Board of Supervisors Adjourned Meeting (Budget Work Session #6)   4/29/2020

There's two order for our April 29, 2020, 10 a.m.

work session on the budget.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A6 in ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Liz Palmer of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District, myself, Supervisor Galloway of the Rio District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, and Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District.

The opportunities for the public to access and participate in the electronic meeting are posted on the Albemarle County website, on the Board of Supervisors homepage, and on the Albemarle County calendar.

There's not any, it's a work session, we don't have public comments scheduled for today, however.

Online, obviously, we have our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Greg Campner, our Board Clerk, Claudette Borgeson, our Senior Deputy Clerk, Mr. Travis Morris,

We also have many department heads.

Lori Allshouse is going to be leading us through.

And with that, we are going to start our fiscal year 2021 revised operating and capital budget.

Good morning, Lori.

Good morning, everyone else.

Okay, thank you very much.

So we're going to pull the slideshow up.

Can everyone see it?

All right.

So David Puckett is going to help move the slides for us.

So you may hear me contacting him once in a while to do that.

But I want to welcome everyone to today's work session.

This is, I think, your first work session virtually.

There are a lot of people with us here today, including the county executive office, but also the OMB office and many of the department heads from many of your departments, just like we would have done before when we were in the room together.

So we'll move forward with the next slide, please.

So here's where we are in the process.

You can see that we have done many things to date working on our budget together, our revised recommended budget.

Today's the 29th.

This is your work session.

It's a three-hour work session.

After this work session, the next thing that we'll do is have a public hearing on May 6.

Here's today's agenda.

We have a pretty packed agenda.

We have many topics we're going to cover today.

We're going to start with an overview and then move to revenues to talk a little bit about revenues and then talk about our general government.

This is an area where we'll talk broadly about a categorical area such as community development or public safety and then we'll be asking you to share with us any questions or comments you might have on these categories.

After we go through the general government departments, you'll hear from Chief Eggleston talking about the fire rescue system-wide services.

At this point, we've scheduled a break.

And after the break, Ms.

Rosalyn Schmidt will be talking with you about a school division update.

Then after her part of the work session, we have information on your capital budget, and then we'll wrap up at 12.55.

So our process, those of you that have been with us a long time realize that we have a work session process that we do.

Each have one of these work sessions.

It's a little bit different today because of being virtual.

We still want it to be an interactive approach.

This is your work session and we want to make sure you get the answers for the questions that you have.

Staff will present some information almost as a launch from a slide, a launching information for dialogue, questions, and answers.

If we have a question today that will take us a long time to do some research on or we need to want to

Go work on something and bring it back to you.

We would like to do that by email.

So it used to be we would say, put something on the list for follow up.

So you still could say that.

Put it on the list for follow up.

And we'll take that as a cue that we need to go get some research done and get it back to you as soon as possible.

We'll answer questions along the way that we can answer very quickly.

And then the other ones, we would like to have the opportunity to send it to you at a later date.

You have another work session that's if needed on May 11th.

So as we work through this, we don't know how the timing's gonna go.

You may want to say, you know, we really need to have that work session on May 11th.

You also have a public hearing before that work session, so you may wanna have that work session as well for that reason.

You'll be approving your budget on May 14th, and that's when you'll complete your discussion and approve the fiscal year 21 budget for the year ahead.

So I'll move quickly to an overview.

First, I wanted to share with you our principles and our goals as we put this revised recommended budget together.

We want to adhere to the Albemarle County's financial policies, continue to respond to the essential service needs of our community, position our organization to lead our recovery efforts.

We want to remain flexible and adaptable with this budget and with this budget process this year.

And we want to maintain our strategic reserves going into fiscal year 21.

You've heard this concept before.

I think it's an excellent concept on how we're working with our budget this year.

Here at the office, we call it the 3-6-6.

We're looking at things in increments of time.

So the first time period is the end of the fiscal year we're living in now before we get to July 1.

and that's the box on the left hand side of the screen.

We want to maintain essential services.

We are evaluating all discretionary spending.

We have frozen positions, 15 as of the time we put this budget together.

We reviewed capital projects and we are coordinating very closely with the school division.

The first half of fiscal year 21, this is a time period that starts in July,

and goes through the January time period.

We're really concentrating on responding, recovering and recalibrating our budget.

So we'll be doing a lot of work along the way.

Mr. Richardson had mentioned to you that we're going to be studying the revenues every month.

We're going to be looking at things all along the way and making adjustments as we see things change, improve or if they go in a different direction.

And then you see that we also think about the second half of fiscal year as that last six in the 366 plan.

We're going to be revisiting the budget at that time, responding accordingly, and implementing any longer term structural changes at that time that we might need to make or that we want to make based on the experiences and what we've learned through this event.

So this is a

You'll see these donut pictures on many slides to come through this presentation.

This is just the total all-fund budget.

So you can see that the all-fund budget is $397.3 million.

When you think about all funds, this includes our capital funds, our special revenue funds, the school funds, their special revenue funds.

And when you put all the funds together, which is a requirement as how we put government budgeting together, you can see that there's a $59.7 million decrease from fiscal year 20.

Primarily, this is due to the changes in your capital program.

We concentrate a lot of our conversation on the general fund.

The general fund revenues is where all the majority of the revenues come through the county.

So I'm gonna spend the next couple slides on the general fund revenues.

And you can see on this slide, it's funny, the pictures block off one part of the picture here for me.

So I'm gonna follow along with my slideshows, my paper copy here.

You can see that,

The general fund revenues is $300.4 million.

This is a decrease of $6.4 million from fiscal year 20.

And you can see that the majority of the revenues are the general property taxes.

You've seen this slide before.

This is a slide we've used over many years.

The major drivers of our local revenues are by category on this slide.

And you can see the real estate there on the left.

We are projecting a slight increase in real estate revenues.

of 1%, it's $1.64 million.

The local personal property taxes are showing a decrease of 2.6%.

Business driven revenues, we've studied those and the projection is that they're gonna decrease by 7.6% or 1.23 million.

And then consumer driven, a decrease of 5.17 million or a 12.4% decrease.

This slide is one that is in your book.

It hasn't been one that we put on one of your slide decks yet, so I'm going to slow down a little bit on this slide.

This shows your local tax revenue, your major streams of local tax revenue over time.

So you can see on the left-hand side of this slide, starting with fiscal year 12, and then you can see the revenues and how things changed over time.

These are the actual revenues, how they came in.

And then on the right hand side you can see the fiscal year 21 recommended, the REC stands for recommended.

And you can see the relative size of these revenue streams as well as how they have changed over time.

So I'm just going to kind of go down the page starting with sales tax.

You can see that sales tax has decreased.

We're projecting a 1.2% decrease in sales tax.

You can see how it has changed over time.

The next line in purple is your business licensing fees projected at a 5.9% decrease from fiscal year 2020.

The blue line, I'll go with the green line.

The green line is your utility, your consumer utility taxes.

Projection is a 5.1% decrease there compared to fiscal year 20.

The blue line is your food and beverage tax revenues, decreasing at a 42.7%.

decrease, a very severe decrease in food and beverage tax revenues is projected.

And then the very bottom line, you can see that again, the relative size of these revenue streams, transient occupancy tax that has to do with hotels is 31.1% projected to decline between fiscal year 20 and fiscal year 21.

Again, this is in your document as well.

Can you tell me just what page that's on real quick?

Thank you.

I'm good.

Sure.

And then the information runs on the next couple pages and shows some of the information about those revenue streams.

Thank you.

So moving quickly to general fund expenditures, and what we're going to do here is look at general fund expenditures per category.

Before we go into the more specifics, this is the general fund expenditures, kind of showing you the differences between the amount of funding that goes to the different categories in local government.

We do organize our

Divisions and our departments by these categories per state requirements.

You can see that, for example, the big blue part of the donut is transferred to the schools.

The majority of our general fund revenues go to the schools through our formula.

And then you can see throughout the slide picture on the left, you can see public safety is the next largest category.

So this just gives you a perspective of the different categories that we're going to talk about in the next few minutes.

There are some expenditures that cross all categories and we call them cross departmental.

The information on these, this information is on page 51.

Just some highlights of things that we're going to cross all departments that we're going to look at today.

You are aware that there's no market increases for fiscal year 21 salaries.

The retirement system rate change had an increase of $871,000.

This was something that you were aware of in our first recommended fiscal year 21 budget that did not change.

There's salary lapse.

We actually budget salary lapse or vacancies.

There's a change in that based on some behavior and some monitoring that we have done on salary lapse over the years and we do think that may increase some.

So we have increased that number.

There's a decrease in health insurance costs.

We're self-insured with our health insurance.

We monitor it also very carefully.

We see that there'll be a savings in health insurance of $632,000.

We also have decreased travel training and education throughout all the departments, and that's a savings of almost $400,000.

And we've also deferred capital outlay expenses, including fleet replacement, at a savings of $1.2 million.

Now this slide here shares with you some of the position changes that are going to occur throughout these chapters that we're going to look at.

And you can see that in fiscal year 20, our position count was 787.

You're going to hear of some frozen positions that are happening.

We are freezing positions based on attrition and a real strong strategic calculation of where we are able to freeze positions.

And for fiscal year 20, we have already identified 15 frozen positions.

We have identified that we need to do 20 more for a total of 35 frozen positions.

You can see how the numbers start changing on the right-hand side of this chart.

And then you can see there are some additions that will be recommended in this budget.

And you can see that there's an assistant elections manager position, an environmental systems analyst.

This is moving someone from a temporary position to a permanent position.

And then we're going to talk later about the fire rescue system and our recommended changes in fire rescue system.

But there's a net decrease.

Through all this attention to the positions, we're going to save about a million dollars over the course of the year.

So I just wanted to put that in perspective because you're going to see some increases and some decreases.

But we always watch the total count.

And there is a significant savings based on this.

So here's where I'm going to slow down a little for you to share any questions that you have.

These are the categories of the general government functions.

The first one is the administrative category, and this is on page 53 in your book.

You can see that it includes the board supervisor's budget, the executive leadership team's budget,

You can see there is an increase in the executive leadership's budget of $35,000 for equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts.

This also includes the human resources contribution.

It is actually a shared position for the schools and local government.

The County Attorney's Office is in this category, the Department of Finance, which is most of the funding goes to finance, information technology, voter registration and elections.

As you are aware, that's going to remain in COP5.

This budget does include an assistant elections manager position.

Supervisor McKeel, you're first up.

I don't think I have any questions right now, although I may come back.

In looking at page 53, though, Lori, you have the 1.0% decrease at the top of the page, which I think is the overall decrease in administration.

But if you look at those individual areas, they really vary greatly.

That is correct.

And I guess I'm just trying for the public to understand that.

For example, the executive leadership has a 5%, am I reading this right?

5% change decrease.

That's correct.

And for example, the county attorney's office is not seeing any change at all.

That's a zero.

I guess I'm just pointing out that within this circle that you have, there are variables there.

Some of them have seen a much larger percent of decrease, some none at all.

I guess only one none at all.

and then the voter registration in elections actually is seeing a 20% increase based on what we're seeing happening about absentee voting.

So I get a little concerned when I see administration 1.0 decrease because that really doesn't, that's not very transparent to the public.

Again, maybe transparent is not the right word, but it's not a good descriptor for what's actually happening with these departments.

Yes, that's a really good point.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Ms.

Alshouse, could you go back to slide 15 quickly?

I'm going to ask our slide person to go back.

On the things listed there, all of them show a dollar increase increase except the calculation for the no market increase for FY21 salaries.

So I don't necessarily need the answer today, but could could all calculate what that estimate would be for future information just so we have it.

No, I'm here.

Yes, in the previous recommended budget, there was a 2% market increase that was approximately $1.2 million.

