreciate that sort of reanalysis and that kind of thing.

And I do have a plaque, which I will read for you, which says, presented with sincere appreciation to Donna Price for her dedicated service and leadership as chair of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2023.

and it shows Ned and me and me and Diantha and Jim Andrews and Claudette and Travis and Grace.

And a little out of order, we'll turn to Ned.

I don't know how you're going to carry it.

She has a wheelbarrow part of it.

I'm going to take a few moments at the risk of using words that sometimes can be seen as hyperbole, but I don't want them to be taken that way.

Robert Coles wrote a book called The Call of Service.

and that book is about idealism and people who answered that call and the methods that they use and why they do it and all of that.

And that book in a lot of ways could have used you as the example in that book.

It could have been just enough your service and call for your service in the Navy, but then your call of service to the county and your work on this board

You know this time of year as we approach December 21st I always reflect on the solstice and winter solstice and how it's been getting darker and darker and we celebrate the light at this time of year and you know in prehistoric times when I was a teacher we used to talk to our kids about individuals and folks that were you know on the planet that would see it getting darker and darker and what they must have thought

and then as the solstice hit, it starts to get lighter and lighter again.

And the words, the joy they must have felt that there was a little bit more light today and the awe they must have had in the face of that happening.

And those are the two words that when I think of serving with you on this board, they really do come to mind.

It has been an absolute joy to serve with you.

I am in awe of your call of service and how you've answered it.

and I think the citizens of this county of Scottsville would join me in saying that it has been an absolute honor to serve with you.

I am thrilled that you're retiring as the light's returning and that you are going to go enjoy your time to do the things and that you have the discipline to do that.

As chair of this board, your regard for the role for the board

for the citizens and I think most importantly for the work that you've done as a supervisor.

The regard you hold that within I think is an example to everyone who wishes to serve an elected life.

So Donna, the last word that I would use is that I see you as a friend and it is with joy, awe and honor that I think of you in that regard as well.

Thank you for your service.

Thank you for your friendship.

Thank you for your leadership.

This plaque says, presented with sincere appreciation to Donna Price for her dedicated service and leadership as a member of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors from January 1 through December 1, enhancing the quality of life through public service.

Yes, you all need to recognize that this is a bittersweet time for Donna.

She was very happy to serve the county and all of us.

It's also a difficult decision for her, but she's doing it for herself.

And for that, I admire her.

And I wanted you all to learn

that I've never learned so much about the Navy.

As from chair Price, excuse me.

But on a serious note, actually that was serious, I really did learn a lot.

The improvement of the county that you always strived for, the improvement of each one of us as individuals that you always strived for, that has been a real benefit to all of us.

One thing I think that exemplifies you is your kindness to all.

even when you were on the verge of having us all walk off the plank, you know, your kindness to all really resonates not only with the citizens but with all of us.

And what amazed me, actually I shouldn't be amazed, but your competence in intelligence

really moved the needle on LGBTQ issues because no one that I know, nobody that I've ever spoken to has ever brought that up because it was a non-issue.

You made it a non-issue because of your intelligence, your kindness, and your competence in what we did.

Your representation of the board is really exemplified

and it's a hard thing to follow.

We've had great representation before though, but yours, you took it up another notch.

And we've all benefited through your leadership.

And I just want to say smooth sailing to our friend.

Thank you.

I didn't think I would get emotional after just four years on the board, but

but it really is because when I retired from the Navy, the Navy band accompanied by my three children who play instruments, it was really a very emotional moment and it was exactly 20 years ago today that I went on terminal leave from the Navy and that kind of marked effectively the end of my Navy career just as this last meeting today

effectively marks the end of my term on the board, even though it won't officially end for 17 days, 8 hours, and 35 minutes.

But it is bittersweet, because for 45 years, any time I've left one job, it was to go to another one.

And this really does mark the end of it.

At my retirement ceremony from the Navy, as I was preparing, I was thinking, gosh, what do you do to represent 25 years?

And then it hit me.

I had a drawer full of t-shirts.

And I've gotten rid of most of them.

But at that ceremony, I pulled out all these t-shirts I had gotten over the years.

But I kept three.

This is actually my favorite one.

I'll hold it up so you can see.

Leaving the Philippines in 1992.

One of the officers who worked with me gave me a t-shirt.

It's got all my family on it, and it says Price Family World Tour.

And the world tour will continue next summer as I head off to Europe to walk the Camino, among other things.

And then the other two that I saved from the Navy were I was the commanding officer of the legal service office.

So I saved that one.

You'll notice these are not worn out after 20 years.

And I was a judge.

and so I saved that t-shirt as well, being part of the trial judiciary.

Now you notice those are t-shirts.

Albemarle County, however, one-ups the military because I'll take with me as I leave here this Albemarle County shirt, which I won't be able to wear officially, but I will be able to wear with pride after the end of this year.

There are four

parts, four players, so to speak, on this team that we call Albemarle County that I want to recognize.

Because we are all on a team and we are all working for the same objective, even when we don't know it.

Even when we may be shouting at each other because we just see a different way of achieving the result, which is to make this county even better tomorrow than it is today.

So the first players I want to thank are the voters of our community members.

I want to specifically thank those in the Scottsville Magisterial District who supported me in my run for office four years ago.

But also those who may not have voted for me, but over the last four years we've been able to find that common ground.

You know, we talk about the Virginia way.

and I think Albemarle County is even a bit ahead of Virginia in terms of ultimately working together.

So the first players I want to thank are our community.

The second players that I want to thank are county staff because while we at the board get the attention, good or bad, it's really county staff that delivers the goods.

It kind of reminds me of the old saying, the rooster may crow but the hen delivers the goods.

Well, it's the county staff that delivers the services to our community.

And you do it as the unsung heroes.

So I want to thank you all.

The third group that I want to talk about are the current members of the board.

And El Presidente, former chair Ned Gallaway, perhaps chair emeritus forever, as you'll get to sit in that seat yet another, at least another year.

You know, I got elected in 2019, started in January of 2020, and by March of 2020 we were virtual.

It was a brave new world for all of us, and none of us knew how it was going to work.

But Chair Galloway, you set the standard which I have hoped to come close to matching.

And you really did put this board on an upward trend beyond what had been achieved previously.

Because we're always looking to do better.

And I want to thank you for that.

And the mentorship that you gave me for those two years that I've had the privilege to serve as your Vice Chair.

I also want to thank our Twin Towers, the Blonds, Mallek and McKeel, and I do know who they are even though on some frequency I might say the wrong last name because they both start with an M and it just slips out.

But I want our community to think about the years of service that these two ladies have provided.

You know, Supervisor McKeel on the school board, as the chair of the school board, here now on the board of supervisors, you know, former chair of the board, Supervisor Mallet, former chair of the board many times, president of ACO.

You know, you don't get public service like this unless people are truly dedicated.

And then Supervisors Andrews,

and LaPisto-Kirtley, each of whom I had the privilege of serving with as chair and vice chair and the work that y'all have done and what you bring to this board.

And as our community thinks about this membership, think about the breadth of experience that is brought and the consistency, the corporate knowledge, which has really helped move the county forward.

And then finally, I want to talk about the executive leadership.

And that's Mr. Richardson and your

Deputy County Executives, Mr. Henry, previously Mr. Walker, Ms.

Wall, welcome aboard.

To the Clerk, Ms.

Borgerson, our Senior Deputy Clerk, Mr. Morris, and Grace Reden-Tamblin.

You know, the work that they do to make these meetings flow as smoothly as they do.

And then I just want to focus specifically on Mr. Richardson.

You bring the leadership that makes this organization home.

You are the glue that holds it together.

And our community needs to understand that under our form of government, we, the supervisors, do one thing.

We vote and set policy.

And then we turn it immediately, instantly, over to Mr. Richardson, his county executive leadership, and his team, and they execute it.

And the county attorney, Mr. Rosenberg, and before that, Mr. Campner.

who provide us with the legal guidance that ensures that we are compliant.

and so it is with mixed emotions that I leave.

But it has been, I never thought after I retired from the Navy I would have an experience of public service like I had here.

And so for all of you and those many who, too many to name today, I thank you for making us look good, for helping us do our job, but mostly for providing the service that you do to the community.

And so, thank you all very much.

I really appreciate it.

May I just add one thing and that is we know where you live.

Don't even think about the fact that you're going to ride off into the sunset and never be involved again because we count on you to continue to write to us and call us and share your thoughts about things because you're a citizen still and we're not going to let you get away.

Donna, I'd just like to add that I never in a million years would have held up t-shirts that I'd had for decades, you know, because they would have progressively gotten larger and larger and larger.

The shirts are the same size.

I'm not.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Board, we can now move to item number seven from the public.

Matters on the agenda but not listed for public hearing.

Matters previously considered by the board or matters pending before the board.

Yes, we have three speakers in person only, I believe.

During this time, set aside for matters on the agenda but not listed for public hearing, individuals may address the Board of Supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the Board or matters that are pending before the Board other than items listed on the agenda for public hearing.

Individuals are allowed one opportunity of up to three minutes to speak at each Board meeting.

Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and light system at the podium.

The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins your allotted time.

The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking.

The red light indicates your time has expired and you'll be asked to end your comments.

To give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the Board requests that speakers adhere to the following guidelines.

When addressing the Board, please state your name, and if you live in Albemarle County or Magisterial District, please address comments directly to the Board as a whole.

Any written statements or other supporting material may be given to the Clerk.

If representing a group or organization, you may ask others present to raise their hands in recognition.

Speakers may not share any unused time with another speaker.

Back and forth debate is not permitted and please do not speak from your seat or out of turn as all comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

Good afternoon.

My name is Dirk Neese and I live in the White Hall district.

Earlier this year the board addressed the issue of affordable housing for low-income elderly and disabled residents by expanding eligibility under the real estate tax relief program to Albemarle County homeowners who fall in this category.

Specifically the board raised the caps for the net income and the net assets

The enrollment period for this program has ended for this year and from the helpful County staff We now know that actions taken by the result by the board resulted in 19 homeowners qualifying for real estate tax relief who would not have qualified under the previous income and asset limits

It's noteworthy that 16 out of the 19 homeowners would not have qualified had the board not had raised the asset and income limits.

In total, the county will award $43,000 in tax relief to these 19 homeowners.

Putting the magnitude of this expended tax benefit into perspective, the county will forego 0.02% of real estate tax revenues connected annually.

So your work resulted in a benefit of 0.02% increase in benefits.

I have previously recommended the board eliminate the net worth eligibility requirement in its entirety and make financial eligibility based on income only.

But if this is too great a step for the board to take, today I have a compromise proposal.

Keep the existing program, establish a separate reduced

tax relief benefits schedule for elderly and disabled homeowners who qualify only under the income criteria.

Additionally, if deemed necessary by the board, establish a cap on the annual real estate tax relief awarded to these income only applicants.

For your consideration, I have provided the clerk with a suggested real estate tax relief benefits schedule

and also the camp that I suggest.

As you set policy for the budget, I thank you so much for your attention to this critical issue for elderly living in the county and being able to afford to stay here.

Hello, I'm Jane Coulo, a resident in the Samuel Miller District, and I currently serve on the board of the Friends of JMRL.

It has been my privilege to speak to county supervisors about Jefferson Madison Regional Library concerns for more than a dozen years.

As always, I appreciate your ongoing support for JMRL.

County residents reap wonderful benefits through your support.

JMRL was named the Virginia Library Association's Library of the Year in 2022.

I'm here today to encourage you to include the renovations of the central JMRL branch in the five-year CIP.

I'll share three perspectives on this ask, need, timing, and benefits.

As to the need, Central JMRL is an aging capital asset, a building of similar age to this one, with numerous major infrastructure needs.

It has received only spot upgrades since its initial renovation 50 years ago.

Modern library facilities, such as multiple-sized meeting rooms, are used almost non-stop in Northside and Crozet branches.

County residents should have access to updated and modern facilities in all branches.

Indeed, they specifically asked for central renovations in the library's recent strategic planning survey.

The building is co-owned by the county and the city.

County and city staff have acknowledged the need for major renovations for more than 20 years, while the request has been parked just off the approved CIP list.

In terms of timing, the most recent design assessment was completed eight years ago and cost estimates have doubled since.

Renovation costs will only increase with each five-year plan.

Many of you have taken time to hear directly about this need, which I appreciate, and I'm sure you can appreciate the complications of getting this capital need into the CIP for both jurisdictions at the same time.

On to the best part, the benefits.

All jurisdictions in the library system share the value of regional cooperation.

The value of this particular shared asset between the county and the city means that the capital costs are split.

