Board of Supervisors County Executive Presentation to the Board - Recommended Budget   2/24/2021

Good afternoon, everyone.

I call the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors to order for our February 24th, 2021 12 p.m.

meeting.

We're here today to hear the

The presentation of the budget from the county executive.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A-16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Liz Palmer of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District,

Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, and myself, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio 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.

Participation will include the opportunity to comment on those matters for which comments from the public will be received, although I don't believe we're doing public comment today.

We have with us, obviously, our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Greg Kantner,

our board clerk Ms.

And with that I'm going to hand things over to our county executive Jeff Richardson for the presentation of the fiscal year 21-22 recommended budget.

Afternoon members of the board.

Thank you Chair Galloway for this opportunity to share the fiscal year 22 recommended budget.

I want to stop right out of the gate and I really want to thank the finance and budget staff for their work to get us to today.

As this board is aware, the annual budget work begins in the late summer of every year.

This year has been challenging as we are working differently and our economy has experienced an extended period of disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Welcome today to day 352

of our COVID-19 incident management team emergency action here at a local level.

352 days that our IMT has been in operation.

The pandemic and our emergency management infrastructure have become a part of our daily routine.

It's part of our new normal.

This year's budget theme pulls forward the budget theme from fiscal year 21, which was respond, recover, and recalibrate.

The fiscal year 21 budget last year, it was a budget in flux.

We did not know in April and May what the next 15 months would look like.

We took a very cautious approach with the board's guidance to build a budget using the best information that we had.

We paused projects and we froze positions.

This year we've added to that theme the word resilient because this recommended budget is designed to make strategic investments to transform our organization

as the community around us transforms to make structural changes and alignments to ensure that we're focusing discretionary resources in the right places to produce the most significant results for the community that we serve.

Here's an agenda board

of today's presentation.

Number one I will take a quick look back to fiscal year 21 budget and review.

I then will move into the FY22 recommended budget followed by the fiscal year 22 drivers and then as I wrap up with next steps we'll go through what happens after today and then Mr. Chair I will turn it back over to you.

Before we look ahead with what this recommended 22 budget is bringing to you for your consideration, I feel compelled to spend a few minutes reviewing where we were last year.

Last year, I recommended a budget on February the 19th.

Fast forward to March the 12th of last year, I signed an emergency declaration for the COVID-19 emergency.

Shortly thereafter we took the recommended budget that you had received and that we had been working through for almost four weeks and we put it on the shelf and we started afresh.

This photo you see represents some of our community development team that continued to work through the pandemic almost at day one.

completing inspections, reviewing plans, processing applications to keep our community moving forward in the areas that we had to support.

Thank you very much community development.

The second and adopted fiscal year 2021 budget focused on our core mission during the pandemic.

to support the ability to respond to the pandemic, to recover from the economic and financial hardships that it created and to recalibrate our organization and our work plans to adjust to this period of disruption.

COVID-19 has challenged every single person in our community.

Every single family and community member has his or her own story.

As a local government, we've been working to support the community through the work, through work with the Blue Ridge Health District, our regional partners, our community nonprofits, and our business community.

The first recommended budget last year had a focus on public safety service delivery.

When we were forced to rebuild that first budget, we knew that we were facing a public health crisis and our public safety infrastructure had to remain a priority.

22 positions within Fire Rescue were added in the fiscal year 21 budget to address the need for career staff at volunteer stations and to implement system changes

to allow for dynamic staffing, cross-staffing, and our people to make sure that we would be able to answer the calls of the community throughout the pandemic.

Those positions were offset with a FEMA SAFER grant that supported 10 positions for three years.

And at the time of our application, we did not know for certain that we would be awarded this grant.

We found out later that we were.

A safer grant spreads the local cost for these resources over a graduated four-year period.

We identified early that our small businesses and our vulnerable populations were hard hit by the pandemic and gathering restrictions.

We retained planned investments in language accessibility, a health worker at ENCI and our economic development fund, our community partners that provide so many needed human services, and we program new support for individuals and businesses.

Some of us would argue that the hardest part was to recalibrate it.

We canceled our summer swim and recreation programs.

We planned to open a new early voting station in the 29 North area, but we re-engineered our approach at the last minute to make that successful at our 5th Street office building location.

We look back on that now and that was very successful.

We cut back on programs and maintenance.

We froze positions immediately as well as training.

Every department one year ago reduced their operating budget by 10%.

We deferred the proposed move to $15 an hour minimum wage implementation as well as the 2% market adjustment that had been a part of the original FY21 budget.