Thank you.

So yeah, if just in the future, if this is, if this slide is used, if you could just add the 1.2 reduction, just so we can see as with the others, the actual dollar figures.

So can I ask a question about that same thing really quick?

Does that include the increase in the minimum wage?

Yes, in the previous recommended budget, there was an impact of $745,000 for the minimum wage, and that has also been removed from the budget.

Okay, and I think that that would be an appropriate, this would be an appropriate place to include that because that does cross all departments and it actually shows the reduced expenditures as a result of eliminating both the raise in minimum wage and the, what we previously thought would be a 40% salary increase.

Just two comments because I may have confused myself again.

The salary increase didn't show a number because it's not happening based upon comparison with fiscal year 20.

That was what I took away from it when I saw it the way it was.

So if that's correct, that's great.

The consumer driven, when you look at that slide, it's got our four kind of revenue buckets.

You know, business driven, consumer driven.

I don't know what slide number it is.

11 maybe.

So when we theorize what this is for the coming year, are you guys hypothesizing any sort of

bounce back a recovery, or are you taking the worst case if nothing recovers?

Certainly.

It was a real well-organized approach with 20 different employees, and we were also consulting outside businesses and others that

We looked at, first of all, where do we see fiscal year 20 ending?

So when we think about revenues, we also think about what's going on right now.

And so the first thing that we did was look at fiscal year 20 and made projections on how fiscal year 20 would end.

And so then as you project fiscal year 21, you start with the end of 20.

So we felt like there would be some pretty severe reductions in some of the consumer driven revenue streams in fiscal year 20.

And so we did scenario planning and then we chose a pretty severe scenario for fiscal year 20.

and then that was the scenario that we started with as we started looking at fiscal year 21.

We then spoke with lots of people, had a lot of conversations, looked at what we thought was going on at that time and that was just at the end of April and you know things continue to change and then we did scenario planning and projected three different types of scenarios that we could see play out and we thought about

how things might change throughout the year.

We thought about how things could go worse or could go better.

And so we looked at it for looking at maybe things will start picking up middle of the year for many of the areas.

And then as we did all that scenario planning, which I'm really glad we did it as scenarios, we then chose for the budget projections at this time, what we call the middle scenario for fiscal year 2020.

So it was kind of launched off of our more

High impact scenario for 20 and then we just kind of a middle approach.

Now we know that we need to monitor revenues ongoing all the time.

So this isn't just a one-time thing and we're going to stop on it.

We are going to continue to watch revenues all the time and be bringing back information to the board on any adjustments that we see.

97 or 98%, something like that is what my memory is saying.

Mr. Bowman, I imagine Mr. Bowman knows that off the top of his head.

Got it.

Andy, you there?

We are assuming 1.5% of salaries would be vacant just based on normal attrition and turnover.

Say that again.

1.5% of salaries.

Got it.

And I would, I see where Diantha went.

She used page 53 in the administration.

I think that's an excellent point.

I wrote the same comment down relative to the positions that were frozen.

In the current year, in the coming year, we're showing what positions are going to remain

but we're not showing really where those positions and where those departments are at.

I think it may be important for us at some point during our budget sessions to show folks what that's going to mean not having those positions.

Are they coming from police?

Are they coming from community development?

Because frankly that's going to be one of the big places where community is going to feel impact and delivery of services.

So while I appreciate obviously we're

and understand why we're showing what we're including or keeping in the budget moving forward.

I don't want to lose that part of the conversation or that part of the information so the public understands what we'll be dealing with.

So that just may be a future slide or can be added to that slide at a future meeting.

I've got a few supervisors who've asked to get a couple comments back in.

I just wanted to piggyback on what Ann said because I in no way was trying to say that I thought that all the departments should take the same amount percent of decrease.

I'm just simply saying that I think when we put that 1% up there at first blush for the community looking at it, it could be misleading.

That's all I was saying.

So I agree with you, Ann, completely that it's very appropriate to look at each department individually

Yes, regarding the scenarios that you asked about, I just had a phone call yesterday from one of my constituents who works on Wall Street as well as lives part-time in Croce and he said

that in looking at our 21, 22 billion dollar, trillion dollar economy in the country that a lot of conservative folks are saying, take your projected revenues and in the back of your mind say, plan for a 20% reduction beyond what we're thinking.

So I'm very grateful that everybody seems to be planning in a very conservative way.

and just wanted to pass that along that we need to continue with that.

On page 66, I found the position summary to be really, really helpful.

The print is pretty small on which departments are losing staff, but I think that we'll figure out a way to talk about that a little bit more so people do understand what those implications might be.

Okay, so I'll move on to the next category.

This again, to Diantha's point, the percentages at the top of the slide is a summary.

Each of these areas can be different based on, you know, what happened in each of these areas.

This is our local government contributes to judicial as well as the state.

So you can see this category includes the Clerk of the Circuit Court, the Commonwealth Attorney, the Sheriff's Office, our Courts Support, and the Public Defender's Office.

So this is on page 54 in your book, and you can see the chart there as well.

We'll go through the order.

None at this time.

Just one.

Oh, you mean the chart is on 54.

OK.

No, I don't have any questions at this time.

Supervisor Price?

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

No questions at this time.

I am happy that we're not in this area, especially for the Sheriff and the

of course and such that they're not taking a huge hit.

But no, no, no questions at this time.

None for me.

Thank you.

Can I go back just to take my question really quickly?

So what, what is the, I'm just looking at the chart quickly because I hadn't gone over that yet.

What is happening with the Sheriff's department?

It is salary, savings, and a $97,000 net decrease in their capital outlay expenditures.

And then that's basically it.

They've also decreased the department's contribution to the vehicle replacement fund.

So it looks like they had salary savings anyway.

They were realizing that.

All right.

Very good, Laurie.

Andy, did you have a comment?

I just see.

Got it.

Very good.

All right.

We'll move to the next category.

This is public safety.

It's on page 55.

You can see that the whole category has a reduction of $372,000.

You can see that this includes the police department, which is the largest portion of this category.

The fire rescue services, we have more slides on fire rescue services later.

So if you have questions on that, it might be useful to pause on those questions because Chief Engelson will be with us later in the work session.

Category of Inspections, this is a category in community development that counts as public safety and so it's placed in this part of the budget document.

The Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, the ECC Center, and other public safety agency contributions.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Ms.

Hollishouse, I believe you misspoke and you said it was a 372,000 reduction as opposed to an increase.

So I just wanted to clarify that if that's what I heard.

I apologize for that.

I have no questions.

I do have a comment.

I'm very pleased to see as with the previous slide that those first responder public safety issues

and areas are being funded to the greatest extent we can.

So thank you, Ms.

Pauls-Hass.

Yes, thank you.

Is there, if the savings in overtime doesn't pan out for ACPD, we have a bucket, a contingency bucket somewhere that can

replenish this $100,000 that we're taking out for reimbursable overtime just because we don't know what's going to happen.

And I just want to make sure about that.

Yes, we do.

In reimbursable overtime, the expenditures match the revenues.

So it's one of those ones that if the revenues don't come in, the police officers don't work the outside events.

So this category would not cover

all hands on deck looking for missing person type investigation operations.

I guess my only excuse me, my only comment and it would probably relate to Department of Social Services in addition to public safety.

Last meeting I brought up about when we start coming back online, what areas get some attention when we come back on?

I know we had mentioned the police department.

But in seeing the 45% decrease in department travel, training, and education, the training and education piece, I would think for public safety departments and our Department of Social Services especially, would be a place I would suggest being a priority for look as we come back online for reinstatement.

Thank you.

OK, we'll move to the next category.

This category is Public Works.

I'm going to turn the pages and stay with you here.

This is on page 57.

It includes the facilities and environmental services, or we call them FEZ, the FEZ division here in the county.

It does convert the non-permanent environmental service systems analysts to a regular position.

There's some beautification program adjustments.

There may be some service decreases in this area that may be visible to the public.

We'll do the best we can.

It depends on how often it rains and how things are going, but there may be some adjustments there that we have to keep our eyes on.

The Rivanna Solid Waste Authority is also in this category.

This funds operating costs associated with the opening of the Ivy Convenience Center.

I think I'm fine right now.

I have a question, but I think it's better directed at the Solid Waste Authority, so I'll get with them.

Yeah, I have no questions.

Supervisor Price?

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

I have no questions.

Okay, next slide please.

This is the health and welfare category.

It's on page 58 in your document.

There's a lot of agencies in this category, so you see a very large chart.

This includes the Department of Social Services.

We mentioned before that we're increasing funding to the Emergency Utility Program.

This includes transfers.

We have other funds in our budget.

This transfers funding over to our Bright Stars program.

It also transfers funding over to the Children's Services Act or CSA.

This category includes the Charlottesville Albemarle Health Department,

There's a community health worker position at ESE Community Center that's included in this budget.

This is a category where the tax relief for the elderly and disabled is.

And there's other agency contributions.

Primarily, most of our ABRT agencies are in this category.

So you can see that there's no change in the ABRT agency funding from what was included in the previous recommended fiscal year 21 budget.

Sorry, I couldn't get my mute button handled.

No, I'm OK right now.

Supervisor Price.

No questions right now.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

I'm good.

One for me.

All right, Lori.

Okay, the next category is Parks, Recreation and Culture.

You can find the information and the chart and the details on page 17.

Just some highlights, the Parks and Recreation Department, there's no summer 2020 programs in this budget.

There is funding though for increased water testing, monitoring and treatment.

The Darden Town Memorial Park is included in this category.

Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau,

the Jefferson Madison Regional Library.

We just wanted to mention that this does not increase any hours at Northside.

Other agency contributions and we wanted to mention and there's no new cultural agencies funded.

There was in the prior fiscal year 21 recommended budget and they're not included in this budget.

Just a comment.

I really appreciate the increase in the continued monitoring of the water testing.

I think that's really important, especially given our challenges around the algae blooms we've been having.

Lori, could you remind us or remind me what the cultural agencies that were recommended to be funded

I'm going to check if my staff has the answer quickly to that.

Otherwise, I'd have to look it up, but I could send it to you by email.

Yes, we actually note that at the bottom of page 60 and top of page 61.

And that is $2,500 for the Charlottesville mural project, which is sponsored by the Bridge Progressive Arts Institute.

I'm sorry, initiative.

All right, Supervisor Price.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

I have no questions.

Thank you.

Yes.

Under JMRL, the $48,000 reduction, is that totally focused on the increase in hours at Northside?

And if so, I think

I would add that to the list of things that could come back more quickly than others when things change because what we found in 2009 and 10 was the need for the library was much greater than during times when the economy was very strong.

So I expect we will have more and more people as we start to come out of our houses who need the library system for more hours if possible.

I can generally speak to that.

The $48,000 for Jefferson Madison Regional Library is really the cost of existing services right now, so it does not include the additional impact Northside.

The reason for the decrease is the city has had, I'm sorry, the JMRL has had some changes in the benefit cost as they follow some city personnel rates.

They've also had some employees just based on their turnover coming at lower salaries and also the regional funding formula for each category of library services changes.

Just a comment, but I think Andy really got at what I was leading to.

I do remember, and I think it's important for us to just keep in mind that we had a discussion about a month ago about Northside Library and the contract to ensure parking

And that really got to the heart of what staff is looking at as an awareness that as we come out of this, our residents are really going to need the services that the libraries offer.

And we wanted to make sure that Northside Library could handle the increase in usership and cars as we were coming out of this situation.

So just to piggybacking on our discussion about the

$5,000 I think we were spending to increase that parking for the contract.

That's very good.

All right, the next slide.

This category is community development.

It includes the community development department, but it also includes other things.

It includes economic development.

It includes other community development agency contributions.

