Board of Supervisors Meeting   12/8/2020

Public comments.

Okay?

They don't know who I am and you know me well.

No, but it takes a quarter of them to know you.

Excuse me?

Well, it does now.

Yeah, appreciate it.

I'm a whistleblower on corruption here in this county.

I have been since 2003.

Did you give me your name?

I ask you in 2019 that the Board of Supervisors appoint a board to investigate numerous uninvestigated crimes and complaints against the Nelson County Sheriff's Law.

The world famous porno movie maker, Nelson County Sheriff's Department.

That's the tip of the iceberg.

I ask you also to investigate the rural, rustic, road project, money, fraud, waste, and abuse.

And I ask you to also investigate the Planning and Zoning Department.

and we all let a 50 year toxic dump exist in this county, Finley Gap.

And I'm also here to call out the great, you people at first, y'all claim you don't know anything about that Finley Gap dump.

It was here in this county for 50 years.

I recorded it in 2014.

Tim Paladino was the do-nothing planning and zoning inspector then answered Mr. Carter there.

And they did nothing about it.

They left it right there.

In 2018, I was near that area.

And I said, let me go back down there and see if people started trashing filth in that place again.

But you couldn't tell because nobody had cleaned it up in the first place.

So I didn't even bother calling anybody in Nelson County.

I called DEQ.

I talked to a woman named Jennifer Welcher.

Ms. Welcher come on the phone, making excuses right off the bat.

She said, well, Mr. Waterfield, let me tell you what the DEQ can and cannot do because of our limited funding.

I said, you need to stop right there, lady.

Have you ever heard of the Environmental Responsibility Act or the Virginia's Clean Water Act?

You're going to clean it up.

And I hung the phone up for them.

And she was calling me back within 20 minutes, saying, oh, we're going to go look at it.

and like I say, this county finally, like I say, I still ain't going down there, look, because I know it will enrage me if it's anything still down there.

Y'all let that set there for 50 years and you're covering that up.

You are going to be held responsible for that.

If you didn't know, that's the one right there, you need to question about it, because in 2014, he knew all about it.

Oh, I want to call out the great Mr. Cropper from the Nelson County Times.

He's in here.

Maybe he can report and tell us why there's never been one word about that toxic dump that sat there for 50 years that was finally cleaned up here in Nelson County.

And maybe he can tell you why they never reported about the impeachment trial of Sheriff David Hill and Commonwealth's Attorney Daniel Rutherford.

And I'm the only person here and you only want to cut me out in three minutes?

No it's not, no it's not, you're right.

We'll call Friends of Nelson and the Sierra Club out.

You fake environmental concerns.

Where's it at, buddy?

50 year dump, need the money up, you're protesting in Richmond about corruption.

All the corruption in the world is gone right here.

You don't need to go to Richmond to investigate corruption.

You stole my property.

You stole my property.

Investigate.

Do your jobs.

Yes, we do have a speaker.

This is your chairman and board.

I have invited Neil Goodlow with the criminal justice board.

He has some very exciting

comments to make about the Nelson County, the state of criminals and kind of how things are looking and give us some overalls and pictures.

I think we've got to turn on that for you real quick.

So other than that, thank you for coming out.

We also have our citizen rep, Mr. Hall, Jim Hall in the back, blue shirt.

So Mr. Chairman, members of the board, thank you for inviting me to present what is really a culmination of about five years of my work life.

As an introduction, I was a state probation officer for 25 years, and then went into private sector and worked as a consultant for another six before returning to the local area to work as a criminal justice planner.

and that planner serves under the direction of the Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice Board of which Nelson County is a member of the jurisdiction.

It also includes Albemarle County, Charlottesville, and the rural counties of Green, Madison, Orange, Nelson, Cleveland, and New Jersey.

That board, about this time last year, directed me to

A series of annual reports, one for each jurisdiction that is a member of the CCJB, and I was challenged to undertake a process that had not been undertaken since in Virginia, and in fact in Virginia.

And what you're about ready to see is the first of its kind in Virginia.

And I would argue among the first of its kind in the country for a jurisdiction the size of Nelson County.

Jails fill an empty in fairly predictable ways.

And the way that they fill an empty and the number of bed days that are consumed by a jurisdiction's inmates, which, by the way, have a direct bearing on cost and locality, those bed days

can be predicted with certain precision using just a fairly common number of methods, which I'm about to present to you.

Among the most influential are your crime rates, your clearance rates of those crimes by arrest, which result in bookings at the jail, and the average length of stay of an inmate once booked.

Those three things in combination produce your bed day expenditure, and your bed day expenditure comes from $93.98 last year, are the comp board's funding allocation per inmate day of the day.

