Board of Supervisors County Executive's Recommended Budget   2/16/2018

Call ourselves to order.

Welcome Officer Beach to help us today.

Thank you so much for being here.

Please everyone turn your cell phones off so we don't get reverb with our audio system.

And please get ready to do our mic check.

Ned, when you are ready, you may begin.

Madam Chair and members of the board, thank you for carving out yet additional time in your busy work week to spend a little bit of time today dedicated to the official rollout of the coming year's annual budget.

Aptly named, I believe we are capturing what we're trying to accomplish by saying that we're delivering tangible results

in an ever evolving landscape.

Our fiscal year 19 recommended budget is second year implementation of a two year strategic plan.

And you will see some deliberate connection from your current year budget as we move into the FY19 budget.

Thank you so much for your attention and for your continued hard work.

The outcomes that we're shooting for today is number one, for us to do a good job of overviewing what this recommended budget includes.

Some of the major drivers that are providing us with the opportunities that we have to continue to move strategically.

and to address a number of quality of life issues in our community that we're trying to address in a professional and thoughtful way.

We hope that today will set a nice framework for our future work sessions.

At the end of today's discussion in rolling out our recommended budget, I'll hand it over to Lori and Lori will take a couple of minutes to talk to you about what happens after today.

because there is a continued commitment, an intentional commitment of your time that'll allow you to dig in and ask questions and to have purposeful discussions about what you see our biggest opportunities are, our biggest needs as we make final preparations for next year's budget.

And for me personally, I believe today is a starting point

of looking at how we understand the decisions that you'll make this coming year will have an immediate effect on your fiscal year 2020 budget planning.

We'll talk more about that as we go through the morning.

The general and capital funding is in this budget to support

a significant and important partnership with our public schools.

It's also there to provide for organizational sustainability to advance your priorities and also to allow that as our community evolves that we're able to adapt to emerging needs that may come forward that we had not previously planned.

Before we dive into the recommended budget for next year,

This year's budget is the culmination of the strategic and financial planning processes that you see up on the board.

You'll hear us talk a lot about your fiscal year 17-19 strategic plan because that's the board's visioning process for trying to identify what are our immediate needs in order to make the greatest impact on our community.

And that's always a challenging

yet fruitful process and the board has been very intentional and I hope you'll see that our staff has also been equally as intentional in aligning our resources with your strategic priorities.

It's also in addition to that being a very high importance you'll be reminded that as recently as September of 2017 you came back and you revisited our strategic plan and you made some

priorities known for the coming year that I hope we've captured adequately and we've aligned into this coming year's budget.

It's also shaped from the two-year fiscal plan and the visits that we had with each of you talking about our two-year planning, our two-year fiscal plan, our balance plan, as well as our five-year fiscal plan.

and then also we've been able to, with the help of a lot of people in this organization and a lot of partner agencies, we've been able to create quite a measurable amount of momentum in our current year budget.

It set a financial course to advance your strategic priorities and with an emphasis on making strategic investments in our community.

We're entering into year two of plan implementation and so I'm proud to suggest that our fiscal year 19 budget continues to support those current objectives.

Let's briefly take a look at the fiscal year 18, the year that we're in, again, delivering tangible results.

Let's take a second to look at that and hopefully that'll help bridge us into what this momentum looks like moving into fiscal year 19.

In fiscal year 18, that budget acknowledged the continued economic turbulence at the state and national level.

And this organization was able to work judiciously in advancing some strategic priorities, such as the rolling out the pilot program for our NFE project to fund smaller scale neighborhood improvements, our economic development fund,

in order to be able to match state opportunities and encourage economic investment in our local economy, modernize our zoning ordinance to support small area planning, implementation and development of the Rio 29 small area plan.

I think that's one of our neighborhood improvement funding initiative meetings that occurred.

We also looked to maximize transformation, increase funding to our innovation fund to support projects that yield a return on investment.