And this is the area that includes transit.

And we do have some more slides on transit following this slide.

All right.

Now I think I'm okay.

Obviously we are going to do this in transit, so that's good.

For right now I'm okay.

Supervisor Palmer?

Just to make absolutely sure, I'm pretty sure the answer to this is yes, but we had discussed the strategic priority support reserve.

I think it was $145,000 that was supposed we were going to use for

supporting community development in some of the initiatives.

And that is still there.

Yes, that is correct.

That's 145,000 is budgeted in the non-departmental category.

All right.

Small dollar figure, it's only $9,080 shown on the chart on page 61.

That really reflects the, similar to JMRL, just the cost of current services.

They've had some turnover in the last year or so, and they just had some employees start at lower salaries.

at the time of the budget, they were also a decrease at that time.

Yeah.

And I just want to, if I could just make one brief comment.

The depth of recall that you and Ms.

Hall's house have on every item on this budget is incredibly impressive and just demonstrates the depth of commitment, the service that y'all are providing to the county.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, Donna.

You just stole my line.

That's exactly what I was going to say about Andy and Lori.

I am very impressed with the recall of every single minute detail.

Thank you.

Supervisor Malek.

Thank you.

I was muted myself and forgot.

I'm all set.

OK.

Thank you, Lori.

I'm going to go into a little more detail than we have been at the rate of the past two functional areas we've gone into.

I have three slides on transit.

What I intend to walk through is where we were at the March 11th transit work session to where we are now.

Also to give an update on the federal CARES funding, which is related to the Coronavirus Relief Act that was approved.

And then also a third slide to kind of say what our next steps are planned to date and, of course, answer any questions.

So in this first slide, referring to Kat and John, as the board recalls, there was a work session that was held on March 11th.

And the top line of here is the county share of the existing services for Kat and John is where we were at that work session.

And from that time that work session to where we ended up in the revised recommended budget, there have been three adjustments that were made to get us to what I call these placeholders for Kat and John in the revised recommended budget.

The first item is a credit

Federal Revenue update that was shared at the work session.

Mr. Sheffield at the Jaunt had identified an update from the federal government that provided funding to CAT and Jaunt.

The county share of that is reflected in that first line.

The second update was in response to board questions.

The CAT director spends approximately 20% of his time kind of providing management and oversight and leadership to the people in the vision of CAT.

So the county receives a credit format that is now listed.

And finally, the third update that we have made is the county share of proposed salary increases has been removed from Jaunt and CAT to be consistent with the local government, the schools, the city, the state, and all the other changes.

So those three adjustments get us to the revised recommended placeholder, kind of subject to additional analysis line, which is rounding up to $2.4 million for Jaunt and then a little over more than $1.1 million for CAT.

Now, this is not final.

I have subject to additional analysis because of the next slide, which is the very significant update that we are currently in the middle of analyzing.

That is the CARES funding, thank you, which is the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act of 2020.

So what we know at this time is that CAT will receive $5.3 million of funding.

JWT will receive $1.8 million of funding.

That is funding that can be applied across fiscal year 20 and 21.

And I should clarify that that is the total amount over that time period.

It's not 5.3 each year, it would be 5.3 for that entire period of 2021.

And those amounts are for the total system for Kat and John, not just the county share.

And so really the county share was something that would be to be determined.

This funding may be used for operating costs, capital costs, or planning expenses.

And certainly it may also meet up for lost revenue as both ridership for Kat and John is currently low right now.

Though a lot of those adjustments have been made, the funding does allow for those costs to be recovered all the way back to January.

I'll add that we have some additional guidance in terms of operating capital planning expenses.

The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation has strongly encouraged localities to prioritize operating expenses before considering the use of this for capital projects or planning expenses.

The reason for that is the intent of this funding is really to continue service as much as we can in this unusual time.

So the top part of the slide is what we know.

What we are currently in the middle of analyzing and in contact with John's staff is the end of last week and the city office of management budget who works with CAT as recently as yesterday.

And there's just some questions as we're beginning to assess what the true impact of the county would be.

Some of this is just part of the budget process.

We happen to be a little bit ahead of the city.

If the city is not finalized yet, we'll be sharing with council and council, then we'll of course have to go through and prevent.

But to give some examples of some of the complexities that we're looking at is how much of this funding will be needed in fiscal year 20?

And how much of that will be needed in fiscal year 21?

Certainly we know that ridership is down and service looks differently now than it did two months ago.

And thank you, I'm getting a little feedback that my microphone cut out.

So I'll move a little bit closer.

And I guess the third impact is, I'm sorry, we also know exactly what the requirements

Recovery ridership and service will look like as we begin to come out of this pandemic.

And then finally, we're still awaiting information from the state for the final information of what may happen to the initial allocations provided to those transit agencies.

So while I would obviously prefer to provide the board an exact dollar amount with the impact of all this is, I'm not able to do that today.

But we do have instead as our plan forward with how we'll continue to monitor and evaluate this, which is on the following slide.

So we really want to think of this issue with transit agency funding in the context of our 366 framework that we utilize to develop fiscal year 21 recommended budget.

And specifically how that will look in 20 and 21.

The county has a MOU with the city for CAT.

that has a clause where when revenues come in that are different than was initially allocated or expenses change, there is a process that will take place for the first time this year to ensure that that budget is monitored and everyone's paying their rightful share.

So that is a process that has already planned to happen and would continue to need to be evaluated.

The other milestone that we can look to is when the city does finalize what their proposal for CAT is and the City Council will review that.

That gives us another opportunity to update what fiscal year 21 would look like.

The third is that we currently have the existing body, which two board members serve on, the Regional Transit Partnership.

That is a venue we have that has not been able to meet in the last two months, but I believe is intended to continue soon at the next monthly meeting.

where we can monitor both the impact of this with Kat and John to understand how service is being impacted, how ridership and fare revenue, state budget, and all of these variables.

And then finally, as we get more information around certainty and what the impacts will be, we can update funding at that time, again, within our 3-6-6 framework.

Yes, Andy, would you go back to the first slide that you had?

I think it was the first slide, yes.

I really want to thank you and the board members for the work session that we had around transit and CATS specifically, because if you'll notice on here, I believe, Andy, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the very first year

And so we've been losing money.

Albemarle County has really been paying

and it's not funny, but this is the first recognition that their director also runs the Charlottesville people transit system and has been spending time, obviously his time is spent to some degree on that.

Right, so this is a great, this is transparency, and I just want to point out that this is the first time this has happened.

I wish we could make it retroactive a few years back, but I guess that's probably not possible.

But at least going forward, we will now have this recognition.

Yes, I think that's a great idea so we'll put that on our to-do list for our next regional transit partnership meeting discussion.

and then just moving on a little bit to the CARES Act and I think you had another slide on that, right?

I noticed that AC, well, the Fire and Rescue Department has already tapped into and they've received notice of their funds for the CARES Act and I also noticed that the airport has already received theirs.

and I guess I don't want to put the cart before the horse, but we know by the MOU that 28% I think is the percentage in the MOU for Albemarle County.

I am a little bit

I'm thinking, why are we needing to replace it all?

Garland sent out an email to us that says the CARES Act funding will also include revenues, salaries, fuel, supplies, including personal protection equipment and cleaning supplies and administrative leave.

So it seems like to me that we could pretty quickly move forward with saying the CARES Act

The $5.3 million that CAT's going to be receiving would certainly more than cover our share this year of the CAT funding.

I guess I'm just throwing that out because the airports received theirs, the fire and rescue department has received theirs.

I just, Amy, I'd like you to respond to that.

Yes, and I would say that in terms of patience, I don't view this as an issue that we'll sort of put on the back burner for a few months.

I think this will be one that will stay engaged with the city on a weekly basis as we continue to move through our respective budget processes.

I think certainly expenses, as you mentioned, there's a pretty wide net of expenses that can be reimbursed by this.

And I think the other item that CATT is reviewing is how much of their lost ridership revenue and state revenue that may be lost will need to be, have the CARES funding applied to that to make up that loss.

Well, and I'll just make another comment and then I'll stop and let other folks have a chance.

But in one email to all of us, to the target at the regional partnership,

Garland indicated that there was no deadline to tap into the CARES funding, which is true.

But when we're talking about funding from the federal government, often what happens is they remain quiet and then all of a sudden they have another priority and what you hear is you didn't use it so you're going to lose it.

And so I just think it's really important that we not sit on this or that CAT not sit on this funding to the point where all of a sudden it's gone and it's been used for something else because it's been tapped into.

So just a comment.

Andy, did you say that the

that the director spends 80, excuse me, 20% of his time on the school bus system.

So how does that math work?

Because clearly he makes more than

Okay.

Liz, our MOU states 28% because of the amount of time that Cat serves Albemarle County versus

I don't know if that helped.

OK, I get that.

OK, I'll just have to think about that for a minute.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Mr. Bowman, the slide that you have up in front of you, I want to express appreciation for the candor

articulating here the uncertainties that we still face, not only with regard to the CARES Act funding, but I think it applies kind of across the board.

Everyone wants certainty, and right now we're operating in a sea of uncertainty.

And so I just appreciate your candor and your presentation in demonstrating that.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much.

So I will add support for, starting at the bottom of my list, not waiting.

We saw how quickly the SBA funds disappeared when they had decided that everything had been drawn down.

So I am not patient at all that this money be received.

I would support on that.

The 28% MOU was based upon runs, as I understand, so there's no reason at all why the county, in my mind, should be paying any part of the 20% of the salary that is used for the school department in the city.

That should be a different category altogether, it seems to me.

Secondly,

The county's urban ring population is really important in drawing down federal money for CAP.

Yet we get almost no credit at all for our 45,000 people who are in their statistics that allow them to get the money they get.

So I want us to be very determined to be able to get at least the 28% of that $5.3 million and use that to offset

this year and next year or whatever we need to do and then we'll have other money to support what John is doing for which we pay a greater percentage of that operation.

Lastly, it would be really great if we can find a way to separate out the money for salary that was set aside for John

to be able to raise their driver's salary just enough to match what CAT has been paying.

And this is something the board has been discussing for years.

It doesn't have anything to do with the overall 2% raise.

I understand that that needs to wait.

But if they're going to be able to keep their drivers, then that equity issue with the CAT drivers needs to be considered.

So I was hoping that $42,000 that was in that category could be considered in a different

Light, and I will leave that for others to struggle with in the next few days or whatever.

I also appreciate a lot more transparency that's been achieved through the discussions at the transit agency, but we still haven't received any accountability for the last five years of the lost runs, the runs to the county that never happened because they didn't get a bus out the door.

And so while I'm glad that there's some information coming,

I would support retroactive clarification, certainly for the director salary used on schools.

That was not something they didn't know.

It was something they decided not to disclose.

And it should not have been up to us to be able to figure out what the right question was to ask.

They should have provided that information to begin with.

So I would urge everybody to be very firm and have a big backbone here.

when we go forward getting this dollar amount squared away over the next couple of months.

The only other idea is that we would perhaps respond to invoices based upon delivery of service as opposed to handing over a million dollars at the beginning of the year, or whatever the amount is, that we have them on a much shorter leash so that we're sure we're getting the services that our citizens are paying for and that they need.

Thank you.

Any earlier you said the TBD, the county chair, was to be determined.

Why would that be the case?

That would be the biggest variable, as I would expect.

Certainly, as we're in the middle of this pandemic right now, there should be a large credit in fiscal year 20.

But it's tough to calculate what that credit is when we're right in the middle of the situation.

And so certainly, whatever credit was not realized in 20 would then be applied to 21.

How well do we have our hands wrapped around the state funding and how this is going to play out?

When you said that the CARES Act, that some of that money could go to state shortfalls, that's really the first time I've

wrapped my head around that statement if it's been said before.