So it's very easy when you know the number of bed days that are expended to be able to ascertain what the inmate

The other thing that this work is designed to do is to create a common template across

I served two jails.

I served the Admiral Charlottesville Regional Jail, of which you are a member, along with the City of Charlottesville and Apple County.

But I also served the Central Virginia Regional Jail, which includes members of Orange, Madison, Green, Louisa, and Blue Man County.

And so what this work allows us to do is to compare in an apples to apples way

controlling the population side of these jurisdictions to be able to look at crime rates per thousand, to be able to look at booking rates per thousand, to be able to look at bed-day expenditures per thousand individuals in the jurisdiction.

And along with this report, I've drafted a report that is now in the hands of the superintendent of Richmond Jail.

which is a jail-wide annual report for the ACRJ member jurisdiction.

These will be used in future years to extend trend lines.

The trend lines you are about to see in most cases are ten year long.

The longer the trend line, the more comfortable we can get with what we are seeing in terms of which way terms we're heading

And how sharp we are to work out a monster.

One of the things that makes Nelson County different from the other counties that I've studied is that you have had virtually no population very good in the last ten years.

You've had just a slight decrease in population.

Interestingly enough, the other smallest county in the study, which is Madison County, had exactly the same population, whereas other counties such as Louisa,

I will say that your population grew more strongly from 1980 to 2010 in the period preceding my study.

But that population really pales in comparison to your neighbors to the north, particularly on Palm County, which, at 109,000 people, is by far and away the largest jurisdiction in my service area.

The first thing I turn to in terms of the dataset is a document that's put out by Virginia State Police every year.

For a crime in Virginia, you can download it.

What Crime in Virginia fails to do, though, is to disaggregate crime data so that I can look specifically at Nelson County.

So I went into a database that's been established by the state police, which is available on that link at the bottom, that allows me to extract

Data on virtually every crime category that is known to law enforcement in Nelson County, which would include the Nelson County Sheriff's Office, but also include Virginia State Police.

And it's collected under three different groups.

The first group were the most serious crimes, most of them felonies.

All of them crimes against persons.

The same are crimes against property.

And for reasons that escape me, somehow robbery is designated as a property crime.

I'm still scratching my head.

And the third one, crimes against society, are crimes that are

Strongly represented by joining the public violations and weapons violations.

And so the key findings for Nelson County are that crimes against persons and crimes against society were both at substantial help over the decade.

Contradicted by a hydraulic crime against property.

crimes against persons per 1,000 residents up 180%, crimes against property per 1,000 down 9%, and mostly crimes against society per 1,000 residents up 283%.

I do want to mention that as a researcher, it is not my job, not my role, it's out of my lane,

to attach any value judgment to any piece of data or any term.

As a researcher, nothing is particularly good or particularly bad or right or wrong.

My role is to simply supply you as decision makers and members of your law enforcement community and members of your public

with data that allows you to decide what you want to do with regard to criminal justice decisions in your community.

Most significant are your increases in narcotic college, about 309% in the last 10 years.

Most of that coming just in the last couple of years.

And these trends

Collected represent a significant impact on your daily utilization rates over the last decade.

There's a crime against person, crime against property, crime against society, specifically your drug and archival expenses.

More on that in a minute.

Another data source that I turn to is operated by the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.

For years, I was frustrated because I could know the number of narcotic bookings in the jail, but I couldn't tell what drug was being seized.

They all were under the same set of Virginia code that simply described them as a Schedule II narcotic.

So I couldn't tell whether it was heroin, whether it was methamphetamine, or whether it was cocaine.

I simply knew it was a Schedule II.

What this database allows us to do is to get a look inside of drug utilization trends, drug seizure trends, over an incredibly long period of time, since 2001.

And they just recently posted the 2019 data, so in fact

I think I issued a supplemental report that included the 19 data for Nelson County, which is now a little bit.

It's actually now the last two years in a row.

You can see a spike between 15 and 70.

And that spike is almost completely the result of increases in amphetamine seizures in your county.

and an increase in club drug seizures.

Club drugs being LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy, and VMI.

I then looked at another database that gathers information on your surgical cases and we see the same kind of rocks

in 17 and 18, all categories.

So what that tells me is that increases in crime are increasing in arrests, which are increasing at felony mode in felony sentence.

Now onto the jail date.

I happen to have the privilege

I'm working with Superintendent Mark Coomer at the jail.

He has provided me with essentially an open book.

Whatever date I need, as long as it isn't Hitler protected, he provides me.

And I have every booking for every inmate, every charge, for a tenure.

And that's what you're going to see next.

Specifically your booking volume of 164%.