So we were looking to do more with less, to redesign processes where it either saved money or yielded a high level of service to our citizens that we serve.

This is a picture that's meant to show with reduced operating cost and improving process efficiency.

I believe this organization traveled to Columbus, Ohio in the past year and received a national award for project partnership with our volunteer fire departments that turn out your repair project national award.

And I believe it realized about $20,000 in savings.

Sustaining a quality organization that requires us as staff and elected officials to keep an eye on what that customer experience is like, the feedback that we get from our citizens.

Also, it requires us internally in the organization to keep an eye on our staff to commit to continued growth and development.

and to that end there was a 2% salary adjustment that was awarded to all of our employees in this past year.

And then in the area of strategic investments, support for the acquisition of conservation easements, a dedicated amount of money in this current year that was placed back into that fund to continue that commitment for the ACE program.

And again, last year, the year that we're wrapping up, there had been a bond referendum and a suggested potential tax rate increase.

And in fiscal year 18, this organization under the leadership and guidance of this board was able to move forward with a strengthening local economy that deferred.

that tax rate increase.

And so we were able to make advancement recognizing that we did see a local economy that showed a lot of vitality and we were able to move forward accordingly.

Finally, and it's underpinned as part of this organization's culture is that we're gonna fund our mandates and our obligations and

That includes our debt service, that includes our partnerships, the things that we're required to do, our debt service obligations, our revenue sharing, and certainly key partnerships that we have across our community and organization.

So as we bridge into the 19 budget, our highlights that I would give our board for consideration today is first of all,

We are continuing to enjoy a strong local economy and I'll talk a few minutes today about what that means and how that looks.

And all of you are very active in our community in so many ways and so you see these things for yourself.

But that ties to our ability to continue, I think, in a meaningful way to move things forward in this coming budget but without adjusting our tax rate.

So I recommend a budget to you for consideration that does not have a tax rate associated with it in the coming year.

With that, we think we can continue to implement your strategic priorities.

We think that we can reserve a bit of our capacity in the coming year to where we will be nimble and be able to respond to emerging opportunities because we know that's going to continue because this community is evolving.

It's a destination community.

And with that comes opportunities.

We're gonna maintain our current levels of service to our community that we serve

and finally we're going to be strategic with reinvestment of our savings and this is past and current savings and I'm sure because it is a part of our budget balancing strategy that the board will want to spend some time with that as you move through the work sessions.

I've got some intention with this slide and it first has to do with really what I think this budget reflects and it's three things.

It's a strong significant internal effort to leverage our resources.

We have 18 departments that have worked diligently through this budget process to pay close attention to emerging needs, sustaining our organization, and prioritizing the board's hard work with our strategic priorities.

Those departments funnel those requests

and those needs through a process in which, in our case, 18 employees, mostly on this floor, but certainly not limited to that, had a meaningful impact in taking all of what was considered and paring it down within reason for what we can afford going forward.

At some point, I asked Lori, I said, Lori, identify those 18 employees, show me who these people are that are working so hard to get this budget balanced.

And I'm proud to share with our board that they represent 197 years of combined experience within our organization.

So first I would speak to a significant internal leveraging of talent and resources to get us to where we are today.

Second would be a significant external leveraging of resources and that's reflected in

in your budget, in your document that you'll get today, which that document suggests 58 partner agency relationships that we have within our community.

We can't do this by ourselves.

We can't move the quality of life needle forward in this community inside the walls of Albemarle County government.

Our key agency partnerships are critical.

and then finally that all culminates in a total budget moving into FY19 of $428.5 million for your consideration.

That's $428 million of community investment where we are intentional about maintaining and growing the quality of life in this community.

This next slide represents that

at a big picture level where the money is coming from and how the money will be spent.

I don't want to spend a lot of time with this today.

There'll be ample opportunity because this includes every fund, local, state, federal, borrowed proceeds, debt, everything at a big picture level of what is coming through Albemarle County government.

The point that I would make is that it does include state and federal money.

What I've always referred to as pass-through revenue.

