Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session   3/29/2018

Thank you everyone and welcome to the board work session.

Board of Supervisors, Albemarle County work session, March 29th, 2018.

If everyone would please adjust your microphones and we will introduce ourselves momentarily for a mic check.

We want to welcome Officer Lowry.

Thank you very much for being here today.

Sure.

Keep an eye on our clerks and make sure we can be heard.

Then we will jump right in and Lori do I kick it to you to begin?

Who's gonna begin?

Yes ma'am Madam Chair, we do have one item that is a carryover from Tuesday afternoon and it is specific to your recommended operating budget for next year.

It does specifically address funding that it can set aside in a contingency

It is consistent with their budget request for next year for $142,000 and we did have an issue that came up

over the last day where after conferring with staff and with the executive director of Jaunt and also with Greg Kamptner our legal attorney we may be able to advise the board to make an adjustment and it would not have it would be a revenue-neutral

adjustment.

So therefore it would have no bearing on your recommended budget, but it would be more specific to the funding as to the availability of the funds affected July the 1st.

Yeah, we have this from Greg that went out to all of us.

It says, what we're doing is actually combining two line items, which does not pose a legal problem because it's revenue neutral, which is what you just said, and does not affect the budget public hearing legal advertising.

in any way.

Of course, even if it did, we had time to change that.

But regardless, Greg's email to us said, this seems to be a correction that should be made to the board's proposed fiscal year 19 budget.

A motion to make the correction should be considered.

And so I have the motion that I can read.

We're just taking it out of contingency, right?

Brad, do you want to come up and explain it briefly?

Brad's here.

Right there on the table.

That happened in the legislature, not here.

So when I put my John's FY19 budget together, there are two typical ways.

There was a typical way of going about that, and that is a standard approach of just taking what we do now and carrying it over to the future year and doing whatever kind of cost of living or percentage increase for wages.

So the idea would have been to take the 85 drivers that we employ now and give them 3% and put them on the road next year to do the same service that they do now.

but knowing that I wanted to find a way to pay our drivers more I dug into the data to look and analyze the information to see how I can try to flex what we do to make that happen and the way I did that was to reduce that need for 85 drivers down to 78 and then take the savings from that and spread it over to the other drivers, the remaining drivers

to provide that wage increase.

So the budget that we put together was what I call a high performance budget, meaning that if I pay my drivers better, I can help incentivize them to do better, which then saves money overall.

Never really dawned on me to have this conversation before because I thought the wage aspect was a more palatable, understandable issue.

But it seems important that it is discussed because it's an either or approach to the budget.

The money that has been set aside

is money that has the perception of for higher wages.

But if I was to pay only a 3% increase, I would still need that money to employ those other drivers that I had eliminated in the higher performance budget.

So it's a complicated approach, but it took a lot of hours of crunching the numbers to make sure that I could do it.

So I wouldn't have proposed it if I didn't think I could incentivize the drivers to do it.

Well, other than it's extremely important to me as a person, I think competitively I don't lose drivers to other driving positions mostly.

I lose them to the other better paying jobs in the market, Wegmans or whatever it might be.

So the type of driver that I want to keep is the same type of person that Wegmans and others want because of their personality and their character.

I can teach skill.

I can't teach character.

and the type of people we serve character is 99% of the job.

So finding how to better pay them and keep them long enough to get them to perform better is a win-win all around and that's the key is keeping them.

I don't want to say I have a problem recruiting but I think Jaunt really, its culture kind of draws people to it anyways.

People don't leave companies, they leave bosses.

People are leaving for money.

They're not leaving jaunt as a company or a boss, hopefully.

So that's why it's important.

I think sustaining that type of performance I think will enable us to do so much more for the city and county going forward because you're getting the drivers to buy into what they do.

And we arm them every two weeks with so much information that it's like knowing the score at a basketball game.

Yes, thank you very much.

So the motion will say, and the motion is, I move that the Board correct the Board of Supervisors proposed budget by amending pages 82 and 160 to combine the jaunt and jaunt driver wage contingency line items

Second.

I'm fine with this.

I'm going to support it.

I think often we've done when there have been different jurisdictions, it's been to get everybody on the program.

But it's important for the county.

Yeah, I'm fine.

I'm supportive of it.

I just didn't, I didn't know.

I didn't know why it was put in contingency to begin with.

It wasn't because waiting for somebody else to do the same thing or?

And I understand that, but just one more question.

I thought I heard something a while back about how this was going to be taken up at the partnership.

So we're just putting it in contingency.

I'm going back to your question in contingency.

The partnership is discussing whether or not we want to have a competitive wage throughout our community, but that partnership would not be paying that competitive wage.

We're just discussing the possibility.

So I just want to make sure I understand this whole contingency issue.

So this is contingent upon the city coming, I mean if you put something in a contingency fund it's contingent upon something.

I'm not sure the origin of the idea on the surface it seems reasonable and again when the focus was on wage it seemed like that was the best approach because that helped foster and ensure a conversation but as things have changed over the conversations about the budget

It became clear to make sure that it was understood that while that money was identified as money for wage increase, it actually was just a wage dollar amount.

Didn't matter about being an increase or not.

It was just existing to serve the purpose of employing additional funds for the drivers, whether again at a 3% amount or larger.

So I think the wage discussion complicated that, or the lack of the performance discussion probably complicated it so that it, or maybe even simplified it to the point that that's where the contingency came from.

So now it has complicated things because we are kind of stuck on this idea of a higher wage, but when we talk about the budget, it's a wash, because if I hadn't even brought that to the table,

I believe from the numbers that I ran the budget request I would have brought to the county would have been 1.99 million not 1.93 million and that would have been just doing the status quo versus pushing the drivers so the wage thing kind of really clouded and distracted what I was doing more internally to make it happen

I regret and have learned a good lesson there of doing something complicated without probably tackling that first and then dealing with something more subjective like a wage increase.

So the wage thing is not, I would almost want to take that completely off the table right now and not even say that we're proposing to give our drivers a higher wage because it really doesn't matter.

Give them 3%, meet 85, give them 10%, meet 78.

It's still the same amount of dollars.

So if people focus on a wage issue, it's more about the comparables of a wage, which then really is a whole other conversation.

That shouldn't be a budgetary conversation.

It goes back to the contingency was intended to try to foster a good healthy wage conversation.

It did not go that way, or is not going that way.

And I think the frequency of the meeting of the RTPs kind of prevent that at this point.

And we're hoping to get there.

So I do think that's going to come back up, but I'm hoping it doesn't come back up as a budget issue.

I don't expect it to because I know how I can manage my own system for that.

I know you're talking to the city, my assumption would be that they're looking at their different qualifications for their drivers and their different, you know, number of years that they're worked and all that kind of stuff and trying to sort of

Yeah, I brought the question up because it just didn't seem like it should have been put into contingency to begin with.

And I can say, Supervisor Galloway, that it was not the staff's intent to create an operational disruption in any way for Jaunt as an agency.

That was not the purpose.

Supervisor Palmer, I love saying that.

I'll reach out to you because I'm reaching out to each of you because we need to have a longer conversation about this type of concept because this type of entrepreneur type approach will help us try to do more with what we have for the county and for the city.

The better you understand how we can push pop things at Jaunt, the better you can understand the ideas that we bring to the table.

That's fine.

It was, what, 3.40 this morning?

Okay, so let me just go back one more time.

I move that the board correct the board's proposed budget by amending pages 82 and 160 to combine

Madam Chair, at this point, if you could hand it over to Ms.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Madam Chair, members of the board, I'm Lori Allshouse, Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Today I have beside me Holly Biddle, and she works in the Office of Management and Budget and is providing the leadership on the CIT.

So she's here.

You notice I have a different person with me every day based on the specialties of different folks in the office.

So I welcome her here today and she can answer some specific questions that I may not have on the slides.

Today's meeting is going to be interactive.

It's your meeting.

It's a work session.

We have some slides to introduce this topic for you and to work through some different components of it.

And I'm just going to encourage you to jump in and make it interactive.

I always start with this slide because I see the march down to the approved budget on April 17th.

As you can see, the amounts of things are not as many now that we have today's work session.

April 10th is your public hearing on the board's proposed budget, and on the 17th you set the tax rate and approve the budget, and you also have a public hearing that day on the tax rate.

So just to see the direction, we're almost to April.

Now, today's desired outcomes and basically the agenda for today's meeting includes a variety of topics.

The goal today is to obtain board's guidance on the 1923 Capital Improvement Plan.

We are hoping for an approval of the plan, but we understand that we may not get there today, so we would love some guidance along the way if we can't actually get to an approval.

The first item that we're going to talk about after just a little bit of background material is a follow-up request from the board.

We have the schools here to just provide a little more detail on the high school capacity improvement project, Center 1.

and then it's basically the question you had on help us connect that center one to the pilot.

There's a pilot project included in the school's operating budget and there was some questions about how does that pilot connect to this first center and then also just a little bit more about how it's all connected to the phases of the project.

So just two slides but just a little bit of follow up to make sure that we have answered your questions on that topic.

We're also going to talk a little bit about the CIP approval requirements and your timeline.

We're going to talk then about the oversight committee's recommendations and how the CIP that we're seeing today, how that evolved.

We're gonna talk about those five models and scenarios.

Sometimes we call it a model, sometimes a scenario, and resource needs.

And it was that 11 by 17 page that we provided at last meeting.

We also provided an additional one today if you happen to not bring it in with you today.

So we have some slides on it, but we're also gonna go over that in a little more detail with you today.

And we're gonna consider a little bit about timing.

There's some timing elements that we should talk about.

And also, just wanted to make sure you're aware of the projects that aren't included.