And since you've actually lost a little bit of population, your bookings per thousand are up 174%.

You will notice that in 2010, Nelson County bookings represented 6.2% of all the bookings that ACRJ

And that had more than doubled to 13.7 in 2019.

I also draw your attention to the orange line.

That line is Charlottesville.

And Charlottesville has experienced a decrease in their booking volume over the same period of time.

That one was up a little bit, not up as sharply as Nelson, but these inadvertently have cost implications for jurisdiction because you're, as you're probably well aware, your cost for participation in the regional jail authority is in many ways predicated on the number of beds that your beds extend.

Felonies up far more sharply than misdemeanors.

Bookings of white individuals up sharply while bookings of black individuals barely changed.

Bookings of females up at almost twice the rate of males.

This is a national phenomenon.

We're seeing it in data from jails all across the country that the footprint that women had in America's jails has grown up in prisons too.

This is by age?

Nelson kind of bucked a trend that I saw in a number of other jurisdictions in which older Americans

It may be that your numbers are low enough so that there's a lot of volatility from here to today.

And if you're interested in knowing what kind of things people come to jail for more often than anything else, read from the left or right.

Narcotics, driving on intoxicated, assault, larceny, operator's license charges, probation violations, contempt of court, weapons, alcohol, drugs.

We can also look at that in a different way when we separate misdemeanors from felonies.

And my gaze is immediately drawn to the drug felony complex.

So that supports the data that I had with regard to crimes against society.

It supports the data that I had from the Department of Forensic Science regarding the uptick in felony narcotic seizures.

And I took the liberty the other day.

This is not in the pack.

But there was a question asked in our jurisdiction.

Well, they also had significant increases in their felony road.

And they wanted to know, were these users or were these dealers?

And so I separated Nelson's level 5 and 6 felonies, which are generally lower levels for our charges of felonies.

from your F-9 drug felonies, which are distribution charges.

In 2015, you had 27 F-5s or 6s.

That had risen to 110 by 2019.

You had six F-9 bookings in 2015.

It had risen to 73.

by 2019.

So we'll see significant increases among both bookings for dealing and possession.

So let me differentiate a booking for a minute.

An intake is a person, a booking is a charge.

I can get arrested for breaking memory and grand larceny, and I have two bookings, but I'm one person.

So while bookings are a great look at one, intakes give us a much better impression of who.

And not only are your bookings up, intakes are up as well, but not as short.

And again, you see the same pattern as white insects are up strongly.

Black insects are actually down 5% over the decade.

And that female insects are up twice now.

So that matches the boogie day.

And you can see that there are increases across the board in every single age group.

So how I read this is there are more people the age of 50 in the year 2018 that got a risk effect was in the particular age group.

What did you do, Dan?

And that's something that I'm seeing in virtually every jurisdiction that I look.

You see an increase of 148% among people over the age of 50.

What I'm not seeing in Nelson that I am seeing in other jurisdictions is, jail-wide, when I look at this graph, the percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds who have been booked over the last 10 years has plummeted down almost 10% for the jail.

Far fewer young people come into the jail generally across the ACRJ footprint, but still above 45% in Nelson.

Consequently, the average age of an inmate in Nelson County has actually dropped just a tad, whereas the average age of an inmate at the jail has risen almost four years since the last time.

And that has cost implications if you happen to have an older inmate who has significant health problems and has to be hospitalized.

One of the reasons that your booking volume is up more steeply than your intake volume is that folks are coming in on more charges than they were 10 years ago.

Ten years ago it was a little better coming in on about 1.75 charges, now you're at about 2.3 per book.

I've got a question.

That's a good question.

There is, in the Dales budget,

There is a line item for medical expenditures that are prorated through each jurisdiction's footprint in the jail population.

If there is a catastrophic illness of an individual, this happened in both Green and Orange County last year at CBRK, where they had individuals who were diagnosed for

cancer once they were an inmate and they had to be treated extensively.

And they ran through all of their budgeted funding for their medical care and ended up writing a check at the end of the year for, in one case, a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Steeper than, in terms of, particularly in terms of narcotics, steeper than any other jurisdictions that we've been in.

And it's specifically because of that rise in methamphetamine.

Reminds

individuals, particularly the smaller the population that we're talking about, and then when we start subdividing it by race or subdividing it by charge tonight, your numbers start to really shrink to a point where for a number of these graphs, I'm unable to develop a trend line that I'm comfortable with statistically.

And where that is true, I will point that out.

That's a great question.

I wish I knew the answer.

Well, here's the problem.

The way the jail's database is established, if you are held, instead of released,

at some point your jail status, and then you go to court and you're convicted, at some point your jail status is overridden by your new status.