It's earmarked for certain programs, and it's restrictive in nature.

In addition to that, in terms of where the money will be spent, again, I would highlight our strong collaborative partnership with our public education program.

with Albemarle County government and trying to affect the lives of the citizens that we serve.

Probably nothing is as much as a good example as how our school divisions affect the lives of our citizens every day.

What I would like to spend some time with today is as a subset of our total budget is our general fund recommended budget.

The general fund recommended budget reflects our local revenues.

And as policy makers, this is where the discretionary money to a large degree is tied, is our general fund.

This is where we look in our organization to see if there is organizational alignment with what's important to our board, you reflect our community, and are we aligning our resources to your strategic objectives.

And so as you see, and we'll talk a little bit more about that, but within our general fund, two thirds of that is made up by our general property taxes.

We have other taxes that make up 20% and then a minor amount after that.

And then again, overall where the money is spent, we showcase our partnership with our school system.

We also

can't go without noticing our public safety, our investment in our public safety, which citizens across this nation have been surveyed many times and they'll always tell you that oftentimes the quality of the community is directly related to the confidence they have with the public safety function.

I want to talk a little bit about strong local revenues.

These are our major drivers.

I want to talk a second to this board and try to explain just a little bit about for the second year in a row, why are we able to progress down the field with our ambitious, what I call very ambitious strategic plan with many goals and initiatives?

How are we able to do that and do that within our existing tax rate structure?

We're seeing strong local

a strong local economy and it is continued over the past year.

This is new money that's coming in to Albemarle County within the next year and this is discretionary in nature to a large degree as to where we're going to put our resources to provide our biggest outputs.

First to the far left is our largest category and that is real estate.

About four and a half million of that seven million reflects our market.

That's the growth in our market.

That's the natural growth in the values that are occurring.

That reflects a confidence in our community.

That reflects a confidence in our local economy.

About three million of that 7.5 million is new construction.

and you are in the community as much as anyone and so as you drive through the community, you see new construction activity, business and residential.

Our community development department is tied to the hip with this activity within our community and they track it on a day to day basis.

But again, that reflects a part of what I would call our local, a strong local economic vibrancy.

Then to the right of that is our local personal property.

and that again reflects a strong year with approximately a million dollars of new growth in that area.

Tied hard to that is the consumer driven activity.

The consumer driven activity is sales activity and we've tracked that hard.

We've seen growth in the last year that is north of 10% with consumer driven activity and again, it's a healthy level of vibrancy of trading that's going on in our community and again, it is one indicator

of a vibrant local economy.

And finally, to the far left is our business-driven activity, and this is our BPOL, business professional licensing.

And so again, it's a small but yet accurate reflection of business activity, trade, and economic vibrancy that's occurring in our community.

For me, it's helpful to look from that revenue growth and say, okay, where's it going?

And the greenish,

Coler category, general government is where again we'll spend most of our time today.

But within that new revenue growth, it's about 21% committed to our agency partnerships.

It's about 16% committed to our operating costs.

A lot of that would point back to sustaining our organization and taking care of our organization.

and then finally, 63% of it is our people and that shouldn't surprise this group because local government, we provide services.

We don't make anything.

We don't produce a product but we provide services to our community and that is tied hard to people count and customer service delivery.

This also includes new positions in the coming year and also a commitment to pay benefits,

and Training and Development for the next year.

So since that's 63% of the budget as it relates to new revenue, let's dive into that just a minute and let's look.

You've seen this data before because this is the slide that we've continued to track over time.

What I think it suggests is that our per capita staffing is identical to what it was in 2009.

What's occurred over that 10 year period is about a 15,000 population growth in this community.

You spent some time Tuesday night looking at growth and development in this community.

You've devoted over three hours of your time along with our Board of Education and also with our Planning Commission learning about growth and development and how it affects us in different ways in this community.

I'm proud to say though that our general government positions by 1,000 population.

we're exactly level as to where we were in 09.