In addition, JMRL and the Friends of the Library are prepared to begin a significant fundraising campaign to assist with this project.

We have proven success in this area.

Back to the ask.

On behalf of GMRL friends and fellow county residents, I ask you to preserve one of the most important public buildings in our community and prepare it to provide the library service our residents expect and deserve for the years to come.

For that to happen, we need you, the County Board of Supervisors, to identify this as a priority for the CIP.

Thank you very much for your time and your consideration.

In my eight seconds left, I want to thank you, Chair Price, for your leadership and professionalism.

Good afternoon.

My name is Wanda Bruce and I live in the White Hall District.

Thank you Ann for all you do for us and the rest of you as well.

I'm here to speak on the affordable housing.

It's a kind of a cliche we hear everywhere and I think affordable housing can have many many aspects about it but where I live is very affordable right now but as the last few years have gone by it's becoming less affordable due to the

exorbitant tax increases.

We are not really asking for any money or anything to be spent in tax dollars or infrastructure or services.

We're just asking as seniors to take less of our money that we are trying to save and trying to work towards retirement and semi-retirement so that we can continue to care for our families

and our relatives in the Albemarle County area.

My husband and I are lifelong residents of the county and wish to live in the community that we grew up with and also with the culture that we enjoy all the time as we've been here forever.

We do not want the high real estate tax forcing us and our relatives to have to leave the county in search of more affordable housing due to the taxes that have increased exorbitantly over the last few years.

My husband and I both live on fixed incomes with a very small pension and no large family inheritance at our home, so we are

on our own basically.

We do struggle financially, not because of poor planning, but because of the exorbitant increases in our real estate taxes.

Finally, we hope you will seriously consider basing the tax relief for the elderly

and the disabled on our very limited incomes and not on our net worth, which is what we have put away for this time in our lives.

So I thank you very much for hearing me out.

I appreciate all that you do and pray that you will consider to get rid of the net worth.

Let that not be even a part of the decision for the relief.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

We can now move to item number eight, the consent agenda.

So moved.

All right.

We have a motion from Supervisor Andrews and a second from Supervisor Mallek.

Ms.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

We can move to item number nine, a work session.

It's actually going to be an action item.

I believe the five-year

I guess this is still a work session.

The other one is when that will come up.

Work session on the five-year financial planning.

Good afternoon to the Board.

My name is Andy Bowman.

I am the Interim Assistant Chief Financial Officer for Policy and Partnerships.

Just one moment while I pull up this presentation.

Today is the third and final five-year financial plan work session we'll be holding with the Board of Supervisors this fall.

It's actually the fifth financial kind of long-term planning discussion we've had over the past couple of months.

Today we are going to focus where we've been very broad the last two meetings, a little more specifically on two programs, the tax relief for the elderly and disabled program and some discussion around the fire rescue system.

The next time after today's discussion we will be back before the board on financial matters on February 21st when the county executive will kick off the process for the recommended budget for fiscal year 25.

So I will start the presentation today by focusing on the real estate tax relief program for the elderly and disabled.

There is no formal action that is required today because this is not the first time the Board of Supervisors has discussed this topic and it will also not be the last.

What we'd like to do is continue the conversation the Board of Supervisors had in April when this program was last discussed, share an overview of the current program, the results of those changes and the participant data,

and also discuss with the board some options for further revisions.

The board does not need to make a decision on what that option may look like, but staff is hoping to begin to narrow down what some proposed ordinance changes could look like.

We'll talk through those options.

and then, of course, open it for as much Board and Supervisor discussion as we can.

As I get ready to talk into the overview of the current program, I would like to thank, within the Department of Finance and Budget, our revenue administration staff.

They have done a lot of the analysis to prepare this information.

They work to manage the program day in and day out.

worked to get as much outreach and information about the program and also spent a lot of care and time supporting many of the most economically vulnerable folks in the community during what is a major program impact for those folks.

So with that, I'm going to start with an overview of the program.

This is something the Board of Supervisors has seen before.

But to share that for any public that may be here or listening, the criteria currently for the program require that applicants be at least 65 years old,

were totally and permanently disabled as medically determined.

Applicants need to be the title holder of the property, and that property may not be used as a business.

Fourth, there are certain income and financial net worth criteria that are shown in the green box there, where we have the income threshold, which based on the income, there are brackets of relief of 100%, 75%, or 50% than a net worth criteria.

The important point I want to make on net worth is that excludes the applicant's dwelling and land up to 10 acres.

So as an example in the slide, if you had 15 acres, you would be eligible to participate in the program.

It just means the relief would be applied after exempting the net worth of dwelling and the first 10 acres excluded as part of that.

So this is just a snapshot of where we are for the current program and where we're starting from.

This is a program that totals $1.8 million in the fiscal year 28 budget, and we will look to revise that number based on what we see as the normal change based on people who may come and go from that program as property values change, plus any other policy changes that the board may direct in the coming year.

So next, to look back to April 2023, there were two actions the Board of Supervisors approved.

First was to increase the income criteria.

This was an annual update based on 80% of the area median income for a family of four.

That was the second year in a row the board made that update.

That was one of the changes.

The second change was to increase the net worth criteria from a cap of $200,000 up to $250,000.

and the board desired that there's a lot of discussion in that meeting listening back to preparation for this one.

And the board wanted to know before they intended to pursue this discussion further knowing to understand the impacts of the changes that these resulted in and also the other considerations that were discussed at that time.

So I'd like to turn the attention to understand what actually was the change in 2023.

And I do want to clarify, as one of our citizens was here sharing the data, his numbers are very close to mine.

But as we further refine them, they are just slightly different.

And part of the difference is how people are counted when you're eligible for both programs.

So our numbers are very close together, but these are the updated numbers that we may have not had a chance to get to them yet, knowing that our revenue administration staff has been engaged with citizens in this discussion the past few months.

So with that, again, slight variance there.

In essence, there are 17 newly eligible applicants.

Total impact of around $40,000.

And again, I'm rounding just to be approximate.

We can see that a little bit of that was due to the update in income.

Most of that change is due to net worth.

and two people qualified or two applicants qualified based on both of those criteria.

We can see most of the change here is in the net worth category and that would be just, you know, what one would expect because that was the most significant change going from a cap of $200,000 up to $250,000.

So before we talk about options to further refine the program, I thought I would share some interesting data with the board about who really makes up the 800s or so participants in this program.

So just a few slides of data.

First is to acknowledge that when the criteria were expanded, it did result in more applicants being eligible.

94% of people who applied were deemed eligible in 2023.

That's up from 89% in 2022.

We look at the average income of those applicants, that was $32,000, and the average net worth was $48,000.

So within that range of the 800-some people and plus who are applying, there's a lot of variety in what individual circumstances may be.

But on average, they tend to be some of the most economically vulnerable folks in our community.

Another way to look at that is taking the data by category.

We talked about there's three bands of relief.

Based on your net income, you can receive 100%, 75%, or 50% relief.

What we see is that about three-quarters of the people in the program are eligible at the 100% relief, and we can see the average relief they receive and their average assessment.

As we go across to the right at 75% and 50% relief, we are there to see the increase in average, I'm sorry, the decrease in average relief and the increase in average assessment because their percentage of relief is changing.

So the final slide to recap the changes in the program is an updated version of the chart the board saw before.

What this does, it looks on the x-axis going across.

It is the amount of relief that is being provided to an applicant.

On the y-axis, we can see the number of people who are receiving that level of benefit.

And so what we can see is that, by and large,

The other item here on this slide that I neglected to mention was if you took the average county-wide assessment of about $436,000 and you took that average tax bill, that would be about $3,700.

So those to the left of that orange line are receiving relief that is less than the average county tax bill.

Those to the right of that line are receiving relief greater than that average.

And so what this indicates of looking at this data on the previous slide is the board has designed a program that really is skewed toward helping those who are well below the limits and, again, those who are in the most economically vulnerable in our community or among those.

So just kind of level setting with what the program looks like, what the board's changes have been, and the impact, I now want to talk through some options for further revisions.

And this really continues, again, the discussion that was held back in April with the board.

of the four options.

And these options are not mutually exclusive.

The board could choose to prepare an ordinance that would update a combination of these, only one of those, or just different options out there.

So we've identified the board can continue to adjust the annual income criteria.

There could be a further revision to the net financial worth criteria.

There could be a cap that was considered for property-specific caps or one that was program-wide.

And I'll talk a little bit more next about what each of these criteria would look like, what are some of the policy considerations the board can weigh, and just some other financial implications.

We have framed staff analysis looking at four questions, knowing that we would kind of for the board to consider.

First, if there's a desire to expand the program, we'd want to do that with a basis that's reasonably understandable.

Second is looking at staffs and the organization's ability to implement changes in calendar 24 knowing that our financial systems are dated and what is our ability to actually implement those.

We have updates from the time that we talked about this last in April.

Looking at the impact of the current program participants and then finally just grounding whatever we may do in prudent financial management.

So with that I'll walk through these options before opening it up to the board discussion.

The first would be for the board if they desire to maintain the approach on annually adjusting the income criteria.

What we have is the income criteria shown here in green and the proposed income criteria that would be in blue.

What the Board of Supervisors has done the last two years is benchmark this to 80% of the area median income for a family of four.

That is based on connection to the affordable housing policy of that 80% figure, so there's a nexus there.

It's also an objective measure that we can track and update annually, so it is reasonably understandable.

Because this is already in place, it can be implemented in calendar year 24 with minimal impacts administratively into our financial systems.

Now, when we update this threshold, two things would happen.

We would expect there would be some new applicants who would become eligible.

And we would also see there may be people who may start at 50% or 75% of relief, but over time may move up in the amount of relief they receive.

Staff's best estimate on what we've learned in recent years in other applicants is the impact of that budget would be about an additional $60,000, again, on top of the $1.8 million that is currently budgeted.

So I'll go through all four of these options before opening it up to the Board discussion.

And I'll say, again, based on the direction, just to give something to the Board to respond to, this would be the update for the income that staff would suggest.

Moving to option B, this would be a revision of the net financial worth criteria.

So what it is here is a proposal, again, for the Board to respond to where we are currently at $250,000.

Staff has proposed, based on the latest inflation data that came out this week, revising that to a net worth financial worth cap of $305,000.

The reason that amount was determined is in 2007 the county had some flexibility when this cap was last adjusted to make a change.

The inflation adjusted value of $200,000 in 2007 would be about $305,000 in today's data.

So this was one because we don't have much data.

There was some caution to not knowing what that fiscal impact would be.

We now know the fiscal impact of going from $200,000 to $250,000.

Staff has much greater comfort in the cost analysis going from $250,000 up to $305,000.

Now the board could pick a different value for net worth financial criteria, but this is just one example as a starting point.

Again, this can be implemented in calendar year 24.

We know based on our current data, we would have three applicants who would immediately become eligible if this was approved in calendar year 24.

And then while we don't know for sure how many new applicants would come into the program, we do have some indication based on the experience from increasing from 0 to 250,000 what that may look like going from 250 to 305,000.

We won't have that exactly right, but that should be within a margin of error that is a reasonable thing that we can manage in the budget.

So options C and D go to some caps that are different than what is currently in the program for the board's consideration if they would like to go there.

And I will say on this next slide, I've actually color coded this in blue because it's very easy when speaking about property specific.

Thank you.

a property specific and program wide caps to just intertangle my language if I'm not careful.

So this is not a proposal, but this is really just an example if there were to be a property specific cap applied.

Because in addition to the policy considerations that the Board of Supervisors would weigh, we also wanted to just give a hypothetical for how that may play out in the real world for people.

So if the board were to consider a cap, they could pick a lot of different caps.

But this is just one as an example to help the board think through any policy changes.

So again, not a proposal, but for this example, the board could elect to choose the median assessed value of that tax bill as the cap.

So if that was in place in calendar 23, the maximum relief someone could receive on their tax bill would be about $3,700.

If they were qualifying, it would be 100% relief.

as that relief changes on the income.

If you're at 75%, you would receive up to $2,800 and then again up to $1,800 at 50% relief.

So because this is not a cap that's in place, some of the analysis on these considerations are a little different than the income and the net worth.

So first, and this is just a general statement, not about this program, but any time set in policy, if criteria are going to be added, that will increase the precision and that who the program supports.

At the same time, it can increase the complexity and understanding for those who are seeking to benefit from the program.

To use an extreme example, if there was a program in place that had one rule, it would likely be very easy to understand, but it would also be painting with a very broad brush and may not get all the intended outcome.

On the other extreme, there could be a program, again any program, not this one, that had 10 rules.

With 10 rules, you would probably be able to be very precise in who would be impacted and served by a program, but it may be harder for the average person to understand just because there are more rules.