And there's no archive for me to go back and be able to say, all right, you had a length of stay of 83 days and 35 of it were pretrial and 40-some of it were post-status.

One thing that I've heard from a person who's worked in the industry

During the COVID crisis, there was a real attempt, particularly in Appel County, to get people out of the jails.

That occurred yesterday.

Yes.

Remember, this data stream cuts off December 31, 2019.

It doesn't include any COVID data at all.

I can tell you from a research standpoint, it's going to be really fascinating.

Once I'm able to obtain all these metrics for 2020, because all the preliminary data I've seen suggests that jail utilization plummeted between the middle of March and the end of June.

All I can know is that there

Each jail has to report to the comforter once a month what their average legal population was for that month.

And I can't disaggregate until the end of the year when I have the full data set to be able to pick up on.

But it's a great question.

I don't want to get too used to the leads about COVID, but COVID is a game changer for the criminal justice system.

Well what happened in, you know, legalized marijuana now?

So that's what, check that out, route out.

It's a $25 price.

Yeah.

I will say that the amount of marijuana possession influenced on this data is virtually irrelevant.

It's very low level.

In fact, I can go back to a couple slides and take a look at it.

Drug misdemeanors vastly overshattered.

Drug misdemeanors rarely serve significantly lengthy sentences.

So in a bed-based expenditure point of view, it has very, very little impact on how much you pay to be a part of the jail order.

A reminder, what is your current total population?

A couple hundred?

Well, not the total jail, but Nelson's.

Oh.

I'll be able to tell you in a minute.

I have your average total population coming up.

I want to bring your attention to something that I think is really important.

So if your... Go back.

So we go back all the way back to Wilkins.

Booking volume up 164%.

So this is the number of charges.

And then we have intakes up 92%.

This is the number of people booked on those charges.

The third aspect of this

is individuals known to the jail media, whether they got taken in once, whether they got taken in five times, whether they got taken in 15 times.

What this tells us is that you have a certain number of individuals who were booked more than once during that year, a significant amount.

We like to call them frequent utilizers.

I particularly like the word frequent flyer, so we decided to use something different.

Booking on every trend that you've seen up until this exact moment.

There is another dynamic working to actually lower your med-day expenses.

And that's your average length of stay.

You have more bookings, more news, but they're not staying as long.

In fact, the average length of stay is over 50 days, and almost 50 days at the beginning of the timeline, and down to about 34 at the end of the timeline, although you can see there was a drop from 18 to 19, but I'm not going to pay attention to that, because it could be noise in the database.

And the entirety

Of that drop in average length of stay have been a long time.

This meter line is just about that.

Down much deeper for your black inmates than your white inmates.

And I want to point this out.

You are the only jurisdiction that I've ever reform on.

that at the end of this period, 2019, actually a couple of years before it, your black inmates served less time than your white inmates.

Now the female average life has stayed down just about the same.

And it's down across the board where we

with the exception of 45 to 49-year-olds.

That could have been one person who got a super, super long stay because of them.

So you ask how many people are in the jail on an average day in 2019?

Just shy of 50 people.

about 48% and that trend line is up 41% which means your bed expense is up 41%.

The reason is, that's 48 total of 48,000.

Sure, because you virtually have had nil change in your population over the ten years, so, you know, calculator rate for a thousand and beyond is exactly the same thing.

And your bed-day expenditure is just your everyday population, that's 365 days.

This is probably one of the two most important slides in effect.

This shows you in a way that is probably easier to see than anything else.

that your bed days are rising 67% at the same time that Charlottesville's pools are dropping 19%.

And since jail has a lot of sunk costs, somebody's got to pick up that path.

And I can imagine, I have not actually seen what your, what your line on it was looking at your budget for ACR jail in the last three years, but I can imagine it went up and up and up.

And the proximate cause of that is avoidative and significant increases in the female mid-day expenditures.

And significant increases among 50-year-olds.

Here's the other slide.

I really want you to spend some time with it when you're discussing as a board.

This is where your money's going.

By charge, Heidi.

Every single one of these hedges is associated with $93.96 worth of expenditure.

and you can see the expenditure on drug felonies, felony probation violations, violent felonies, even traffic cells.

And along with that rises your bed day costs.

They rise for two reasons.

So for one thing, if you say, wait, our bed days are only up 41%, why does that cost?

Well, the jail got more expensive.

It got more expensive to run.

And over that period of time, the increase in non-operational costs per inmate bed day increased, as did your bed day expense.

And the combination of that

produces a cost per citizen in 2019 that was somewhere around $117 for every person in your jurisdiction.

And that's it.

Mr. Rose, do you have any comments you would like to make?