All of this was in an effort to implement our 3-6-6 model.

This allowed us to slow down, divide the next 15 months into more bite-sized portions, allowing us to take a cautious approach last spring to try to position and prepare us to weather the pandemic without having to dip into our reserves prematurely,

or furlough or lay staff off.

We were able to meet those objectives.

In the last quarter of fiscal year 20, that's the last three months as we were preparing for fiscal year 21 board, if you'll remember, we were also in the last quarter of fiscal year 20.

We aggressively slammed on the brakes

in an effort to reduce expenditures during that three month period and we were very successful.

In the next half year period we focused on our core objectives moving into fiscal year 21 to meet the community needs during the pandemic and to have more time available to look at hard data

and to prepare for the ongoing impact of the pandemic.

In the second half year period where we currently sit now, we're continuing to study our financials.

We're working to implement longer term structural changes that adjust for the financial realities and that will position our organization to be successful in the future.

The 366 model was built to be flexible.

For 352 days, board, we've been in a crisis.

One of the underpinning cornerstones of crisis management is agility.

The 366 model was built to be flexible to allow us to adapt.

In January of this year,

and earlier this month, the board has been deliberating and making decisions to do just that.

Take our real-time data, our economic projections to reflect on where we are now financially and how to move forward.

In January, this board approved moving forward with capital projects that had previously been approved but paused to open Biscuit Run Park to move forward with Crozet Elementary School's addition and renovation.

and to advance key maintenance and replacement efforts.

This last week the board approved the use of strategic reserve funds that have been built up over the past several budget years along with some pandemic reserve funding to advance strategic initiatives identified by the board.

Another thing that was not on any of our team's radar was the infusion of federal dollars into local government through the CARES CRF program.

Albemarle County received two payments totaling $19 million allocated by the state to localities by population formula.

Our goal was to move funds to support areas of the community most impacted by the pandemic

We have pushed nearly $10 million out to the community to support individuals, households, nonprofits, businesses, in assisting them through the pandemic.

In late December, our most recent year, early December, the federal government, we learned, extended the program for an additional year.

We'll be back to the board with more details on these funds in the coming weeks.

We will have a series of work sessions planned from March the 10th through early April to take a deep dive into the budget document.

I want to share at a high level how we're transforming to build a resilient Albemarle.

This is a familiar slide because it's got boards fingerprints all over it.

As always, our revenue recommendations are guided by our strategic plan.

Those are the initiatives that are shown here, the nine strategic initiatives that the board painstakingly goes through every several years to identify what are the top initiatives that we need to be paying attention to either for opportunity or to address problems or both.

I want the board to take a second please to note

that across the bottom of the nine strategic boxes that identify your initiatives, the long bar that almost looks like the foundation because it underpins the work of the strategic plan.

It's called quality government operations.

We're able to advance the strategic plan priorities by investing in our organization, by investing in a quality workforce, and by managing our financial foundation in ways

that sets us up for future success.

As county executive, I must always pay attention not just to the nine strategic initiatives, but in addition to that, paying close attention to the foundation to make sure that it's solid and that we're investing in it to remain modern and also planning for tomorrow's challenges and problems.

So the triangle with the financial foundation, we will continue to guard our triple, triple A bond rating.

This recommended budget in no way damages or brings that into question.

We're also continuing to look through the lens of our local economy, trying to determine our future economic outlook.

You heard from Mr. Allshouse earlier this year, along with real estate folks, and they're trying to give you the best information that we have today.

And finally, our workforce stabilization.

It's the tip of the spear.

It's the part of the organization that reaches out and touches our citizen and community in a real way every day.

Thank you.

In 2020, we expanded the organization's core values to include community.

As you can see on your screen, that value means that we expect diversity, equity, and inclusion to be integrated into how we live our mission.

Our mission is to enhance the well-being and quality of life for all of our community members through the provision of the highest level of public service consistent with the prudent use of our public funds.

Ms.

Siri Russell on a regular basis takes our leadership team through our mission moment and brings us back and says focus on this because it matters and we do.

When she was before the board with the second year of the Office of Equity and Inclusion annual report she shared that in this third year our work ahead was to develop the tools and the training to empower our staff to integrate equity into all of our work.

That thread runs through this budget.

How?

It is what is driving the recommendation to increase our broadband capacity and resources.

It is driving the way we are approaching the comprehensive plan update and the climate action plan phase two planning work.

And it's why the budget recommends strategic use of one-time funding for affordable housing.

and it's why we are recommending one-time funds to support the implementation of this community value itself, to penetrate it through the organization, to support training and the resources so that equity is embedded in our work across the organization.