You can't get everything of course in your CIP, but we wanted to make sure you were aware of the ones that aren't even included in that model.

We're gonna just do a very check-in at the end.

We're not gonna go in a lot of details about the referendum and referendum timeline, but we did wanna talk with you just in general about how that timeline's gonna work moving forward if you choose to move towards a 2018 referendum.

And then we're gonna leave time at the end for any outstanding questions or considerations that you might have, and then really wanna wrap up some guidance for us and for you to consider if you wanna approve a 1923 CIP at this point.

So any questions about the plan for today?

All right, so just some quick background before we go into the follow-up from last Tuesday's meeting.

A little bit about the CIP and the capital budget.

As you know, on Tuesday I was really focused on the capital budget, which was your first year of your CIP and the importance of approving that capital budget as part of your budget process.

And today I wanna just talk with you a little bit about the CIP, and the CIP stands for the Capital Improvement Plan.

and this is just some background information from budget documents.

The CIP provides details on projects a local government wants to undertake over the upcoming five years.

It is a plan.

And each year we update our CIP, we update our revenues and expenditures, we revise them, we do timing adjustments with projects, and new projects can be added or removed.

And historically here at the county we've done kind of a full-fledged one in one year and then kind of an amendment year.

That's how we've been trying to do it the last few years.

The implementation of a CIP, because it's a plan to implement it, it really depends on the availability of your funding, and it's subject to revision in out years.

So it's a plan, not a budget.

While a locality must adopt a capital budget, you do not necessarily have to adopt a CIP.

However, the county's practice has always been to approve a CIP as part of the annual budget development process, and we think that's a good idea.

An important point, and Greg was driving this home when we were together on Tuesday, if the county desires to undertake a November 2018 referendum, staff strongly recommends that the county approve a CIP this spring, and preferably by April 17th, but last time we did a referendum, we came in a little bit later, and the process has still made it, but the earlier the better, especially for education for the community.

Any questions about that, just the clarity between the planning and the budget?

Today's considerations, and so just to think about how our day's gonna go today, these are, trying to bring it down in a nutshell of what we're trying to get to is that basically you're deciding today or shortly thereafter what should be included in your plan and your CIP for the school division and for general government.

And then what can the community support or afford?

You gotta think about affordability and capacity.

So those are kind of the two ways to look at this.

Thanks, Laurie.

Rosalind Schmidt, Director of Planning and Budget with Albemarle County Schools.

As Laurie mentioned, we just wanted to provide two quick clarifying slides to connect almost Tuesday's conversation to this larger CIP conversation.

The one question I thought that was a little outstanding was the role of the pilot center as it related to the larger CIP request in the 600 student center.

So we want to emphasize again that the first center to come online is what we're calling the pilot center that is in the operating funding request.

It is leased space.

It will have a soft opening in this coming school year with anywhere from 20 to 40 students.

We hope to grow that over time to as many as 150 students.

And the purpose, and this is what I want to emphasize, it's not to test whether the center model is the right model or not, it's to test the details of that center model, from food services to transportation to communication of students.

So it's not the intent that we would have complete results from that center before the next center comes.

online.

And there is a large possibility that it will continue to operate after the larger center opens.

And that leads to the next center.

That's what's in the CIP request.

That's the 600 students one.

And the one on the right is to imply that the intent of the model is to build this network of models.

And the second center is that to be determined whether it's needed at an instructional need or a capacity need.

Next slide.

And then the next clarifying point we wanted to offer is the context of this phasing.

There was a question of, if we commit to phase one, does that mean that we have to do phase two, three, and four?

The intent of the request was that it was a comprehensive request for the entire high school program.

So yes, Center One could operate without the rest.

But the impact on students would be limited.

So that you would serve 600 students, but you wouldn't impact the full high school program.

Greenlight.

But you're still creating barriers for some students, which is what we're trying to avoid.

But isn't the idea, too, that you're

You're making changes all along the way.

Maybe you're not testing it with the prototype center, but you're certainly going to see what works and what doesn't work and adjust it and there's going to be new technologies.

and I think one of the leaps of faith was the Agner-Hert multi-age space that they took on.

That was really kind of a first go investing in a project like that.

Now it's been there for a number of years.

They've been able to research it and that's what's going into the Woodbrook space.

Also comment, current modernization efforts through interdisciplinary classrooms at high schools.

So, I don't know if this is the right time to ask this, but why not?

Should I let you go further?

That's all I had was those two slides.

So, if the board decided that

Do we have an alternative?

What would the schools do?

So I would say if this project doesn't go forward, you're at your status quo right now.

You're leasing trailers at Albemarle, you know, up to eight classrooms, and that population is only continuing to grow, so it only will increase.

Western right now is sustained with no trailers, but if nothing is done, they're going to start popping up trailers out there.

And I do have a memory of somewhere around 20 or 30 trailers at Albemarle High School about 20 years ago.

And I would like to speak to the fact as a principal of the school of Virginia Beach that had trailers, nothing was more devastating I think in terms of student morale than having to go out of the school building.

into trailers.

And the trailers were air conditioned so it wasn't that they were unattractive, but they didn't allow the kind of natural space and the same feel of being in the school as having a school building.

So it's not to say the educational

quality necessarily declines in terms of pedagogical impact and effectiveness in teaching, but I think it's harder to teach a class and sustain that through a whole semester teaching in a trailer because it has a temporary feel to it.

It's just inevitable.

Can you also refresh our memory, Rosalind?

In one of these boxes was the Scottsville improvements that is not on this bar, and there was an amount that went with that.

I have a slide.

It's coming later?

Okay, we can wait until later if that's fine.

When we get to Scenario 5, we'll pull that slide in.

All right, great.

I'll write it down on here to look for it.

but it is interesting that the center's model hits two, it's kind of a one bird or two birds with one stone kind of piece.

It hits program wise what the school division is going after from a curriculum standpoint.

It also happens to deal with a capacity issue in a more cost, a not so cost prohibitive way because what everybody else has been talking about is a new high school which is another 40, 50 million dollars on top of that.

We can look to one of our neighbors to see how they're dealing with the new high school.

And a new high school is frankly not needed based on our capacity studies.

So the status quo, there's really no other option at Albemarle.

You can continue to add trailers, but

Everybody should remember the last redistricting committee did say that even if you had redistricted those couple hundred students, which the board chose not to, that that was the final redistricting option you could even explore at Albemarle.

So that means even if you redistrict, you got maybe a 200 seat fix.

Inescapable bricks and mortars issue.

You cannot avoid the fact that we're facing bricks and mortars.

We need to have more capacity.

It seems like the question is whether it's a specific project.

If we do nothing, yes, we keep

Building more and more trailers, that's obviously not the best idea but is the only alternative to say we're going to do everything and it's going to be a project that we're working because at the end of this project there's going to need to be another project.

Can it just be more like the Japanese industrial model traditionally of just constant improvement if we build the

The intent is not to do it all right away.

And I think you bring up a very good point, Norman, that there's going to be here a need for assessment of how the center is working, not only for the teachers, but especially for the students, how parents feel about it.

And we talked on Tuesday about the transportation dimension, that that will be an ongoing issue.

But there are a lot of aspects of this, and I think it would be really important to pause

and take the pulse on how the learning centers are working before we go to the next step.

So I really do look at this as an isolated project.

Yes, it's the keel of the aircraft carrier when you look at the full range of things, but we need to bite this off in bits here and do what we must do immediately to address the overcrowding issue.

Okay, well I know we will come back to talk about this in a little bit but I think no one argues with the, is trying to cast any doubt about the process you've gone through and the benefits to the kids.

It's how much, how fast, and how much that will completely take over everything else that's happening.

So those are the kinds of decisions we need to talk about and try to make the next step.

Madam Chair, Trevor Henry, Director of Facilities and Environmental Services.

Just wanted to take an opportunity to mention, as you talk about the center one and consider it, we have shared this project with Stantec, our Development Services Advisor.

The region that the school really is looking at is kind of in that Route 29 area that we've been spending a lot of

I just wanted to share that when Stantec goes out for their pre-marketing, this project would be one of the projects that they would talk about as a potential.

There may be opportunities that we aren't even aware of that will come out of that over the next few months.

Super.

Thank you.

And we can speak again to this as we go through the process.

Folks are still here and we can continue to talk about this because it is a really important project when we think about the CIP.

So I appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Rosalyn, and I appreciate the added comment by Trevor.

So I'm going to move now to the Oversight Committee's recommendation.

and there's two board members here that were on the oversight committee this year and so I'm gonna start this off and talk a little bit about the recommendation and the memo that came out and a little bit of the background of how we are, where we are today.

First of all, you all remember and I always like to show this slide because it shows the past work that a lot of folks have done and where we are in the process but

This is a long term process developing a CIP in this county and I want to thank Trevor for a lot of the work he does along the way as we work these projects through all kinds of iterations, a lot of study that happens along the way and as you know the oversight committee is a very important part of the process and the oversight committee does prepare a report and it's in yellow up there just to kind of point out where oversight committee is and the process

and that report comes to the county executive's office around the time that we're putting together this budget.

And this year the oversight committee provided us with something a little different than we've received in the past.

On the oversight committee, the members, I just wanted to share with you the information about the members.

It's a committee that includes board members, school board members, a planning commission, and a citizen representative.

The oversight committee, they have a certain charge.

So their charge is to provide a report recommending a balanced five year CIP to the county executive.

And this year they developed scenarios.

We talked a lot about scenarios.

And they developed scenarios to address some pent up infrastructure needs.

So that's what we really talked about a lot this last year's process.

So this is kind of a summary.

It's in small print.

I'm gonna slow down here for a minute on this slide.

But the oversight committee's memo this year provided two basic scenarios.