I do, Mr. Carter.

I do, Mr.

I do, I do.

So, just a couple, to counter a couple myths that are going around, marijuana.

I stopped prosecuting it back in 2017 for jail offenses.

So it's a term that's been played by a certain party that people were in jail for misdemeanor marijuana on massive levels.

Since I took office, I've been put in jail for that.

Same with driving up dispensers.

The new laws had no impact on Nelson County for those reasons.

The bigger part that you will see is we've gone after drug dealers to a massive level when I took office to the tune of 48 individuals that pled guilty to the sentence and multiple sentences for racketeering.

Those individuals, not from Jesse District, but they had a host of impact on our violent problems.

The mass distribution in this county was horrendous.

73.

That is distribution.

That's not one gram.

I don't do controlled buys to charge people in Nelson County.

I don't believe in committing criminal activity to catch a criminal.

We did it all through conspiracy, all through finding out how people did it.

So that vastly increased what we did and what my office did, by working with the Sheriff's Department and the drug task force to do that.

So that's been explained in everything.

Next thing, COVID.

Just because there's a virus doesn't mean I'm not in front of the block.

Not one single inmate was released because of COVID in Nelson County.

I refuse to let law-abiding citizens get hit with lockdowns and then, oh, we're going to let inmates out because there's a virus.

That's a judge's determination.

I'm talking about COVID issues, I'm not talking about bail.

Judges have bail and they impose bail.

I prefer violent criminals to stay in jail and I prefer those who can abide until they come back.

It's great that they let them yell.

I have done homoelectronic monitoring before there was COVID issues, so if there is a reason they should be out on homoelectronic incarceration monitoring, great, they should have a good reason, but COVID isn't going to be no longer.

We believe that if someone is given a sentence, that sentence should be served in jail, otherwise I did an injustice trying to then modify it down.

So that's generally how my offices try to handle this.

And we try to make sure that we've stayed in through the budget, the board has given us, and I'm grateful, absolutely grateful, for how the board has handled my office and given us the tools to keep everyone safe.

Because all of this meant, it looks like, you know, we have these issues, we just recently had two massive busts at the end of my profession.

We're finding that

They're not going after drug dealers, so now I'm going to have to go after Charlottesville's drug dealers because their meth in the Patrons is ending up in Nelson County.

The drug dealers now avoid Nelson, they stay in Charlottesville, they ignore all their transactions, and then they, you can see the meth directly come back to the Nelson County.

So it's not a Nelson limited aspect.

It's not just Nelson has this problem, everyone else does.

Some jurisdictions close their eyes to it.

That talking heart stated Charlottesville closes your eyes.

So you'll have evidence of that.

It's kind of like squeezing a balloon, right?

You put pressure on one side, they will go to someone else.

You'll never, I'm not saying it'll be ever finished, but drug dealers move, and when I mean drug dealers, I'm talking about traffickers.

I'm talking about people who deal pounds at a time.

They realize in Nelson, I think in Europe, 14 to 27 years.

So they go elsewhere.

We just finished our racketeering meeting.

That involved a Jamaican operation working in Nelson County.

I can talk about it because they're all sentenced now.

They specifically dealt them here.

They saw it was cheaper than now.

They dealt with Nelsonians.

Yes.

You catch them?

That's the law enforcement's job.

They catch them.

So they caught them?

Well, it depends.

So we've gone after them through what's called certain grand juries.

And so we do the old school conspiracy round where we build up a case on who's this operation, who are they, we work down who the people we know, we go above them, and then we go below them.

And so that's generally how our office has handled big operations.

So we then find out who they are, we use certain tools, we use certain technology to figure out how they operate, where they go, and then we get them that way.

To a large extent.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'll be back next year.

I don't have a whole lot to report this month.

I did send Steve and Amanda

We have been tasked with going through the motions of approving a FY21 six-year plan

It really doesn't have, this is just me talking, it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with anything that we've got going on in Nelson County, but as part of approving a statewide six-year plan, and in order to approve a statewide six-year plan, you've pretty much got to have all your counter plans approved.

It is the exact same FY21

This is not like what we're going to do starting March or April of next year where we review it all and do a total revised plan.

This is just taken

The plan we approved last year in our road hearing in 2019 and basically we approved in the FY21 year of that plan, just to put it to record.

And I've asked Steve if we could do that at our January meeting, and I think they're going to work out the details on that if I'm not mistaken, Steve.

I think we're going to work on that.

I've sent them the information.

So again, it's not, certainly if we have citizens or residents that make requests, that's fine.

We can take them.

But it's not adding anything.

It's just going with what we already had.

with the plan that was approved in 2019.