It's also one of the cornerstone reasons that we felt that it was critically important to figure out a way to advance the $15 minimum wage in this budget.

are all full and part-time staff.

This year has demonstrated, maybe more than any other year, the critical role that broadband plays in our lives, almost like electricity and water.

We talked last week about establishing a broadband affordability and access program using strategic reserve funding.

This work will thrive with support of the new Office of Broadband Access using a similar model as the EDA and the Economic Development Office.

The Office will have two recommended FTEs that will report through the County Executive's Office to support the work of expanding access in urban and rural communities to very different approaches and needs.

The full force of this organization will support this office, which will work to tackle broadband using the equity lens.

The budget also recommends $350,000 in FY22 to be transferred to ABA for project work, which is on top of the $3 million that the board approved in the strategic reserve earlier this month.

While the housing policy works toward final edits,

that we expect will be adopted later this spring.

Funding has been identified to support its implementation.

The $600,000 one-time contribution recommended for fiscal year 2022 would add to the affordable housing fund.

to support the housing needs of our community.

$1.7 million of that fund has been committed previously to support the Habitat for Humanity Southwood project and $1.94 million remains available for other opportunities to be identified.

Last year, this board adopted a climate action plan.

The recommended budget identifies one-time funding for implementation projects.

Transit is also an area of intense focus and it dovetails with our housing and climate action work by expanding access and effectiveness.

This budget supports the regional transit vision work that will hopefully set a roadmap for the future.

It's a small budget investment in fiscal year 22 but it will help to create a long-term plan to guide our region's future investments in this important area.

Albemarle County is a destination community.

It continues to grow and keep up with mandates and community priorities.

It requires investment in our built environment both in fiscal year 21 and into fiscal year 22.

We've been able to keep in the capital budget strategic investments to keep moving forward and ensure that we have the capacity and the equipment to maintain our quality of life.

or you'll remember that over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, you were working judiciously with our school board and you were looking at an ambitious increase to our capital, CIP, that would contemplate debt.

designated tax rate increases, several over the next five to seven year period.

When we slammed on the brakes, this board said, let's be careful that as we slow down and that we become more cautious, let's just don't stop everything.

And we have not.

Based on the recommendations of the CIP Advisory Committee, this budget supports the construction of the Quartz Project,

We plan to advance $25 million in fiscal year 22 as we move to construction.

This is the largest local government capital investment that we'll make in a generation to modernize the court's safety, security, and IT and to ensure adequate capacity for caseloads.

We'll continue to set aside funding for transportation leveraging and economic development, public-private partnerships,

which enables us to leverage local dollars by attracting state and private funding that are invested right here in Albemarle.

We're investing in our schools, keeping our planned elementary school expansions at Crozet and Mountain View Elementary moving forward to address system capacity constraints.

We're investing in our parks and trails, notably moving forward with the opening of Biscuit Run Park and to support ongoing Blue Way and Greenway trail work.

and we're supporting public safety needs, catching up after we had to pause some projects last year.

We want to ensure that our team stays connected and stays safe while they support 726 square miles in Albemarle County.

The recommended budget continues to support the cornerstone of public service, our elections,

We are providing greater in-person early voting access through state mandates that ask our registrar's office to support sustained high volumes of customers over a long period of time.

Our comprehensive plan, which is the guiding document for one of the busiest policy areas, land use.

The state budget is currently supporting the full cost of two family preservation positions within social services to enhance our family support function if the state budget passes and these positions stay intact.

Albemarle County would have no cost for fiscal year 22 and they would then be asked to pick up about 15% of the cost beginning in fiscal year 23.

This budget supports the needs of our regional partners, our nonprofits, our arts and cultural institutions,

which meets so many of the human service needs across the community.

And again, it invests in our public safety plan.

Albemarle County Fire Rescue continues to stand at the forefront of Albemarle County's pandemic response.

Last year, the budget supported new positions to address ongoing challenges in our combination career and volunteer system.

The new positions last year made it possible for us to meet those needs.

Albemarle County Fire Rescue has spent the past 15 months recruiting and training new firefighters and EMTs while also responding to calls and managing the pandemic emergency response and planning.

Now North Garden Volunteer Fire is requesting

is requesting career staff to support weekday daytime coverage Monday through Friday.

They face similar challenges as we faced over a year ago in Crozet.

This request would take five positions to support as well as a capital investment with a new ambulance.

