Board of Supervisors Two Year Balanced Fiscal Plan in Context of Five Year Financial Plan   11/17/2016

I'm sorry, is Laura Van Sant, our Senior Budget Analyst, and I'm just going to be really, really strange right now.

I'm Lori Allshouse.

and today we'd like to spend take the last 10 minutes if we can depending on the situation to allow for public comment today and we'll just go ahead and turn it over to Lori.

So there's about a million of that is due to an increase in personal property taxes.

And estimates?

And vehicles only is what you're talking about there, not these other license fees and things that have been picked up in the last year.

The state did an assessment on one company and their property increased very significantly and so that one change on one property's assessment really made a big difference in our taxes on that and I just want to let you know those are kind of things that are unknown sometimes and that's a real zig-zaggy revenue stream due to those types of things so that was something that had occurred and we took that into account as we're projecting these forward.

Can you tell us how much that is for that one particular?

I don't believe I have that exact details but I do know that it's over a million dollars increase in this category overall.

The category but the vast majority of it was one particular?

The vast majority of it was one particular company.

It's significant and obviously it increases our base as we look to the future but it is a very unusual one and one that certainly has helped us.

You know, there's one of those things that you don't know a lot of the details about, but the state does the assessment.

And so that's a hardwired sort of thing, and it may be something that contributed to it.

I think by the end of December is when we're supposed to hear more about that but definitely something we all have to be very thoughtful about.

so that and the WQIF is the Water Quality Improvement Fund where we get a lot of money for our stormwater and things like that and that only has money if there's a surplus so that's out the window for this year as well.

Yeah it's really far-reaching it's more than you realize of what actually is going into the the county's general fund it has far-reaching impacts.

We get the state numbers and all the things.

Basically is the mantra we need to get in our head so that what we need to take care of, we need to find a way to take care of it ourselves and not wait for somebody else because the genie is not going to come.

Thank you.

And this could be if revenues took a really strong hit that we didn't recognize, or there'd be some cost that happens to the county that we didn't expect.

Lori, could I just ask you, is that the total 1.78 million for the Rainy Day Fund?

That's correct, currently.

Currently, okay, thank you.

So that leaves a balance of about 8.6 that's available for some one-time use.

Just to follow up on that, that's just our, that's just the general county government.

That's correct.

Can I just make an observation that the numbers therefore indicate that the board was justified in cutting back the proposed fiscal year 27 tax increase from 2.5 cents to 2 cents because we even at 2 cents we end up with a significant surplus this year.

For example, if you add a police officer position, the purchase of their car and the purchase of some of the one-time items to start off is an appropriate use of one-time monies.

We actually reduced expenditures by that half cent so it had no real impact on the fund balance but certainly there's a question about the fund balance and its size and whether we could have utilized more money in terms of what we had coming in and a lot of that has to do with the difference between our projections at the time and what we ended up actually ended up at the end of the year but we'll talk more about that fund balance issue as we go forward just for clarification.

7.6 cents on the tax rate so if tax revenue so if the tax rate the revenues go up there's some funding that moves over to that fund just for your information that number covers their compensation and benefits for the fire rescue folks also about 90,000 of that is targeted for increases for the agencies the volunteer agencies so it's in about 40,000 of that is for increases in their operation overall

I mean, across the board.

We're being very cautiously optimistic.

In that general economy, we're not expecting it to be as robust.

Thank you for the information in the box, which is something I've been asking for and I'm very glad to see because we get very little recognition of what the local government side does.

the HR department you do share in the funding of the HR department which provides services for both sides of the house as we say but in Greg's department and in Betty's department that's fully funded by the general fund.

And at this point, we've at least gone to the point of identifying

Tom is there any situation in other counties where there's a similar arrangement between the school board and the county government and in fact these two cost centers for the county in providing services to the school board are included within the school board budget and therefore the county is quote reimbursed for those expenses?

At least you need to know that it's in that neighborhood of a couple million dollars.

I'm sure you'll ask them.

I would doubt because they've always denied it, really, in the past.

I think with counties, if you mix cities in, it's a different story.

It was number six, as I remember, and that's not including the work that local government does for them.

And we talked about transparency so I just it's important that we took this step this year and wanted to bring it to your attention.

That's great.

Or is it more just like with a lawyer that one lawyer spends most of their time on that so you allocate his salary kind of thing, which would be easy to do?

So I think it's worked pretty well over the years.

And the three to one ratio of school staff versus local government staff is sort of the base for that.

I mean, we have all the positions in the HR department and it says what percentage is local government charge, what percentage is schools.