But it does have statewide implications as far as getting a recorded plan.

And that's really what they wanted to do was get a recorded plan for FY21.

So that's where I know about it.

I didn't even think we were going to do it.

It kind of popped up out of nowhere, so we'll do what they asked me to do and ask us to do about it.

That's okay with the bold.

Just doing a normal maintenance operation, we can do a couple heavy rain, heavy floods.

Floods from these tropical storms, remnants of these tropical storms that come up through here.

We've got a lot of hitcher pavements in the room to fix, and it will probably take us probably close to the rest of you to get that back, get those runway shelters and fix some things and uncalled pipes.

We'll be working on that till the end of the year.

I do have some good news.

Route 627 reopened yesterday.

They had a glint on loop that we were doing that structure of bridge repair and our bridge folks told me that they did finish that yesterday and reopened the road.

And we've got multiple, multiple pipe cover locations throughout the county that

We are in the process of getting drainage studies done for replacements.

We just keep, we haven't a rash of pipe failures.

and it seems that they all come, a lot of them come and do.

We looked at that pipe, looked at that pipe up over on Abelhorn, at 950 Abelhorn.

Preliminary studies drainage analysis, we need to put a 48 inch pipe in there.

and do some work, some other work too.

So, you know, there's a lot going on, maybe not, we've pretty much finished our rural rustics for the year.

I think Shipman down here, they had started working on high feet, but, you know, this rained a while and all.

I don't think they got too far along with that, but.

We'll get to it with the weather, finish it when the weather gets a little bit better.

The traffic study for 664, that has not been completed yet.

I haven't talked to our traffic, district traffic engineer who is conducting that.

I don't have any new information on that.

Earlier today, I was communicating with Steve Morelli, who's a board member on that side of the mountain, and he said that it's his understanding that they're trying to secure some land to install a turnaround spot on the bottom of the mountain, hopefully somewhere near that, like church.

Okay.

I think it was a rash on them.

I think one group of trucks in particular that had a special use on them, they quit using it.

I think that's helped a whole lot.

I did talk to a recovery company and they said they had one in the last few weeks maybe.

I will, you know, we are looking at trying to do some additional painting on the Nelson side at the most acute curve up there on our side of the mountain, on our side of the pathway.

And I think we're- There's really not that many feathers.

Well, I know we don't want to, well we,

Pardon me, I'm very excited.

You know, the message boards, I don't know, I haven't been overlooked.

Yeah.

I think a lot of that is reaching out to that.

So that's where that's in.

I had a meeting over there last week with the gentleman as well as Mr. Woodstead.

We got a gentleman over there last week.

I think still there's no risk for nothing.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

A lot of people that are real lucky to try them.

They're really viable.

Exactly.

They pay you themselves.

This guy has been giving me grief for as long as I've been safe or as long as I've been here.

The only thing I have is not in my area, but do you all have any control over any input

Well, the issue that I'm asking about, so now temperatures are freezing in the morning, they use water for those, for that part of that installation.

There, for Sunday, I went to food line Sunday morning about 8.30 and I fish table going past Oak Ridge Road where it's frozen from that construction

This morning, there was an accident in front of Almost Home at the Dachshund Center because of water.

And I don't know this, but I think that it was part of that water center.

Well, it's interesting you mentioned that I talked to our permit specialist who expects this work going up from Nell's 29.

and then I didn't really know about what you were, what you're talking about but I told him, I said this, this, this uh, this main line involved .9 and trying to get up .9, I said I hope they don't take that finish before they move on because it's a lot of

I see a lot of ditch work that's got to be straightened up.

I think High Peak is excited whenever we get there.

They will not be hard serviced until the next, late next summer morning.

That's it.

No.

I'm struggling with this, Mr. Arthur.

Are you looking, though?

No, no.

It's causing a lot of problems for you.

Well, there came a lot of them.

There's plenty of them.

I understand.

Maybe the person's involved or somebody's off, tires off, something that

And most of them you put them in to scratch off the tile.

Just carry that small string.

You're trying to.

Trying to.

I know you're probably looking at the edges of the road and right there when you come out of the

As soon as you come over, you have to convince them of that.

You've got one that, there's one going up the hill on 151 at Ashley's, there's some on the other side of Ashley's, there's some on 6th, coming on 29th.

You're talking about

They are getting closer and closer to holding us accountable to maintenance, performance metrics, and set of targets and goals.

One of the main pushes is to ditch this road because I think it's killing us in all parts of the state.

David had mentioned something too, that on 29th, you get in a real hard rain, you come down right where Davis Creek is, and you drop down in that little low spot, come in the south, you can't go and lean the road down.