We do not at this time.

Both Mr. Sheffield and John speaking with city staff are watching closely to see the final numbers in the state.

Well, if there are some questions that we would want to ask of the state,

We have an MPO meeting later today.

That's a good place for me to ask some of those questions.

So if there are some things that we can start to ask to get this figured out, I'd like to know what those questions are.

Was it canceled and I didn't see the cancel come through?

I will verify the check and get him to get back to us.

Thank you, Ann.

Well, in any case, if there are questions like that, we can still, through that organization, go back through and ask questions if that meeting is not going on today.

Are there any other questions here?

I do have a comment because I really appreciate what Ann stated around history and certainly the partnership is working hard to

to improve our partnership and transparency around transit.

And I would support Ann's thought around job funding because they have really been, their salaries for their drivers have really been a problem over the years as CAT's salaries have gone up.

And I understand sometimes you feel like you've

increase one salary and then somebody else goes up.

The partnership has a committee that was supposed to be working on that very issue of bus driver salaries.

But so far, I'm not even sure if they've even been meeting lately.

But we didn't really have any resolution as to solutions when the pandemic, when the meetings all shut down.

So I would support some funding perhaps for salaries is what I'm saying, the bottom line.

The other thing that I'm trying to figure a way toward with transit is that currently Albemarle County and the city were going to be applying for a grant through DRPT for

assistance with visioning what transit should look like in the future.

And we knew that DRPT was going to do that study for us.

And we knew it would be two years out.

I think it's important that since we have noticed that the CARES Act is providing additional funding

I think it's important to have a discussion around that particular visioning plan funding at least have a conversation about not just letting it go because when we come out of this current reality we're going to have a new reality and it would be lovely to have that planning happening over the next two years ready to go.

The other

Grant that was more directed just for Albemarle County was a technical assistance visioning grant through DRPT for just us.

It was $110,000 for our match.

And I would very much like

to see at least Andy and staff take a look at continuing perhaps that in the budget.

Or at least I'd like to know where it is exactly and possibly being able to continue it because that work is really gonna be important for us.

And to let it just sit for whatever amount of time for the next year, I don't think is good for us.

I can speak.

The first grant that Supervisor McKeel refers to for the Regional Transit Vision Plan, the funding for the first year of that continues to be included in the revised recommended budget, so there is a solution in place for that.

The second grant that Supervisor McKeel refers to, since the last communication I had with Chip Boyle's planning and district commission,

He was hopeful at the time there would be able to provide enough funding that would eliminate the cost for it there to be any cost to the county.

Yeah, because in answering my question, you know, Jen DeBruyl from DRPT indicated that certainly if that was important for Albemarle County, it would be something that they would consider.

You know, she addressed that and didn't say, no, you shouldn't do that or no, we're not interested.

She was amenable to that.

So I'd like to at least take a look at that and think about it.

I would just pile on in support of using some of that CARES Act to offset the $300,000 that the county was going to put in for our match, because we have a lot of other things we can do with that money.

Yes.

Yes.

I agree.

All right, this is a slide on reserves.

So we're about finished with general government as a category.

This is our last slide, and then we'll be moving into the fire rescue portion of the work session today.

So just wanted to point out that

As part of our principles for this budget development, it's really important to think about reserves.

So on the left side of your screen, we've talked about this before.

You have a 10%.

The county has a 10% unrestricted fund balance reserve.

We also have the 1% budget stabilization reserve.

Both of these reserves, if you like details on them, are in your policy section of your budget document.

In addition,

There's a $2 million Advancing Strategic Priority Reserve in your capital program.

And this was set aside in the past and it's still available.

And there's also a $1.56 million addition we had talked about prior to the situation they were in with the virus.

We had talked about adding to the Advancing Strategic Priority Reserve that's on the bullet ahead of that.

So those reserves are all in place.

This budget does not use any of those reserves for any specific budget item.

If you go over to the right side of this page it says others and basically on page 65 and there's also another good page a chart on page 63 in your document talks about some other reserves that we have in different categories in your budget.

So the Strategic Priority Support Reserve is one that Ms.

Palmer had spoke about earlier that's in the Community Development Department.

There's also a Climate Action Funding Pool.

The Board of Supervisors approved $500,000 to be placed in that pool that was to support the actions coming out of the Climate Action Plan.

And that funding, that $500,000 is still there.

There's a recommendation in this budget to add another $250,000 to that pool, but it would be specifically targeted for weatherization and home repair.

There's also a reserve called a business process optimization reserve.

This is an internal reserve.

As we're setting our processes and optimizing our business processes, that reserve, there's $250,000 still in that reserve.

We did reduce it from the prior recommended budget.

But it still has $250,000 in it for work that we have planned or we expect to do in the upcoming year.

There's also a salary and benefits reserve.

This is a reserve for changes that may occur based on

changes and positions, or it could be that as we freeze positions, there may be a new position that has to take over different jobs.

So we do have a salary and benefits reserve.

It has been reduced from the prior recommended budget, but we do have some funding in that in place.

And then this is also the category of personnel savings.

You can see that we have a reserve in there for anticipated future personnel savings for the additional 20 additional frozen positions.

And then you have a reserve for contingencies of $600,000.

This reserve is for things that come up along the way in your budget.

This is similar to the reserves we put in place every year.

This is an increase from last year's budget.

for your reserve for contingency.

So I'll stop there to see if there's any questions.

Again, a great chart on page 63.

And then there's some descriptions on page 65 of these particular reserves.

Supervisor Price?

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Ms.

Alshouse, you know, we're going through the presentation and I'm thinking about a comment that Supervisor Mallek mentioned earlier about, I think, Wall Street projecting a 20% expectation of reduction of revenues or something into that effect.

I see the news reports of GDP

These reserves are critical.

My question, not for an answer today, but my question is what further actions can we take to reduce our overall expenditures, increase the reserves?

Because I do have

Anxieties or concerns that the situation may continue to get even more stressed than we are right now.

Are there actions, you know, Mr. Campner and Mr. Richardson may have to weigh into this as well.

And again, I'm not asking for the answer today, but further ways to reduce personnel expenses.

I recognize that keeping positions frozen in an open category does nothing but increase the workload on the remaining personnel, but I am concerned that we may not have enough

in the reserves if the financial situation continues to deteriorate.

So I will simply leave that at this point.

I'm not asking for a question and answer at the moment, but I would like to get some information later on further ways that we can reduce expenses.

Well, once again, I'm following Supervisor Price and I do agree.

I think we need to do everything we can to, at this time, to build our reserves.

If things do turn around quickly, then we'll have that money to spend, but if they don't, we'll make sure that everything, the community stays safe, the community receives what they need to receive from the county.

We maintain the positions we have in the county.

We don't have to lay people off.

So I'm very much in favor of making sure that we do everything we can to build on our reserves.

Thank you.

I support, I agree with the preservation of reserves, but also the other side of it is we, I need some guidance and it doesn't have to come right this minute about how we are living up to our agreements, which we have made.

One of them, which has been in the Crozet Master Plan for, since 2005 was a traffic study.

which I understand now is not being fulfilled even though it was part of the agreement that we made for the downtown approval.

So I'm hopeful that I'm misunderstanding and that that is actually going forward.

It was gonna be reimbursed by VDOT anyway, but to hold it up for several years really puts a project at risk when they've already invested millions that are trying to wrap it up and get the shovels in the ground.

So that is just one of those things we need to continue to focus on and not be seen as a backslider when we make agreements with folks who are putting their private dollars into our projects.

Will there be follow-up on that, or should I?

Yes, thank you.

Supervisor Mallek asking about the Crozet transportation study.

We are still looking at trying to fund that.

One of the major issues with doing that right now is

We are having trouble figuring out how to get accurate traffic counts.

And without the accurate traffic counts, it could be very difficult to get reasonable results from that study.

So that's one of the major things that we need to overcome right now.

But we are still looking at ways to advance that.

You are correct that it's partially funded by the developer who

I would clarify, in addition to Kevin's comments, we have identified funding in the community development budget in the first, in the current year.

I think it's more just a logistical question of the time to move forward given the traffic counts.

Oh wow, I hadn't thought about that.

Traffic counts would certainly be way off right now, wouldn't they?

Good.

The Grants Leveraging Reserve was put in place so many years ago and it was for grants that departments were not able to find funding in their own budgets for so a lot of times a department leads in the grant development

and when they know MATCH is coming or they know it's a grant that they apply for, we build in funding into departments.

So the Grants Leveraging Fund was a way for us to put some funding together in the past for those that are unexpected and we've been monitoring it over the years.

We were putting aside a little more than we needed in it.

Right now we did remove that

I think grants are a very important thing for us to consider given these times.

Agreed.

and they were able to find monies in the past for that, then it'll be tighter on them to be able to find that.

Certainly, and you'll also have your reserve for contingencies.

Thank you.

Lori, thank you for

The work to get us to this point, both Lori and Andy, and Mr. Chair, members of the board, I'll be brief and I will be introducing this slide that will move us into a more detailed discussion about fire service and EMS medical response and transport service related issues that our fire chief, Dan Eggleston, will be walking the board and the community through in just a few minutes.

I would remind the board, and we've talked about this previously, that we started in earnest last year, last calendar year.

We had several key partnership public safety agencies, volunteer agencies that we work closely with and we have relied on.

They've done outstanding work in the past, and two of our key agencies, Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad first, they

worked with us and identified continued challenges that they've had in the area of advanced life support response to our Albemarle County community.

They indicated that as we crossed into the FY21 budget year that they would be looking to reduce those services in Albemarle.

And these services are provided by Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad.

Fire Chief began to work early in our budget process with our budget team.

And we loaded the 12 positions necessary to ensure that those services are maintained as we cross budget years.

That was an early move that we made in the budget process.

These positions were identified and this board remembers that when we first pulled the budget out, those positions existed.

And then as we experienced the decline in revenue associated with the pandemic,

We continue to maintain those positions in the budget for obvious reasons and the need for continued service delivery into next year.

So we've talked about that, we've discussed it.

The focus that the Fire Chief will move toward is the

The second key agency, the Crozet Fire Department, indicated last year that they were having some difficulty in maintaining a service delivery Monday through Friday, weekdays.

And that is a high volume service area.

So we began to look at a variety of options with leadership of the Fire and Rescue Department.

and we ultimately in the second iteration of the budget, the revised budget rollout, we identified some federal funding that is available.

It is a competitive grant.

We're poised to compete for this grant and we are optimistic that we will be successful.

Chief Eggleston is going to walk you through the details because this grant opportunity not only gives us the

capacity if we're successful to address some of the urban needs in Crozet as well as in Pantops.

Ultimately, Pantops is also a high urban hall area, but it also helps us to solidify support in some of our key rural areas across the county.

Finally, we also have aligned in our capital budget the need for some apparatus, one-time money for apparatus

replacement and additional apparatus, both with an engine and ambulances.

And then finally, we've also committed to, in our capital budget for next year, radio and mobile data computers.

This is some known related IT infrastructure for our public safety system aimed at our first responders who are in the field to ensure that we can continue to utilize

across Albemarle County, the need for strong IT structure when these people are in the field.

Thank you, Jeff.

And let's see.

Okay.

Good morning, Chairman Galloway and members of the board.

Dan Eggleston here, Chief of Fire Rescue.

I'll start off the presentation this morning to sort of anchor us with a quick overview, if you go to our next slide, of our current station location.

Represented on this slide are 14 stations that are distributed across the county, represented with the light green dots.

As I mentioned, there are 14 stations, those of which are concentrated in more of the urban areas you can see here, were purposely designed to cover those growth areas in the county.

In addition to that, as you'll see in some of these slides, we have shaded purple areas that represent high rates of emergency calls for service.