It seems like I would consider that just for accuracy and transparency.

But again, as you compare jurisdictions, that's pretty similar in most places using those facilities.

and the Parks and Rec budget is what maintains all of those facilities outside.

And I think particularly when you start looking at cost comparisons with other jurisdictions, you at least need to be aware that some of these things don't compare as truly maybe as others do.

I mean increasing it with respect to different programs, expanding the

We have to get Greg in here to help us.

and then come back to you with here's the assessment of what we see as infrastructure and where those needs would be increasing over time.

We're not talking about river health in the rural areas or anything like that, improving that.

We're just talking about infrastructure, the gray infrastructure.

Is that true?

That assessment will help us to determine what we should do in the future.

But I think the board as a whole, while we may not have voted that far down in the weeds as far as the program report was concerned, there was considerable support for doing better with our natural side as well as our concrete side.

so we'll be coming back to you I think on that to say you know what where do you think we should go from there and the in the budget process and this process are the times for you all to voice those things that you think we should you'd like to see more information on us getting to the next level and what that might cost because this is a plan it just starts to put us in motion with some of the priorities that you give us some direction to

What's the timeline on that assessment?

Probably be coming back to you late spring with some analysis and thoughts about how to proceed.

It is part of your strategic plan so certainly that's the kind of feedback we're trying to get.

The biggest unknown is our wonderful world of sinkholes and how we're going to deal with them.

You might remember that he had presented two or three scenarios of the level of service we might provide.

Well the one that I think one of the elements that did receive strong support was identifying the easement the ground easements that are given to the county where we don't even know where they are and nobody's taking care of them in addition to the pipes on the ground which is I think what your RFP is for is for the structural assessments which also we don't know how they're doing many of them are 50 years old which is half of their lifespan but there's

I think it's really about both the assessment of the infrastructure, but then the level of services that we might provide.

We need a different skill set to do the structural assessment.

That's right.

Perhaps you could share more with us when you have the draft of the RFPF so we know what's going on.

Perhaps when the RFPF is through, we'll bring that back so we can share that with you.

The first item you mentioned, the inventory of easements is underway now, though.

The guys with the camera are what we have to hire to get out and check the pipes.

Greg, did you have something you'd like to add?

No, well I just chimed in that staff, Greg Harper's team is currently assessing the existence of easements, working with us to determine whether or not they're public or private and also they're still identifying all of the storm water management facilities and tracking down maintenance agreements and figuring out what the next step will be.

If I may take us back a second.

I'm not looking at something that is specific but I think just general have a perspective.

So it's a very complete and thorough report that I think will give you the information.

They put it on the department to determine the amount of time that's needed as well as the cost impact.

There's different ways we could approach it, but the first step is to go through the allocation process and we could take this to the next level if that's what you all want to do.

Do we know if the city does this for the city schools?

We can get some more information for you on that, too.

How much staff time does it really take you to go through and do all these, I mean like the police and all the detail that you're talking about?

Right, right.

I was about to say, so we have to pay them more to do that?

So if it's important enough, you do it one time, and then you set up a system on how you do it going forward.

We won't know if it's important until we get the answer and so I'm very much in favor of going ahead to get the answer.

Does our Board of Supervisors budget allocate for paying here?

the argument about having this transparent makes us able to really see what the overall level cost is on an annual basis and will be beneficial for the school board to have that information too.

I, you know, it's just at some point you have to draw the line of, you know, you can... You can take it to a point of absurdity.

I agree.

I think them pulling through the parking lot of the school at night just to see if there's any buddy spray-painting on a school is kind of getting into that

But we'll do that with the caveat that if there's something significant that's indirect, we try to identify it.

We don't want to have an argument about how valuable the education of our children is and how that saves us money because they know how to pay their taxes or, you know, you could get pretty ridiculous about details.

I think we're focused on direct costs.

The first one is your strategic priorities, and this is just a list of those, a summary of your strategic priorities that Tom went over with you.

A number of things that aren't on this list aren't because there's some study underway and we're not sure exactly what the next steps will be and what the costs will be, so just wanted to clear it.

Again, we'd look at fund balances every year as we move forward and make additional potential investments in this fund.

So beyond this, there's I think some good funding to set aside investments.

So between now and the end of the year, for example.

If there's a what match?

And then we did have to replenish it because that was in the neighborhood of a big six figure amount that we put in.

How does faith's salary fit into this in terms of does that go into the fund balance?

So it would show up at the end of the year as unexpense salaries as an example.

Not in the economic development arena specifically.