That's not to say one is better than the other, but these are just some of the policy decisions that any decision-making body would need to weigh and set in any policy.

So this is a change that we believe staff could implement in calendar year 24.

This was not certain in April, but working with our vendor, talking to other localities to implement a cap that is property specific is something that staff believes can be implemented.

The other consideration is that setting a cap would limit access for individuals above the cap, including those currently in the program.

So in this example, I'm going to hop back a few slides to this chart.

If that cap was set at the 3726, the orange line shown on the slide, anyone receiving relief to the right of that in blue would receive a reduced amount of relief.

They would still receive the 3726, but their new tax bill would be the difference between their tax bill and that 3726.

There's about 53 participants who were in that with a total budget impact of around $240,000.

Oops, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself.

But the actual budget impact on that would depend on the cap set, if any.

So the final option for the board's consideration is here in green, the program-wide cap.

And this one is a little bit different than the specific cap.

In essence here, just an example, not a proposal.

The board could set, for example, a program-wide cap of $2 million, and that would be shared among total eligible applicants in the program.

Again, $2 million is just a hypothetical.

The board could pick a number of different amounts.

The same point applies here on complexity.

Adding an additional criteria does create complexity, although this one creates complexity in a different way that there is some more uncertainty.

In thinking about how to frame this, I thought of an example that the county, at least any county taxpayers who have vehicles, will understand is the Personal Property Tax Relief Act.

So in this example, the state provides Albemarle County every year just under $15 million to pass along to taxpayers to give credit for personal property relief.

When you as a taxpayer receive your tax bill for personal property for the first $20,000 of your vehicle, your actual tax bill is going to be based on your own assessed value and also the change in the total assessed value throughout the entire county.

because that $15 million is fixed and that will, you know, depending on the total value of properties, the more vehicles, the more value of vehicles, the further that relief goes every year.

So again, that's just a little more complexity as we think of what it may, when we look at our personal property tax bills, you know, how that may feel, the questions that arise from that.

In addition to this program, there are some impacts that would be to our processes for participants who are in the program when we have a program wide cap.

The first of which is it would really require a change in due dates for first-time applicants.

If you are a first-time applicant in the program, the deadline is in October, meaning that in calendar year 23, even though the June tax bill had passed, you could apply to the program, be eligible, get any adjustment or credit to your prior tax bill in June, and then also have no tax bill or whatever your amount of relief should be for that tax bill, I should say, in December.

In a program where there's a program-wide cap, we would really need to know who everyone is eligible in the program by April so that we can do that analysis before the tax bills go out.

So in that regard, it would be less time for first-time applicants to apply in the current year where they are eligible.

The second impact to program participants really speaks to that concept of certainty as well.

Right now, when our staff in finance and budget determine someone is eligible, we are able to follow up very promptly after to certify with a letter the amount of relief they are eligible for.

They can then take that letter, work with their mortgage company, work with whoever else they need to in their financial planning.

If we're in an environment of a program-wide cap, people may be determined to be eligible, but we will not be able to certify their amount of relief because it will, again, depend on the total people who may be eligible for that program-wide cap.

and again speaking to the percentage of relief may vary year to year.

So this is not to say in this decision of complexity whether it's good and bad but to acknowledge these are things we need to think through, manage the change, communicate with folks who have been in the program for some time.

A few final considerations.

This is one where because it is a more complex program, we are still studying with our vendors whether it could be implemented in calendar year 24.

That's not to say that it could not be, but we are not at a point of confidence compared to the property-wide specific cap.

And we can certainly bring back more information if this is a route the board is looking at pursuing.

The other analysis, just like many of these, is setting a cap could limit program access and reduce existing relief for people in the program and the budget impact of that would ultimately depend on what the cap rate program-wide is set.

So I ran through those four options at a high level and would be happy to answer any questions, but it's really now the most important part of this discussion is for the Board of Supervisors.

Staff would look to say of these four options, if we were to bring back an ordinance for calendar year 24, what would be those that would be of the most interest to the board so that we can begin the process to consider what an ordinance may look like that could then be implemented as part of the fiscal year 25 budget process for calendar year 24?

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

We will go through our orders.

Thank you, Andy.

I think you made this as simple as you possibly could.

It is a lot of information to receive.

So we're going to be suggesting what we think we would like to hear back from you.

That's correct, and I'll clarify that too, is that based on the approach of the last two years, the board has updated the income annually based on 80%.

And so I think staff's thought is we would continue to propose that for the board, but just wanted to reaffirm that with all of these other policies that are being considered.

I would say the revised net worth financial criteria staff has proposed a starting point of increasing that to $305,000.

But again, that's for the board to respond to.

The board could pick a different limit.

Options C and D are more examples where I think we would need to hear a little bit more about the board's interest before we could better refine those.

Yeah, and thank you, that's helpful.

And I will say, obviously, I'd like to hear what the other board members think, but just first blush.

A, maintaining approach on annually adjusting income criteria, I think is probably possible and that would be where I might go for one suggestion.

So A, I would support that, yes.

And B, I would like more information.

I'm not going to commit to that right now, but I would like more information if that's possible, Andy, as we get into the budget process.

For me, C and D sound over-complicated.

and I'm not sure that I'm as interested in going to C and D just because I think for the public, complicated to understand, which I think is never a good place to be.

And that's just my first, like I said, at first blush.

That's what I'm looking at would be A and or B. Does that help?

Thank you very much.

I'm surprised, Malek, if you want to make comments as well, that's fine.

Okay.

But then I would say in the additive thing, so one, two, three, or four, or whatever, you have changed A. So yes, to continue doing A, for sure.

I would support that.

Yes, as a minimum for B because this is something that using that upgrade on the 2007 numbers has been debated off and on for 15 years.

And so I'm really glad to see that it's now being done two years ago and this year.

But I think that's really important for number what I call 3C.

So I'm a little confused about this.

So there was slide eight that talked about, I mean that image.

So you said that the people to the right of this line would then lose their current coverage even if

So to clarify that, if we had someone, I'll say at the $4,000 line, that's the amount they currently receive.

Wait, whoa, you said $400,000.

Are you talking about $4,000 or $400,000?

I'm sorry, $4,000.

OK, very good.

Please correct me, because it's very easy to mix up this terminology.

So yes, a $4,000 tax bill, under the current program, the individual would receive 100% relief if they qualify.

If the board were to keep the program the same, except for adding a cap that the relief would not be greater than the average tax bill, that tax bill would be approximately $300.

Okay, now if we did A and B, would the same thing happen?

Because I expect that, in sort of a cosmic level, one of the biggest issues has been the radical increase in assessed value, which none of our constituents can do anything about.

It's just the reality of the market and everybody wants to buy things here.

And so,

Is there a short answer to that?

And would that radically, do you guess, change the participant pool?

Yeah, so based on, I'm going to jump back to a slide that's going to put these together.

We would expect if option A is enacted, that would have a budget impact in fiscal year 25 of around $60,000.

If we enact option B, that would probably also have about another $60,000.

OK.

Now, that's perfectly fine.

Now, let's see.

Let me jump down to some questions on D. Well, number one, having

When I joined the board in 2008 the program was under $900,000 and the difficulty was so few people knew about it that we were missing huge numbers of people who just didn't have access to the and they absolutely deserved it I mean these were people who had been our county staff for 50 years and had run out their age was carrying them way beyond what their ability to pay was so

There was a big expansion in outreach through churches and carrying things around in my car and leaving them at the post offices, et cetera, to try to get more people to know and also for trusted advisors, family members, neighbors to talk to them about it as opposed to someone they didn't know at all, which means slam the door and go away.

There was also a lot of resistance from people who said, well, I don't want to be dependent on anybody.

But when I explained to them that

You've done your time here.

You've worked really hard.

You've given your whole working time and now it's my generation's time to help you be able to stay here.

They went, oh.

I don't know if any of them followed through, but that was the best I could come up with as a reason why people would resist participating in a program that was designed to help them stay in their house.

I'm very worried about number four, D, for that reason, is that it has already gone from 800,000 to 1.7, and capping it at two I think is going to, especially in the current market in which we are, and I don't expect that market to change.

That would trouble me a lot to go to the D right now.

I just want to also credit and thank the finance staff who has been exemplary in working with individual people and trying to explain to them something that is ridiculously complicated, not ridiculous by me necessarily, but just that the way it's evolved, it's just hard to do.

It's like filling out a bank application and I haven't enjoyed doing that for a really long time.

One of the suggestions that came from citizens was for people of extremely low income,

who struggle to apply now or who don't apply because they just can't manage the application.

even people who make so little that they cannot, they don't even file an income tax return.

Is there an easy button option to be able to say I don't make enough to file an income tax return, you can verify this with state DOT and check the box.

So that's just something for you all to think about as a way to perhaps do the best job we can for people in very different circumstances one to another.

That's why I think it's so challenging is that every circumstance is

is different.

Thank you.

Thank you very much Mr. Bowman.

I'm tending to go with Supervisor Malek and Supervisor McKeel.

I'm just going to say C and D. I'm not interested at this point in time unless I

learn more that changed my mind.

I do like A and B. Please explain to me, you have the net criteria of the land and also income, so you have income and land.

Are those two

They would be exclusive of each other.

You could qualify for both?

No, that's not an answer.

What I'm wondering is if you have to have income, if your income and

Net Worth Property.

If those two are, you have to meet both criteria for receiving something.

Alright.

So, then going back to, I mean, I like, A, I think that would be easy enough to do financial net worth.

It worries me because I know some of the

Maybe someone's income isn't that high, but then they may own a lot of property.

You know, maybe 20 acres, 30, 40, 50 acres.

So if you're combining, I don't think anyone expects to have a free ride, correct?

It would depend on the size of the property because the dwelling in 10 acres is what would be exempt.

So if you were below that, then your tax bill, if you qualified 100% relief, that would be there.

Okay, alright.

That explains what I was reading.

Right, the net worth.

Correct, that's what I meant.

Right, okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I apologize for perhaps making this a little more complicated, but I want to just

Really a viewpoint.

The employer I had for several decades at one point put in a program where you could basically look at your retirement two different ways and it was the employee's option.

One was that the contributions went into a plan that you would just get a fixed benefit when you retired of a certain amount of money per month.

and the other was that no, it would go into essentially like an IRA or 401k type of plan where you would be owning that pot of money at the end and you could see to it yourself that you earned whatever or took out of that whatever you needed to live.

and those weren't really considered different outcomes for the employees, just two choices.

However, it appears to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that this program currently has put in penalizes one over the other.

In other words, if you decided to take it based on just a monthly income, well you might have a fairly low income and you might qualify for this program.

But if you sock the money away,

sufficiently, now that you've got this pot of money that you're going to live on for the rest of your life, that it pays that exact same income to you, but it's your money.

You're not eligible because your net worth is too great.

Yeah, I'm going to try and say this back in response and please chime in if I don't have this.

In our society, there's many paths to retirement and what that looks like.

For some people in the county of our size and for all the people in the program, the income criteria would be more impactful to their eligibility.

For others, the net worth would be more impactful.

So I think this would really be the challenge for the board of really what is that right blend knowing that both are there.

I think you are.

I mean, I don't mean to add complexity, but I do have to wonder whether

It would be too much of a burden to consider a combination that basically said, look, if your income is below this, it will look at your net worth a different way than if your income is above.

And I think this gets complicated very quickly, so I'm very cautious about proposing it.

I just wish there were a way to kind of recognize that people may be living either under a fixed income or a fixed asset that produces the income that they have to live on.

Yeah, I'll share two comments in response to that.

One is, two years ago, the Board of Supervisors, when they revised this program, instead of having three possibilities of relief, there were actually nine because the net worth was, just as there were three options for income, there were three options for net worth.

And so this grid would have looked more complex.

As part of the board looking to expand this program, they also simplified it.

If the board felt that the income or the net worth were not quite the right balance of the two of those, the board would always have the option to revise those to a new threshold if they felt the $305,000 was not the appropriate number, whatever that may be.

Yeah, and I appreciate that, but I think what I'm suggesting would be that instead of being both, that there would be some way to look at either.

I mean, so if you're below a certain income, then we can look at your net worth if you're not.

It's just a thought because I think it is probably too complicated, but it's what worries me about our current approach.

I don't think that it's entirely fair to someone who made the decision to go one way or the other a long time ago in their retirement.

That said, I am supportive of A and B. With respect to C, could we look at slide 8 again, please?

So I understand that we're looking at the portion to the right of the $3,726 tax bill.

And I notice that there's a tail out there that's out around $8,000.