Well, we've got high shoulders everywhere at Central Library.

Yes, sir.

All right.

Thank y'all very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

She wasn't able to be here.

I would think this would take a little prior to ending up in here today.

Care of it.

Mr. Royles and Ms. Jacobs, Chip and Chris Stater here from the Planning District Commission and Chris Stater is the project manager for the business assistance plans.

She can help us if the board has any specific questions about that to document Chris.

So we put up on the screen, we hand it out to the board just prior to the meeting because this information was updated today, early this morning.

This is a summary of the status of the overall CARES Act clipping.

It shows categorically how the funding has been allocated to date.

Allocated to date, you'll see general government, it's just the county use of the fund for

various things, $112,612.

The school division was allocated $500,000.

The local investment safety program today, the $401,200.

Community relief initiatives, several different things.

Total is over $1,761,000.

that breaks down the criminal assistance for the business assistance program, got attention to the planning district commission for their housing program, the broadband expansion with Firefly, and then state assistance again that was used for Firefly.

The bottom is the current balance, just over $142,000.

That can be advised just before the meeting that we've received a letter from the state saying instead of the December 31st deadline to expend on the funding, it's been

January 15th, and we have to report up in 5 January 22nd and we'll return the money by that day.

Another handout in addition to the summary of the Distance Assistance Program.

We reached out to the firing of NASA agencies, so here's the potential uses.

of that balance of funding.

The Fire Department has some equipment replacements they want to do if they can be scheduled and completed by what we thought when we were speaking with them by the end of the month that we now may be able to be accomplished in total.

And then with the

Community Services Agencies and the Sheriff's Office, additional personal protective equipment, and then lastly, speaking with Curtis Sheets of MPOA, and I'm not, I think Candy's very, better or worse than I am on the, how these ultraviolet lights work, but anyway,

Wintergreen has purchased those for their units and it seems to be highly effective at helping with their disinfecting or sanitizing these areas that they're building to their vehicles.

So potentially if the board would endorse that, we would move forward with using approximately

for $41,581 rounded of that $142,000 balance to try to make those things happen before January 15th.

And what our plan is is anything that's still on account, let's just say,

First of January, we've developed a cost allocation plan which is allowable under the federal regulations where we would reallocate percentage years of employee time and charge those percentages even back to March against payroll costs.

So for example,

Anyone who's participating that are helped in trying to address and preventative measures associated with the virus, and that's a children's expense.

So the new money is not lost.

And that way, you bet you have it.

And we do use the money that way.

And that means that money would still be available to the county without necessarily any constraints on time and use of the money.

Okay, just using myself as an example.

So, when the CARES Act money was first realized, I think back in March, we can go back to that time and say 100% of my time working for the county, if I spent 5% of my time just, this is an example, dealing with virus-related matters, coming up with this claim that we had to implement it for state requirements.

and dealing with virus issues, et cetera, et cetera.

But we can use 5% of our time, annual costs, back to March and charging against the CARES Act.

So if you can do that, basically, the money that's left is going to the general fund?

And then we can decide how to use it.

Again.

And we

Spent a lot of time looking at that just to make sure the federal guidance sit down to allow it.

And I mean, I've read it in the dinner and just waiting to see if there's at least four subsections that speak to that.

So I feel very comfortable noting to the board that's allowable use of funds if it comes to that.

And if you have questions, that's where we are.

As I said, the board is comfortable with these additional, more or less, MS cost proposals.

We can proceed those immediately.

And otherwise, we've asked Christine to stop.

Well, I was disbursed in accordance with the plan in order to approve it.

The board carried the plan over one month to another before it was approved.

And it's been followed in accordance with the board.

People that have helped are not the three ones that we assigned to them.

These small organizations that, you know, are a business, these other businesses are the ones that sometimes up their butt all the time.

And how we can give two organizations the businesses that were funded had to show losses and definite to their operations in order to be funded.

That hadn't been the criteria.

And with respect to, and I was very concerned about that too, there were businesses that

On the surface, people think they were the same business, but they're organized as separate business entities, separate federal employer identification numbers.

Their employees are different.

Their decision has to be made on should they not be funded, if they met the criteria.

And ultimately, I think after we delayed that for 60 days, I mean, yes, it's on parity to get the correct funding.

I think if the board wanted to do more, there's potentially another federal stimulus kind of board to date.

Who knows if it'll happen?

The proposal that we've seen is $906 million.

There's tens of billions of dollars that were allocated to state-level governments, which means Nelson County will get some of that money.

It's approved.

Otherwise, if the board has concerns about the business assistance plan and you want to do more, we have a very healthy fund balance.

We can go back to the drawing board.

Tommy, I agree with you.