There will be a balance at the end of the year.

And so we're increasing the amount of that, our estimation from 1.25 to 1.5, which would support about another $100,000 in operating costs.

We'd be very comfortable with this.

That happened a few years ago and that was awful.

Actually this is the highest we've ever been.

I mean the school department, I remember they budgeted like a million dollars and they only had two hundred thousand and that was awful.

I want to have a shout out for Laura, she manages all that for us and so when she's confident that it's okay, we feel confident.

I feel confident.

Excuse me.

So the HR cost is already taken care of, and this is the difference between a regular person working and somebody else doing it for overtime.

All right.

You can consider this as a return on investment for the This is part of the transformation or the different way of doing business to better manage the resources that we currently are using to support our personnel.

So it's kind of thinking about moving ahead towards more contractual temp places where we need funding as we're doing transformation in these departments rather than bringing on a lot more full-time equivalent positions permanently.

So I'll just leave that question and somebody can talk to us about that.

Okay.

Okay, good.

So he's now looking at several different options including hiring temporary staff or bringing on management firms that help us with execution of these projects.

I think what the way we did it for the streetscape in Crozet was to hire the guy out of Stanton who worked for us but oversaw everything that was going on on the property every single second and that really made the difference so something like that but in these other realms will really help us and is worth the money.

And again there's such a variety of different kinds of projects that the solution will be the same across the board.

And you know that that has its own almost enterprise fund so they can staff up based on the change in projects just by hiring out folks to get the work done rather than it coming through the same kind of added FTE kind of process that we would typically have.

And it would be somebody with the particular skill so when they open up the ground they find all these drainage things they didn't know were there then you have somebody who knows what to do about that.

And I'm just trying to get a handle on exactly what this person will be doing.

I think Doug might be better able to do that.

By the way, Doug, this is local government or schools in local government?

And this is one of those where if we want to do that type of, have that type of investment in our own workforce, then we need to be thoughtful in how it is that we create the capacity to do that.

And this discussion is one of the reasons we put it in as a temporary position so that we could.

Very much so, yes sir.

I know some private companies anyway reached a limit of how much they could have temporary employees and not lose their culture of long-term employees and people that are committed to the organization rather than just floating through.

I would just generally say we haven't done much of this at all in the past.

No, I don't feel like this is a collapse of the system or anything like that, but it's a significant step to have 10, 15 casual employees as we call them.

I think we see this as a pretty modest step in a strategy to try to deal with some of these challenges.

Are we seeing it that way too?

So that's been part of our conversation.

I think UVA does that a fair amount.

Again, not reflected in the two-year plan but certainly reflected as part of the conversations about implementing your strategic priorities.

Sounds good.

and it will end, the oversight committee work ends before the end of the two year planning conversation period so we may have some information from the oversight committee that can inform the board before the end of the two year fiscal plan adoption.

That's happened in the past and it's very confusing to try to do it at that point.

And are there any other changes you'd like to see?

It's really very comprehensive.

I don't know how to answer how well but I'm glad we're starting and we have to start somewhere and maybe this time next year we'll understand how well we did.

So that's what this priority-based budgeting has all been about.

That's what they care about the most.

You could do that as well.

that sometime next year hopefully we'll know more and we'll be able to direct staff to do something specific.

This was to bring down federal resources as lots of other communities have to strengthen our effort on this.

We'd have all that information ready to go that if some developer came along and wanted to help us complete, fill those gaps, or to go after any grant funding.

Are you talking about predominantly other areas along 29 North specifically?

I think each of us have areas that we might want to tackle, and I'm not saying we have dozens of them, but I think we have an opportunity with one-time money to bring some people in to help us line up the expectations and what it's going to cost us.

So we want to

Let's figure out what it's going to cost us first and then really discuss where the money needs to come from.

So if we're not able to capitalize on and build the people, the CACs is really where this I think needs to be pushed along rather than bring outside people in.

I think what we end up facing is prioritizing even those projects, which I'd like to know whether we have a lot of worthy projects and we just need to find the money or we just have to bite the bullet and prioritize the projects because we don't have enough money.

That would have a measurable benefit for both of those communities.

That's on the study side and then there's even transit money if we're making improvements to those corridors those neighborhood levels that include transit we could go after capital transit money to actually make the add to the pot that makes the improvement wouldn't fund the whole thing but of course y'all get the idea.

to start to identify that maybe it's the corner of Road X and Y and the whole area around there that needs to start get a planning study.