The budget also recommends the addition of one additional staff person in the training division to address capacity challenges due to the increase of personnel and the mandated training requirements over the past two years.

In our police department, a shift in how the school division provides security is creating capacity for how five of our officers would spend their time.

With a new investment by local government that's at the equivalent of over two FTEs, we will be gaining 5,000 hours for patrol officers to devote their time to Albemarle County to support our geopolicing work to connect with our community and to enhance our public safety profile.

The budget also recommends steps to bring back areas that were paused during the pandemic that we needed immediate expenditure savings.

The Public Safety Pay Plan is recommended to move forward with a 2% investment and our public safety fleet replacement cycle will resume.

These investments help us to retain our public safety staff, which is critical for both our efforts to build strong relationships in the community and also keep the staff that we train extensively here in Albemarle County.

Our investments strengthen public safety functions which strengthens our community's resilience.

This past year has shown us to expect the unexpected and how well prepared our community is to face disruptions head on.

As I mentioned earlier, underpinning our success in delivering these projects is quality government operations.

This budget recommends using one-time money, one-time funding to advance our quality government operations work.

Doing so builds us a bridge to undertake evaluations, implement changes, and shore up weak spots without obligating future budgets.

It allows us to utilize some of the expenditure savings that we were generating by pausing so many program areas last year and to build a bridge to next fiscal year as we continue to monitor the performance of our local economy.

Last year, I recommended that our organization move to a $15 an hour minimum wage.

This had to be deferred when the pandemic hit to ensure that we were meeting basic obligations and public safety needs.

We've continued to review the data in our peer localities and across our employers to stay competitive to hire and retain quality people in our critical customer safety.

Last year, I recommended a 2% market increase to staff in local government.

It was also deferred.

And again, as we look at the data, we see employers who are competing for our staff and they have given market increases during the past 15 months.

So this is a step that we must take to remain competitive as an employer

and to retain our folks.

Our self-funded health care plan is projected to need an approximate 6% increase next year on the employer side.

This budget recommends that the employer absorb that cost increase so that our employees do not see their market adjustment get diminished by a cost increase in their benefits.

Our Business Process Optimization Program, BPO, is where funds focus efforts to assess the foundational systems that drive our organization and service delivery.

We focus on systems alignment board.

We focus on process improvement work.

That enables us to see how we can and should be working differently to drive organizational performance.

This year this budget recommends using one-time funding to continue this multi-year work in some key areas in scoping an enterprise resource

ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning effort, and that includes our county view system used in our CD department to update our business systems for the modern workplace, to assist with the upcoming strategic plan update, to integrate equity into our program and project design using data, and to continue our work to formally assess our internal infrastructure.

Board, I'll pause for a second and remind all of you that in the last year we've totally overhauled and introduced a new website.

That website was 20 years old.

It's unheard of to go 20 years and to lean on 20 year old technology and then go through what we did.

It was very painstaking to update that website.

We did it, we're through, we're through with it and we now have a beautiful new website to be proud of.

We have other systems in our organization that are close to that being that old and they need our immediate attention.

This budget recommends that we invest in some key areas that were deferred in an effort to generate expenditure savings during the height of the pandemic.

Parks equipment needs IT infrastructure needs that keeps our systems and our people working so that they can continue to deliver high quality services.

I'll spend a moment more on our IT needs.

We need to move our servers, which have traditionally lived here on site, into the cloud.

This creates redundancy, security, and access needed to support our workforce.

And as you know, board, our workforce is increasingly mobile.

We still find ourselves very much in the throes of the pandemic.

Fiscal year 21 and 22 are linked much more tightly board than what you may have seen in past years.

I want to spend a few minutes walking you through the fiscal drivers behind this budget.

Board, we believe that during the course of FY22 that our economy will continue to stabilize.

We know a lot more about the long-term impacts of the pandemic on our economy, on our customer service.

We'll know a lot more about our economy, our customer service expectations, and what the public needs and expects, and the way we work.

The approach for fiscal year 22 is that we're in a year of transition.

We believe that there are investments that we can make now that will allow us to be resilient in the future.

We started every budget with a check on our diagnostics.

How are we doing?

For the past several years,

It's been predominantly good news.

Prior to the pandemic, we had a very vibrant local economy.

We saw increases pretty much across the board in assessments, building business activity, consumer spending activity, and building activity.

This year, while assessments continue to grow,

On the residential side, and residential building activity remains strong.

Commercial real estate, as you learned last month, those assessments are down, and they're down by 5.5%.

There are areas in our community that are really struggling.

Staff applications year over year are up 34%.