The darker the color, the higher the rate.

That gives you perspective in terms of where we're seeing most of the activity in the county.

So if we go to the next slide here, this slide just gives you again a snapshot of those stations in which we have career staff staffed.

So of the 14 stations, we have career staff assigned to 10 of them, again represented by those light green dots.

Of the stations with career staff, half of them are staffed during the daytime Monday through Friday from 6 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

and the volunteer staff during nights and weekends.

The other five stations are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week with career staff.

So if we go to the next slide, as Mr. Richardson said, it's been about a year now we received a letter from the leadership at Crozet Volunteer Fire Department requesting daytime assistance based on their lack of volunteer support during the daytime.

We have been working very closely with Chief Dillon and his staff since that request has been put forward in assessing the situation and we consistently hear that we need the staff there sooner than later because of the decline and the rapid growth that we're seeing in the Crozet area.

So we've been working, even since we've been developing this revised FY21 budget, a couple of options that we can do to try to honor our assistance for Crozet.

So basically, what we've done is we've looked at our current hiring list that we're going through right now, and we have an opportunity to hire four experienced firefighter EMS personnel, which would, in essence, bring the department up to full staffing.

and we can start an experienced recruit school actually next week which would put those people through an accelerated recruit school in May and we would be able to graduate those folks and train them up and actually begin staffing the Crozet department in 2020 in September.

That's a very rapid turnaround but because these folks are

are trained to have experience in other areas around the state.

We believe that this would work out well and could certainly benefit the staffing out at Crozet and get the department the staffing that they need sooner than later.

While this really gets us to a more accelerated staffing model for Crozet, it will result in some overtime and probably use of dynamic staffing because it'll stretch us quite thin in terms of our staffing.

But we do have plans further in the presentation here to backfill some of the positions so that we can relieve the stress on the system.

So if we go to the next slide,

This presentation and this FY21 budget does not recommend the relocation of career staff from low-cal volume stations.

However, we think we have a great opportunity to maximize the use of staff assigned to these stations.

using two strategies here.

The first strategy is cross-staffing, where we take the career staff and staff an engine and an ambulance based on the type of call.

This is called cross-staffing.

So for instance, if there's an EMS call, the staff would take the ambulance and run the EMS call.

If there's a fire type call, they would do the same with the fire engine.

And keep in mind, we've been doing this cross-staffing scenario in Earliesville for about eight years now, and we believe it's worked very well, not only for the staff that are assigned out there, but for the community.

We think it's risen, the type of service that we have, and certainly has benefited the community quite a bit.

The second thing I want to talk about was the dynamic staffing.

That's where we reduce the staff at a station in times of staffing needs across the system from three to two.

And while the fire engine in that case would go out of service, we would still have people in the station that could respond in the ambulance and to provide much needed EMS service, including ALS or paramedic level services to the community.

So these two things, I think moving forward, we'd want to implement

more broadly for these lower call volume stations.

I'll get into this in just a minute if we go to the next slide.

So as I mentioned, the cross-staffing part is where we would cross-staff a fire engine or an ambulance really is, we believe, an effective use of resources in these lower call volume stations.

So by placing ambulances in these low call volume areas, we get two benefits really from this.

It improves our response times to those areas in terms of EMS.

But it also increases overall ambulance availability by keeping those urban high volume call ambulances in the urban areas.

Instead of running out to the rural areas, now these ambulances in low call volume areas can answer those calls, again creating the capacity for those urban ambulances to stay in those areas to answer critical calls.

So we believe using one of our reserve ambulances, we're prepared to place a daytime ambulance at the Stony Point Volunteer Fire Department to begin cross-staffing as early as July of this year while we work through the rest of these situations.

That would immediately enhance that area of the county through the use of the cross-staff ambulance and again better utilize the staff that are out there.

And then in September of 2021, with additional staff,

We will place a daytime ambulance at the East Rivanna station and begin cross-staffing there as well.

Again, same benefits, it provides an ambulance to that community and better utilization of the staff that we have assigned there on Monday through Friday.

So if we go to the next slide, this is where I talk about the use of dynamic staffing.

And really, this goes into dynamic staffing and cross staffing are used in unison here.

So we believe that implementing dynamic staffing across the board to both Earliesville, which we already have there, dynamic and cross staffing, Stony Point and East Rivanna will benefit the system in a number of ways.

First of all, we would cascade the use of dynamic staffing, meaning that in times of system need, we would go to Earliesville, bring that station from three to two, and then we'd move to

Stony Point and do the same thing and then move to East Rivanna if needed to do the same thing.

And in this case, what we would do is we would not shut down the station at all.

So just for example, unfortunately, last year we had to completely close the Erlesville station about 25% of the time.

So this approach, using this strategy, will avoid closures of all stations in those low call volumes.

So it's a big benefit to those lower call volume stations, but still, again, utilizing lower call volume stations to go to during times of staffing needs.

So certainly a benefit for the community in a number of different ways.

The next slide really addresses and talks a little bit about the staffing that we are recommending for the Pantops engine during daytime hours beginning September of 2021.

The Pantops station, or engine, excuse me, will provide really two vital roles.

First, it covers a high call volume, high risk area, which as you can see on the heat map there, it's dark purple.

This represents the second busiest area in the county, the first being the 29 North corridor.

but it also provides much needed backup for Stony Point and East Rivanna should those stations be taken down in terms of staffing from three to two.

It provides fire suppression backup for both Stony Point and East Rivanna and also provides backup if those stations are on another call.

So that station serves multiple roles and certainly will provide a much needed service mainly to that Pan-Cops area.

So if we move to wrap up here in terms of the benefits of this proposal, as mentioned, certainly the Roseville station will remain open during the daylight hours due to the sharing of the dynamic staffing across three stations.

That's certainly one benefit.

The Stony Point and East Rivanna stations in those communities that they serve will gain across staff ambulance without really increasing staffing at all in those areas.

And then the last, the Pantops,

Engine gets a daytime staffed engine that provides closer backup for Stony Point and East Rivanna and really aligns our resources to the second highest call volume in the county.

This is all done at the same time honoring our commitment to volunteer stations that need supplemental career staff as in the case with Crozet.

So this last slide, and then I'll pause for questions here, is sort of the timeline of how this, in our eyes, is going to unfold.

As I mentioned, we do have the opportunity to hire four experienced firefighters right now that we can put in an abbreviated school.

That's going to happen next week in May.

It will last until September.

And at that time, we can begin staffing the Crozet engine there during the daytime.

In July, when the budget's approved, we can bring on 12 additional staff that will run a complete full recruit school that will last through January.

And then following that, we will have an in-house paramedic school to ensure that we have adequate paramedic staff for the system.

In addition to that, when one school ends in January, we'll start another one in January of 2021.

with hopefully the FEMA grant positions that we'll get.

And that will allow us to begin staffing on a more permanent and reliable basis the Crozet engine, as well as staffing this Pantops engine.

So when it's all said and done, we should wrap this entire program up by September of 2021.

Certainly a lot of moving pieces, but we have high confidence in our training staff to conduct these training programs.

We also believe that we have a good story on our FEMA grant and have high confidence on securing that grant for the staffing that will take place in September of 21, starting with a recruit school in January.

So I'll pause here for a moment.

I know there's a lot of information.

Thank you, sir.

Dan, I don't have any questions right now.

I really appreciate, though, your work on finding solutions for our community.

This has been really an adventure in education for me around the fire department and your response times and fire and rescue, the way that

Our large county has served, and I appreciate the clarity, and I really appreciate the work on trying to find solutions.

Thank you.

It's certainly been a team effort.

Yes, thank you to Chief Eccleston.

But I do have a question.

On the Stony Point, during the week, during the day, during the week,

There's an ambulance and a fire truck.

And then nights and weekends, there's just a fire truck.

That is correct.

And keep in mind, we're going to put the ambulance out there in July of this year.

So right now, there's not an ambulance at that station.

But we've already reached out, had a conversation with the leadership at Stony Point about this entire proposal.

So we're placing an ambulance out there in July.

During the evening hours and the weekends, that ambulance will not be staffed by the volunteers right now.

Okay, great.

It's the same situation there, although they already, East Rivanna already has a small number of volunteers that are trained up and released on an ambulance.

Thank you very much.

But the ambulance stays there physically.

There's just nobody there to run it at

at Stony Point, but there is somebody at Rivanna sometimes.

Okay.

All right.

Supervisor Price.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Chief Eccleston, thank you so much.

I have a number of comments to make.

First, I appreciate your calm demeanor over the course of the last number of months where there has been a lot of interest, legitimate interest, concern.

which of course raises the motions when it comes to public safety.

And the actions that you, your staff and the volunteers have worked with together to come up with what I see as a really good solution is really commendable.

And the Stony Point situation in particular, I think we can all be very pleased with that.

We can also see that this is a process that is not taking place overnight.

It's gonna take a period of time.

The FEMA grant is critical to achieving this, but we also see that FEMA grant is essentially financially a temporary resolution, which comes to the greater point that I think we need to focus on, which is as we work forward, and of course with the uncertainty of the economy right now, it's very difficult to have any certainty

But as we move forward, it appears very clear to me that we need to start preparing today to increase the budget to the fire and rescue services.

because we're able to meet our requirements right now, but we know they're going to continue to increase.

I believe we can expect that there will be further pressures placed upon our volunteers, which are likely going to require a greater increase in permanent staff to meet needs going forward in the future.

But for myself in the Scottsville District as well as Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley and the Rivanna, the three stations of Stony Point and East Rivanna and Pan Tops, what I see that you've done to help this eastern part of the county

are really commendable, and I just really want to thank you for the work that you've done to go through this process.

It wasn't easy, but I think you've come up with a great solution, and I'm very thankful.

Thank you, Chair Allen.

Yes, thank you very much, and Chief Eccleston, I think you and your staff have done a commendable job, phenomenal job, frankly, in coming up with the dynamic staffing and

the cross staffing.

I know the people in Stony Point are very happy, they're very appreciative, especially we're getting an ambulance, which really makes a difference.

And the fact that you came out to Stony Point and listened to the community and then afterwards met with me and the volunteer fire department, the chief and the upper echelon there.

Willie showed me that you cared and you were listening and I'm just hoping we can also and I know you're planning on funding the volunteers to keep that and I'm hoping that we can increase our volunteers because I know that's something you would you are interested in doing the reality is you know we don't know and the supervisor Price is correct the FEMA grant

If we're lucky enough to get it, which I hope we will, I think we will, that will run out in four years.

So we have planning to do as supervisors to make sure that the staffing continues.

But I think it's a great plan, very creative, very innovative, and it really meets the needs of the community, which is most important.

Thank you Chief.

Last week I had asked about how the ripple effect.

I'm specifically, obviously I understand the need at Pantops as a high volume area.

Putting that, putting this plan into place, how does it specifically impact the stations at Murkmar and Hollymade?

As backups or does the service, does it help us deal with call volume there in any way?

Does it stay the same?

Certainly.

We try to spend some time to actually quantify the impact, and we're finding it difficult, but in reality, what it does is it helps to create capacity across the board by, again, keeping those engine companies particularly in their deserved area because

In some cases, we see when the system's busy, we have a lot of units crisscrossing the county, responding into other areas because of concurrent calls.

So what this will see is certainly provide more capacity for the Monticello Station, Station 11.

It provides more capacity for the 29 area Station 8, which happens to be our busiest, both engine companies and ambulance there.

So we think it's going to be a huge benefit, because they often come into the Pantops area

right now because we don't have a fire resource there.

It would have been secondary.

Exactly.

Right.

Yes, exactly.

So it's probably less impact in Hollymede, but we'll see some impact there as well, which in my view is going to help us out because of all the growth that's happened along the 29 corridor right now.