We're going to talk with you about five scenarios today.

And the oversight committee looked at a number of scenarios.

But the two that came forward this year were these.

The first one was a foundational model or a basic model, which is just the mandates, obligations, maintenance, replacement projects.

Basically what we do

We've been doing a long time through the past many years.

We've had a pretty basic CIP with some, I think Trevor called them one up projects.

There'd be some projects that would come in, but basically it was a pretty solid maintenance and replacement CIP.

So a model like that was provided.

And then this other model was provided that we're gonna call scenario five in a few minutes when we go through the scenarios.

And this model included some specific project requests in it.

and a recommendation that the county consider placing a number of quality of life projects.

This includes schools and local government projects on a bond referendum or referendums for the resident's consideration.

Now at the time when the oversight committee made this recommendation, the specific referendum projects were illustrative in nature.

So we basically, we called it at one point a straw man.

Trevor did a lot of work on this and we kind of bundled, called it bundles and straw, I guess that's where straw and bundle came together.

Straw man bundles of projects that you could consider on a referendum that kind of provided a balance of different projects.

and the memo came out and said that the final list of projects would be determined later in the process.

So there hasn't been a lot of real detailed scrubbing of what would go in that first bond referendum, especially on the local government side.

Some of the projects that we had put in that first straw man bundle were ones that maybe weren't complete because we thought there might be some other referendums coming down the pike.

So the box here over to the right is very important in that the oversight committee

discussed the possibility of considering bond referendums as more of a regular practice in the county.

As you know, there were many years, I think it was what, 1970s, that we did a bond referendum in the county, and then there was many, many years of no bond referendum, and then in 16 we did a bond referendum.

Some other jurisdictions do this more of a routine basis, and there was a conversation about that, and Trevor bundled three or four different scenarios to show the oversight committee the way that could work.

So what came forward was the way I took it was the oversight committee basically showed this and said we want the board to consider something a little different this year.

So it was for the board's consideration and it was a little bit different than the past.

And I'm looking at Norman, am I hitting that right from what you all talked about?

Here's the slide that we used when we talked about this in March 1st with everyone.

It's a different CIP.

That was that sense of crossroads, something very different about this CIP than the ones we've done in the past.

This particular CIP that we're going to be talking about, especially when you get to scenario five, would require additional resources beginning in 20 based on current projections and

As you know, in the past, we thought we would have a tax rate increase associated with the 2016 referendum, and for two years we were able to defer that.

And as you know, when we talk about the scenarios, that was a deferral, and we'll talk about that in a little bit based on our assumptions.

and we also did a lot of strong infusion of one time money.

We had a positive variance in fiscal year 17.

This model shows a pretty strong infusion of end of the year money.

So that was another way that we really wanted to help support the CIP and what's good about that is you don't have to borrow.

You can use some cash and cash funds and things.

We also looked a lot at our financial management strategies and we wanted to, although we're a AAA and we do a really good job, we wanted to really concentrate on our management strategies and make sure that we're considering that as well.

And as we talked before, that pay-go or pay-as-you-go process is important to add some cash in to your CIP, it's not all borrowing.

So our models are showing a little bit of increase in pay-go along the way, so you're adding a little more cash into the model.

We also are getting more fine-tuned on what we're calling spend plans.

So the borrowing would occur when the spending is needed even though you approve a referendum or approve going to borrowing.

We're watching that cash flow a lot closer and that you borrow right when you need it so you don't borrow too soon or too late.

So we're doing a lot more work together with the schools and everyone who has projects to start developing and managing spend plans for each project.

and this particular model, and this is working with Davenport, has another thing that we haven't done in the past and it's got some short-term borrowing between issuances and basically, when I say the word issuance, that's where you go out and you go out with Davenport and you do a big borrowing and those cost money to do and so if you do a little short-term borrowing, you don't have to do them all the time.

You can do a little short-term borrowing between your issuances and what's interesting about this, you can also borrow from yourself

So you're also watching the whole cash flow of the county.

You can borrow from your own cash flow or you can have a short-term situation in place with a bank that you watch that and you can go into a short-term borrowing or not.

So again, this is fine-tuning our financial management here at the county to get to another level.

The other thing I want to mention is the operating impacts

of Scenario 5, which is the big picture that we're gonna be talking about here in a few minutes.

We haven't talked through all the operating impacts.

We do know that there's some associated with Center 1 of the high school, and we do have that identified, but there might be other operating impacts as well.

For example, if you're gonna go with a much stronger CIP, you might need more folks that do procurement, so there's activities associated with a doubling CIP that we would have to consider as well.

We haven't fine-tuned all that, because again, this is a CIP for your consideration.

The other thing is that this particular Scenario 5 that we're going to get to and other scenarios along the way does include a 2018 referendum.

the high school capacity improvement project or elements of the project.

And we had other quality of life referendum projects included.

And when I say other, it doesn't exclude the schools.

The schools also have a couple projects in that other quality of life package including Scottsville and some learning space modernization.

So it wasn't that it's schools, it's just the high school and the other ones are local government.

It had the combination of schools also in that second bundling.

Water resource projects are included in the CIP.

We're not gonna talk about that a lot today, but right now, the stormwater or water resource capital projects are included in your CIP.

Lori, if I may just interrupt on that and thank you for that.

I'd like to propose to the board that we table discussion of the staff proposed stormwater utility fee as will be presented to the board and to the public on April 11th.

I remind those listening to this broadcast that the board of supervisors

has not publicly discussed this proposed stormwater utility-free program in its totality, nor received or reviewed the final staff proposals to date.

Thirdly, despite this reality, the Board of Supervisors has continued to receive daily emails and calls from primarily rural residents

opposed to the stormwater utility fee in the rural areas of Albemarle County.

Fourth, I recommend that the board utilize April 11 instead to examine a variety of options

several of which I've shared with the board and staff that have the potential to improve the equal operation and fairness of the stormwater utility fee in the rural areas.

The goal will not be to finalize the contours of the rural stormwater utility fee on April 11th.

but to begin to discuss whether refinements and improvements exist to enhance the rural stormwater utility fee.

Finally, if at the end of the board, staff and citizens looking at an improved rural stormwater utility fee,

Consensus, or board majority support for a different rural stormwater utility fee is unattainable, then the board will and must be prepared to retain stormwater management in the rural areas as a general budget item

and not have it funded through a dedicated stormwater fee.

At the end of the meeting today would be the time to do that discussion, not right.

I would not like to have it right now because we have things that are already on the agenda to talk about and you've certainly, I had Rick written down here at number three to come back to that later.

So that's where I think other members, matters from the board would be the time to take up that.

Not right in the middle of the process here.

Go ahead, Laurie.

So.

Where we are right now is to think about scenarios and again the oversight committee looked at a number of scenarios from a basic foundational scenario through a scenario that I'm calling scenario five that was the narrative that was included in your budget document included scenario five.

So we have passed out a piece of paper that's in front of you, I think it's 11 by 18 or so of these different scenarios and I've also got some slides on it today so we can actually look at it in a couple different ways

and I have a slide, this slide talks about what the scenarios are and the next slide talks about affordability or additional resource needs again based on current assumptions, based on current assumptions on interest rates, current assumptions on revenues and so those resource needs of course will be adjusted in the future as things change.

So I'm gonna walk you through from one to five

just the basic scenario and how we got to them and Holly's here because she did a lot of work on these so if you have specific questions about any of the scenarios we can go into more detail.

But as we discussed there's a foundational or basic scenario very similar to some of our capital improvement plans of the past.

Maintenance obligations, maintenance and replacement projects,

and the courts were included.

So this is basically your CIP that was approved last year with updated revenues and expenditures, some adjustments in timing, some just basic minor adjustments and that's what we're calling scenario one which is a foundation scenario.

and we'll talk in a minute that that even has a resource, a need associated with it.

And again, we're talking five-year now and not, we're not talking about this year, but we're talking about out into the future of five-year CIP.

Scenario two is that foundation with some enhancements in it.

and basically it included some funding for ACE out in the four years starting 2020 and on the ACE program.

There's a, basically I would call it a reserve for advancing strategic priorities.

The board has some strategic priorities with activities going on, project management's going on on those that we know will require some capital resource needs and so there's $2 million in this foundation enhanced for some of those that are still being defined

The Ivy Recycling Center is in this particular version.

Fire Rescue's Volunteer Facilities Pilot.

It's not the complete program and this is something that's on our watch list.

There's going to be more funding, likely more funding requests in the future here.

It's got a police evidence processing and vehicle design, storage design.

So we're also going to start talking about what's in and what's not in.

What's not in scenario five is the actual construction of the police evidence processing and vehicle storage projects.

So Scenario 2 is where you are right now.

I heard you say 5.

I was just confused.

Actually, you're raising a good point.

There are some things, and we're going to talk about it as we get to what's in and what's out Scenario 5, but

The CIP, the way it's set up is there's money in there for the design, but because we didn't know the full cost yet, it hasn't been built in yet.

So just so you know that even when you get to scenario five, there's some things like that that we haven't built the full cost in or even the estimates in in the out years yet until we know more about them.

So really good point.

And then scenario three,

includes, and all these are buildings, so that's kind of why we built it in the steps here.

It builds on the first two and includes the high school phase one, center one, as Rosalyn shared a lot of information with you on the center one.

And then when you get to scenario four, it includes all of those plus the high school phases one to three.

And when we say one to three, basically what this means is

Center 2 has been moved out of the five years based on the school's scrub over the last few weeks on it that they said, you know, that second center, we're gonna wait.

You might not need it till the CNA or the out years of the CIP.

So that's not in there right now.

It also includes those two modernizations.

So phases two and three of that project is modernization of the other high schools.