I mean, CACs don't know what VDOT would allow us to do or this or that, so staff's going to have to weigh the potential of the planning effort that could exist for those areas.

So let's just say that this is some seed money to start that effort, and we'll take this to the CACs and try to move it forward based on your conversation.

areas where they would benefit from a planning study and that corridor would be from Woollen Mills going right to the insurance company and to the hospital and we would... Well, okay, I mean it's laid out to go to the dam, so it's a much longer corridor than just the urban area down there.

Yeah, but it would be at least the start of that.

partnership oriented section of this where we could potentially look for an economic benefit as well as a recreational benefit.

PDC is positioned to do some of this work, so that fits into what?

They're sort of waiting for us to give them the go ahead.

the Rivanna River corridor plan and the Pantops master plan and whatever else we could come up with you know as far as other small area plans type stuff but it's definitely in the works.

Sunset Avenue area is something that needs a little work too on that.

Well, the bridge, the free bridge too, sorry.

If we can commit ourselves, we're telling the public we're trying to squirrel away the money to have it ready and we're committed to it by dedicating X percent or something.

It's focused on the strategic priorities.

We need to put it back.

Is that the case?

It's definitely nice to the Historic Preservation Committee.

I was talking to Elaine about this recently.

Huge can of worms.

And I'm not sure we want to open it.

OK.

The only thing I know that is coming is the amendment to the rural area district regulations dealing with restaurants and inns.

For those three?

And right now it's a narrowly tailored ordinance.

And so I'm wondering how we're working.

Okay.

So we have to be aware of interests of multiple levels.

Absolutely.

I'll drink to that.

I guess that is a question we've talked about, but anyway we can talk about that another time.

I think you've already given some direction to that, although final decisions are going to be made next year sometime.

So for the current year it will stay as the .7 as fiscal year 18 that you're preparing now?

But that wouldn't be until 19.

Are you talking about something entirely different?

This really helps us to stay focused on investment needs.

I think those are critical long-term for us.

This $500,000 you were looking at?

Yeah 500 and the 230.

Well the 230 is for positions that need to be put in in order to continue the management changes and things like that.

I agree with Rick, I think it is a priority to do it, but you've explained to us that you have to come back.

I think Rick responded with an email on that, but I just don't think we set up a process to identify these areas that was very effective.

Not coming top down.

But if in this process... And I agree, Ann, I said I agree.

Again, you all aren't putting a budget together now, so this kind of discussion helps us to go back and think more about how we might best get at what we're hearing you say.

You never know when the next opportunity is going to be.

But anyways, we'll take the feedback.

More about service districts and there was somewhere on here where we were talking about fund balance and I thought well a little bit of that fund balance could just put as a little seed amount in each one of those service district areas and then there would be the beginning of that resource money for each individual master plan area instead of a big pot.

We have five minutes left, and we did say that we were going to give a few minutes to public comment, and since we only have one member of the public here, would that member of the public like to comment?

Here he comes.

Madam Chair, if there is one minute or so left at the end, I just wanted to add one more thing to the general conversation.

because that's what the public expects you to do.

I don't feel restricted at all not to make a scene in February and March and April about things we have to change, so I count on that too.

And just technically, again, your appropriation on an annual basis is the only thing that sets anything in stone and of course you can even change that.

Can we change that too?

This is just kind of the policy-making setting, but things change and there'll be an election next November, you know, so there's opportunities.

I'd like to just give Norman a minute, he asked, before I opened up the public comment to have a minute before we adjourn.

so I just would like to see a priority or at that stage I don't have a specific plan but I'd like help from other people that are environmentally oriented I think it's a needed balance with the economic development too that we just are constantly talking about what we're going to be building and growing and I think we also need to talk about what we're protecting

Right.

So in the next two months, there's two opportunities to hear from the committee and from staff who's been working with the committee in this regard.

But that all takes resources and it isn't in the CIP yet and those kinds of things.

Could I suggest that we carry that conversation on when those come forward and then if there's pieces that aren't in there that you think are important maybe biodiversity plan and the recommendations from the past didn't get didn't even get fully discussed as a part of what's coming forward that you identify those our objective is to try to define your strategy where you want to go with these things.

Sounds great I just wanted to you know with all our talk today just throw it out there at this stage of the conversation as a general

So there's a place where we can flesh this out more to give more direction.

Yeah, that's exactly what I just quoted from.

We really very much appreciate it.

Okay.

Second.

Mr. Randolph?

Aye.

Mr. Sheffield?

Yes.

Mr. Dill?

Yes.

Ms. Mallet?

Ms. Palmer?

Yes.