The line suddenly gets a little thicker.

which suggests to me that we have people who have property tax bills that are more than double the average tax bill.

How we're getting potentially 100% relief if they're otherwise qualified based on 100% relief for income.

Yes, that would be correct.

I understand that.

I'm in favor of C, and let me just say with respect to the complexity, one of the things that I look at when it comes to that cap is that it doesn't change who would apply.

People would still be encouraged to apply.

It just changes the maximum benefit they could get.

So it still seems to me that while it adds complexity, it doesn't change eligibility and it doesn't really change predictability because we can set the cap and people will know what that cap is.

If they have a tax bill that's greater than that, then they will be responsible for that portion that's greater.

and perhaps it then frees up our ability to provide greater relief to more people because I'm not interested in

in lowering the amount of tax relief that we provide I think this is a very valuable thing.

With respect to D, while that starts to add complexity that makes it less predictable and that bothers me, I think it depends a lot on

How much whatever we adopt is predictable for budgetary purposes?

If we start to tinker with this in a way that we say, we don't know what the effect this is going to have and it could be much bigger than we anticipated, then I start to worry that we need a cap.

because I just don't want to be faced with the situation where we planned on a certain amount of relief and then found out, oh, the way we set this up, we really misjudged and the amount of relief has to be much greater without the cap.

And those are my comments.

Thank you.

Let me just ask a question based on where Supervisor Andrews concluded his remarks.

So where would it come from if we had a program in play that overshot what we were anticipating?

We would probably look for that from the board's reserve contingencies, which is really something we set aside usually at around $600,000 in the budget and manage that throughout the year.

I will say that historically, in absence of the program changes, it's common for this group to grow about 8% a year.

So we'll make a projection, but sometimes we miss that.

And so if we're, usually when we miss that, it's a matter of tens of thousands of dollars, not a larger budget change.

When we begin to look at changes that are more substantial, then we begin to

Just like in other areas where we have, we can't exactly say what the cost projection would be if something is over, if we go beyond, we always have reserves there for that reason.

So this would fall into that same

Yes Category.

Thank you.

I think I'm out on D. I'm just out.

I think the relief needs to be predictable.

I think that's just a critical component of it.

I think you're in and you're out.

What needs to be budgeted for can't change.

and I do think we just need to make the decision and live with the cost, whatever that decision is.

So I think at a minimum, A and B should always be adjusted based on inflation and other factors.

So whatever that number should be based on the approach, that should just be the case.

Now to the amounts for B,

I would be open, you know, I think last budget we were concerned about, well, we don't know how many people are going to become eligible, but now hearing how many, I mean, to me that was like, oh, well, I would have liked to have seen that go further, right?

So as a person who was thinking back, well, I'm not just trying to say we want to willy-nilly not understand what our costs are, but I was hoping to have a bigger impact than we had.

So that leads me to consider that in B that the net worth amount at a bare minimum should be what you're proposing but I'm open to conversation about taking that further.

In looking at some counties or jurisdictions that we tend to look at as peers or market-based or what have you it does seem like the net worth is much higher than what we have set up.

So I think there's certainly, in my view, I'd be open to expanding that.

Because when I look at who this impacts in the average assessments in the properties, and I think there's some pragmatic nature of folks that don't need the relief, probably won't just be applying for it to get it, to gain the system, if you would.

I think that, I mean maybe there will be, I guess it's not a perfect thing, but I think that if you don't need the relief you don't tend to go try to get it just to game it.

Maybe that's naive thinking.

I'm sure there are some that are, and shame on them I suppose, but it is a process you have to go through in filling out the application and all of that.

And for the folks that it really does impact, and they need it,

that I want to make it as simple to do, as easy to understand as possible.

So I think based on some of the Supervisor Andrew's remarks, C, I guess I'd be open to having more dialogue about, but I'm not interested in removing people that are currently eligible based on A and B from what they're receiving.

And C, that seems to be where my concern is with C.

But I'm not going to say that I fully have my head wrapped around C enough to just say, well, let's throw that out, or let's do it.

I need to do some more work myself on understanding of C. I think I've answered all the questions.

I think this is a program that I remember having town halls last spring telling people I think this will really help, but now in the town hall this year if I say it's only helped this many more,

I know as a policy maker, I was hoping to have a bigger impact.

And this money is the money that comes off the top before the split.

So it's cleanly handled, it's transparent, and I think it's one.

I mean, has any other supervisor had a community member wag their finger at us and how dare you do tax relief for the elderly?

Absolutely not.

I think this is one that

Thank you.

Prior to Supervisor Andrews and Gallaway's remarks, I was not inclined to support C, but now I'm open to learning more about that and no on D. Now for my lengthy comments and questions.

Slide number three.

I'm looking at all of this as affordable housing on what I would call the back end.

Mostly when we talk about affordable housing, it's on the front end, getting someone into housing.

But as we know from our recent developer incentives discussion, keeping someone in a house is affordable housing.

So looking up on the internet while people were talking, so I know it's true, 20.8% of Albemarle County's population is over age 65.

What I'd like to know is both the percent that is disabled as well as the percent that is both elderly and disabled

but not just percent, I'd actually like to know the numbers because that would help me have a better sense of how many people may actually be eligible to be impacted by the programs and right now I feel like I'm operating pretty much in a void.

Going back to the developer incentive meetings on slide number four and I know this came up before it may be something in state law but the 10-acre limitation and the reason that raises concerns with me

is I think I believe we should look at both an acreage and a development rights consideration because for example if you're in the rural area and you have a 21 acre tract of land that is no longer subject to further division because there are no more development rights then what we've done because someone bought a piece of property some years in the past now effectively excluded them from consideration because they'll have

more than 10 acres, but they can't get rid of any of the excess above 10 acres because they don't have development rights.

So in terms of being able to stay in their house, they don't get the benefit.

They'd have to sell if they wanted to.

So I think we should look at whether, much like in the developer incentives, we want to have the affordable housing period match the period of tax relief.

we need to look at the acreage matching the ability of the landowner perhaps to sell some of it off.

So if you had 15 acres and you could sell five of the acres and then you could get a little bit of money but you could keep the 10 acres with your house and still qualify here under the program perhaps then we're not forcing someone out of their house whereas if it's a minimum, you know, you don't get benefit over 10 acres but you can't sell any of the excess over 10 acres we're not really achieving our objective in that situation.

Turning to slide number six, I'm curious as to how much money the county puts into affordable housing incentives.

as we can then look and look to see about how many households we're helping through the affordable housing as we that's getting people into housing and then look to see how many people we can help stay into their housing because if we're putting I don't know we're building three hundred four hundred affordable units that's three four hundred

households that are

but it strikes me that this bell curve is disproportionately skewed towards getting people into housing and not sufficiently helping people stay in housing under this program.

So I'd like to just kind of know, again it goes back to how many people are we actually helping.

If you go to slide 10, again looking it up on the internet during the meeting, under the income relief, the zero to $44,400, that $44,400 is almost exactly the annual income based solely on Social Security for a couple.

In 2023, the average Social Security payment was $1,840.

Double that, multiply it by 12, and you're at $44,000, about $200 if I remember right.

So anybody, any couple in a household above average Social Security, their income is already going to put them up above.

And I just throw that out for something to think about, you know, where does that really work, fit in here.

So again, if we go to slide number 11b, I definitely agree with that, and I agree with Supervisor Galloway's comments that at least raise it up to the $305,000 which adjusts for inflation to the value in 2007, and that may not be sufficient.

I'm open clearly to consideration of increasing that.

Slide 12, Supervisor Andrews, I really appreciated his comments.

I had not thought about it in those terms, but that definitely is something that you make a decision as you're getting ready to retire, not necessarily appreciating how that might affect you down the road.

For any of the considerations of a program-wide cap, however,

I have some real concerns and I think this follows Supervisor Galloway's comments in terms of people being able to plan for what the program may provide.

And I kind of equate this to people who near the end of their calendar year are trying to figure out how much money can they pull out of retirement

and not have their modified adjusted gross income adversely impact their Medicare payments two years down the road because of an income related Medicare adjustment amount.

If you know what the caps are, then you know how much money you could pull out of retirement and not have to pay more for Medicare.

Well, it's the same thing here.

If people are trying to plan their finances for the year,

They need to be able to have confidence that this is where they can be and still qualify for some type of tax relief so they do not inadvertently end up doing something that for a few dollars knocks them out of coverage in the program, if that makes sense.

I just think people need to have some sort of reliability in the program, whereas if we put a dollar cap

and we have more people apply, you know, and I'm just pulling figures out, the $1500 in tax relief they thought they were going to get is now $400 and that's just totally screwed up their budget.

So, definitely yes on A, definitely yes on B, open to learning more about C, no to D, and I'm very concerned about putting a cap out there.

that would result in an adjustment to what people believe they may be eligible for and especially that catching them off guard.

So those would be my comments.

Any other comments by Supervisor?

Thank you.

I do have a couple to go back and I'm very grateful that so many others

I've already said things about the things I was saving.

The connection to the affordable housing and the NOAs, the naturally occurring houses, the ones built 100 years ago or in the 1950s for $5,000 and are now assessed at $5,000 in taxes every year.

People have said this to me, I built my house in 1955 for $5,000 and now that's my tax bill every year and I cannot

Manage.

So I'm really grateful to hear that.

I think it's very, very important that we recognize this.

So what I have heard is some discussion about what is other communities definitely do not use the net worth at all.

So that's a choice that we also need to consider.

And I think why several citizens have been saying, for simplicity sake, please consider not using the net worth at all.

And I think we're working our way through various processes.

What we don't have today, and I hope you'll be able to bring us back some more information about it, is that other option of just going with the income and what the projected impacts of that might be based upon all the other things that you have learned from the step-by-step things that we've done so far.

Regarding Supervisor Andrews' comment about the pensions, another side of that same issue which has been described to me is

There are people who have pensions and they have a predictable check that's going to be coming.

in addition to my $800 a month Social Security, that's great.

And Social Security, of course, depends on what your salary was all those years.

And so some people have a tiny one, and some people have something you might be able to live on.

But there are very many people, especially self-employed people and people in service jobs their whole lives who are never going to have a Social Security amount that's going to be livable.

But people who have small businesses of their own or worked in a small business and don't have any kind of pension, all they have now to live on besides that Social Security check is the return from whatever assets they have that they were able to put away.

and when I was a teacher I didn't qualify for any kind of retirement so I mean this is our family's an example you have to save as you go along and try to have a little return on that to supplement what you're doing but if people are if the net worth is continually having to be reduced in its base by having to sell off some assets in order to pay the taxes then you're

guaranteeing yourself lower return in which to buy groceries and medicine going forward because that asset pool, your asset is being eaten away.

And that is almost an unfair situation that we're creating between people with pensions and people without.

So I just wanted to share that.

I think it's been addressed in other ways very, very well, but I think it's important to consider

I really appreciate the requests for information we're coming back on about the other approaches to the affordable housing side because that's something that dawned on me during the affordable housing discussion last week that I thought, oh, wait a minute, bingo.

You know, there is another side of this, which is great.

I'm still confused.

And if I can take a minute to try to understand on that slide eight, the people, the $9,000 relief

Yeah, so in the case, the individual who is not knowing the circumstances, and again, we would not be many, I think it's just over 8,000 is where the highest is, there would be individuals there who would qualify based on age or disability,

They're not using their property as a as a business and so they would have an income that would be less than An income less than the forty some thousand at that level and their net worth would be you know the 250,000 or less is it would really depend on that person's property in terms of what is their acreage after the exemption it

It could be that, or it could be a smaller high valued property.

Okay, okay.

And just one last thing, because I was thinking of

Dear older resident, Woodrow Keaton and his wife, Rosie, who lived until they were in their high 90s.

But in 2007, when the assessed values had gone up in Albemarle 15% per year for three years in a row, and they were told by no one who's working at the county now, I guarantee you, because there's a lot of time has passed,

Well, Mr. Keaton, you can just sell that five acres out back and pay your taxes with that.

And he, in my presence, burst into tears at 95 years old to say, that's where our cow lives and our garden is and we couldn't survive at all if we didn't have our garden and our cow.

That made an incredible impact on me and it's why I've been driven all these years to try to do a better job with this.

So I really appreciate everybody's attention to the different categories here, and I really look forward to getting more information from you all.

Any further comments?

I guess I just want to clarify that my comment about the difference in which ways people get their retirement is to indicate that I do have more trouble with worrying about the net worth criteria because someone might have saved that money for their retirement for that purpose.

but I also think that when I say that with respect to be it would be towards raising that up even more or eliminating it which is fraught and I would want to know what the projections are before considering that but that would be in conjunction in my opinion with something like C where they still get tax relief

up to a certain level.