So that is in.

And then scenario five,

builds on all of those, and it includes, again, this bundling, this quality of life referendum project, which was a bundling of some projects across many categories in the general government, plus it included a couple extra projects for the schools, and that one was some more learning space and modernization efforts for the elementary and middle schools, and included the Scottsville elementary school project.

and those two projects, an important point, and I have another slide on it as well, is that those two projects, to your point of 19 or 20, everything that was in that one we called the quality of life referendum project, we basically put it in as kind of one lump sum and said those will start in 20.

So we didn't actually go into each project and go, oh, this should start in 19, this should start here.

We just kind of said, oh, we would do that referendum and then for the modeling we put them in 20.

So just so you know that we had modeled it in your, the one in your budget document is starting that, Scottsville in 20, which is an important consideration that we need to talk about later.

So that's just what they are.

And I can toggle back and forth between these two slides if you need to.

We just couldn't get it all on one slide.

And you have a handout that goes with this.

So now you need to, again, if you remember that slide I shared with you in the beginning, your consideration is this is a plan, not a budget.

What do you think should be in here for schools?

what should be in here for local government and what is the affordability?

What do you think the community can afford and participate in for your CIP?

So those are your three considerations you have to think about today.

So what we've done here is based on assumptions today that will change as we get updates in revenues and expenditures, we actually talked about what the project costs are in each of these scenarios and

The additional resources needed, both in dollar amount and in a tax rate equivalent if you use the real estate tax rate to be a mechanism to bring those resources to bear.

So you can see on the foundation, again, which was our basic model, and this is pennies over a five year period.

It's not pennies all in 2020, but there's pennies over the five year period.

A total over the five years would be 1.2 cents for the foundation.

unless the revenue assumptions change along the way we're going to be updating your revenues but you're right that's your but if natural growth in the future happens as it did this year where we deferred the increase that was needed by the 2016 referendum then that would contribute some number of millions of that needed 8.7 for example or 12 without additional

And there's two things, and you mentioned, and that's a very important point, it's not just the rate, but it's the assessments themselves too.

There's two things you have to think about when you think about real estate.

The rate plus the assessments that may change on property.

This is based on assumptions as of today, things could change.

It also is based on our assumptions today of how much cash we would put in at the end of a fiscal year.

So that can also change this.

Okay, so that is part of the foundation.

It's not in addition to that.

No, it's not in addition.

It was kind of, I think, if you want to look at it lots of ways, it's just something that needs to do it.

Right, yeah, it's not any addition to something that's already on a model.

So it's really lower than what we were deferring.

combination of the two.

So there's definitely a higher burden that the taxpayers are paying based on, for many of them, their assessments went up and the rates stayed flat, but the dollars still went up.

I need to be aware of that.

And the end of the year.

The end of the year money's a very important point that Ned brought up too, because remember the formula, when you see that formula of how much goes to capital and local government and schools through the formula, that cash infusion at the end of the year is real important.

so if you look at the next one the enhanced foundation again those were those specific projects we just talked about you can see an increase

You can see level three that does is the one we've been talking a lot about because we talked about it Tuesday about when we talked about the capital budget and

as Palmer talked about it a little bit earlier, it's the one that has an equivalent right now based on current assumptions of about a 4.6 cents.

Tax rate increase over five years, period.

Lori, one thing that I find helpful is to go back to sheets that you've given us on the 23rd of March.

It might be helpful also for Liz that where you show on those sheets of the scenario summaries, when we look at number one proposed draft CIP, the foundation, it shows 1.2 pennies over five years, but it adds the one cent

in fiscal year 20.

So we compare that to scenario three, the proposed CIP of enhanced foundation plus the high school center number one.

and we move in fiscal year 20 from one penny, which we just talked about in the first scenario, to two pennies in fiscal year 20 and then we have to add a penny in fiscal year 21 and then eight tenths of a penny in fiscal year 22 and 23.

So over five years, it's 4.6 but it's spaced out.

Right.

over a period of time so unfortunately the hit that occurs in fiscal year 20 is unavoidable because included in there are not just the start of the learning center to pay for that for its implementation but the enhanced aspects of the second scenario ace through the process police evidence processing and vehicle storage design.

so it's both of those together and so I think when you compare scenario one to scenario three based on those pages and when you see how it's proposed that they roll out you get a firmer idea that you're looking really at the first distinct difference being in fiscal year 20 instead of one penny it's going to go to two but then additional pennies have to come to the forefront to prevent us from

going over the 10% figure and to keep our AAA bond rating.

So that, but it's declining on an annual basis from two to one to 0.8 to 0.8 down.

So it's accumulatively over five years it's 4.6 pennies.

the other thing that we'll have to keep in mind again coming back to an item I've talked about before when we talk about the budget and we look at staffing we add staff not looking at the fact that that is a recurring expense

that takes money out of the budget and therefore that's money that actually could be in the CIP and help alleviate some of this.

So while it's good to meet project goals and objectives that all of us have as supervisors,

it really I think going forward this year more than ever is going to require us to be self-disciplined and focused on the fact that the CIP is something we have to be very conscious of because voters will have a reaction to the projected increase in taxes

they don't understand the rationale behind the operation of the CIP that well.

Some do, but a lot of them don't understand it as we go forward.

Is that helpful?

Yeah, I had read that.

Just take the two out of the middle, that's all.

Yeah, I had read that.

All right.

And the other thing I'd like to say about, just to add to your point on scenario three,

Sometimes capital projects have an operating impact, right?

So you have to be mindful that when that center one comes on or the schools have done an estimated cost on the operating impact that we actually have built in and have included in this estimate on increased needs.

So it does have an operating impact too.

We haven't probably scrubbed every single operating impact for every single project, but that's one that's very large and the schools have already provided a number on.

So we're all under an obligation as a board as we go forward in working with the school board to try to find, as Trevor has pointed out to us today, P3 opportunities to take out that coefficient of cost associated with real estate, to potentially look at a P3 opportunity there.

where there can be a value add in having an innovative school center in a community where people are living and working and that we can try to drive that cost down not nickel and diming the learning center but trying to get it as much as possible with a constrained and contained cost still being able to hit all the educational objectives of the school board.

The real estate costs will be offset by our rental that we'll have to make, though they're not just giving us the real estate.

They're investing in it and then getting their return by leasing it to

Rosalind, would it be logical to think usually when you do like a Woodbrook you're going to increase your operating costs.

But it seems likely that there will be more kids, and so you will have more teachers.

and ideally potentially may also be able to eliminate some of the trailers so that you recoup the benefit of not having that utility expense and that rental expense in the budget potential.

The other point I'd like to make, and this is one that the oversight committee also made, was that you see scenario four and then you compare it to three and you're like, wow, the additional funding that you need to go all the way to phase three is only a very small amount.

And you'd go, well, that seems strange, but it's because the cost will be outside of the five-year window.

So keep it in mind that the extra resources needed are those within the five-year window.

So there'll be additional costs that can come out in year six or seven, and when I show you one next year, it'll have another year in it, right?

I think realistically given the level of indebtedness the county will have to incur that this project overall for its achievement is going to be phased in over somewhere close to 10 years.

Realistically, just in terms of being able to go out to referendum, you can't go every single year.

It's not politically astute to do that.

Interest rates are going up.

We may have several years where we

I don't want to go out because the interest rates have gone up so high and a market correction would give an opportunity to go out again.

No, no, I don't want people listening.

I don't want people listening, Ann, to assume that we're trying to shoehorn in all of this into five years.

It's got to be done within five years.

For budget purposes, you're presenting this as a five-year budget.

This is what it would look like.

All I'm saying is, realistically, the way it will probably roll out with this board and future boards

is it will be phased in over perhaps a 10-year period.

As I remember, we were told that if we go out to referendum, we have eight years to spend the money.

So that was plus what?

I think we have to be very careful to Rick's point about how much we ask the public in a referendum because I would venture to guess that you go out for this whole entire amount

you're going to get less buy-in more than one.

And also having different topics, different questions, different types of elements of the investment are really important so that people realize that it's not just all one tunnel that we're going into.

Yeah and we may feel as a board or a future board may feel in four years that given the capacity then will have been reached for the county office building there's a need to put either an addition on this building or there's a necessity to move out of this building and that is going to get put into the CIP as a priority.

going forward.

I'm sorry to bring it up every meeting, but I know we're pushing the outer limits here.

A meeting with a consultant this afternoon and told him how many people we have residual capacity for and he said, you're at capacity.

If you can fit 15 more people in here and shoehorn them, you're at capacity right now.

So, you know, we've got to be mindful about that and whether we are going to utilize this site or whether we look for another site, we have a responsibility to staff because it will start having an impact on staff morale if we just

I'd like one thing real fast and it's not something that we will need any discussion or direction on today but going back to Mr. Henry's comment about the collaborative nature looking at the high school phase one mentioning the work that he is helping to shepherd with Stantec

We also may, and Supervisor Randolph mentioning the two boards working collaboratively together, by the time you pass your budget on April the 17th, we may need just a little bit more clarification from a timing standpoint as to what this board's expectation is specific to phase one and the school's desire to look in the general vicinity that we're also

working with Stantec Home because there could be a timing issue in calendar 2018, calendar 2019 with especially the potential for

So staff will be in a position at some point to give us feedback on what an existing timing would look like.

I mean, that'll be part of what their report is.

By the end of this year, next year, we'll be prepared to do this.

If opportunities are real and we don't want to miss a chance to take an opportunity and we need to know what the barriers are and where the limits are and what these various time intervals and that kind of thing.

I'm very glad somebody brought that up.

Okay, great.