This is a federal program for food assistance that's based on income eligibility.

Our tourism and hospitality industry due to travel and gathering restrictions has also been deeply impacted with year-over-year hotel room occupancy rates being down.

These businesses generate consumer activity and supply many local jobs.

Thanks to our financial management

This includes our planning and our flexible approach over the past 15 months.

We have maintained our AAA bond rating and have guarded it judiciously.

Much like the broader community, the impacts of the pandemic have affected government revenues differently.

This is not like 2009.

The board was very wise to caution us to slow down and be careful, but also look to strategically move ahead.

This year's state budget numbers and composition of the local revenue transfer to the school division has come in higher than in fiscal year 21 for a total of $11.9 million in new revenues that is over fiscal year 21.

On the local government side, non-shared revenues came in lower than in fiscal year 21 resulting in a net growth in revenues year over year of 4.7 percent.

You take that 4.7 percent and you take away all of our obligations and our mandates to include the revenue sharing payment with the city of Charlottesville

as well as employer health care plan needs and other large ticket items.

This only leaves $2 million in undesignated new revenues for fiscal year 2022.

The recommended budget, I want to remind the board, includes the CIP advisory committee recommended projects.

Our capital budget back last year was balanced and we assumed a 0% revenue growth.

The budget recommends the CIP Advisory Committee project list that is shown in front of you.

Note several projects were able to advance in fiscal year 21 due to stronger than expected revenues.

These projects join substantial investments.

already underway in the courts renovation expansion, ongoing work at Red Hill and Scottsville, and many others.

The capital budget, as I mentioned, is balanced on 0% revenue growth and without the one cent tax rate increase that was part of the modeling that we did over one year ago.

A formula, the capital fund this year should receive an additional $1.6 million that was not anticipated.

In my recommended budget, however, I am including the additional transfer of $400,000.

I'm recommending this approach for two reasons.

The CIP Advisory Committee recommendations are supported and because capital projects rely on substantial staff support outside of the project management function,

It is directly supported by the CIP.

It relies on procurement, legal, as well as other areas of government.

And in my opinion, we lack the organizational capacity to take on additional projects at this moment.

The $400,000 that I just mentioned to you is earmarked for the North Garden Ambulance.

And this ties to our fiscal year 22 priorities that have come into focus because of the pandemic and the impact on revenues and our needs.

This is a lot to look at in one slide, but it is almost a spot where we can see it all coming together.

The North Garden Volunteer Fire Department has requested career personnel, as I mentioned earlier, to cover Monday through Friday daytime.

Local government must support this public safety need and it is included in the budget.

Broadband this year more than ever has demonstrated its role as critical infrastructure.

But there are still too many areas of the county that are unserved and underserved on one hand and too many in our community that struggle to afford access, placing students behind constraining access to telehealth and eliminating teleworking opportunities.

And our own IT department needs to take our organization

into modern, secure computing.

This expense has traditionally been planned as a capital investment.

Now it must shift operating as we move to the cloud and it will be recognized as an annual service fee.

Our servers are aging and these needs must be met in fiscal year 22.

At the same time, we're balancing workforce stabilization needs and a desire to advance strategic priorities.

Retention, as I'll remind the board, there had originally been 1.6 that would have been going into the capital fund.

I took 400 and I'm recommending the purchase of an ambulance.

Retention of the 1.2 million of the transfer keeps the school's division whole.

It keeps the capital fund whole.

And it bridges the general fund while we continue to monitor our economic performance and meet these compelling community needs.

Moving to the center column, that also allows us to focus the revenue growth on addressing our workforce stabilization needs.

Given the health of the self insurance fund balance, we will implement a one month employer and employer premium holiday next year.

This offsets the healthcare cost increase and it also supports the full year implementation of a 2% market adjustment and bringing the minimum wage implementation across our positions and including the public safety plan, public safety pay plan.

Looking to the final column, this confidence in the economic outlook, it gives us the confidence that we can use fund balance to make strategic investments and to drive organizational and community transformation using one-time money that has been reserved by expenditure savings generated as we sought to preserve cash at the beginning of the pandemic.

Recommended FY22 budget is balanced at a total of just over 466 million dollars which is balanced on a tax rate of 85.4 cents per 100 dollar assessed value and that is the same tax rate as our current present tax year.

revenue sharing agreement with the city of Charlottesville is calculated on a formula and it fluctuates each year based on activity in each locality.

This year that payment that is due to the city will go up $822,000 from last year.

Moving on to the general fund board

The picture that you see here captures many of the functions that are connected directly into our general fund.