But once, because their property likely in this case is much more than the average value, assessed value, their relief is capped.

And so they will have to come up with the tax payments for that additional value.

But it's just that additional value.

It's not to say that they don't get relief.

They still get relief.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And commenting on what Supervisor Galloway said regarding we just had 17 new eligible people this year, I'm thinking is that anything

to do with our affordable housing program, which is we have many homes that have not been purchased because they go 90 days, 130 days, or 180 days, and no one purchases them because we don't have a ready list.

I'm wondering, my thought is, do people know about this program?

Who knows about this program?

Is there any way that the county,

wanting to put a burden on anyone or anything, but is there any way that someone could, the people who might be eligible are notified because I don't think we have enough people applying and I think a lot of them, they don't know.

I know something goes in the tax bill, but you know what, not everybody reads that.

I mean, they toss it, but it would be

Okay, thank you.

Anything further?

No.

I'm just going to recap just so we walk away to make sure we have clear direction that all of my notes are thorough and accurate that we look at these four options.

There was clear consensus from the board to continue to pursue option A.

Option B was yes at a minimum.

Some board members are exploring farther, but we know B at a minimum is where we would look to start in the next round.

There was a desire from the majority of the board to look at option C in a little more detail with the intent that it's not about reducing the program, but looking at it in conjunction with any other changes.

and where more information would come back.

And then D was not supported by a majority of the board in their comments.

And we have some other specific follow-ups on data we'll bring back.

All right.

Thank you.

So Mr. Richardson is satisfied?

All right.

Thank you.

So with that, we're going to move to the other topic of today's work session on the fire rescue system.

We framed this in the executive summary about workforce stabilization, and this is really about a very specific change in circumstance we have within the fire rescue system.

Chief Eggleston is here to lead through the presentation today, but I'll just generally acknowledge that just for anyone in the public who may be unaware, we have a combination fire rescue and EMS system, meaning that we have our Department of Fire Rescue staff who work in partnership with our key volunteer stations throughout the county.

That system has been changing in recent years.

We've been very successful obtaining three FEMA SAFER grants.

And though we have a strategy in those, we're also thinking beyond that of what the program may look like beyond those FEMA SAFER grants.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the board.

I'm Dan Eggleston, Chief of Fire Rescue.

And with me today in the audience is Deputy Chief David Puckett, our Operations Chief.

We're excited to be here today to share with you our strategic outlook and needs assessment for Albemarle County Department of Fire Rescue.

Dan, I'll interrupt for one second, and I'll second what the Chief just said, Board, and I appreciate, Dan, very much you stating that.

We're on the eve of the budget, and this Board knows that very well, because this Board's been working and doing this for a while, and you understand the budget process and what we're getting ready to go into.

But I want to remind this Board, and I appreciate the Board, several years ago saying,

We know the landscape has changed with volunteerism in our country and it continues to and our community works very diligently to appreciate volunteerism and to, and without that level of volunteerism over the decades, I can't imagine

where the county would be today.

It's amazing the level of commitment that our people have in this community in public safety but across other areas as well.

With that being said, I don't want the board to mistake this as an early budget discussion ahead of knowing where our revenues are and ahead of knowing where our competing needs are across all of the areas of our strategic plan and all departments with our operational needs.

This board several years ago asked for a long-range plan.

Please, let's look at a long-range plan for what we think over the next five years that we could be facing.

And I applaud Dan and his team for those efforts.

But I just wanted to reiterate that because we're so close to the budget process.

I didn't want the board to mistake this that we're already diving in.

So thank you, board.

Thank you, Jeff.

I appreciate that.

So in terms of what we'll be talking about today, we'll begin with an overview of our current operations and strategic direction.

will then examine our recent improvements in the challenges that lie ahead in terms of our service delivery.

And then we'll lay out various strategic options available to consider as we refine our multi-year financial plan.

And at this stage, the board's input and direction are crucial to ensure that we're well prepared for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Go to the next slide.

In terms of our fire rescue planning process, it really revolves around four key components, reading from left to right.

I'll cover these in more detail later in the presentation, but I'll give you a quick overview of what they mean.

We begin by ensuring our objectives are in lockstep with the county's strategic plan, which sets the direction for our operational priorities.

Our next step involved a thorough assessment of our service performance against their standards of cover, which is a board-adopted plan that's instrumental in defining the scope and level of the services we provide.

Additionally, we consistently track our service demands to understand how it influences our capacity to respond to our residents' need.

And then finally, and then a critical component of our planning process is the workforce stabilization.

Given our department's reliance on volunteer personnel, a decline in their numbers has a direct and adverse effect on our service capabilities.

This information and aggregate helps us to develop a multi-year financial plan

which to us is really an integral part of our planning process, enables us to project and strategize for the long term rather than on an annual basis.

And we believe this methodology has guided our planning for the last several years and we really look forward to engaging in conversation with you all today about this.

As I mentioned in the first part of our planning process, our connection with the county's strategic plan is very important and we play a role in helping the county really achieve many of those strategic goals.

We're not just putting out fires and treating patients, we're really focused on long-term strategic priorities of the county to help ensure a safe and healthy community.

We're particularly focused on goals one, two, and six.

In terms of our Goal 1, that's our primary objective, and it's really to achieve a safe and healthy community.

For Goal 2, we view this as an investment in prevention and mitigation services to help build a resilient community, highlighting our roles of the community risk reduction and emergency management divisions within fire rescue.

They really help to move the ball in this area.

In terms of Goal 6, our firefighter and EMS providers, both career and volunteer,

interact with our residents on a daily basis.

So it remains vital that we recruit and retain the very best because they are the face of Albemarle County.

So if we move to the standards of cover slide, back in June of 2019, I know some of you probably may remember this, the board approved our standards of cover, which is a comprehensive strategy that's designed and details our approach to respond to and mitigate emergencies.

This plan encompasses a thorough risk assessment, the allocation of resources, defined objectives for response times, and a method for evaluating our performance.

Within this framework, we've established distinct response time goals tailored for both urban and rural areas.

Our urban response time standard of 8 minutes 90% of the time is in alignment with other like-sized communities.

It's worth noting that our rural area response time standard, when we benchmark it,

against other national standards in similar sized communities are notably longer.

Later on in the presentation, we'll talk about our ability to meet these performance standards that we've laid out earlier, and I'll talk some more detail about that.

In fact, I think Chief Puckett's going to be mentioning that.

So in terms of what our main challenges are as we're facing and meeting our service demands for the community,

Well, we've seen a significant increase in calls for service.

In fact, we've seen a 21% increase since 2020, and mainly that's driven by the urbanization of our county and aging population.

One thing to keep in mind, this increase is really across the board for both fire and EMS emergencies.

At first, we thought that growth was mainly related to EMS, but it's across the board, which really relates to the density and the urbanization of our communities.

Another thing that we're seeing is unfunded state and federal mandates, which I know is something that's very close to you all in terms of attention, especially related to EMS, are really challenging our ability to maintain.

For example, we expect to be impacted by a DEA regulation that regulates the management of narcotics.

This regulation will likely cause us to bring someone on board just to manage this program itself.

So that's an idea that came with no federal money to outside it.

It's just a decision that was made that's going to impact not only us, but really every EMS agency across the state.

We're also dealing with supporting firefighters in the field.

You know, with adding 69 operational personnel since 2020 and the need to evaluate our administration's training staff to support our career and volunteer members are really important.

We want to make sure that we can meet our commitment to ongoing training and initial training that's needed every day by our volunteer and career personnel.

In terms of trends related to call for service, one thing that we see is an increase in human service type calls like mental health,

residents without proper health cares and those suffering from addiction and social isolation.

In fact, I just heard today at our ECC regional meeting that the number of suicide-related calls today almost match a number of cardiac arrest calls.

So that's something that all of us, the county, the city, and the university are keeping a close eye on.

I'm really happy to report that our hearts team is up and running.

They're slightly overwhelmed right now, but this is a great example of how prevention efforts can really help us in the long run.

And I think all these factors, in essence, are really putting a strain on our capacity and highlighting the need to make sure that we pay attention and invest in our resources.

Our next slide really shifts focus more towards workforce stabilization, and this is really a critical issue impacting fire and EMS services.

Let's start by the pressing challenge of the decline of our volunteer fire and EMS personnel.

It's a national trend that's concerning not just for us, but for the safety of our community.

You know, volunteers, not only in Albemarle, but really across the country have been the backbone of fire and EMS service delivery for so many years, and their decline is hitting as hard as at the current time during evenings and weekends.

It's really important to note that this decline in volunteers is not consistent across

the county.

There's some of our volunteer stations remain very strong and in fact getting stronger by the year but others are grappling with reduced volunteer numbers.

So this difference is a crucial aspect of our challenge and we must consider it as we explore potential solutions.

One thing I also wanted to talk about was the deployment of career firefighters really is our best option at this point to address the decline in volunteers but the problem is it's not an immediate solution.

We've made meaningful strides to diversify our department by recruiting those interested in the fire service But but lack the training and experience to come over as an experienced firefighter So with that in mind it takes us still about 24 months to fully deploy career firefighters Which means that we need to plan well in advance to ensure no gaps in services that exist So this long lead time presents a really unique challenge for us as we plan for volunteer staffing supplements when we get

notification from a volunteer department that they need help, we must anticipate that need long before the possible need exists.

One other thing is in 2023 alone we had over 100 instances of mandatory overtime.

This is a concept that we used and it's a short-term solution to ensure that we have consistent and reliable coverage.

But we must pay attention to this and realize that

The abuse of that and overuse of mandatory overtime really take a toll on our physical, mental, and emotional well-being of our staff.

So we've got to be really careful and we watch that very closely.

And then the strain on our career staff and lack of volunteers makes our challenges even harder.

Some of the communities are already seeing service reductions because of this and I'll give you an example that

Some of our rule stations, when we're really short on daily career staff, we'll pull that station down to two people and only staff an ambulance at that rule station.

While there's still a presence there, it's no fire protection, it's just EMS.

The same is true sometimes with our volunteer partners, too, because of volunteer staffing during nights and weekends.

If they don't have staff, then that station is taken out of service on a temporary basis.

That's something we try to manage on a daily basis.

But it does have an impact on our ability to deliver services.

So you're probably asking, how do we plan for supplemental career staff effectively?

It's really about foresight and strategic investment.

We've got to anticipate, as I mentioned, the need for those staffing needs long in advance.

And that's really one reason that drove us into this long-term planning process, is try to predict and plan for those type of situations.

Good afternoon.

So I'll walk through this next slide.

It illustrates for the board the investments since 2020 that we've made in Fire Rescue.

It's important to note that the dates are based off when the service was implemented, not necessarily when the funding was approved.

So in 2020, we had five FTEs to provide daytime staffing at Crozet Fire, and we also put an ambulance at Stony Point Fire Department.

The ambulance was just a resource, the existing staff there, cross staffed engine and ambulance to provide additional service to that community.

In 2021, we made several enhancements, including a fire engine staffing at Pantops.

We transitioned ambulances at Pantops and Ivy to 24-7 staffing.

Previously, they were only daylight Monday through Friday.

And then much like Stony Point, we added an ambulance to the East Rivanna station, which allowed our existing staff to cross staff the ambulance and engine and provide additional service to that area.

And we also added a Second Battalion Chief on 24-7 to provide additional supervisory coverage.

2023, we transitioned, or we put staff in North Garden daytime and added a fire engine and an ambulance.

and then we also, through a SAFER grant, added additional personnel specifically to help reduce some of the service reductions we were seeing in the rural stations.

And finally, we transitioned that Pantops fire engine to 24-7.

As we look ahead to 2025, the board's aware we had a SAFER grant that provides personnel to add a ladder company to the Monticello Station as well as a 24-7 fire engine to the Scottsville Station, Station 17, the formerly Scottsville Rescue.

So of these 69 positions, 50 were grant funded for the first three years, which equates to approximately $11 million in savings to the county.

So considering the workforce challenges and increase in call demand the Chief described earlier, the Board's investments have largely gone toward maintaining service levels.

That being said, I'm happy to share information about some of the improvements that we've been able to achieve over the last few years.

First, I want to thank the board for your investments in the Volunteer Reimbursement Program, which helps make volunteering costs neutral, as well as funding the Public Safety Pay Scale to maintain market competitiveness.

FireRescue will be fully staffed when our recruit school starts in January, and employee turnover in 2023 was the lowest it's been since we started recording it in 2016.

As a result, over the last quarter, we've seen a decrease in mandatory overtime,

and a decrease in service reductions due to career staff shortages, and we're optimistic that trend will continue into 2024.