I've looked at these numbers many times and I'm sitting here looking at this sheet that has individual scenarios and the pennies I realized I double counted inadvertently the pennies for operating impacts in FY 23 and

which means the totals are slightly lower.

You can work off of any sheet and what we're going to give you is the updated numbers and it's going to change on this chart even.

She has some good news for you.

Any handout will work.

So for scenario three, for your pennies, the dollars and millions is still correct.

That's how many you need because you need operating impacts each year.

But you only need to increase the taxes for the operating impacts by 0.8 pennies, not 1.6.

So the 1.6 doesn't show up on us, so that's fine.

22.

In 22, so you're taking- Oh no, actually I lied, I'm sorry.

Correct.

So we take the 0.8 pennies out fiscal year 23.

Correct.

Correct.

And then in scenario five,

Yeah, and I apologize.

I've looked at them 100 times and I was like, oh.

and just to help me put those numbers into perspective.

So this year, the new money extra based upon natural growth was four million, did I write that down the other day?

Three million something, which had those equivalent tax rates that were not increased because we had the cash to be able to pay the mortgage on last year's referendum, et cetera.

So that helps to put

some of these numbers into perspective in that it doesn't necessarily mean rate changes if we're successful.

And this is pie in the sky.

Believe me, I am a Pollyanna, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this job.

If we have success in our economic development support and the investments that happen in growth and better employment, etc., etc.

these kinds of revenue positives will be more possible and more perhaps predictable.

It's why our work around economic development is so important.

It really is.

Well, you do me a favor though, Holly, because we have all of these sheets with these numbers

It doesn't have to be right this time.

Okay, I will.

Just email it to us so that I have something that has these new revised and make sure it's titled...

The new stuff.

Of course.

Of course.

It'll be all right because we've got all of these.

We'll probably be adding more questions to your list the rest of the afternoon.

And we'll revise these numbers on this slide deck as well.

Yeah.

So I apologize for that but I am going the right way and I appreciate Holly bringing it to our attention.

So with those new numbers, I'm gonna go forward to a couple slides about, talk a little bit about scenario five, and then I'll come back to this page again if that's all right with you, just to kind of share with you what's in and what's out, unless there's more questions about scenario four or five.

Five takes it to this quality, adds to the quality of life referendum of about $40 million in.

So that's kind of the, when the oversight committee recommended two pictures,

for us to consider.

They recommended basically your basic or foundation picture in their letter.

And they also did the one on the right side, the scenario five that included all of these items plus some additional quality of life referendum items.

They picked up some items for the parks and for transportation revenue sharing and that.

So let me share with you, the next two slides are what's in scenario five.

So you just see in general,

what's actually included in it by the narrative.

So you can see on the left some of the items that are included in scenario five for general government.

And again, all that's different in general government between four and five, of course, is a quality of life referendum project, which is almost that last bullet there on the left.

But you can see that you've got

Two years of the transportation leveraging program in the CIP.

You've got the PVCC site work that had been approved last year, the Senior Center of Belvidere funding, the courts, that $2 million reserve for strategic priorities, a public safety maintenance replacement program that includes apparatus and those types of things for the public safety area.

We have county and parks maintenance and replacement program.

We have an IT item called county server infrastructure upgrade project that has some funding.

It does include the water resources, storm water related items.

It has the quality of life referendum projects.

There was a few projects in there on that.

and then on the school side you have the school maintenance and replacement program, you have a lot of technology related administrative and student technology programs, the school bus replacement program, all the 2016 referendum projects as they're ending, as they're getting finalized, you have the high school capacity improvements phases one through three,

There are other quality of life referendum projects and project management fees on both sides.

And here's a little asterisk note there at the bottom.

And this is, we also have a couple additional slides that Rosalyn has put together.

The school's quality of life referendum projects.

that were currently included, included the Scottsville Elementary School Project and some more learning space modernization beginning in fiscal year 20.

The schools have, they actually requested those projects to start in 19 to meet important timeline considerations and needs.

So for the modeling, for the purposes of our, the one that's in your budget document,

included everything in the quality of life referendum projects, which included those additional two school projects to begin in 2020, fiscal year 20.

And the school's actual requests were for them to come in a little sooner.

So we just wanted to make sure you were all aware of that.

And I guess the schools were surprised to see that change.

Here was what happened, and when we were thinking about the quality of life

Bond referendum items.

We did it as a straw man bundling of some projects.

Trevor put out three different bundles for the oversight committee to look at, and when we put it together for the letter, the oversight committee's letter, they said, you know, these items aren't set in stone.

These are just items that you could consider on your referendum project, the quality of life ones.

So, Scottsville Elementary and the other quality of life projects

for local government as well as their other learning space modernization was part of that bundle.

And because that bundle came into the budget document as $39 million bundled, these might be or might not be the projects you want to do.

and your quality of life referendum.

We hadn't really decided exactly which ones they were.

They weren't clearly identified as this project starts in 19 and this one.

So Laurie, if I understand this clearly enough, if we were to look at scenario three, high school phase one, currently in programs one, two, and three, bundled together to be phase three,

with now a reduced from 4.6 to 3.8 cents.

If the school board and presents to the board and the board supports a 2018 referendum on quality of life projects, where is the payment

for those quality of life projects in scenario three.

Where does it first crop up?

My understanding, I'm gonna look to Holly for clarity on this, but my understanding that the quality of life projects would start as a bundle in 2020, fiscal year 20, so depending on some of the timings she built into the model,

Sure, my question is that I don't see the quality of life projects included in the three scenarios that we were given.

Scenario one, the foundation, scenario two, the enhanced foundation, scenario three, enhanced foundation plus high school center number one.

But it's proposed that this be approved in fiscal year 2018.

So it goes out to referendum in 2018.

My question was, is the two cents that shows up under scenario three in fiscal year 20, are those two cents, two cents that are dedicated to helping pay for the quality of life projects or are we seeing here finally the two cents to actually pay for the 2016 referendum that has never shown up?

to date as a dedicated set of pennies within the CIP because we've deferred that for two years running, actually incorporating it within the CIP.

I think so.

Okay.

There are no 2018 referendum projects in scenario three other than the high school center one.

Okay, so to get the quality of life package here, I sound like I'm at the car dealership, so to get these custom wheels here in the fifth scenario, the only way I can get these quality of life

No, we just moved them, that's all.

That's how it's modeled.

I'm clear.

I'm on the right page now.

Those are still school projects I think is what I understood you talking about, the modernization in Scottsville.

And I'm talking about also to think about where we can pick up some of the other local government projects that are not now down, that have been buried down in number five because when the

CIP committee looked at this.

There were five little chunks on the board and all of them had things that different segments of the population needed.

Some of them were 20, 30, 40 million dollars and some of them were 2 million dollars for things that lots of people could use for free.

So I would hope that we will also look very carefully at

those other projects and figure out where rather than waiting five more years because people have been waiting for 20 years already to be able to think about some of those others and back in the on page two of the CIP memo

The first three on the list certainly were the school projects, but there were park improvements, Hedge Road, Darden Tow, North Town Trail, those kinds of things that we hear about a lot for recreational activities, for opening parks for which we have ownership but no operations because we have not chosen to invest in opening them yet.

So those are also things that we at some point

I think they should be different.

I think there was a lot of support on the CIP committee for having the schools definitely need to be their package and so Scottsville needs to go in their package, not stuck under parks somewhere where it's going to be invisible.

If it's a truly important thing that has to be done ASAP.

Now, I will remember that three or four years ago when we had the first introduction of the modernization, it was like $36 million.

And the agreement was that it would be $6 million a year for six years.

I agree with you and I also think that when you look at the quality of life referendum projects, and I'd say this even if it was in my district, so if this was actually an Agner-Hert Elementary project, knowing that we had closed the school in the north end and we were moving part of the population over to Agner-Hert and therefore we needed additional capacity.

I think there's a real distinct qualitative difference in necessity, urgency between improving an elementary school and the learning space modernization when our leading project is going to be the Learning Center.

And again, coming back to the fact that I think we really need to assess how that works and

how responsive people are to it.

I'm not saying delay it for years down the line, but in terms of urgency between those two, if we decided to take one of the items here in scenario five in the modernization project and build it in to scenario three, my argument would be that the elementary school would be the most critical of the two, and that should be the one that we put in there first and to see

to see what happens if we put the Scottsville edition and the two years of learning modernization

Just the former.

Okay, thank you.

Then let's see what the modernization does.

I don't want to leave the modernization out, but I want to get it lean and trim and have it by necessity.

We know we need additional learning space for the high school

capacity needs in the county and we know we have to add capacity at Scottsville Elementary School and get rid of the trailers down there, especially for students that move out of Yancey where we improved Yancey and now we've put them in trailers.

We have a slide, by the way, and I don't know if this is a good time or not, that Roslyn put together on Scottsville Elementary.

Would you like to see that right now, or no?

No, don't need all the details.

This is year 19.

It does say that it would go out the referendum in 18, so let's fast track it.

So basically it would not, it would have to be.

Just to clarify, the issue with the timing of this project.

So as requested, we requested it in 2019.

If it were to go on the 2018 referendum and still maintain that schedule, we would need design funding in advance of that referendum beginning this July.

So that I think related to your Tuesday's discussion on FY19.

Okay, thanks.

I have a quick question, while you're up there.

How many, not that I'm all for doing something about Scottsville, don't think I'm not for my question.

I can quickly do it on the back of the envelope.

There's multiple ones that have trailers.

I will comment that Scottsville is the only one that uses it for grade level classrooms.

So other schools use it for music or pull out.

Scottsville is the only one that requires it.