Well, I appreciate understanding that.

Thank you for that.

We do have a few additional comments.

Okay, I'm going to, I just want to mention we're all, many of us are predicting how the pandemic will change our, how life going forward and Supervisor Price got me

reminded me of something that I've observed through people contacting me about people who in the rural areas had put their houses on the market and now have taken them off.

Not because the market's bad, but they've decided not to move into urban areas because they are really appreciative of the fact they can

Thank you.

I must have missed the previous question session when my battery died and I had to try to get back in.

So I have a few things to ask and some comments sort of mixed in.

First of all, I'm grateful for the proposal being made.

It's been a long time coming and a lot of different points of view struggling to find some balance and I credit Dan and Dave and

of the Chiefs for making this kind of progress.

I will say that, um, Earliesville has had a very painful 15 months of having the station dead when people show up.

And so it could not happen fast enough that we get back to two people as a minimum there, or having somebody else come from home to be able to, to, uh, supplement, to be able to get an extra engine out.

So, uh, the dynamic staffing,

has only been Earliesville all this time instead of being shared.

And I'm sorry to bitch about this, but it's good that the other stations are going to be taking some sharing of this extra responsibility, the call volumes three times at station four, what it is in Stony Point.

So we need to be able to use, I'm sure that Dan's folks will be using call volume as a way to cascade as far as how they start their priorities to poll people.

but oh shoot that 25% empty house is really really damaging for the community.

So are there, I know that the ambulance cross staffing has worked really well for a while in Earliesville until we ran out of space for sleeping there was a whole new crew who joined up as volunteers to run the ambulance and so

Once those structural changes could possibly happen out there, then we'll probably be able to come back.

We had a whole women's crew, but they gave up because they had no place just to sleep.

The, okay, talked about that, talked about that, talked about that.

The Thema Grant, if you look back, look back to that chart on page 66 when you have time, because back in fiscal year 11, there were 80,

people in the ACFR and then there were several rounds of FEMA grants which helped us but then all those positions became absorbed into the county budget so between 80 to 142 is a quite a large increase in staff and I think it's really important from our leadership point of view

that we continue to, we don't become the self-fulfilling prophecy where we say, oh, volunteers are hard and so we're going to give up on that.

It will be dozens of millions of dollars to replace the services that our volunteers provide.

And we've been pretty consistent around 400 for about a decade, even though back in 2008, there were lots of people who said volunteerism was dead.

So I hope that we will be the place that actually

It just proves that we can continue and I think this plan makes a really good start toward a really more broadly balanced sacrifice and also some really great investment on the part of our budget to get some things to happen.

So I will

The other thing that I wrote down just as I came back online was the stress on the system and on the individuals is real.

And we're hearing a lot more about this in the pandemic stuff from all over the country.

But when people do hours and hours and hours and days and days and days of overtime, it does wear them out and really put stresses on their families too.

So I know that that having

All these folks moving from station to station is going to be tricky to manage, but it is definitely worthwhile in the overall scheme of things.

And I will stop there.

And I apologize, Supervisor Mallek.

I think I actually jumped the gun and missed you in the lineup, so it might not have been your battery mishap.

It was at least well timed.

My apologies.

I do have a clarifying question for Dan, but first I just wanted to make a comment that, Liz, I appreciate your comment about the rural area.

I do think it's important for us to remember that much of our work is predicated on a development area and a rural area.

and our comp plan really addresses the rural area services and the development area services.

And for those of us who like living in the development area, it behooves us not

And I'm not suggesting that you were doing this, Liz, but there is a tendency sometimes in our discussions for the community to look at it as the rural area versus the development area.

And I don't think that's where we want to go.

We need to provide good quality of life for everybody.

and try and take out the divisiveness of the issues, whether it's dogs on leashes or parking on secondary roads or 18 wheelers parking in neighborhoods.

But we really need to figure out how to come together and look at this as one county and not two counties, the rural area and the development area, if that makes sense.

I just have to add, I said that I wasn't going to go into any detail about what I brought up on that, but my purpose in that is to reiterate something we've talked about before, that there is a difference in the response times in the rural area versus the development area.

that's important.

And we have talked about in the future trying to explain better those differences to the public.

And we do have a policy where we encourage people, we are trying to encourage people to live in the development area by making the development area a more livable place with green spaces, all that sort of thing.

So I certainly was not trying to be divisive in my comment.

What I was trying to just say is that as we increase broadband capacity in the rural area and we have more people living in the rural area, we may very well, excuse me, run into some problems.

with just our communication and our costs as what Supervisor Price brought up as our increasing needs going forward.

So that was the reason why I made that observation and simply an observation.

Thank you.

And I agree.

And this will be a really, I think when we look at our comp plan again, this is going to be a great time to help educate the community, Liz,

around the rural area and the development area.

And that's really where I was going.

So, Diane, my question for you, and maybe I was just hearing it incorrectly, but I want you to just make sure for the, maybe for me, but also for the community, I'm looking at the chart that you gave us

with the safer grant funding for the, I'm specifically looking at the funding for the grant, the fire and rescue grant.

When we talk about that grant running out, that grant does certainly run out in 25, but you all have built in a way to pick up those positions so that that grant funding, when it ends,

It doesn't mean that these positions go away.

And I think when we're talking about it, it's important for the community to get that.

That's correct.

And Nandy may want to chime in on this, too.

That was one of the reasons for this slide.

First of all, we wanted to be extremely transparent about the overall cost of this, including our share.

And when that grant runs out, what the total cost is going to be, for instance, at FY 25.

Yeah.

Mr. Richardson?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, sir, Mr. Chair.

I believe this was actually the transition slide.

I'm not trying to minimize the board's further discussion and further questions, but this was actually going to be the transition slide.

And this is a slide that we did share with the board in a previous

I like this slide because it is very clear, pursuant to Supervisor McKeel's questions, it's very clear that this is basically a four-year phase-in, and then beginning in fiscal year 25,

the county would assume full expenses for all of the positions that we ask for in the SAFER grant.

I think Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley mentioned this earlier too, that this is a purposeful strategy if we're successful with this federal grant.

It's a purposeful strategy to front end load beginning in fiscal year 21 going into 22.

We're front end loading

what our current needs are to fill these gaps with our key partner agencies.

If you will look down in the far left hand corner under fiscal year 21, net cost in year one beginning next year is just shy of $169,000.

Andy and Lori, the leadership team, we have loaded this into next year's budget and we're making assumptions that if we're successful that we would run through the next four years with our partnership with the SAFER grant and that we would need to make budgetary adjustments over the next four years as this moves from majority funded through the federal grant to majority funded to the local side.

Finally, in 25, we take full funding responsibilities.

It gives us four years to phase this in.

but we in no way would anticipate that the need would go away so we would need to plan for this budgetarily.

This would become a high priority and we would have to do this as we move through other competing needs and we would have to plan for this as Supervisor McKeel stated.

Okay board we are actually running somewhat behind

We were scheduled to do a recess at 1140.

I would recommend we go ahead with our, we'll take our recess.

It was scheduled for 15 minutes.

Yeah.

All right.

Recess.

Good afternoon, Rosalynn.

Hi, good afternoon.

I'm Rosalynn Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer with Albemarle County Public Schools.

This afternoon, I will utilize slides that we used with our school board last Thursday to provide an update on where we are with the development of our FY21.

budget.

I will be the presenting staff member, but we do have several other staff with me for the questions and discussion.

So Dr. Haas is with us, Ms.

Collins, Dr. Kaiser, and Ms.

Kumazawa.

is certainly a team effort.

I just want to start with a sentiment that Dr. Haas shared at the end of our work session with our board.

These are certainly hard budget conversations, but we are so grateful for our collaboration with local government staff.

So I just want to formally thank Mr. Richardson and Ms.

Allshouse and her team for their timely updates, transparent approach, and just team

I wanted to start off with, let me make sure I can advance.

I'm supposed to be able to advance their screen.

Correct.

There it goes.

Okay, a little delay.

So I just want to start off with where we are in our budget calendar.

We have had a couple updates with our board.

Most recently, last Thursday on the work session, we're here to provide an update to this board.

The school board has a special meeting scheduled May 7th to

receive updates on all of our operations, but also a revised budget recommendation.

And they are holding a public hearing on that same day.

They are scheduled to adopt their budget on the same day that you are, May 14th.

And then we understand that there'll be appropriation action June 3rd.

We have developed, and when we knew we had to kind of revisit our FY21 budget, we've developed a series of five priorities that we've outlined here.

The board has endorsed these priorities and we are in the process of serving our community on them.

Just to highlight a couple of them here, obviously student learning, we continue to fulfill our mission, which is to establish a community of learners and learning through relationships, relevance, and rigor one student at a time.

We have continued to focus on equity,

In these certainly trying times, we also want to make sure that we're valuing and prioritizing our current employees, knowing that it's uncertain the importance of contingency and despite all our virtual efforts that we keep our stakeholders engaged.

So as I mentioned, we are in the process of surveying our community on these items.

So here are just some preliminary results as feedback.

The first thing I want to call your attention to is we've received 3,000 responses.

The amount of engagement of our community right now is very encouraging.

And obviously they're supportive, but the fact that 3,000 people are responding to this is very encouraging and positive.

So the survey is still open.

It's a pretty simple survey, five questions.

Appreciate people's continued input as we make these decisions.

I'm not going to spend too much time just because of time constraints, but I did want to highlight we translated these priorities into strategies.

And these strategies will you'll see manifested in the scenario that is currently under consideration.

But just to highlight a couple of these first around student learning.

It was our strategy to make as many departmental operational reductions first so that we can prioritize classroom positions.

As I mentioned, equity is a continued focus of the school division, so it is our intent to keep all previously funded proposals fully funded and continue all current efforts.

Our current employees, we are making department FTE reductions where there are already vacancies and realigning instructional positions across schools where possible.

We are doing our best to maintain our fund balance this school year so that we go into the next school year as flexible and agile as we can be.

And as I mentioned, stakeholder engagement, we have both the survey and a public hearing on May 7th.

So starting on the revenue side, this is the only slide we have on revenues.

We want to illustrate our revenue estimates with two comparison points.

The first is if we compare our current revenue estimates compared to what we were previously thinking FY21 would look like when the school board adopted their funding request in February.

So that's the first line item.

We've broken it based on our major revenue categories, the local transfer, state budget, and other.

So our current estimates indicate that we are anticipating $15.6 million less than we were previously thinking about

and forecasting for FY21 back in February.

If we compare it, so the same estimates to the FY20 adopted budget, which is our current fiscal year, here's how the comparisons makes.

We anticipate the decrease in the local transfer, a slight increase in the state budget, and then the other category for a total reduction of $1.8 million

as we compare to our current funding levels and our current adopted budget.

So as we know, and I'll touch on it a little bit, we are a growing school system.

So when we talk about reductions to current funding levels yet serving more students, that is providing a challenge.

I do want to quickly comment on the state budget.

The governor did revise his budget and the General Assembly adopted, but

He did not, they did not re-forecast sales tax.

And so we have certainty, some certainty of what local basic aid would be.

But we've had to make local estimates of what state sales tax and lottery funding would be.

So we feel like we've made some conservative estimates.

I just wanted to call your attention to it.

And we know that the General Assembly will likely reconvene in early fall.

We'll hopefully have some more information.

As I mentioned, we are anticipating student enrollment growth.

We've used this slide prior.

We, in this current school year, enrolled 300 more students than we were anticipated, and then we project an additional 200 students next year for a total budget-to-budget growth of 500 students.

Now, obviously, enrollment growth is as uncertain as anything most data is these days.

At this point, we do not anticipate updating this projection.

We will just have to evaluate that when school opens next fall.