We were also able to successfully transition to a no-cost mutual aid agreement with the City of Charlottesville.

The Board's investment in county resources allowed us to reach a more balanced model that is mutually beneficial.

From a service standpoint, we've seen a 10% reduction in our ambulance response times county-wide.

This is made possible by transitioning to urban ambulances 24-7 staffing and adding ambulances to rural volunteer stations where existing career staff can crawl staff and ambulance and fire engine.

Finally, there's also been an 8% reduction in fire engine response times as a result of adding staffing to Crozet, Pantops, and North Garden.

It is important to note, though, that communities across Albemarle don't experience these improvements the same.

As an example, after adding career staff and an ambulance to the North Garden station,

That community experienced a 25% reduction in ambulance response times Monday through Friday 6 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

But other areas, like the Route 29 and Rio Road area, haven't seen any improvements in ambulance response times due to the high call demand and limited resources.

So despite our investments, the rural area, we're largely meeting our response time standards, but we continue to fall short of meeting them in the urban areas.

Okay, thank you Chief Puck, I appreciate that.

So, for a moment, let's look at what options we have to go forward.

Each option has its own several implications in our services to the community, so I just want to sort of walk through some of those and then I can talk about what they mean in terms of an impact.

The first option is to really re-evaluate our response models and how we react to this.

We could evaluate and optimize the county's emergency response strategies to really focus on the distribution of assets and efforts to address the most critical needs.

This could include prioritizing resources to the areas with highest demand or re-evaluating our response time standards.

We've been down this road to some degree before, but I think it's worth noting that components of this perhaps could be something that we'd want to discuss.

For example, could we perhaps defer a request from a volunteer station that needs staffing?

We haven't done that before.

Most of the time when they come forward and ask for help, it's greatly needed.

But again, it's just an option I put on the table for consideration, because we do have a lot of competing needs, and I certainly appreciate that.

Our second option is to strive to maintain a current service level.

And this is where it would mean really increasing our staff at volunteer stations as their numbers decline and then they request assistance, we add more personnel just to compensate for that loss.

And on occasions, and I'll talk about some of this later on, adding some staff in cases of demand.

So this is all about just maintaining what we have today, but even with the drop-off in volunteers, that's going to require more of an investment.

And then the third option is to maintain current service levels and include prevention and resiliency programs.

This option, I want to emphasize, involves not only maintaining our current service level, but also implementing prevention and resiliency programs that really have a long-term impact on our community.

These programs are key because they address the needs of our most vulnerable populations more effectively.

An important point, really, quite frankly, it's by focusing prevention and mitigation efforts, we're not just getting the right services to the right people, but we're also looking at long-term cost avoidance.

These strategies could significantly reduce the need for 911 service in the future for low-acuity calls.

Right now, about 20% of our calls are low-acuity EMS calls, so there could perhaps be a deferral to a much more proactive, preventative-type program that's a lot less costly.

than an ambulance that's staffed 24-7.

This is a trend that's coming about very quickly in the fire service and I think this is something we should explore.

It's about being proactive rather than reactive and long-term I think it's a right kind of service.

But each of these options have merits and challenges and our goal is to really try to reach the best decision for the community's well-being and safety.

So looking at

What options that we really have here in terms of the five-year FTE forecast, I'd like to present you with really option two and three because one is so variable right now in terms of what the impact may be.

So turning to our five-year forecast, FTE forecast for option two, maintaining services, our goal there is just really to maintain what the community relies upon.

We're looking in this model of 52 FTEs over a five-year period to address this critical factor.

And let me just cover quickly the driving factors that we're assuming in this model is that we do have decline in volunteer numbers, which is pushing us towards a 24 career staff model at some volunteer stations, not all.

So we need to ensure that we're prepared for that and to maintain reliable service.

But also we're seeing a rise in demand for specialty training and administrative staff to meet our service needs and regulatory requirements, especially those related to the pharmaceutical regulations I mentioned before.

One other thing, too, is the high volume of emergency calls, especially at our Medic 18, which is on Burkemar Road, is putting a significant burden on our system.

This specific unit handles about 3,000 calls a year, and nearly one-third of the time they have more than one emergency happening at the same time in their area.

So that pulls additional units out of their area to answer.

So this situation has an impact really system-wide.

and it's vital that we strengthen our team to ensure we can continue to provide timely and effective responses to these emergencies while avoiding strain on our system.

And then in the last prevention and mitigation goals, in addition to the 52 domain services, we're proposing perhaps if this option is something the board wants to discover, non-additional FTEs that really again provides us right service to the right people.

And this is integrating our human services and mobile integrated healthcare together.

This is something that we've already done now with the HEARTS team.

We're seeing some good results on that.

I think there's a large overlap between our human services initiatives and what fire risk you can bring to the table in terms of doing some more preventative mitigation type efforts.

So we think this is a great asset, again, to help prevent those calls from happening in the first place, but also providing that critical resource to the vulnerable population.

Community outreach is another key component.

It's about building these relationships and educating our residents to be more resilient, providing them the resources.

And then finally, with urban area growth, with mid-rise buildings, fire protection engineering is becoming more critical.

It's not just about a response, about really designing our urban spaces to be safe from the onset.

So really in conclusion, we're not just expanding our team, we're trying to strategically enhance our capabilities to ensure that we can provide consistent and reliable service.

Before I open it up for any questions or comments, I do want to acknowledge the great support that Fire Rescue has received, not only from the County Executive's Office, but from our CFO,

Jacob Sumner and his staff, and Christy Shifflet with the COO.

This has been really a true team effort, and I know, Chair Price, you mentioned about team in your opening remarks today, and I couldn't agree 100 percent more.

I've been here 21 years.

I've never felt this amount of teamwork more than I am right now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief Puckett, as well.

Yes, I really appreciate this conversation now.

We've seen this coming for a long time, I think.

I just have a question, and I don't want this to be taken the wrong way by the community, but we're talking about urban areas here.

OK.

Both urban and rural.

It's basically the residents who don't have adequate access to health care or may be challenged in other ways in terms of not having access to the care that they need.

A lot of times we're the last resort.

We're called for a wide range of challenges.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

Because I know there are a number of calls to help people get out of bed or up off the floor.

And that's what you're speaking to, those types of calls.

Yeah, and sometimes people just don't have access to health care.

So a lot of times we're used as a

And I'm going to go back to my first comment.

I don't want to take us down into a swirl, but we're reviewing the comp plan right now.

And it says throughout the comp plan,

If you live in the rural area, do not expect the same service that you would receive if you choose to live in the urban area.

And I think we just need to be aware of that, because as we're going through and updating our comp plan, that's a decision and a policy.

And I just want to make sure that our comp plan matches what we're actually doing.

It does, and we had a lot of discussion

during the development of our standards of cover about the rural area response times.

And right now, the response time is 20 minutes, which I mentioned in my comments is well outside of what we see in other communities.

And in fact, our performance right now, we're meeting just barely the rural area response time in terms of the 20 minute standard.

We're not meeting it at all in the urban area.

So that's another thing to grapple with is like, OK, we

So that's a problem.

And that's why I'm mentioning it and I think it's good timing in a way as we're going through and looking at updating the comp plan, but we have to have a match on what we say or what we say to people to expect and what they're actually receiving.

I just put it on the table.

Good, thank you.

I appreciate that comment.

Well, I went through one time and underlined in the comp plan all the references to rural and urban probably three or four years ago and their significant number of, you know, so we just need to make sure we're working towards matching that up.

Thank you very much.

I was just finishing my note here.

I have a couple of questions just to make sure I understand correctly but thank you again for all of this.

It's been a long journey and you're really doing so well to bring together so many different concerns and get so many good solutions.

So I've taken good notes on all the projected needs going forward and you mentioned needing support for training and I do know anecdotally that

you need people, enough staff to be able to then release the people who are waiting.

So I know this is many different of volunteer agencies have that problem.

It's a wonderful problem to have, to have 12 new EMT people dying to be released and wanting to get to work.

So I understand that completely.

And I appreciate the

variability among the stations and one station can have a really hard year one year and then come back the next year and to me a really important goal is when the station is finally saying we're doing really great we've made the right connections we have all these people here who want to go to work

When we don't have enough places for them to sit down, much less sleep or do any kind of homework, then they give up and go away.

And this is now, first, I'll just use Earliesville as an example.

Their first do is all the way from Ivy Farms all the way to 29, you know, around to the mountains where it is way more than 21 minutes to get to Boonesville, even if the engine is, the house is fully staffed.

But they have

five years ago had a big boost of people from NGIC who came and wanted to go and they, with the new ambulance there that the station had brought in, and they vanished because they just couldn't manage the fact that there was no place to go.

So while I know that there are some projects that are going along, I hope that there will be also continual, and Andy's still here, getting answers to how

We separate from a CIP point of view.

When we have CIP projects that will get facilities to support the volunteers who can actually, those rural people do support themselves and be able to supply the services themselves that

without having to bring in paid staff that we need to do the bricks and mortar side to make that happen so we don't lose another cohort of people from the station or other ones who are ready to go and just can't get in the door.

You mentioned several times station 8, is there

I remember that there are now two Angos is there, but we need more.

That was getting the first one there.

the concurrency of calls is a really big problem if you're right there in the urban area because if they had somebody in the house it'd be a pretty quick response time, you know, probably five minutes.

So is that something in your plan that you're going to get to later on in the presentation?

We plan to submit some.

I know we're not supposed to go there, but this is where my brain is going.

I brought extra ambulance in there.

and so I'm looking forward to what your suggestions are as far as I don't really understand what you mean by dispersed resources.

What do we do about that?

So I guess from the standards of cover situation it's where the full-time staff is going.

I think David mentioned that.

There were fewer incidents of pulling the day staff, for example.

So I'd love to know sort of more about how successful that's been with the number of staff whom you have gotten in the door and released to be able to keep those things going.

And I think that our rural residents really try very hard to be independent.

They really do and not require, I mean, as many have said, you know,

Reducing speeding is the number one thing ever because of that impact on all of their lives on the country roads, et cetera.

And that's an ACPD dilemma because it's so hard to achieve.

But it's a long wait.

I remember when my hay truck was on fire.

It was the longest four minutes in my life.

But that was lucky because they got there so fast.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Captain, Chief Eggleston, excuse me.

I'm really concerned, and I don't know the answer, and I don't know how you could, what's going to happen, but when you talk about the long-term cost avoidance through implementation of prevention strategies, and you mentioned about people not having health care, you mentioned about people

Maybe there's no one else around and somebody falls.

So what they do is they call, first thing they do is call 911 because maybe it's an elderly couple and somebody can't help the other person up.

So what do you do?

I'm wondering if there's any talk about discussing it with our healthcare systems.

You came up with the HEARTS program, which is a wonderful program, but with the healthcare system and independent facilities, I'm wondering whether or not those senior living places

Is the first thing they do call 911 or are there staff there that can actually assist people without having to call 911 if there's a fall or something like that?

Educating maybe the independent living facilities.

I know on Pantops we have the most.

Well, I think, and Chief Palicia is working on this as we speak, but it's going to require a strong partnership with Fire Rescue, our Human Services Division here within the county, Public Health, and our university and Sentara Health facilities, too.

I mean, for instance, she's already working on perhaps a partnership with UVA that we could take advantage of telemedicine.

You know, that's a good example of preventative medicine where we could connect that person with a physician or a personal professional so that they could get care.

So it's about really getting, as I mentioned, getting those right services to the right person because the default right now is 911 and that's such a mismatch of services.

Right.

Exactly.

Mainly in the urban area right now, we're not meeting them at all and that's even after trying to optimize things through dispatch protocols as much as we can.

We've gotten to the point with that increase in number of calls where the system gets maxed out quite a bit.

and it's quite frankly sometimes a domino effect.

All right, those are all my questions.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you for this presentation and thank you for what I think is an improved service in the North Garden service area and the response times in the rural area, at least that part of the county.

Very appreciative.

And I think that what you're suggesting here, my understanding is that while we know the locations of our rural assets, it's a big

and getting there is not trivial because it can be a long way.

But in the urban developed areas it's not so much a question of can we get there, it's who could we send there because they're already busy with something else.

Thank you.

I don't mean any pointed questions to be critical of any staff or department area, but I think some of this needs to have a little bit more frank conversation.

Let me ask this just a basic question first.

It usually is a 12-hour holdover.

So it's 12 times 100?

Yes, in most cases, for instance, if somebody were to call out sick and we have no one else to work in that spot, we'll tell somebody who's getting ready to leave work that day, you've got to stay for another 12 hours until we can get somebody else in.