So I do want to share with you one more thing very quickly when you're thinking about scenarios and I know I'm jumping to five and I appreciate your request and we'll work on that but the CIP there are some projects not included at all in the scenarios and we talked about earlier about the storage facility which just had the design in but didn't have the full completion of the storage facility for the police evidence

Storage.

There's a lot of items.

The CIP only includes two years right now of transportation, revenue sharing, or what we're calling transportation.

There's an incentive funding, leveraging funding.

So there's some things that you have to just be mindful that aren't in the CIP.

But I mean, it's not that it's a bad thing.

It's just you have to keep thinking.

CIPs are a plan.

They can be amended each year.

But we just wanted to make sure you were aware that we're

several items that weren't in here.

The Crozet Elementary School edition is not included in any of the scenarios for the five years.

Yeah, and even in addition to the backlog, I'm not trying to bring this down, but there's also some future things that requests just aren't in.

We know some requests are coming.

They just haven't come to you yet or come to the county yet, so there's some other things that

There's nothing moving.

From a school parity standpoint, you know, we're putting a lot of money into Scottsville, we still have Red Hill.

So I don't have a whole lot more slides.

We can go anywhere you want with this conversation.

It really is, you could go to an approved CIP.

Again, it's a plan.

We can run some other scenarios and bring some things back to you.

You can provide just general guidance to us.

I'd love to take a break if you wouldn't mind.

Is that okay to take a quick break?

And that would give Holly a chance to update her whole chart.

Would that work?

So does everybody understand what we have?

We're creating a pile in the middle there that's the old stuff that goes to recycling.

There we go.

That's good.

This looks a lot better.

but it does sort of lead us on to the next, Lori, help me understand where we are on the next question here so we don't jump ahead too fast because I don't want to jump, cut you off.

Madam Chair, members of the board, welcome back from break.

For those that may be listening at home, what we've done, we've updated the numbers, updated some handouts for board members and updated the scenario.

Again, this is based on assumptions as of today, as of some

potential additional resources that might be needed for various scenarios that the board's reviewing right now.

So I'm only, we took a break and it's about five till five.

I only have two more slides.

So we can do that and then I really want to hear from the board and I feel like we've gotten one.

I thought you had the capability to give us that right now in real time if you can't would you then have Holly provide us with separating out both aspects of the quality of life modernization so give us within scenario three alternative a which includes just Scottsville and then

And there was also, and I'm looking at Rosalind to make sure I have this correct, the learning space modernization that we had included in the bundle for a referendum, which I think you're pulling Scottsville from, was the modernization for elementary and middle schools.

So the high school modernization was a part of your high school project in its total, but the learning space modernization that we had included in that

And the referendum was also referred to as learning space modernization.

It was the first two years of it.

And that was the bond referendum now that she's talking about is the one that we already proved in 16.

If you remember, it had the term modernization in it.

So it was touching every school, but it didn't do the complete modernization.

I think it's going to be really important in going forward to make it very clear to the public

what was included in 16 and was achieved in the aftermath of the funding in 16 and what would be proposed in here no matter what year it goes forward and what this modernization entails.

Because when I, I mean I looked at it and went

Hey, I thought the voters approved that in 16, so is it modernization take two?

So I think it's going to be really, really important that that be clearly explicated.

So it's meant to be a multi-year program.

That first referendum impacted about 130 classrooms.

And on a smaller scale, you were doing learning space modernization prior to the 16 bond referendum.

So the 16 bond referendum was a continuation of CIP projects.

And before it was called learning space modernization, it was called something else back at some point.

Yeah, contemporary learning space.

Can I ask a clarifying question?

So I'm happy to make it kind of reformat things and put different projects in.

No, all of them.

No, put the whole enchilada for modernization as the school board has proposed.

So give us two alternatives.

Scottsville alone, stand alone, along with, we already know what proposed CIP enhanced foundation plus high school center one costs.

All of them as they are proposing.

Okay, then that's it.

It's the middle school, elementary.

Elementary.

Okay, good.

What she mentioned about how 2016 was the first two years.

They're bundled in a way that that's how much we think we can accomplish in two year increments.

Well that's all that's in the quality of life modernization project is two years worth of work.

Well, what is achieved in those two years of modernization is not going to bring up every school to equal parity.

In a way, it seems as though this new sheet, the five scenarios are sort of being scrambled around, so before you start doing a lot of modeling, let's give everybody a, well, give some more refinement to the request, I guess, so that you're not spending a lot of time with something because I think probably others of us have things that

are way down in Siberia now, 12 years from now that we have been ignoring since 2002 that we really would like to have considered to somehow be packaged up.

And there are many of them smaller, the $500,000 things, the million dollar things that always get pushed to the bottom because they're

Call Quality of Life as if that's sort of not so important, but it really is important to so many of our residents for whom that's the only contact they had with government is going to a park or doing something like that.

But I will say that, Madam Chair, at least the NIFI program, it swept some of those out of the CIP that had been sitting in the CIP.

for a period of time and now we've had through that program the means to fund some of those essentials.

Not all of them, but at least that was a forward step.

So there may be an opportunity in the future not necessarily to repeat NIFI, I don't think

It's ready for that nightmare a second time through but there may be an alternative way to approach it that some of these as I would refer to them as lower hanging fruit in the CIP but are absolutely critical to quality of life in neighborhoods

and people look for supervisors to try to get those projects done that we can get them funded and get them done because those are the visible projects that people really measure performance by in terms of the elected officials but also their county.

Can you give me what I need in my community in terms of quality of life?

Yeah, I mean, I would personally, I see this is going to be our problem of kind of getting everybody together on the same page of the list that goes in the referendum.

But, you know, if we did scenario three with some enhanced projects, you know, I would be picking things like the North Town Trail and the trail down to Biscuit Run and

you know in soccer fields at Biscuit Run or wherever we're gonna put them I mean you know those would be some of the you know some of the things that I personally would like to see in a referendum that are those small low hanging fruit that not not small some of them are bigger but you know

Well we would probably all have some different ones and then we probably all have some overlap you know yeah so you know.

Oh good, yeah.

This slide is just an old one.

It's a slide we shared with you on March 1st, and basically when we talked a little bit about this, again, bundling of projects that was done for the oversight committee,

these were some ideas.

The schools had the learning space modernization and these were kind of based, Trevor did a nice job and other staff were involved in it but he basically looked at what were the TRC high ranking projects and then what was a way to kind of balance it over some categories.

So Trevor did a nice job of trying to pull together something just for consideration.

So the schools you can see on the left, the learning space modernization for the elementary and middle schools.

at 12.8, Scottsville Elementary School additions and improvement at 12.1.

And so the schools had some projects in addition to the high school capacity and improvement project that was put in this.

This is, again, this is just an idea for consideration of what could be on a referendum.

and then we had three other categories.

We had one called transportation and on that one you can see some projects that were chosen and the important thing about some of these projects that they may or may not have completed the project.

They might be the first phase of a project.

So those are some of the considerations we would wanna have before we actually put something together for a bond referendum for the non-school projects is to make sure we choose the projects that we believe would be the most important ones.

and again these were just a beginning thing to consider.

And then we had a category we called community facilities and green space and you can see some ideas that were put in that category.

And then under public safety the fire rescue training facility was one that ranked pretty high and was put in that category again for consideration and this wasn't a, it was a

Illustrative purposes, but they were high ranking projects, and there was some thought that went into them.

and for the fire rescue, the burn trailer that we did accelerate into this year is to buy us time.

And it'll have about a 10 year life expectancy, depending on how much use it gets.

No, it's.

It's like $80,000 I think, which is a mobile burn, but it sort of,

Can I just clarify Liz's point that we don't see Biscuit Run up there but I would remind people listening to this broadcast that many

People are aware that I've communicated that the expectation is that the Commonwealth of Virginia through the Department of Conservation Resources that they will be making an ongoing commitment to working with the county to help us fund some of those improvements.

so that we do have an opportunity to apply for grants through them and through other sources including federal sources to get some of the kind of infrastructure upgrades that are going to be necessary to fully utilize the entire expanse of Biscuit Run.

And that I think is a good example of the kinds of improvements that for parks particularly it does take some amount of county stake to get the gravel down on the driveway to get something open but then that opens the opportunity for state conservation departments and other

Funders to weigh in to really bring out the next level of development.

But without that initial county stake and the commitment to open, it's not going to happen.

You're just a slide away from where you are right there.

So you're exactly right, that's the next slide.

And it could be even toggling back and forth because we want to meet this timeline.

There's some work that we would need to do on finalizing projects.

So this is a referendum timing considerations in a broad way.

There's a lot of details involved in this.

But April, which is just around the corner, you'd have to provide general direction on the referendum.

And you'd have to say, yes, let's go forward.

Here's the things that we want to put on it.

and we would start working on questions and working on dollar amounts and those types of things and working with our legal department.

School board would have to request a referendum in May for their projects.

In June the board would request a referendum and the county would file a petition and then in August the court would order a special election and in November it would be on the ballot.

held at the same time as the general election.

So you can see it's a pretty tight timeline, and if we want to go, we have to really get moving on it very quickly.

There's a lot of community education that goes along with the referendum.

We've done it before, so we have a game book that we could just pull out and do it again, but we would want to make sure that we're in position and we have the right items on the referendum.

So that's the timeline, and we'd have to now think about

If the board's thinking that this is a direction we want to go, then we're going to have to go backwards here and say, well, what is it that we really need to decide?

What scenarios do you want us to run?

What items do you want us to consider?

And so if, for instance, we wanted Trevor's last slide that you had with parks

with athletic fields.

We don't have to put which athletic fields, we can just put parks with athletic fields and then we have much time.

Some way to organize people's first, second, third goals and see how many board members want to do this.

The CIP committee, large committee, came up with some suggestions.