There's several things that have occurred.

Of course, the dip beginning in 10 and 11 and going through really about 14, that reflects the national economy.

If we looked at, I believe, almost every local government across the nation, we'd see that.

Where local government had to take steps back, trim back, and use creative thinking in ways to, in some cases, lower services,

I also would suggest that this includes this community and this county leveraging our agency partnerships.

and it's intentional to be able to do more with less and to deliver services to maximize resources where agency partnerships suggest that maybe our relationship in an outside agency, we can get done what we can do at a less, less expensively than if we were to do it internally.

I would say that the more urbanized we become, the broader the demand for services and I think that's also a theme that we need to keep in our mind is that as we see a more intense level of urbanization in the community,

as we do grow in the development areas, there will be an expected higher level of service due to the density and due to other features that I'm sure we're learning and studying and will continue to.

I wanted to take that and take it a little further though to understand it a little more because it's not just looking across the organization with 18 departments, it's also peeling layers back and looking at what has happened

over the 10 year period.

Where has the position growth occurred?

If you see the top, we have seven functional areas within our organization and this excludes the division of schools, which again is a key partner with this organization as well.

But if we look at our seven functional areas within our government, the top two, health and welfare and public safety,

That is where the majority of our position growth has occurred over the last 10 years, approximately 90%.

So over the last 10 year period, net growth and position growth has been in those two functional areas over that period of time.

And again, we go back to looking at the general fund expenses where they go.

It's a 15% commitment to public safety.

that's fairly common across local government as I mentioned earlier both for cities and counties.

That growth has occurred in concert with our population growth and also I would say that I would applaud our fire and rescue folks because one of our key agencies is our volunteer fire departments and that key agency has kept these staffing adjustments less than what they would be otherwise.

The bottom five functional areas, though, you can see growth within the last two budgets, both within the FY18 adopted budget and within our recommended number for staff in FY19.

You see what I think is a more balanced number when you go from top to bottom.

when you look at actual 17 and then compare 18 and what I recommend in 19, you see a little bit more dispersion and balance across most of the functional areas.

For example, community development, we're recommending five positions in fiscal year 19.

In administration, which also includes IT, it includes finance, it includes our internal service departments that underpin

Many of the service interactions that we have across this community, you see the need for us to continue to grow those functions to be able to keep up with the pace of work.

And so administration, community development,

Those are two areas that I would point to.

Parks, Recreation, and Culture and Public Works, they've stayed relatively flat over this period.

And as we urbanize, we've got to look more closely at Public Works.

And as you know, you recently received the first part of the Parks, Recreation, and Culture Needs Assessment, along with some CIP oversight committee work that is recently questioned in the long term.

Do we want to look at quality of life projects that could include some of our trails and some of our public parks?

This really speaks to the committedness of this organization to try to do more with less, maintain levels of service, and begin to look cross departmentally at where we can leverage resources within the organization.

What this budget supports

First I would start with education.

Again, they are a critical partner within our community.

We emphasize in this budget a shared commitment to providing learning and training opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds.

We're going to transfer in the coming budget.

If this board accepts this budget, we'll transfer to school operations about $130.8 million.

That's a $6.8 million increase over the current year.

And that equates to about a 5.5% growth.

Continued in addition to that is our in kind support that roughly totaled $2 million for administrative services that would include finance, IT, and legal services.

Also includes our debt service totaling $14.4 million as well.

In addition to that, indirectly our budget is somewhat sensitive to supporting our education to the broader community in areas to include public safety,

Health and Welfare, Economic Development, Expansion of Broadband, and other related opportunities, as well as our agency partnership, funding to agencies that support education, Boys and Girls Club, United Way, PVCC, and continued support for our libraries.

Oh, I wanna go back.

This was our favorite picture.

Absolutely our favorite picture that we were able to put our hands on to put into this slide deck.

We should all have days like this.

This is a good day.

All right, and so the remaining three areas, and it is a balancing act.