We support a lot of areas in county government out of Virginia.

This chart provides an overview of where the revenues are coming in from and this board knows that the majority of that is general property taxes.

This chart shows where the expenditures are going and we continue to place a high priority on excellent public school systems and you can see that by the dark blue shaded area.

The new positions

support the needs in fire rescue and in advancing broadband.

You have in front of you a position change summary that is embedded in the recommended budget.

The DSS positions will greatly enhance our family support programs and they come in the coming fiscal year with full state funding if the state budget is passed.

The chart is one that many look for every year, and I want to highlight that while there is a net increase of 10 positions listed here, this comes at the same time that we have continued to freeze 19 vacant positions in the organization.

Those were positions that were frozen as they became vacant over the course of the past 15 months.

And we feel currently that until the economy continues to stabilize more, it is prudent that we move into next fiscal year with these positions frozen.

And I will also highlight to the board that as we move into fiscal year 22,

Hopefully as the ground that we stand on continues to stabilize, we will begin to visit each of these positions and looking at customer service needs, workload demands,

in trying to evaluate what is the long-term impact of these positions remaining frozen.

I would be remiss if I didn't remind the board and connect those 19 positions to approximately 40,000 hours of staff work that is being frozen as a result of the pandemic and the stress and strain in our general fund.

I applaud our staff for them continuing to do more with these positions remaining frozen.

Fiscal Year 21 has been a challenge and will continue to be a challenge as the world around us continues to shift through this pandemic.

I'm proud of the value that we've been able to provide our community during this difficult time.

Public schools staff continue to work hard to provide necessary services for our children.

Our calls for service continued to be answered.

Our parks and trails, even in the absence of organized recreation and sports, have seen unprecedented use.

Almost one million visitors over the past year.

Our inspectors for buildings, engineering, water quality, fire suppression, and safety have all continued to support the continued vibrancy of building activity.

Our offices, while being closed to walk-in customers, have never stopped serving the public.

We strive to be a resilient county government.

We're going to keep moving forward.

This budget makes strategic investments to ensure that we're able to meet the needs of the community as we all adapt to a reality that continues to shift with the pandemic's evolution.

Mr. Chair, I'm going to close and in just a few minutes I'm going to go to the slide on what's in front of us.

But before I do,

If you'll beg my indulgence, I'd like to take a second if Emily Kilroy could help me and I want to look, I want to point the board to what's directly behind me.

That is a beautiful landscape picture of Albemarle County's scenic beauty.

It is today where it resides is in the lobby waiting area of our county offices right here out front.

This picture appeared in our office several months ago out of nowhere.

It was really, I think, over the holidays, and even the staff traffic was down further.

And as I walked by it one day and looked at it, I asked one of our staff members, where did that come from?

And our staff member said, oh, that came from Dan Mahon.

Dan did that.

and retired recently in our Parks and Recreation Department.

He worked in CD over the course of his career, community development, and he also worked in parks as a trail supervisor and as a parks planner.

And he came by one day and he delivered this to the county and he said this is to thank you for all that the county did for me while I worked for county government.

This is a beautiful rendition of the scenic beauty of this county.

And I'll put it back where it goes, right after today.

But I never got a chance to thank Dan Mahon for providing that to the county.

I never got a chance to thank Dan for his service.

He quietly went away and he retired.

He is an example of the workforce that we have in this county every day.

And Mahon loves this county.

Our workforce loves this county.

And so do I.

Emily, if you would move us to the next slide, the budget development process.

Board, this of course is the first step in our formal budget process.

There will be a public hearing on this recommended budget on March the 3rd.

Work sessions will go through early April.

This board will have adequate time to delve into the details and to learn more

about these recommendations.

That's your job and you do it well.

We will work toward a final public hearing on April the 28th and hopefully the adoption of this budget on May the 5th.

All meeting information is posted on our website and all meetings will be held virtually in compliance with local and state ordinances.

Thank you board for your time today and with that I will turn it back over to Chairman Galloway.

Thank you, Jeff.

Board members, this would be a good time if you have any questions or reactions or comments, if you wish to make them, we can do that.

I'll go through our order.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Yes ma'am, you are exactly right.

We have built this budget on the existing tax rate that we have now.

There is not a tax rate in this budget.

And thank you board for having those conversations early with me as we were moving through the very beginning of this last fall.

Thank you.

Then I have no further questions at the moment.

I do look forward to getting the booklet.

and then being able to go into detail, which is where we'll find a lot of our answers.

But I do want to make a couple of comments.