I think the affordability piece of it, and I'm glad we got some updated numbers, that's an important consideration for the board.

Where is it you want us to go?

I mean, we can do this by a dollar amount.

We can think about things in different ways, but that's the piece that would be really good guidance for staff, and then we could package

I think the scenario three, to me, the money associated with the scenario three is, you know, something that, because you always know other things are going to come up and, you know, and we just, we, it,

And we don't want to make the referendum too large that people don't want to do it either.

I mean, it's a huge amount.

Are you saying scenario three as it is?

The money.

Oh, the dollar amount.

The dollar amount.

You said we could do it as a dollar amount, and I was pointing to scenario three as a dollar amount that was reasonable for me.

I would perhaps weigh in and say scenario three plus some dollar amount that was

to implement some of these parks and local government projects that are still way down the list for things where the citizens are engaged every day.

The 3.8 cents.

And I would agree with that, Ann.

Well, I think having separate questions to me is really, really important rather than trying to have one monster question.

And I think we really do have to address the athletic field issue, especially with the schools growing like we are.

And my understanding is that this new center doesn't have an athletic field associated with it, at least at this point.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

So that to me means if we're going to do

So as Laurie suggested, one way to do this is we could bring back a sort of increments in terms of dollar amounts or we can look at increments in the tax rate.

I like the pennies on the tax rate that really gets right, personally that really gets right to the heart of

Oh, I'm not just focused on the cost.

I think what I would propose that we try to accomplish today, I'm not sure we can necessarily reach agreement what the perfect mix will be, but I do think based on our discussion on Tuesday that there was general majority agreement of a value of a high school center needing to be funded.

That's an unavoidable topic.

and Enhance Foundation plus the high school center brings us to number three.

And if we did nothing else today but walk away and say we've committed to three and now we're gonna work out what it is that's the mix in three.

Do we add any other items to three?

And that we get therefore a hybrid or three

three bis rather than a pure three as we see here and what that would entail.

Then we have agreement about the foundation and now we're talking as we're building the house on top of that whether we want vinyl siding or whether we want natural wood.

and are we putting hardwood floors in or is it going to be carpeted?

So then we can have a discussion about the details and packages can be presented, voted up and down after we discuss the merits, but at least then we will have an agreement about the general foundation.

It seems like kind of a consensus though of some of the park type things, so maybe you could

I'm just looking at the fellow staff members here but I feel like this is good direction for us.

It gives us a place, I like the idea of starting with some foundation that we have and then we could bring back more than one scenario too because you want to have some options.

We could bring back a few options for you.

We'd have to do it very quickly, you know, thinking about this timeline.

But we could bring something back to you quickly.

We'd have to work with Clark and others to get on your agenda and try to get to an approved CIP by April 17th.

It'd be great.

We've already made a lot of progress today to get you to something which we could approve on April 17th knowing we're going to change it.

when the right information comes along because none of us expect that everything is static as of today or April 17th or whenever we do vote.

So hopefully you'll take some comfort in that and understand that things will, we understand that things will evolve and we're also going to keep asking you questions and helping you evolve, helping all of us evolve together.

but I'm especially I think that there's having a spread of things across the community local government and school side is very beneficial because it does I think show that there's sort of in the spirit and someone else suggested this to me I didn't think of it but in the spirit of the 60-40 split that's used for new money in the spirit of that same sort of spirit should be used in

Investing in our capital projects is that we can't have one side or the other completely left behind because that builds resentment and everybody feels bad.

And so in order to keep a positive spirit, we need everybody to feel like they have a stake and that somewhere they're going to get their dog, you know, their dog's going to get their bone soon.

It just may not be tomorrow.

It may be later.

But having all these different things discussed and having different

projects that begin to remedy what we've had for decades of things just being left out because they're not life threatening police, fire, and schools, which obviously had to be the focus in 2009, 10, 11, and 12.

they didn't have to be the only focus if we had managed to bring in some cash to be able to do something else that would have been great but it didn't turn out that way so now as someone said we're clawing our way out of the hole and as I've said to my citizens many times when they've complained about this funding stuff it it's hard catch-up is terrible it's very very painful but we have these things that need to be done all across the

I'd have two requests, I don't know if either can be met and then don't push them but to help us prepare for

figuring this out.

I don't know, do you guys have this information in a spreadsheet form?

The projects listed, the dollar amounts?

This isn't gonna necessarily work for everyone, but to me to have something that I can move projects around and the numbers change and it lets me play with that would be very helpful to me as a tool.

And then the second one is whatever we arrive at,

Earlier in a budget session I recall us having slides where our AAA status, our debt capacity based on a scenario and you trended it.

Anything else for us?

you're going to go ahead with the assumption that we're doing the referendum.

That's good to clarify.

Are others?

And that was the basis of the CIP recommendation.

I do want to thank the oversight committee.

They did put something out here that challenged us and put us out here in this position to really start thinking about CIP in a different way.

Now you said that they had, that they they bundled some things together for consideration but didn't really do a deep dive.

Is it worth it to try to get that group?

I mean the timing lines probably wouldn't work out, but if they know that this is the direction we're going, what would they...

And I think that Trevor and his staff can

All of the projects had to estimate it.

I think what you're asking is actually pretty difficult.

What oversight did with support from staff was to look at our ranked projects and look at an approach to try to, could we over a period of every couple of years do a referendum?

And looking at that concept.

So staff did work and put in those groups, schools, transportation, community facilities, public safety,

groupings of projects in 2018, 2020, 2022.

We have slides from oversight that we could bring back that show kind of what went into those buckets.

What you would see is things like libraries in 2020, other school projects in 2020, other things in 2022.

And so why I think what I'm hearing and why I think it's going to be challenging is what we did for looking at, let's say looking at transportation, Northtown Trail, we just looked at two years of that program.

That's a four million dollar program over five or six years.

You know, would you want me to then say, okay, well we can only do whatever the equivalent of that total is, it looks like that's three million dollars.

You know, basically say, we'll work with community development and we'll work with our ranking of projects and for three million dollars we'll pick

you know, one project that can get nearly complete.

If that's what you're asking, then I think that's doable, kind of staying within those totals.

But I also heard you only wanted to look at certain things with scenario three.

I would personally love to see a high priority trail or bike thing completed.

I'm not trying to get it in my district or somebody else's district.

I've been hearing about the Northtown Trail for a really long time.

I think it would be really great for the community to see something actually completed over some

And I think those gaps are frustrating.

Yeah, and the funding for North Town is anticipating the study and what we need to fill in.

Get all their bikes or they're walking and then all of a sudden there's this huge gap.

or find out what's the most reasonable that staff already knows that they can complete.

The biscuit run one I always love because so much of it is already there.

You just have to get permission for it.

So that list, the category of schools, those are well-defined programs and projects.

The public safety category, that's a very defined and discreet project.

It's not creating new fields, but it adds significant capacity based on how they're used.

But it's turf.

It's turf and there's lighting that's with it.

Let's you use it at night, which is a whole separate question.

And so maybe, Laurie, you understand better what the board's asking.

I think that it's how the questions might be asked.

I mean, to Ms. Palmer's comment earlier,

and I'm kind of looking at Greg and Dean because Dean's done a lot of on referendums.

You can ask the question, you know, we could just say a combination of $7.2 million or $7 million of community facilities in green space and not have it real specific and it might be harder to do that way but that way then the community and other people can weigh in and you can figure out how, what's the best use of it or you can have a very specific project listed.

So I think you can,

State the questions in different ways to either give you more flexibility or to be more specific.

Those two projects in a single question.

when we're looking at trails, we really need, I would urge the board not to do anything until Bob's Parks and Recreation report comes back.

We get ahead of that report in terms of going ahead and saying we're gonna do X and the recommendation is not to do X but to do Y, then we have to re-engineer.

So I think we're really better off in waiting for that report and then figuring out,

and how we're going to fund that and how we're going to work on that going forward.

The second point I want to make is, lest anything be misinterpreted, I'm really interested in seeing what the final package would look like, but I'm not comfortable to say at this point I'm signing on to a referendum when I don't know what the referendum looks like, what's included in it.

and that is going to be critical.

I'm interested in moving forward.

Because if we're not, then they don't need to waste their time.

No, I thought I'd communicated that I think it's going to be helpful to know different scenarios and I think the voters are out there looking for us to go ahead and have a clear set of alternatives and options and make decisions and then stand behind those decisions with them.

As far as the parks are concerned or the trails are concerned, that's why I was asking about a general question for now, and then when you asked the question about, you know, do you want to get these parts done, that was sort of for a future discussion, you know, as to, you know, when we come out to the public, are there some things that we can actually complete?

So if we're getting the report back from Parks and Rec in June does that give us time to make some decisions so that

if we have something like that on the referendum that the community would really know.

We have to have the questions written by such and such a time and I don't remember what it was.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Doug Walker, Deputy County Executive.

I think that there will be enough information in the most recent update that the board will be receiving very soon to give enough guidance on the types of projects that would be compelling.

Yeah.

For the language and all of that.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, we got it, for the language and all that.

Yeah, okay.

So Doug, that's good.

Yeah.

And I think that having the scenario information is really important to make sure that we're meeting our end of five year goals and we're staying above with the two million dollars at the end.

That's terrific, but not, I think also for some of us there may be a mix, I'll speak for myself only.

I think that support for phases one, two, three plus

is based upon the referendum.

So I'm not willing to separate the support for the CIP that we're expecting to try to do in the next couple weeks with whether we're making an arbitrary decision or we're going to include that in the referendum.

So I hope that others will weigh in on that issue of how important the referendum is to them as far as taking on these kinds of $198 million of investment.