I love this slide because it forces staff to look.

across the organization and pay attention to the three things that you built your budget on last year and we continue to move forward and that is emphasizing a quality organization, emphasizing the strategic priorities, and again, reserving a level of capacity to address emerging needs.

And so I'm gonna walk you through each of these areas and try to talk just a little bit in detail about what is included in this budget.

I will say that to the far left is part of sustaining our organization.

It's maintaining service levels that our customers expect within reason.

It also is a commitment to growing our people.

And I'd also say that we have to ask ourself, is there an internal organizational alignment?

An internal organizational alignment, meaning that as our community evolves,

that we're preparing our people in our organization to evolve and grow as the community changes.

And so there has to be an intentional effort to invest in our people.

Sustaining a quality organization, it covers our obligations and our requirements.

I've talked a little bit about our support for education and our funding for our school division.

It also includes our support for the capital program and our debt service.

I've talked a little bit about supporting our existing workforce.

We've put additional money in training and development for the next year.

One of the things that this board talked to me first when I got here was succession planning.

Succession planning is hard work.

It's hard work because you're expected to do your job every day.

You're expected to do your job well every day and take time to grab the person that's the most closest to you and share and grow and develop

to prepare our people that work with us for future opportunities and future leadership opportunities to grow and develop from within.

It takes time.

It's a dedication.

It's maintaining our current levels of service to our community, to stay connected to our community,

to look for the pinch points that exist with our service delivery design and high performance organization.

They design processes with the customer in mind.

I hope we're moving in that direction.

I think there's a dedicated attention to that and hopefully in the next year we're gonna be able to spend a little bit more time with that.

Advancing your priorities.

that we work hard to help you develop to look for what's important now.

What are our highest priorities now?

So I'll talk just for a second that what we're trying to do, it places a high priority on the advancement of the quality of life initiatives that you identified in your strategic planning, covering

budget years 17 through 19.

It consists of eight goals, 22 objectives.

This coming budget represents a second year of a two-year plan and invest resources to continue to advance these priorities.

We're moving more from planning to implementation.

We're not there yet.

We're continuing to look for ways that we can speed processes up that need attention, and we'll continue to do that.

In the area of economic development, we support current and future economic development projects.

We're gonna set aside funding for arts and culture, the arts and culture initiative, which is a $50,000 amount of money for contingency.

We continue to invest in capital investment, strategic and emerging capital needs.

We have pushed some of our undesignated funds for cash infusion purposes into our capital programs.

In the world of urban services we're focused in supporting the small area planning with support for revitalization and urbanization projects and this will need to continue as our urban ring continues to age and as we urbanize which means traffic and additional density we will continue we will feel we will feel that pressure to provide more urban services to our citizens in those areas

There's support for transportation related initiatives, urban infill projects, regional transit, multimodal transportation, and there's a focus on trail and bike paths.

That sounds so city-like.

It really does.

I'm reflecting back to my days in Asheville where we had an urban environment.

These were words that we used with regularity.

Increased median mowing and other public services.

We've been able to find money to suggest that we increase operating hours marginally at our north side library.

And we've also got positions that loaded into the budget in neighborhood planning, a transportation manager, and a planner, all focused at providing a broad level of attention to these areas.

in the area of environmental protection.

We're talking about our climate action plan and we received direction in the fall that the board wanted a heightened level of attention and so we are suggesting that a energy program coordinator position be funded in next year's budget.

In addition to that, we've got money in our budget for the material utilization facility at Ivy.

to be able to bring that online next year, as well as the Recycling Convenience Center.

Also next year, our at-risk four-year-olds, this board knows that we have been supportive as a local government for continuing to push that forward, and I've suggested with the support of staff that we fund for three additional positions that would allow us to open an additional classroom next year.

We are currently maintaining 10.

and this would be a targeted focus on our at-risk four-year-old program.