We do know that in the prior recession, we did have an increase in student enrollment due to economic circumstances.

So we still feel fairly confident that we will still see enrollment growth.

Before we get into the expenditure scenarios that we're proposing, we wanted to pause a little bit and discuss where our expenditures are.

This is FY20.

As you can see in the blue wedge and the orange wedge, blue is school-based compensation and orange is department compensation.

So we are a people business.

85% of our expenditures are around salary and benefits.

The smaller wedges are department operations, the yellow and the small wedge is school operations, which is green.

So as I mentioned, it is our desire to make as many cuts as we can in the operations.

We just wanted to use this pie chart to know that our options are limited.

As a reminder, our previous FY20 funding request back in February was divided in these four categories.

We had our non-discretionary and directed items.

We had an item around supporting that 500 student enrollment growth and around growth in demographics.

We had an item with compensation increases and strategic proposals.

So when we look about how we were going to revise this funding request, we knew right off the bat that we would have no new spending.

So all strategic proposals are being eliminated.

in alignment with the decisions that you are making.

We are suspending all salary increases initially.

And then we've had to just scrub these growth and demographics.

We feel pretty strongly that we can't eliminate it altogether without significant service reductions.

And then we've been scrubbing our technical and non-discretionary items.

So if I compare those four categories to the revision that we're looking at at this point,

You can compare it in two ways, just like we did the revenues.

If we compare the proposed expenditure changes to the funding request produced in February, that's the first table.

And then the second table is if you compare it, let's pretend that we were at this state in a normal budget development process, how we would look compared to FY20.

So I'm going to focus mainly on the bottom piece because that's the further slides compared to.

So what we have done is we have scrubbed our non-discretionary and directed and technical items for a savings of a million.

We are proposing operational reductions, which is a savings of 2.7 million.

With those savings and making those cuts, we feel like we can afford a portion of our growth in demographics, which is a $1.9 million increase.

But as you can see, that's almost $3 million less than what we need.

So as I compare that FY20 budget from where it was in February to where it is now, this is a good visual of how the story has changed.

The swing from compensation increases in growth to minimal growth and operational reductions.

And then I'll have a slide on each of those categories, growth, reductions, and non-discretionary items.

So again, the remainder of the slides are benchmark against current adopted fiscal year.

figures.

So the first, and I won't go through every line item, but the first is around non-discretionary, what we call technical estimates.

We have scrubbed and updated what we call our baseline adjustments.

That's the majority of the savings as we roll over budget to budget.

The health insurance decrease or rather the holding of the rates yields us a savings of $600,000.

and our increases in this category are related to the SPED restructure.

I don't recall that we got into a lot of detail with this back in February, but this has not changed previously and it has to do with changing guidelines and funding methodologies from the DOE related to regional programming.

So that increase is still planned and budgeted for.

We still have to plan a budget for VRS rate increase with some other miscellaneous operational changes.

The next category, the second category, is operational reduction estimates.

I'm going to draw your attention to two of them.

We are proposing that department and school operation budgets be reduced for a savings of close to $1,800,000.

Our departments include building services, transportation, technology,

Central Office.

Those are just some examples.

There's more.

And then the school each gets a per pupil funding for their operations that we're proposing a reduction of.

We are proposing a reduction of 15 department level positions.

We think this can be achieved by freezing vacancies as currently the vacancies are pretty well distributed across departments.

Those total savings of $2.7 million

allow us to yield some increases for our enrollment growth.

So there's three categories here.

We are proposing five special education teachers, 15 classroom teachers, and five additional transportation employees.

I think it's important to note what the original need was on these items, and we've included those down below for comparison.

So we are funding the bare minimum around SPED.

It's half of the general teacher FTEs and about a third of the transportation drivers.

I want to draw your attention specifically to the general teachers.

By not fully funding the number of general teachers, we do anticipate a class size increase.

And so I just have one slide on that.

This compares our average class size

to the state staffing standards.

We know as this community, we do have small class sizes.

But we also know this has been a high priority for our community.

And this is not a decision we take lightly.

And we are fortunate that our community has invested in front of this.

So we hope that this is only a temporary increase and we can restore back in future years.

So that, I believe, I'm just looking

That's all we had.

Thank you, Rosalind.

Thank you, Rosalind, for the good presentation.

Very good.

Thank you, Rosalind.

Also,

So the one thing that the public will notice is likely to be of course the increased class size.

So I think

and the impacts of everything you're seeing on the operational reduction slide.

So I'll take class size as one example.

But transportation, when we're not fully funding our transportation levels, there'll be service reductions, whether that's longer bus rides or double backs where they drop some kids off and go back.

You'll see, I'll just take another example, building services, the number of work orders will be reduced.

But the work orders in the buildings, just a little bit more, I'm just trying to get an idea of what

what the public will see.

And I'm not sure what that means.

So, I mean, I think we're going to get into a capital conversation, but I think it'll be similar on the operational side.

So we'll be able to do essential, obviously life safety work orders, but not things more enhancement, maybe moving a whiteboard or a painting project or other things like that.

It will be a fair level minimum service.

Very good.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Yes, thank you very much for your presentation.

Having gone, probably the only teacher and principal on the school board, having gone through similar cuts and everything, I think your approach is a good one.

An increase of class size that will have some impact, but it shouldn't have necessarily a major impact if you keep it to around 2021 at the elementary level, even 2022, but we have to do what's necessary.

My question also is regarding furniture.

There would not be any change of furniture or increase of

things like that.

Would that be correct in assuming?

Can you clarify the question?

I would imagine it would be very limited.

I can think of some examples where we would, if we're adding a classroom, because some schools are still growing, we would do it.

No, I think your approach is solid and well taken.

Yes, Rossum.

Thank you for the very comprehensible presentation.

It's very thoughtfully done.

did not see or maybe it's too far down in the weeds.

So at this point, there was a proposal around the expansion of the afterschool program that has been eliminated at this point just due to the financial reality and the cost of that.

But it's still something that we would love to pursue once revenues

We are more optimistic about them.

Thank you, Rosalind.

Did I hear you correctly?

You said the state did not re-forecast state sales tax.

They did not.

We know we're going to get technical details on our basic aid, but they are not re-forecasting sales tax, which has a component both to basic aid and direct funding.

Sure so the baseline adjustment you're seeing there is a comparison to the adopted FY20 we are still in the process of

unpacking the financial impact in this current fiscal year.

We are anticipating some savings by the fact that we're closed.

I'll give the most tangible example, fuel.

I'm not running buses right now.

But as you know, we have had substantial revenue impacts both at the local and state, and we are incurring increase in costs in other areas.

So we anticipate probably net savings to some degree, but the specifics we'll know in the next week or two.

I don't expect the decrease in revenues will be offset by your cost decreases, but it would be important to just know what that full story looks like.

And this may be a question for Superintendent Haas or for others, but we've been looking at, in our own departments, under business process optimization, what we've been learning by going to this new reality that we're in right now from dealing with virtual meetings and

how departments work from home, things like that.

So thank you very much.

Mr. Gallaway, I really appreciate the opportunity, or Dr. Gallaway.

We are in the process of doing a program evaluation for our response to the closures that we're experiencing from COVID-19.

I just reviewed four different surveys this morning that will go out to staff and students and all employees and then also teachers as well to

to find out how we did with our response or how we're doing with it so that we can make short-term corrections in the program we're offering, but also how do we keep getting better at providing a virtual environment.

I think that our teachers did an absolutely amazing job in standing up a 14,000 student virtual school in just a matter of a couple of weeks.

Certainly when I look around the state, there's mixed reviews in terms of

the competency of different school divisions to do this work.

I think that our technology department has also done an outstanding job for support.

For example, when we switched over to offering virtual continuity of learning, instead of just having our helpline for staff only, they converted that so any parent could call right into our own helpline and have that distributed out to the school so that they could get

very quick support from our technology staff.

That was an example of a lesson learned.

I think these lessons learned are gonna pay off because we don't really know when we'll be back at school on a regular schedule.

So we may be offering a hybrid of face-to-face, small groups, things like that and virtual learning in the fall.

I don't think it's just gonna be a transition of straight from

No school to 100% of the students attending at one time.

So all of the things we're learning we'll be able to apply.

I appreciate the response.

I certainly have watched my children adapt quickly, more quickly than some of us to the virtual settings that they're in since they live in that on a regular basis.

I just noted what the note that made me think of that question is when I heard the technology cuts understood that things are just going to have to be cut because we have to find the area to do it.

But we've been looking at what comes back online.

Exactly.

I would imagine

the needs there for technology and to run this virtual platform.

Yeah, I think the priorities that we started out with in working with our board, keeping those priorities in mind as we move from responding to transitioning in dealing with this crisis,

will help us prioritize bringing positions back.

So if we keep our eye on the ball of student learning, and it's a big if, I know, if the economy begins to improve heading into the fall or perhaps during the winter time, and we're able to bring positions back, we're gonna bring back the positions that support student learning.

For example, with the technology department, we've looked at freezing,

a vacancy or two that they have right now that's going to impact our service level but the good news is is unlike teaching staff you can hire back a technology staff at any time and they can jump right in and start to have an impact so we're we're thinking I think the same way you are right now that making the cuts and trimming so that we can have an operational budget to get things up and running and then

Once we have things up and running and to quote Dr. Acuff to say, well, it's doable and we're doing the work and we're satisfying our customers, then we start to think about as we have revenue come back to us, then what do we prioritize?

Thank you, Dr. Haas.

Good afternoon, Dr. Haas.

We appreciate you all making time to meet with us today.

I just have a question about connectivity.

I believe you all are mapping where you have gaps in the connectivity for students.

And certainly in Albemarle County, on our side in government, we have gaps for our employees to be able to easily join our virtual meetings.

So connectivity is about safety and education and work, being able to work.

And so I was just wondering where you are with that, if you could just comment a little bit about it.

So I think I could say a couple things, and I also saw Rosalind nodding her head, and she always knows more than I do.

But I will say that you try to look for the silver lining even in a situation like this.

And one piece that's been a silver lining for us is that we implemented a program, we expanded a program that we call Check and Connect where we asked all of our teachers to contact each of their students every week.

Now for secondary teachers that was a little different.

They had to structure that differently because they carry more students per class.

and one of the advantages we have from that is that by making telephone calls or reaching out in other ways, they've been able to have conversations with parents and students about their connectivity and our technology department has been gathering data from that.

We're also using a follow-up survey that's part of that program evaluation that I was talking about to gather data around connectivity and we have

We've been using Kaji hotspots as a way to begin to bring staff online that lacked connectivity at home, as well as starting to prioritize students for that.

And I know that we have more devices in the queue that we should be receiving later on in the spring and early summer that we can distribute as well.

So we've also expanded the internet access into our parking lots so that people can pull up and download work that they need to download through a very good platform that we've been using called Schoology that we brought on board during the school year.

So I think we were poised to make some changes to help students and to help our staff.

At the same time, we are finding out to a greater extent more accurately

what our gaps are.

And it is true that Chris Bunin, who's a social studies teacher at Albemarle High School, who runs the GIS program there, is also working with our technology department to create a map of the county that we can more accurately determine where our gaps are in coverage.

No, I was just nodding in agreement.

I think you said a silver lining in this is we've never had this granular detail of data around connectivity.

And so it's been a positive opportunity to get access to that data and a great opportunity with students to work with GIS to map it.

and 5% is less than what I thought and it is more accurate than I think what we were thinking.

However, 5% of our students is still a school, if it were a school, it would be a school the size of Mountain View Elementary School.

Good, thank you.

Yes, so my question goes along the lines of internet access for our students, both in the rural and urban areas.

You said about 5%.

So what is the plan for making sure that those students are reached?

Well, thank you.

That's a great question.