I know that we don't have all the details now, and if we're not voting on the CIP today, well, that's okay, but I think that saying we'll decide later about the referendum or not when we're waiting for the scenarios first is troubling to me.

I'd rather go along parallel tracks here and keep thinking about it as sort of a package deal.

When we get the scenarios, we may decide, whoops, phase two doesn't get to happen for two more years late because of the headroom, all those other financial implications.

you know maybe that's where the two years turns into five years and the five years turns into eight years because that is a better way I think to do it than to try to scramble the content of the project because the projects have been laid out according to the priorities of the school department and the other local government side.

So just making it affordable by stretching out the timetable seems to be a preferred approach to me.

So I don't know what we do next.

I'm gonna look down the line here, but from my perspective, from the budget perspective, we're gonna model some, we're gonna start with, and just make sure I have it right, we're gonna start with scenario three.

and then we're gonna do some modeling on scenario three by adding in some other quality of life related items from this 39, show you scenarios on potential resource tax rate implications for those.

You may get more than one of those scenarios back to kind of give you an idea of like kind of a menu type of thing.

And I'm gonna work with Trevor and he's trying to,

He got eye contact here with Trevor, so to start looking at the projects, he's very close to the project, being lead of the technical review committee and other staff members to make sure we put a package together for you that we can explain and feel pretty good about as far as ranking and moving the ball further.

Just the timing, I think I heard Lori say that we're going to be working to get back in front of you prior to the 17th and that we would be working with the clerk.

We do have a work session on April the 11th and we have a public hearing on next year's budget on the 10th as you know.

Lori, could you go back to the slide that has the different scenarios that has the resources?

This may not be information that we could get to today, but in sending staff back to the drawing board a little bit, it might be helpful if there's a sense of what's the upper limit that the board would be interested in from extra estimated pennies on the tax rate?

Or do you need to know the projects in order?

You could do it two ways.

If there is a, you know, what's the appetite, then we can take what was recommended by oversight and through the executive office and try to build to that.

The scenario three includes the high school center one.

We know that that's 3.8 pennies, potentially.

and some other things to build up to, yes ma'am.

So if we're gonna bring something from the right, from scenarios five, four or five, then that will make that need go higher.

And I guess I'm just trying to ask, what is it?

It's not 6.8.

Yeah.

So 4.3 is probably within the range?

Yeah, that's good.

Yeah.

I would definitely stay under.

Yeah.

A little bit under, but yeah.

Yeah, that's good.

I think that's very helpful.

All right.

Okay, I have, yeah, this was very helpful to us.

It was just obtaining your guidance and of course I have my next two meetings scheduled.

We can come back to what was from Madison the board for a few minutes here or from a matter of time at the end.

Mr. Richardson, did you have anything else?

We'll jump to you next before we go back to the board to see anything else for today.

Okay.

That's just grand.

Very good.

And there is no closing.

Family obligation.

All right, so let's come back then to Madison, the board.

We have one item on the table now.

Is there anything else from anyone else to bring up, to put on the list before we begin?

You know, just a clarification, I'm not expecting staff to be ready with alternatives on April 11th.

I really see this as a discussion among the board members about ways in which we, if they're available, and if there's an agreement that there might be alternative approaches available to enhance the effectiveness and the legitimacy and political support

for the rural stormwater utility fee and just have a discussion about that and if we reach agreement on 11-13 that we cannot resuscitate this patient, then April 11th, I would propose we declare last rights and move on and basically then

understand that at least for the rural area that this would have to be funded through the budget.

The general governmental budget as we go forward it would not be part of the storm water utility fee.

I thought that was the topic for April 11th, so I'm, I guess, confused, but that's fine.

I'm glad to have it clarified if others had a different view.

Yeah, I,

I'm not comfortable having that discussion now without having the chance to I mean that that could be a two and a half hour discussion about all of the aspects of it and I'm prepared to have that discussion if there's a feeling on the part of the board but we also have closed session I really think what I'm trying to do and where I'm differentiating

from the intent and purpose as you understand it for April 11th and my express intent and purpose is to send the message to the public that that meeting is not about us approving in any way though it's a public hearing

I want them to be very clear that the intent from the outset when they're coming to the work session is that we're out to enhance the rural element

of a storm water utility fee with different approaches in trying to ensure that there's greater equality there as the rural interests see it between rural and suburban and plan residential development.

And so it's just a different tone, it's a different intent.

I suspect we've all sort of been doing that on our own so it's nice that you bring that up and that it's good to signal to the public that what we've seen so far doesn't work and we agree with at least some of the stuff that we've heard from the public and it's kind of a

It's a difficult thing to kind of articulate because we do want to have the discussion and we do want to talk about why it didn't work and make sure that the public understands why at this point, I should be really clear here, as what was presented so far to us needs significant work.

Exactly.

At the same time, we have real needs in the urban areas and the development area.

I'd like to see the list of projects at some point.

That need to be taken care of.

It would be kind of interesting to see that list.

What we've talked about is the rural area and I get that.

It's unfortunate what I'm trying to avoid is pitting the rural area against the development area.

because there's been no discussion about, up until now, the frustration, and I understand it, from the people that live in the rural areas, they feel like they're having to pay for something that they're not getting any benefit from or that they've put a lot of work into on their property, but we really have a lot of old infrastructure in the urban area that needs attention.

and so if we can have a discussion around what our other options might be would be or at least not that you guys will have that on the 11th but at least talk about that a little bit because I have a constituent just the other day that called me and said you know I have this I'm on the list

and I have this aging infrastructure.

And, yeah.

But these are all things that have been discussed by each of us in different ways in our own constituencies and nobody, even the most outraged person about the potential or what they understand to be the potential, which is still pretty hard to explain, is, well nobody's against

doing things methodically and properly, 1% of our infrastructure every year to prevent these cataclysmic and expensive collapses that happen.

Everybody's in favor of that.

They've all said, yes, we want to support the clean water thing.

We're not against any of that.

It's just the mechanism and how it got to be so complicated that we couldn't explain it.

Be able to help people understand that it was beneficial for them as well as the community as a whole.

And that's my failure because I couldn't explain it.

But that is really the core of it.

It got to be so complicated that it was incomprehensible.

And that's not anybody's fault.

I mean, the staff did exactly what we asked them to do.

To work on this and do a really, really good job based on what everybody else in this sort of sphere is doing.

But that's the kind of discussion I was hoping we would have, and each of us would bring the kinds of details that we were given by our constituencies to try to help figure out better ways to go forward.

Not to pull the plug on anybody or grab at anybody, but just to say this is how we're doing it.

And the people who came to my meetings, all 225 of them, do understand that that's what, you know, I said don't come with your torches expecting something to happen.

This is a work session, we're not scheduled to have a hearing, we're not scheduled to have a vote.

This is a discussion.

So happy to have you come, happy to have you share with us in writing or phone or anything else what you want to say.

Well, I was just going to say, I just don't understand why we're trying to get out so much.

It just seems like the consensus is that we don't need a storm water utility, we need

Just keeping it in a general fund, which has been everybody's mantra.

So we probably will get to a point of having that decision at the end of April 11th.

I don't want to do it today.

I'd rather not do it today.

So one thing, Laurie, not to prolong the discussion, one thing Laurie does have is a detailed slide on what is in the FY19 budget in stormwater.

And so right now, if you approve your budget as recommended to include the capital budget for FY19, and she referred to this briefly earlier today without this level of detail, you do have

almost 1.6 million dollars of dedicated capital money going into water resources infrastructure for next budget year.

What staff was prepared to do on April the 11th

was to come back to the board.

There has been an initial public interaction period over the last maybe four to six weeks with the frequently asked questions, some general information about the program, no specific information on a property by property basis, but examples of how this program would work with fees, utility fees, both in the rural areas of the county and in the urban areas.

The board is very aware of that.

what I hear this board saying is let's do not have the detailed discussion on the 11th about the utility in how it has been designed to this point but rather we know we've got almost 1.6 million in the budget for next year and let's have a general discussion on the 11th

You know what I would really love is that I think would be a good idea for the public first is for Greg to go over some of the things the slides that he went over with us when we had our individual meetings so that the public can know what we saw and why we decided that you can't just take the you know we just can't take an urban area the way it works for instance in the city in an urban area and plop that down

on top of a rural and a urban area and give exactly what he gave us because it was very clear when he gave us that, I mean, staff knew it wasn't going to work that way.

It was very clear when they presented it that this was not gonna work.

Yeah, and of course what's happened is the public's come in the middle sort of they've caught up now and they haven't seen that.

They haven't, they've missed out on that discussion.

What's the history and how we brought the board to the point of the formation of the utility and the specificity of how the fee structure would work and stuff and a lot of the work that happened with the committees and of that nature.

But what we would not do then is move through a detailed work session on implementation

Yeah, I think that's great.

okay is that I'm looking at Trevor to make sure that he feels like that we've got what we need and and back to Lori we're good okay I just want to say one thing and that is throughout all of these conversations one thing which has been said over and over again is how wonderful staff has been to work with because there were lots of people who even though the interaction on the website business wasn't live there were lots of people who brought their properties down to Greg Harper and said

Here's the way I'm thinking it's going to turn out.

Would you please verify this?

So they know exactly what their impacts are going to be.

And it was a wide range from $50 to $2,000 per property per year.

And that was sort of the bingo moment that began to come forward to me as I kept hearing these reports from people.

some time going forward when the expectations from state and federal are going to jump back up again and we're going to have to be ready to deal with that and everything we've learned in this process can be carefully preserved because we're going to need to take it out again at some point and figure out different mechanisms for things.

Yes, that's where I wanted to get to with this.

That's why I was making that proposal.

All right, are there any other concerns from board?

All right, very good.