And then finally the strategic plan support and the board's strategic priorities that includes project management and implementation, Southwood, the support of Southwood, affordable housing initiatives,

and funding to cover studies including phase two of the Rivanna River Corridor, the Pantops Master Plan, and Rio 29.

As I mentioned earlier, the strategic investment of undesignated funds, I believe it was

Supervisor Galloway, and it might have been in his very first meeting as a Board of Supervisor, asked us about the use of our savings, our savings from past years, 18, where our revenues have performed a little better than what we suggested or what we had anticipated.

All of this is wrapped into undesignated funds, and we will hopefully spend dedicated time in a work session

that will give you an opportunity to look at our strategy for putting some of that money to work in the current fiscal year within our capital improvement program, our economic development fund, and within our broadband initiatives, and then also putting some of that money to work in next year's budget.

If you are so inclined, you have got your budgets today, you can

tied back to page 199 and you will see detailed listing of what we would recommend that you take a look at tied back to that undesignated funding.

Maximizing transformation and addressing emerging opportunities.

I told Doug if he's got the IC today to do a distraction.

Thank you, Doug.

I appreciate that.

He's got this intuitiveness of if I'm in trouble, he knows what to do.

I'm hoping a good one.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

One of the constants in Albemarle County local government is our emphasis on working as one organization that's committed to excellence.

I really love that about this organization.

And through our budget, we retain the united focus on innovation, transformation, and the efficient use of county resources.

Allocates resources to the continued momentum for implementation of transformational initiatives such as our CIP process improvements and the use of technology needs assessment.

I'm really excited about that.

We've got a group of folks, a group of outside consultants that are looking hard at our use of technology, how we utilize technology and are we maximizing the use with a focus sure on internal staff capacity but also again on the customer service experience.

So I'm excited about that.

The technology needs assessment, records management, other technology solutions, innovations fund.

We've got money in this year's budget to increase the innovation fund and to encourage that level of creativity and risk taking.

all focused on becoming a strong organization.

We're increasing our GIS licensing capacity and exposing the tools to more people in our organization.

GIS is a way to, as you folks were talking as recently as Tuesday night, where you map, overlay, and you can begin to see how data coincides in ways that maybe we've not considered in the past.

Emerging opportunities.

transparency and analytics, the way that we work and the expectations of the community that are changing, customer focused technology, arising community needs that are not otherwise captured in the strategic plan, Yancey School,

Biscuit Run.

These are two opportunities that emerged over the past calendar year and this organization needed to remain open, nimble, and adaptable to determine at the board's direction if these were things that we needed to look at for the betterment of our community.

We have two positions that we've loaded for recommendation and consideration in the next year's budget.

One is an additional budget analyst.

The other is a business process analyst.

and so we're gonna work hard if those are supported to go to another level of analytics to where we can become a little more proactive and maybe not quite as reactive as we move forward.

And again, I applaud staff for as recently as Tuesday night where they said let's try something different.

Let's get three boards together for the first time and let's look on a separate but parallel track together and separate as to what big data suggests in terms of the trends for the future.

Savings in our health care as well as savings in our Children's Services Act.

These are things that are somewhat within our control, somewhat out, but this has been a good year and so we've enjoyed good performance within our health care program that will allow us to do more things with pay and benefits in the coming year that in a bad health care year we might not have been able to consider.

We'll continue to

to try to spend dedicated time though to try to understand where's our best bang for the buck in our healthcare system, our employees and their dependents.

This is probably the most important benefit day in and day out that we can provide.

Our response to our citizens in evolving way and how they use our citizen services.

So, as I begin to come to close, I would like to talk just for a minute about

our strategic resource allocation.

I showed, we had meetings around December and we talked about in the budget process the requests that had not been included in this year's budget.

Let's look first to the middle category if you don't mind.

The middle category, and this is a busy slide, but bear with me and let me walk you through.

Advancing our strategic priorities.

I'd say first that I am requesting

about 22 and a half new positions.

And we've got four positions that were already approved in this year's budget that would carry over.