What I would say is the first piece is to accurately map where those students are located and then based on their location and

where they are relative to being able to receive broadband, then the next step is to figure out how to get the broadband in proximity so that then they can be deployed with a hotspot, you know, a kajit or some other kind of device that they could use.

I'll turn things over to Rosalind for that.

I'll have to defer to our chief technology officer who's not on the call right now, but we can get that information.

I think it's important to know any current student that does not have access to internet is still being served.

Our administrators and teachers are amazingly creative and have gotten access, whether that's paper packets or other ways to students.

Yeah, they're just being super creative.

They are doing everything from telephone calls to mailing, thumb drives.

Creativity is the key.

Thank you very much.

So there is a broadband survey that is being run by Mike Culp and the IT department in order to

provide the data for these state and federal grants for fiber expansion that we're doing all over the place.

So as your teachers are having these conversations with their families, if they could also be provided the link to that particular survey, that will really help Mike and his

of folks gathering that information.

Because one of the most powerful leverages we have is when we develop a whole neighborhood area, 300, 100 families, then the companies are much more willing to jump on that investment with us.

And it's much faster than trying to go door to door, which is what I'm trying to do in my area, to figure out where the gaps are.

So hopefully you'll figure out a way.

put Mr. Diggs in consultation with Mike Hope and they can figure out the best way to do that.

Well, on the same lines, as a member of the broadband authority, we have been talking about this and doing the mapping.

We've done extensive, a lot more work on the mapping just in the last few months.

And my understanding from our conversations is that

that our IT department is reaching out to the schools and working with the schools.

We just had another conversation just last week about this with an understanding that there would be another outreach to the schools.

So that is my assumption going forward.

I also know that we have a lot of

We have a VADI project that is really attacking some of the most difficult areas currently.

And my understanding also, again, is that the schools are aware of that and that your IT people are in contact with the county IT.

That is a correct assumption.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Superintendent Haas, to you, your staff, and the school board, I just want to express my appreciation.

I'm sure as with Chair Galloway with the classes that he teaches, in the middle of the semester, I also had to go from in-person to online Zoom classes where I teach, and

It was difficult enough on the instructional side of the equation, but from the administrative side, from the technical side, what you all have done to be able to ensure that all the students are still receiving instruction is really a tremendous effort because those challenges are great.

And as Supervisor Palmer just mentioned, and I'm also with her on the broadband authority board,

This has been an ongoing challenge.

There are limitations upon what we as the county are able to do.

And I am just so impressed with the actions that you at the school system have done to fill the gaps through the mobile internet access, and then for those individuals that don't have access, ensuring that they're still getting the instruction.

So I just want to thank you for what you all have done.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chairman Galloway.

Yes, I just want to update everyone that Chris Diggs and I have met on Tuesday and we're working to put the layer, what's called a layer, of teacher access as well as student access in Albemarle County to help us better build a broadband map that the

Internet service providers can respond to.

So we're going to put that out and ask for the Internet service providers to give us better information on what they need to make the 5% less.

So we're working together on that.

So thanks for all the work with ACPS.

We've done a great job working together and we'll continue to work together.

Thank you, sir.

And everyone with that, I know that you guys will be sticking around.

We're going to be moving to Capitol.

I'll go ahead, since we are running a little behind in schedule, who's going to lead the Capitol conversation?

Okay, so thank you.

The capital of budget approach, as folks know, in Albemarle County, we're pretty unique in that we do our capital planning together with the school system.

So we've worked together, as you know, the two boards have worked together a lot over the last year to put a capital budget together and a capital improvement plan, which is your five-year plan.

And we can continue to do that and work very closely with the schools.

So our approach, so if you think about capital, we know that we have projects ongoing, so there is the ongoing projects that are underway, and we know we have a long-range plan, the plan for the next five years, but what is really at question today and what we really need to concentrate on

is what are we going to place in the fiscal year 21 budget?

So this is your capital budget.

So it's the first year, the next year of your budget.

So the next few slides really concentrate on fiscal year 21.

So it's a time in your capital planning.

So as we entered this situation, all the work that we've done in the operating side, we also did on the capital side.

Our goals on capital is to preserve cash,

to minimize additional debt requirements until we know more about the future, our future revenues and our future ability to borrow at good rates and to delay certain projects while monitoring the economic situation.

So time is on our side on some of these things.

If we can delay, it's a good idea to delay some projects until we see how things start unfolding.

And on the other hand, it's really important as well to support the local economy with capital investments.

So you have to think of it in two ways.

We definitely want to delay projects, but we're very mindful that capital investments in the community is important for the community and it's also important for those who work in those fields.

So our considerations as we move forward is first to really of course support our mandates and obligations.

We have always had a principle in this county to maintain our current facilities as a priority.

So there's essential maintenance and replacement projects and programs that we believe should continue.

We're also selecting projects currently underway that are essential for infrastructure.

For example, there's a couple projects moving forward from the previous year's budget, the current year budget, at Red Hill in Scottsville.

So there's some projects that are currently underway that we think are essential and we are recommending to continue.

Those projects with limited operational budgets, as you know, the capital program often interplays with the operating budget.

So the other thing that we looked at as we made decisions was what are those items that are in the capital program that won't have a large impact on operational budgets because they're so interrelated sometimes.

So that's how we approached it.

Next slide, please.

So your recommended capital budget is $18.1 million.

And these are the projects on this page that we are recommending that we proceed with.

The box on the left is your obligations and mandates category.

There are things that by either agreement, like the senior center at Belvedere, our contribution is by an agreement.

There's ongoing maintenance projects that we will continue.

There's annual debt service at Morris Creek Septage Receiving Station that we're required to do.

Annual Maintenance at Ivy Fire Station 15.

We have an agreement on the Regional Firearms Training Center to continue a reserve.

This is the county share of it.

And then we do hold funding available for what we call a cost of issuance.

So if you go into a future bond, you do have to have some funding available.

to secure that bond and to do the proper paperwork and those types of things.

So we have also reserved money for that.

So if you go over to the right side,

The programs that are funded as requested, the economic development funding, it's targeted for P3s.

We want to also remain flexible on economic development funding, so we're open to if some other needs are more important, giving our current situation

to have some flexibility in that program.

The school technology programs, this is a great segue from an earlier conversation today on schools technology, that is all being funded as requested.

The county server infrastructure aid is also being funded as requested.

Fire Rescue mobile data computer replacement, staying on schedule, the police radio replacements, their video cameras, and the fire rescue to ambulances and a fire engine.

So those are things that we are recommending to include in this budget for fiscal year 21.

And then there's others that we are recommending that we continue to fund but reduce the scope or reduce the funding somewhat in those categories.

That's our maintenance replacement programs.

I mentioned earlier that those that are essential parts of those move forward, but some of the other items that we can delay for a while, we're recommending delaying it.

I do want to thank

all the folks in parks and fez and other divisions and the school division to really work together to look through every one of those items in those programs to see are there some ones that we can delay without any issues and which ones we want to essentially move forward so it was a real team team approach across both the schools and local government together on that and the same with the school bus replacement placement program

the school division still has a need to replace three of the special education buses and radio equipment but the larger buses they're in a place where they can delay replacing those for a while.

So that's basically that's it in a nutshell of what's included in the 18.1 million dollar to proceed on.

The next slide

is something we just wanna share with you that with capital, we're not talking about stopping things, we're talking about delaying things.

And this is delaying things until we get more information about the revenues and about our future.

So the programs that are recommended to be delayed, as I mentioned, the maintenance replacement non-essential programs, the other school bus replacements I just mentioned, the ACE program, there was,

In the prior fiscal year 21 budget, there was $500,000 for the ACE program.

There is currently money available and carry forward for that program, so we're recommending not to delay additional funding for that.

And the bike, pedestrian, quality of life project funding, you may recall that was $6 million.

We worked very closely with the Community Development Department, and we feel we can delay that decision on these funds until the fall.

And so we do need to relook at that again in the fall timing wise, but for right now we are recommending delaying that until a later time that we can come back and talk about that further.

And then the Crozet Elementary School addition and improvements, we are designing that, but again this is a joint conversation with the schools and a decision with the schools that we can delay the construction on that for a while as we continue to see how things play out.

So I think I'll stop there.

That actually is our last slide on it.

And then the next slide is just our steps moving forward.

So I'll stop there for any questions or comments.

And we do have a lot of people on the line that know a lot of details about the recommendations that can join in.

Supervisor Mallek had a few issues there with the viewing of the slides.

I've sent the presentation to her.

I have not had a chance to jump over there and look at it.

I missed a couple of slides, but not many I could hear all along.

Is there any more discussion?

And there may be an email that I have not gotten to see this morning with extra information about the transportation leveraging program.

And I missed everything Kevin said earlier because my battery died, but I'll catch up with him by email about that later.

And I'll loop back around to Supervisor Mallek if you get a chance to open that up to see the slides you missed.

Well, I guess I just wanted to have a clarification and a comment.

I talked to Kevin this morning.

Lori sent out an email for us around our current capital budget, the currently funded transportation leveraging program projects.

And I guess it was yesterday, I'm sorry, Lori.

And I was a little surprised because I saw on that that it talked about the

Eastern Avenue bridge study, which was proceeding to design the sidewalk at Commonwealth and Dominion Drive was proceeding.

And I understood that completely.

And then it said the sidewalk hydraulic and barracks road project was proceeding.

And my question to Kevin was, what project are we currently proceeding on?

on Hydraulich and Barracks Road, I thought those projects were completed.

And so I guess, Kevin, do you want to just speak to that email or that information that we received?

Yes, Supervisor McKeel, my understanding is that that is some just remaining money on the hydraulic and barracks road sidewalks that the construction is complete on, but the project has not been closed out.

I also know Blake is on this call.

and obviously- I can provide, can everyone hear me?

Yes, this is Blake Afflamp, Chief of Facilities Planning and Construction.

That project is complete.

We had held a small amount of money.

We had some, during the inspection by the service authority, we had a little additional work that was requested, a lowering of a manhole.

So we had reserved a little bit of money based on inspections by

utilities and VDOT and that's all that is.

So that, in fact, that's been completed recently and that money will be returned.

There have been some discussion about the potential of trying to move that to another transportation project, but that would certainly have to be something that goes before the board.

And because in this current climate, you know, there's an uncertainty on bids that will be coming in and we'll be bidding a number of

transportation projects in the very near future.

And just to comment along those lines, I know we were talking about the quality of life monies and we will come back to those in the fall.

I think you all said around the possible projects that would fall under the quality of life.

and I just want to put in a little plug here that the hydraulic CAC did not receive or did not none of the monies in that particular fund were tapped into or the hydraulic CAC didn't receive any of those fundings and so I guess what I'm saying is I would like to at some point look at a sidewalk project

in this older urban ring neighborhoods here in the Jewett district right off of Hydraulich and Georgetown that could possibly tap into that if at all possible, such as we used for the Taber Street and High Street project in Crozet and the old Lynchburg Road project and the Niffy project.

So I'll be bringing that up again because it would be a very inexpensive

as they go sidewalk project because there's no right of way that would be required, I don't believe.

According to Joel and VDOT, there would not be any right of way required, which makes it very appealing.

And there are other aspects to the project that would be very rewarding as well.

So enough said probably about that right now.

You're quite welcome.

Good.

I have a question and I believe a comment.

We have projects that have gone in that are applications that have gone in for the quality of life projects that we're expecting to find out if we get funding for this spring.

and I have no idea what's going on on the state level and if they're gonna be changing that funding and I'd love to have any input on that but I'm also wondering if we get that funding in the spring for a project, is it still gonna be there in the fall when we make a decision?

I can respond to that.

This is Kevin McDermott, once again, a transportation planner.

Yes, we've been working with OMB on that question.