First off, I want to thank you for both a prospective and a perspective outlook on what the county has gone through and will be going through.

I believe that you and the rest of county leadership and county staff have really provided both a visionary and a transitional

I think you've also pointed out with regard to the North Garden situation something that we need to acknowledge

will be an increasing trend on the reliance upon more full-time Albemarle County Fire and Rescue employees in the future years.

So that is simply what I envision or see as an increased expense that we are going to have to deal with for years to come.

I thank you and all the members of county staff that have prepared this to this point and again I look forward to getting the

the booklet and spending it looks like every week a couple of times for the rest of the month working on budget issues.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Richardson.

I thought that was a very good summary.

I'm quite impressed.

I like the direction we're going in, and I do want to thank staff for the sacrifices they have made in making sure that the county runs on a

on a really excellent level of service for our community.

I want to make that clear and also I want to thank our community frankly for the most part being very patient with what we're all going through and I think economically we're in a good position.

I look forward to delving more into the budget but I think it's been a very good summary and kudos to you and the staff for putting all this together.

Thanks.

Mr. Trevor Henry and also Andy Bowman.

I see him on the screen.

Andy, could you go first and maybe tell us what's in there?

Yes, I'll begin and then I'll hand it off to Trevor.

I'm Andy Bowman.

I'm the chief of the budget division in the finance and budget.

We have two pages in the budget document that outline what this kind of broadband services looks like.

Both across fiscal year 21 and 22 for the support that goes to ABBA, the outdoor broadband authority, and for this new broadband office of access and affordability.

And we'll certainly spend time during the board's first work session on March 10th talking about it in more detail.

Yeah, the budget document talks about the services that it will provide and the area of coverage.

Our budget documents typically do not break down at an FTE level what their job description is.

So those FTEs, and I figured that they wouldn't actually be described in the budget book, but I wanted to understand when we would get that.

these two FTEs would not be approved until we got the budget approved, is that correct?

And then we would find out, what did you say, March 1st would be when we would get a more, I didn't quite catch the date that you said that the board would get more information on what that would look like, what that broadband office would look like.

Okay, thank you.

And just wanted to say, for anybody on the board that doesn't know, the North Garden volunteer fire department is a wonderful building that's been kept up by the community for many years.

It is a prime location for an ambulance.

There are so many accidents on 29 North, excuse me, 29 South down there, where the volunteer fire department, the volunteers are able to go and stabilize patients, but they're not able to transport, which has always been quite perplexing.

So I'm very happy to hear that we're going to have an ambulance down there.

That's great.

And thank you.

I just look forward to reading the budget and I'll go by and pick it up today and start the process of going through it.

And thank you for the presentation and all the work.

Yes, good afternoon.

Thank you, Jeff, and to staff.

I know you all have worked tirelessly, many hours to get this budget together for us, and I really appreciate it.

And I do, I agree with the comments that other board members made.

Thanks to not only our staff, but to our community members.

It's been a tough year.

I have found when I explain

to the community.

We have tried very hard to keep people employed and to keep the business of the county moving forward.

They have been very appreciative.

And I am appreciative that they've worn their mask and kept us as safe as possible during these challenging times.

Jeff, just a couple of clarifications, and I think Donna hit on one, which is I think the big takeaway for the community is that you're not recommending a tax increase.

But to wrap my head around this, just again from a higher level, you are recommending an increase of 2% for the classified, which is one of our pay scales, and then we have the public safety pay scale

I'm really, really pleased that we've been able to move that $15 forward.

That is really great.

And that our employees, both the classified and the public safety scale will be seeing an increase.

That's great.

and with that I will oh I do have one other quick question and maybe this is for Trevor and I don't want to get down too much in the weeds but I noticed that there is there was money as we knew for that regional transit grant that we're looking at I saw that identified we have a critically important Albemarle County Transit

Grant that we're working on as well and my understanding is that the money was included in the budget for that as well.

Oh yes, go ahead driver.

Andy, go ahead.

I was going to ask you anyhow.

Thank you very much.

This is an exciting time of year for everybody because of the wonderful summary that's provided about how we got here and the optimism.

We have to be optimistic that we will find a way to take baby steps to continue to provide excellent service to our citizens, even if it's a brand new way.

And I just have passed along the news I've received to senior staff, but many, many times people have reached out to say how

Far beyond their expectations was the service they received when they had to come downtown for something they couldn't do by themselves.

And that is just a really great example of our culture here and the people we have working.

So I'm appreciative of that every day and we all need to keep working along on that.