And so we are requesting a higher than normal number of positions in our budget.

But if you would look, the three pie charts suggest where those positions are.

And in the middle of the page is advancing our strategic priorities.

72% of the recommended positions that are tied to advancing our priorities, they rest in that pie chart, in that category.

I like that because that suggests to me high organizational alignment.

We're paying very close attention in my mind of what are the most important priorities and how we move those priorities forward in the coming year.

We still, with that in mind, did not fund every position that was tied to strategic priorities.

We just didn't have the affordability to be able to do that.

I'd then go to the far right and I'd look at maximizing our transportation and addressing emerging needs.

We've got to be disciplined as an organization to reserve and earmark some level of purposeful margin.

We cannot leverage 100% of our resources

and remain adaptable and remain nimble to emerging needs.

We just can't do that.

And so we had several positions that were supported that were tied back to maximizing transformation and addressing emerging needs.

Finally, I'd go back to where I started with the previous slides on sustaining a quality organization.

I think this is both a blessing and a curse in that what we've got in our organization right now is we've got dedicated and hardworking people.

a third of the positions that were requested were approved that were asked for by our 18 departments tied back to customer service maintaining pace and expectations for customer service delivery and acceptable turnaround times.

That's where a lot of our managers, we're gonna be spending a lot of time and we're gonna be trying to continue to look for where technology

can help us drive process redesign where we may not need as many people or may not need as many touches in order to produce the same level of quality internally and externally.

We're going to honor the past

but we've also got an eye on the future as the organization needs to change to keep pace with the community we serve.

This has to do with us continuing to bear down on best practices.

What are best practices across the nation and how can we learn from that with change management and service redesign where it's applicable.

Staying current in our field and that goes back to the committed growth and development

More education dollars are in next year's budget for our people.

More training and development dollars are in our budget next year for our people.

because the demands are high but we've got to invest in our people.

It's a continual evaluation.

In that quadrant I would tell you that it's a continual evaluation.

It's a blend of innovative management with investment in growth and development of our people.

This requires us to be visionary but yet practical so that we hit the sweet spot with our staff.

And this is, we're still working on this.

We're at a crossroads and I talked to you about that

When we started, I'm proud of the fact that our staff has worked hard with your vision and your support to maintain all of our unfunded mandates.

One of our challenges is that we believe we certainly could put more money into capital, but we also, with undesignated funds, we're making that a priority.

We are doing cash infusions into our capital program, recognizing that we must continue to invest in our infrastructure.

I've talked to you about a national level

of economic uncertainty that continues to be the case.

I've talked to you today a little bit about our staff capacity.

But as we move forward, as I mentioned that there has been a lot of work that's been done over the past year just to get us to this point.

That as we look for that 2020 forecast, if you accept this budget, you will be accepting it for the second year in a row where we have successfully deferred a tax rate increase.

But as we look toward 2020, we will have to be broad in our thinking

in trying to determine what is the appropriate balance.

We've got capital infrastructure that's coming with our schools, necessary and needed additional funding, substantial funding for schools.

Our CIP oversight committee took some time and looked at that

and that could end up being somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe $90 million of needs that will take us forward with our K through 12 public education investment.

But that CIP oversight committee broadened that discussion and said, what else should we be looking at?

What else is under consideration as we move toward 2020?

It's almost appropriate that this man's beside me because he's been looking at with triple, triple A bond ratings

How much can we afford to do and take on and still maintain our strong financial position in this community for the years to come?

We've worked way too hard as a community and we've been highly disciplined to get to this spot.

Now as you approach the 2020 crossroads, you'll have to take a lot of things into account simultaneously with the help of staff, key partner agencies, in order to be able to hit what I would say is your sweet spot.

And so we wrap up in summary recognizing that we, the people at this table, the people in this room, we have a common obligation to make our local government work for the citizens in our community.

It's a partnership.

I refer to it as a partnership.

It's not just a partnership between this board and this staff, but the 58 agencies and ultimately the citizens that we serve.