It really is instances.

It could be longer than that.

Some of that could be more than just to hold.

Is it mostly holdovers, David?

So the conversation has been building about the urban area and specifically Rio 29 was called out and limited resources.

So it sounds like staffing, but it sounds like it's more than just staffing out on a call than the

the capital needs are not there.

Now we put Pantops online to help with that, but it doesn't sound like that's getting the job done.

I think we're fine in terms of facilities.

We didn't need another ambulance at that Burke Marr station is what we need to help answer those calls.

Because what happens in those concurrent situations, it pulls in that Pantops and Ivy stations to answer.

So when they're in, then it affects the Pantops and Ivy areas as well.

You know, we've gotten as most of the calls we can out of that ambulance, about 3,000.

So I guess my question, or where my thinking is going, is similar to what we're trying to do with our workforce stabilization and income.

We're not trying to catch up, we're trying to get ahead of it.

So you say we need one, but is that to catch up?

Or how do we get ahead of it?

We probably need two then.

If you're telling me we need one, my guess is you need two at a minimum.

Well, I am, but I'm trying to be very prudent with the resources, well, knowing that we have other competing needs within the county.

So I think that would catch us up.

I think it's a good start to then re-evaluate after that resource is added.

Would I like more than that?

And I appreciate that very much, but we also are telling folks what the response times are and what they should expect, and if we can't deliver, then we need to alter what the expectation is.

So are we going to change our expectation for response times, or are we going to equip the departments as necessary?

to meet the response time.

And that's a question we have to debate with.

So the preventative care piece, I mean, I get all of it, the low acuity calls.

But frankly, I remember Marta back before I even joined this board over six years ago sitting down and telling me that this was a problem.

So who's holding the football in this issue?

I mean, and I'm not, I don't necessarily, I'm not even pointing this to you, Chief.

I mean, Mr. Richardson, I'd even pull into the conversation.

And I'm not being critical of anybody in the staff.

It's just a matter of this has been something that has often come up year over year.

I don't know if it's us.

I don't know who's supposed to be going, we're going to take this bull by the horns and figure out what the solutions are.

and work with the partners and do all of that.

All the departments are completely overworked.

This is very complex and is not an easy answer.

So again, this is not meant to be critical.

Well, I'd love to give you my insight on that.

I think it's wonderful that we have now established a human services division within the county.

And with Kaki, who's wonderful to work with, we're already talking with her what that looks like.

And that's going to expand, as I mentioned, out to perhaps our public health agencies and other community agencies to really make this a community event.

So I would say, and I don't want to get too far over my skis here, that this is a human services fire rescue endeavor that we have a vested interest in because this will help to manage our calls.

That's the way I see it.

If somebody falls and they don't have a family member or a neighbor to check on them or a private service where they push the button, who else are they going to call?

Well, I get that, but who's the alternative?

What I'm hearing is that we need alternatives to 911, but that's what I'm not understanding.

Okay, in those situations, who's it going to be?

and it'd have to be a similar staffing, right?

It's people, it's vehicles, and it's the time on hand and then the coordinating of that and dispatch and all of that.

So I would imagine there are some communities that have these type of networks in place that we can look to and if it's a budgetary item that we have to take on or working in partnership.

I guess it's just, I go back to my original question that

This is a conversation that has been around for a bit.

I think we just need to work together to identify who's going to be responsible for making this happen and put the strategic plan in place to make it happen.

Because to free up the resources, the staffing and the funds to get at what these other issues are, this sounds like it's at least a way to do some cost avoidance to help us get there.

So it seems like a worthy

a bit of time and investment to try to figure out, but I don't know who to look to.

You know, it's not like, you know, if you need, you know, it's not as easy as saying, well, I just need 10 more people or I need one more engine or one more ambulance.

Well, in essence, that's part of the discussion today and guidance that I need.

If the board is interested for us to pursue the mitigation and prevention efforts, then we could come back in conjunction with Human Services, perhaps, and let you know what that would look like in the future.

That's what we're prepared to do because, again, we're doing it to try to curtail calls in the future and make sure that the right people can get the right service.

but there's other benefits in there too.

Well I would endorse that.

I mean I think somebody's got to, we have to get after it.

Ultimately it could free up and help your response time, it could help the limited resources that we're hearing, etc.

Is there any, or well, what is the impact, we deal with transportation issues all the time, traffic, you know, moving of people around.

In the urban area there can be problems just going to work, play, etc.

They have some impact.

I will say that we've got great support from VDOT in terms of our traffic preemption devices that allows us to turn the light screen and get through there.

So that helps to reduce quite a bit.

So I would say on most occasions it has minimal impact.

When we looked at our standards of cover and the distribution of our fixed resources, the stations,

If they're staffed, inadequate staffing, we should be able to meet our response time standards, which was a good sign.

That means we don't have to build any stations at this moment.

Well, that's good to hear.

But I mean, the urban area is not getting any smaller.

We are certainly being pressed to do more in terms of the density within the development areas when we bring on for housing and other purposes and what our strategy is there.

Also with the coming purchase of a huge property of land for economic development, the development of North Point, Rivanna Futures, so outside of just so many housing units coming on,

and the employment centers that are coming on.

I mean, I guess we need to be having those conversations now to get ahead of when those things are implemented or in place so that we're not finding ourselves really behind the eight ball once all that is online.

I mean, you know that.

I'm not saying anything you don't know.

But that's why I bring up the whole other station piece.

Like at some point, just like you need, at some point you need a school, at some point you need to add.

Yeah, which I think is the reason we try to do this five-year forecast, just to anticipate those needs in the out year.

I will say that these numbers too could fluctuate quite a bit.

This is our best guess.

A lot of it depends on, again, our volunteer partners and how confident they are in terms of their forecasting as well.

So I'll just say that as a caveat to these numbers.

It's possible.

Some of the hot spots we're looking at now, Fifth Street, just because of the road network.

We'd love FDOT to have a road connector solution for us there.

That might help, but that's a hot spot.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

If you could go to slide 20, the standards of cover.

So if I understood your comments, without regard to the percent of time that we're actually meeting the objectives, the 21 minute rural area response time is outside of what comparably sized populated counties are able to achieve.

I think it's a good question.

I don't really have an answer for you right now.

I will tell you that it should be lower.

We're barely meeting that now, so all we would end up doing is just, again, raising expectations.

But I think it's something we need to look at.

I can tell you that I've been before the rural area community and have talked about this and they don't like it.

And you all hear it.

I pay the same taxes I do in the urban area.

Why do I get less service?

Well, that really wasn't my point, that there's a difference between development and rural.

I mean, it takes five minutes to drive down the gravel road to my house.

I'm not expecting an eight minute response time.

My comment was that the 21 minute rural area response time, as I understand it, is too long anyway.

So the first question is, what do we believe would be

a reasonable response time for the rural area.

Similarly, what do we believe is the reasonable response time for the development area?

Once we know that, then we can start to calculate how many additional units of equipment are needed to try and meet that based upon the demand call number, the volume frequency now.

That then allows to calculate into a budget

the cost of the additional equipment as well as the cost of the additional people and then maybe we can meet you know that standard within a reasonable time so i would say that would be the first thing we need to figure what should be the response times what additional equipment and people we need to meet that if you go to slide number twenty five which is the options for consideration

As I understand it, I would add a fourth one here.

The first one, re-evaluate your response models, we should always be evaluating, re-evaluating.

So that's sort of, I'd say, a no-brainer.

And if we go to slide 27, which shows options two and three together, I think option three, at a minimum, needs to be pursued, but with the expectation that over time,

Option two also needs to because the volunteer numbers are going down, population's increasing, we know we've got to increase our response times.

So I don't know whether the nine FTEs or the 52 FTEs is what the numbers are going to be, but clearly that needs to be there.

And then the fourth option really is we need to add the additional equipment, which I referenced back to the first one.

and so I would say all of that needs to be taken into consideration as you work towards what the budget proposal will be and if 69 FTEs that we've been able to achieve through the SAFER grants was $11 million you can do the math and figure if it's 9 plus 52 or if the 9 is within the 52

We're probably looking by then at an additional $10 million at least for personnel, plus whatever the cost for the equipment, plus whatever the cost for the capital plan would be for additional buildings, facilities that have to be built down the road.

Okay, thank you.

In terms of your question about the

Rule Air Response Times.

What I would like to do is gather the information and come back to the board with perhaps a recommendation because I think it would be good to look at what other comparable size counties do in terms of air response standards.

Our challenge, of course, is such a large area.

No, and I appreciate that and for our community who has experienced increasing rising property values which even without an increase in the tax rate has resulted in increased tax bills we have major expenses that we're facing and each time they come and say lower our taxes it's what do you want to cut?

Do you want to cut the ambulance?

Do you want to cut the fire trucks?

Do you want to cut police?

Do you want to cut schools?

Do you want to cut parks?

I mean, all of these things cost money, we just have to be good stewards of it.

Yes, thank you.

Because I forgot to report properly.

I had so many questions last time.

So yes, I look forward to a joint presentation with HSS about how to do this better.

On the news the other day, NPR, in some area they were using nurse triages as part of their 911, which may be what you were referring to, but I'd love to

Hopefully you already know about that.

Question to answer another time, are increased highway accidents part of this demand issue that we're seeing?

Because the driving behavior that we are seeing everywhere is crazy.

It is.

It is driving quite a bit, especially those rural roads are now used as highway.

The joke in North Garden is Interstate 29.

Very high speed, two lane, four lane road.

Okay, and so definitely I would be all for option three and option two, of course, goes with it.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

I was just going to say what Donna was getting at was exactly what I was talking about.

Yes, exactly.

Great.

And one other quick clarification.

We talk about our SAFER grants, which I understand are FEMA grants, the federal government grants.

I'm reading right now in the Richmond Times Dispatch about how the state firefighting EMS grants, that money is not there now.

and their communities that have taken those grants and there's no money to fulfill those grants.

No, we get a stipend from the state every year through the Department of Fire programs.

It's very minimal.

All right, and my information is only this shallow because it's just what I've read in the Richmond Times, but I just wanted to make sure that we weren't at risk with state grants.

That's all.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, Board, thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right, Board, we have succeeded in running about a half hour beyond what we hope to be, so if we could go ahead and take a break, I would ask we try to get back at maybe 10 till 4 to try and catch up a little bit on our time.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome back.

I appreciate everyone coming back in timely fashion.

We can now move on to item number 10, a presentation on the fiscal year 2023 annual comprehensive financial report audit results, which actually ends up becoming an action item.

So good afternoon, Ms.

Hi, good afternoon.

Thank you for this opportunity.

Great.

Thank you all.

Thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you, Chair Price.

Good afternoon.

I'm Shenandra Usher, the Assistant CFO for Operations in the Department of Finance and Budget.

Today I'm here to present our Fiscal Year 23 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report and Audit Results.

Could you speak up a little?

So we'll start with our general fund revenues.

As you'll see on this slide, we have a lot of positive variances for what we budgeted for and what our actual revenues that we collected were.

Our current real estate and personal property taxes are projected at about $246 million.

That's $4.5 million, or 1.9%.

above the revised budget.

This is primarily due to the net impact of the calendar year 23 real estate assessment being greater than the projected calendar year 23 reassessment in the fiscal year 23's revised budget.

So technically, we've collected more than what we projected we collect for calendar year 23.

The variance also includes actual collection rates and other adjustments in values and buildings.

Business driven taxes are projected at $19.4 million.

This is about $900,000 or 5.4% above the revised budget.

This is primarily due to increased collections for business, professional, and occupational licenses, which is primarily based on businesses' gross receipts in calendar year 22.

This trend increases

in business professional and occupational licenses is based primarily on a business's gross receipt and the prior calendar year.

We saw a decline in fiscal year 21 due to the pandemic during calendar year 20.

The recovery in calendar year 21 translated to much stronger revenues in fiscal year 22.

As economic activity such as consumer spending and development activity increased during that time, that trend has also continued into fiscal year 23.

Consumer driven taxes are projected at the end of the year to be around $53.2 million.

This is 3.4% or $1.7 million above the revised budget.

The primary reason for this is due to year-end trends in sales and transient occupancy taxes.

The revenue exceeded projected increases in the revised budget due to continued strong growth at a slightly higher rate compared to recent history.

Other local revenues are projected to end the year at $15.7 million, which is $2.3 million, or 17.3% above the revised budget.

Are the slides advancing?

We're still on the first slide.

I'm trying to find the numbers.

So the way it's presented on the slide deck is how it's presented in our financial report, our annual comprehensive financial report.

But the way I'm reporting it is based on what we budgeted to our actual.