I know that in the update meeting yesterday and there was some mail I passed along, there is even more teacher-raised stuff coming from the state, maybe, and so that will probably throw

another monkey wrench into the school department's budgets later, but we don't even have certainty on that yet.

I certainly hope that the state government will, I mean the state budget will continue to keep local government in mind as they have started to because that will help us in the long run.

I have lots of questions which I will not ask now, so we will, I look forward to getting my book tomorrow and then I will dig in.

I'll reserve questions for when we get into our work sessions, but I will bring up, it's a good time, Jeff, for us to remind everyone of the protocol or the guideline for asking questions as we work through the book when we're not in the actual meeting.

So in the past, if you

For some questions via email to somebody, we've started, you know, we just ask that you include everybody on it because a lot of times the questions that one supervisor asks are pertinent for the rest of us to hear and learn from.

Jeff, who are we as we work through the whole budget season, who should we direct the inevitable questions to?

Yeah, absolutely.

So thank you, Chair Galloway, for that question.

What we'll do is push them to the budget team.

So Andy, if there is an email address that's not you, please stay now.

or they're going to come to you.

But what we'll do is we'll package them and make sure that we're sending them out in a coordinated fashion so that there's going to probably be a deluge of questions that come in.

But we don't want to also send out a deluge of answers.

And so we'll coordinate those and package those and send them out at a cadence that makes sense.

Yes, that will be fine, and I will delegate and work with staff as we need to.

And as Ms.

Perfect.

And then, just the normal copying that we do, if we send it to Andy, we should loop Jeff in.

So that's fine, sir.

Trevor, Doug and I, any of the three, whoever comes to mind, any and all of us, we coordinate on a daily basis and appreciate your attention to that detail.

Great.

That's all that I had.

I mean, I'll have questions and we'll get into that as, like I said, in the work session.

So I appreciate the clear and concise presentation today of this budget.

Good kickoff to the start of all the work we'll be doing over the next several weeks.

Well, I wanted to follow up on the really good suggestion you had and just to ask, I think you said, but I want to make sure, when I send a question to Andy, if I copy BOS, that will keep other people from having to ask the same question and I will see their questions and not have to ask 14 so that our staff doesn't have to receive the same question from 16 people.

So that was, I think, what we were trying to go for.

And just from my own personal thing, having answers,

Almost question my question, makes it much easier for me to find the answer later when I'm searching for it in my email or something.

I have personal difficulty with five page answers.

So if we can have a paragraph instead, I would love it and just have more of them.

That would be great.

But you figure out how to manage all of that.

Any other comments, supervisors that come up?

Well, then we will move through.

and like I said good kickoff to the start of our budget work this year and board our next item is number three from the board matters not listed on the agenda I'll go through everyone to see if there are any items here.

Supervisor Price?

Nothing today thank you Chair Galloway.

It was in our weekly report but I just want to say that the Yancey Community Center vaccination clinic worked quite well.

Everything went according to plan and I know I guess supervisors probably saw that in our weekly report so I won't spend any more time to mention that.

Just one quick, maybe it's a request or you all might be planning on it.

I think it would really be nice at one of the next upcoming meetings to have someone from the Health Department.

Maybe an update from the Health Department.

Supervisor McKeel, it's as if you've got Deputy County Executive Walker's office bug.

Mr. Walker,

called me coming in the parking lot this morning, and he said, I really think we need to speak with the chair, vice chair, and also our clerk, Ms.

Borgenson, to see if we can create some capacity at our March 3rd meeting.

And so Doug, you've chimed on, and so Supervisor McKeel, your timing couldn't be better.

Doug, you're thinking ahead as always, and you may want to say something to that or just use that as marching orders to solidify your thought process.

And the only other thing I'll say is, and I don't want to belabor this right now, but it's never too soon.

I had a great discussion over the weekend with Sally Hudson, and she already has some connections with us that she would like us to look at on our legislative packet, Greg, for upcoming.

So I say it's never too early to start that discussion as well.

So we can talk about that further, but we do have some exciting things that perhaps we can help support.

Thank you.

Not right now.

I'll wait till next week.

I do not have any items.

Well, very good.

Again, thank you everyone.

And good luck as we all kick off on working through this budget this year.

So we will then, if there is no objection, adjourn to March 3rd, 2021, 1 p.m.

And that is an electronic meeting pursuant to ordinance number 20-A16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

Information on how to participate in the meeting will be posted on the Albemarle County website, Board of Supervisors homepage.

And with that board and everyone else, we are adjourned.

Everyone have a good day and be safe.

Thank you, board.