Citizens usually judge us well, judge us on how well we meet this obligation.

And it's on the basis of three things, community economic vitality, community quality of life,

and community responsiveness to its needs.

I would suggest to you that this budget addresses all three of those areas to the degree that, did we identify everything that we needed in the budget and fund it?

Absolutely not.

We were not able to afford to.

But at the same time, we looked at all three of those areas

Community Economic Vitality, Community Quality of Life, and Community Responsiveness to its Needs.

We'll continue this discussion through our work sessions.

but between now and April, Lori's gonna walk us through that and look and show you what that means.

I'm excited about this process, I'm excited about the opportunities, and I'm excited about exploring more with this staff, this board, and this community, how we best move forward into FY19 and also plan for what I call 2020 crossroads.

Albemarle County did not become such an amazing community by accident.

The leadership and vision of past boards and boards, both appointed and elected boards, has put us in what I call an outstanding spot right now to move this community forward.

And I really, really applaud the leadership of this board and past boards to put us in the spot that we're in currently.

Thank you very much for your time today.

Madam Chair, I'm going to turn it back over to you and certainly

as I turn it back over to you if there's anything.

Oh, I'm gonna turn it over to Lori.

Thank you very much.

I'm Lori Allshouse.

I'm the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

And before I start, I do want to thank a lot of staff I see out in your audience today, and there's many, many others that did such a great job getting us to the place we are today, which is the launching place for your discussion.

I especially want to recognize Jody Saunders who's back there pretty well in the back row.

She did a lot on this presentation and she really put a lot of effort into it and I thought she did a fabulous job so I just wanted to make sure we recognized Jody.

You have a document in front of you.

It's about 312 pages thick.

It has in it also an ABRT.

You heard a lot of conversation about agencies that we work with.

You have a refund of the agencies, all the information about those agencies and recommended funding, both from the city and the county.

That's a joint process we work with.

And additionally, you will see a blue piece of paper

It's probably on the inside left of your folder.

And what we've done with that is we've identified the next steps.

February 20th will be a public hearing at 6 p.m. in the auditorium.

and on the 22nd will be your first work session and you'll see the chapters and I always think about Ann when I say this, your homework.

So you can see the pages that we'll be discussing so if you'd like to look at them ahead of time you can glance through those and be ready for the work sessions.

You'll have another one on the 26th and you'll see the items we plan to cover there.

If you have a lot of discussion and questions we may

run a little behind in some of these categories, but just keep in mind we'll try to keep you moving at a certain pace to get you through the document.

On March 1st, we're gonna start with the school division's request, and then we'll move into the capital improvement plan conversation.

March 5th is, we have a list usually you'll go through and you'll identify a lot of items that you'll wanna discuss further.

We'll make sure we get through your list on the 5th, and at that point you finalize the tax rate for advertisement,

and you'll approve your proposed budget.

So this budget will move from the recommended budget from the county executive to your proposed budget at that point.

And then if you need additional work sessions, we have some time set aside for that on the 27th and 29th.

And then there'll be another public hearing on your proposed budget on April 10th.

and on April 17th, that's when you will set the tax rate and adopt the budget.

And our plan is to appropriate your budget this year, early on May 2nd.

So, are there any questions?

All right, I'll turn it over to you, Madam Chair.

Questions, go ahead.

Rookie question.

We'll share that with you as we start the first department and share the information about the compensation, the benefits and all that right off the bat.

Thank you and thank you for the assigned homework because 2008 is still seared in my brain where I read the wrong chapters to be, so I wasn't ready for the work session and it was traumatic.

So this will really help us to be on the page, on the right page, on the right day.

Other questions from board members before we move on to anything else we need to do?

Well, I don't hear any questions.

Thank you again to all of our staff who have, again, done a wonderful job of providing this homework to us.

Anything else from board members not listed on the agenda for today?

All right.

So we will adjourn to February 20th at 6 p.m. in Lane Auditorium.