So it's more so based on the revenue streams, revenue sources from our budget document, because that's typically how

We report our revenues in this form for the board.

Does that make sense?

So it's a combination of all the things you see listed there, but the grand total is going to be that variance of $15.3 million.

Is that helpful?

So our state revenues are projected to end the year at $28.3 million, which is about $900,000 or 3.2% below the revised budget.

This is primarily due to revenues not received

due to corresponding preliminary actual expenditures in the Department of Social Services and the Clerk of the Circuit Court.

Federal revenues are projected at $8 million.

This is about $300,000 or 3.6% below the revised budget.

This is primarily due to revenues not received during corresponding preliminary actual expenditures in the Department of Social Services.

So it's mainly a timing issue.

We have the expenditures in one fiscal year.

We're getting the reimbursements in a different fiscal year.

Advancing to our expenditures.

As you can see, the figures for our revised budget, and then our actual expenditures for fiscal year 23, and then those variances.

So the total expenditure variance is $24.4 million.

The general overall

The reason for the larger variances are $10.1 million in operating costs for items that are anticipated to be reappropriated from fiscal year 23 to fiscal year 24 pending review and approval.

Then we have $1.8 million in departmental salary and benefit savings, primarily due to employee turnover and vacant positions.

There's $9.6 million in school reserve funding in our education category.

There's $895,000 in Department of Social Services and federal programs that are largely reimbursed by related revenue.

And then there's $807,000 in savings from community partner agencies and other one-time programmatic savings.

So if we look at this by functional department, which is listed on the slide, I'll

I'll give you guys specific reasons for the larger variances on this slide.

So for the General Government Administration, there's a $7.2 million variance.

This is a combination of salary, savings, and reserves that have now been reappropriated for fiscal year 24.

For health and welfare,

The $2.2 million variance, this is a combination of Department of Social Services savings and ARPA reserve programs not fully expended in fiscal year 23, but have been reappropriated for fiscal year 24.

For our education fund at $9.6 million, this is related to how we account for our school reserve fund.

For community development, $1.8 million in expenditure variance.

salary and benefits savings and funding to the strategic plan initiatives such as AC44 and forum code work that have been reappropriated into the fiscal year 24's budget and then for our contingencies at 1 million dollars unused climate control pool reserve funding reserved for contingency funds and early retirement funds many of which have also been reappropriated into fiscal year 24

So that brings us to our net change in fund balance.

As we can see, our revenues exceeded our expenditures for fiscal year 23 by $39.7 million.

When we account for our transfers in and out, this gives us our net change in fund balance figure, which is $17 million.

To give you context around what's in our transfers in, it's related to transfers from our ARPA reserve, transfers from the tourism fund, transfers from water resources, and a few other minor transfers.

The variance is related to the fact that the budgeted use of fund balance also appears in the figure shown.

Our transfers out is mainly made up of ongoing transfers to capital, debt service, the water resources fund, the school reserve fund, and a one-time transfer to the housing fund.

The variance is related to the transfer to the school reserve fund, which if we account for our revenues exceeding our expenditures in $39.7 million and add our net change in fund balance, which is $17 million,

And then add our net change in fund balance of $17 million to our beginning fund balance, which is $74.2 million, we end the year with a fund balance of $91.3 million.

So in our fund balance, there are three different categories that have been defined by GASB.

They are non-spendable, committed, and unassigned.

In non-spendable, this is the balance of our inventory, our prepaids, and our net lease receivables.

The majority of the variance that we see from fiscal year 23 to 22, which is a large variance, is mainly due to an invoice, a prepaid invoice that we paid to Bay Corp, which is our county insurance carrier, in the amount of $1.2 million.

So that's why you see that significant increase from fiscal year 22 to fiscal year 23 in our non-spendable.

and are committed are the funds that have already been approved by the board for future use in all of our functional areas.

This includes the encomprances, reappropriations, and the school reserve fund balance.

Our unassigned funds are available for use for the future, but it does include the 10% fund balance reserve totaling $48,105,234

and the 2% revenue stabilization reserve totaling $9,621,047.

Please note, the report that has been circulated to the board is a draft.

The act that you all have is a draft and it's in the quality control review process with our new auditors, Brown-Edwards.

The final report will be forthcoming and will be posted on the county's website upon completion.

Speaking of our new auditors, I am excited to introduce and to announce that we have new auditors, Brown Edwards is our new auditing firm, and they were introduced to the audit committee at our spring committee meeting.

To provide background and context for those of you that may not be on the audit committee, we went out for RFP because we've been with our previous auditors for several years.

The contract was awarded to Brown-Edwards.

It's a regional firm headquartered in Royal Oak, Virginia, and it's one of the leading firms in Virginia serving governmental and municipal entities.

Brown-Edwards was listed in Inside Public Accounting's Top 100 Public Accounting Firms by Net Revenue in 2022.

They have an operational initiative of providing five-star service quality standards to include responsiveness, product quality, product delivery,

ease of access to decision makers and professional attitudes of all team members.

We've personally experienced this quality of service firsthand in our partnership with our managing partner, Megan Arganbright, and our in-charge senior associate, Addison Rushley.

At this time, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Megan Arganbright to continue reporting our audit results.

All right.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Please feel free to bring the microphone down to your mouth.

I was a little concerned I wouldn't even be able to see over this monitor.

So glad that worked out.

I'm Megan Arganbright.

I'm the partner on your audit.

Very happy to be here.

Addison is also joined with me.

So if you ask any really hard questions, Addison is on deck to answer those.

Yeah, as Shenandra said, this is our first year doing your audit, so we are stoked to hopefully, fingers crossed, the plan is right now, the due date is Friday.

If everything goes according to plan, we will be issuing on time.

There are a lot of deliverables that go along with that deadline, not the least of which is the draft report that you have.

I'm going to go over a few things in it.

Shenandra hit on all of the numbers, but I'm going to hit on the very high level, important audit results.

The first one of those is our audit opinion, which we are going to issue a unmodified opinion.

which is a clean opinion, that's the one that you want to get.

In relation to that, we also issue two compliance opinions, the first of which is a yellow book opinion and the second of which is that of the federal awards.

As you go through the draft report, there are a few things to look at and that I like to point out.

The first one is the transmittal letter, which is at the beginning of the report.

It's the very first thing you'll see.

That's written by the county.

It's written by finance, and it's a very high-level view of mostly non-financial information about what's going on at the county.

You guys have particular insights, but an outside person who wants to learn about the county of Albemarle, I would say, go read their transmittal letter in their ACFER.

It tells you about what's going on, what's happening, what kind of place it is to live in Albemarle.

The next item is the management's discussion and analysis.

That's the place you're going to want to go if you do want to see numbers, numbers comparison, current year to prior year.

with explanations of why things changed.

That's going to be in the management's discussion and analysis.

Again, that's written by the county staff.

And then you get to all our part, which is our opinion.

All of the numbers that are in the balance sheet and income statement, right?

Then we have like 60 pages of notes that provide more information and more detail on what those numbers are, what they mean.

Because otherwise, they're just numbers, right?

But then you can look at the note disclosures and get more information.

There's also required supplementary information, which is required.

It mostly has to do with pension and OPEB and budget to actual documents.

There are no explanations there, it's numbers.

After all that, you have the compliance section.

As I mentioned, we have two letters in that section.

We did have some

Findings, there's no better word than findings.

We did have some findings, which is not unexpected in a first-year audit, especially when you've been with your prior auditor for quite some time.

So one of those items was properly implementing a fairly recent GASB standard, GASB 84, which requires you to report in your ACFIR

Any custodial funds and these are funds where you as the county are holding the money and doing The fiscal services for these other entities you all knew they existed right they were disclosed in the financials now we just have the numbers also included in the financials and So that's just those are for like Darden tile park the ECC those sorts of entities that hadn't been in the act for in the past and

We also have recommendations related to capital assets and to school grant management.

We did go over those in the audit committee meeting a couple weeks ago in more detail, but those information is there.

We also are required to do state compliance and that is the auditor of public accounts and

has an entire audit program that they say, auditors, you have to go look at this stuff for us.

And it's various departments at the state level who want us to look at things.

So we did have a couple of findings there.

One for Department of Social Services and an information security policy that needs to be updated and some security policies that needed to be written for each person.

But that's already underway.

The nice thing about this is that we do those procedures in June and July and we can already know that they're already implementing change by December 13th.

And the second item there is that the annual school report is required to be turned into the state by September 15th and due to some circumstances with payroll transition, that report was not completed by September 15th.

So kind of that's a compliance thing, right?

So it's a little black and white.

We also have a uniform guidance report, which is our opinion for federal awards.

Anytime your federal awards are greater than $750,000, we are required to perform a single audit.

We did not have any findings for federal compliance.

The programs we tested were SLFRF, also known as ARPA.

We tested SPED, Special Ed, Title I.

ESF, the Education Stabilization Fund, and then the SAFER grant.

Two items that you do not have in front of you because we didn't have drafts prepared yet are but I wanted to tell you we're still planning like I said issuing on time but I did want to communicate there are two other deliverables one of which is the comments on internal control and I've already discussed the findings that will be in there

And then the second one is the audit committee letter, which is the communication to those charged with governance.

So that's you guys, so I'm going to tell you about it.

It's a fairly boilerplate standard letter.

If you look at it year to year, even with different auditors, it's going to look very, very similar and that's because it's required communications.

and we're accountants and we like to be as particular and clean as possible.

But one of the things that it mentions is that your financial statements have estimates.

Not every number is an exact known number.

Us and finance and management do the best with the information we have to get the best numbers available.

But there are some estimates and some judgment that goes into that.

Not the least of which is your pension and OPEB liabilities.

There are actuaries hired to come up with those numbers.

and they are the experts on that.

It does also go over corrected misstatements, uncorrected misstatements.

And then at the end of that letter is the management representation letter, which is about seven pages of items.

When we come in and do an audit, we ask a lot, a lot of questions.

And this letter is signed by management and says, we told you everything that you asked to the best of our ability and honest about it.

and then they signed this letter.

So, like I said, it's been a whirlwind.

We've loved getting to know the county and understanding how you guys operate and we do hope to be issuing by Friday.

Alright, thank you.

We will go through our order.

Yes, and welcome.

I do think it's best practice to change audit firms.

And I'm pleased, not any reflection of our former, but I'm pleased that we've done that.

So thank you for being here.

I do have one, and I don't know that I have a lot of questions at this point, but I have one quick question.

So the school system had not submitted their annual report, but they have by now.

I believe so.

Okay, just wanted to make sure there's... And to be honest with you, I don't think I have any questions right now.

Perhaps our folks that were on the audit committee will have some questions.

I'm going to do the same.

I appreciate the presentation and I've taken good notes, but I don't have anything marked in yellow right now.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much for the presentation and if I understand you correctly, we have no federal findings.

Correct.

That is a good point.

Worth mentioning a second time.

Thank you.

I did have the pleasure of hearing some of this report ahead of time, so that did give me an advantage, but it's still perhaps helpful.

We don't have any federal findings.

That's great.

We do have, however, some minor findings with the state.

It's deficiencies that you've identified in your report.

I wonder if you could just comment briefly on whether these You said it was changing auditors And so the expectation is that these have been there.

One of the comments is on the fiduciary funds, which are those other entities that hadn't been included in the act for before.

But those other entities did issue separate financial statements.

So there was no misleading information.

Those financial statements were out there.

It's just technically per the GASB 84 standard.

They should also, so it's duplicating it, but since the county is holding the money and doing the transactions should also be reported in the county's ACFR as specific numbers instead of just disclosed, which is how it was before.

So it wasn't misleading.

So that was because of new GASB requirements.

The other deficiencies were not necessarily based on anything new.

So one was on capital assets.

And I would say that that recommendation is coming mostly from a turnover standpoint, turnover in the folks who are responsible for managing the projects and for

When you're doing capital assets, there's a lot, a lot of transactions.

And there's projects and figuring out what projects are at what stage and what needs to be recorded.

And so the person responsible for that kind of picked up more with turnover than they had done in the past.

And I think that we've worked with them specifically to come up with a plan.

And that plan's already in place.

It was implemented in order to get the numbers to where they are in this report.

I think we should be very, very good on that one.

And then the other one is the school grants.

They have a plan and so hopefully they can get caught up.

It's very, very hard once you get behind.

to play catch up, right?

Because you're doing what you currently have and then also trying to catch up on items.

So they've been open.

We've had conversations with school finance about plans for them to catch up on their grant reimbursement requests as well.

So hopefully that one won't be in there.

But I feel much more confident saying the fiduciary activities and the capital assets should be in a much better place for the FY24 audit.