I totally agree with that.

Do you think that

If they were helped as much as these ones that got funded, that was handed out, laid out to them, the people that we're involved with all the time, I mean, I've got one, I try to get into a place and no, I can't lie.

Peace and my blessings to the military as well.

And you can't tell me that the majority of them on here are hurting business life.

I mean, the military is in these breweries.

They have passed all the time.

They don't have to meet any of these regulations that all of us do.

They've gone to a new thing now where they put up tents.

and they can pack them tents as long as they don't get over 25 and they can put 100 tents up there if they ain't got room for them.

Now when I drive by and the parking lots are full, the park may be rude and all the regulations been wiped off of me.

I agree.

But the purpose was to help

You know, the people that were hurt by this COVID.

But I don't have anything clear in my mind how to identify those people.

There's some $5,000 in the middle.

And some of these beds are probably going to do $5,000 in a year.

They're little small operations.

The people that got hurt to work were the rest of them.

I'm not talking about the rural areas, that restaurants that have been shut down, that have to do everything under the sun, have restaurants.

People like that, I mean, it's like, you can almost, I can sit there and see the ones that were probably hand written, that

I would just note to the board that we felt very strongly, the county staff, that the applications and application review, the scrutiny given to the applications was, in accordance with the board, approved.

And no one submitted misinformation or false information or information that could have been revealed.

You also have to have a business that knows about it and also has the ability to apply for it, so to speak.

We had the same issue happen with the PPP.

You had some people who were getting in and you're like, I'm in the construction business.

My business is all right.

I'm fine.

I don't necessarily need to apply for this.

Then you'll look at how many construction people you see on there.

But

The problem is, is the small mom and pop like gas station, so to speak, the one that didn't really sell as much, you know, fried chicken and taters and all that.

This is normally, you know, they usually don't look at these things on five foot.

They've been used to life as it is, and they work around it, so to speak.

It's these people who, I would just say, and I'm not halting anybody who applied for it in the sense of, you know, them wanting to get the attempt at a grant.

I mean, you know, I don't fault any of them for that.

I encourage that and how we can do that and I hope we could maybe refine that.

That would be my suggestion.

We follow throughout the authorization program trying to

We were able to actually expand on funds, so that was a challenge as well as anything else.

Those businesses are the largest employers in the county, or some of the largest employers.

There's over 500 employees in these property businesses, particularly the ones that have been funded.

You know, they're the largest tax payers.

If you want to lose the largest businesses in the county, I guess that was one of the reasons, at least a basis of establishing those as property businesses.

I will say to comment on top of this, I did have a chance to speak to the Chamber of Commerce and they had not dispersed it to their people from my understanding, which I don't know where the mismatch came down from there.

I'm not sure really how the grant was advertised, I guess we didn't advertise it on them,

on social media, I think we should just maybe look at refining the language.

I mean there's still $100,000.

They're going right into another round of code and a shutdown.

Well the challenge you'll face now is we can keep the program open but time is running out.

Tom is running out because now we have until January 15th to fully expend the money or any balance has to be returned.

We can continue.

We have applications coming out of the way.

Well, as I said,

I feel very confident in saying to the board that we, every morning at the clock, was fully scrutinized.

We had to meet the criteria.

We discussed that.

I want to compliment Christine and Chip and John and think of the board.

They're mutual people.

They have no ties.

I'm just wondering if there's a possibility of prioritizing the information so that it goes into those less visible, less served, less connected, less

Well, as I suggested earlier, one, we can continue the program as I said and as I suggested.

The subject of the conference, acting, they are considering a $960 billion additional stimulus bill and there is, I mean,

Well, 44 million, tens of billions at 400 million, I don't recall the specific number for state and localities, but if that state's the bill, the county's going to get some of that money.

I'm not sure how much.

And this is also suggesting if the county's fund balance, we've just gotten a draft audit, it's still very strong.

If we really wanted to do more local money, we can work with the agencies that

Restructure the grant program and try to make it more universal and reach out to more businesses.

There's certainly no intent on either the PDC staff or the county staff to open the classes to one group or another other than those priority groups.

We've been calling Mr. Rutherford, I don't know if we involved him initially, and I apologize for that, but certainly no attempt to hide anything from the Lord.

I've seen this happen, I mean, it just... And I don't want to burn a soul off on any of this.

And it's going to be very hard to define the difference between necessarily a Neville's backbone and a Lovingston Cafe, so to speak.

They're both in this relatively sane business of cooking food and letting down.

And I see your frustration with the same repeat three name on there.

I got it, you know.

I don't know what, I know he provides jobs, you know.

But at the same time, we have to expend this money, right, Steve?

This has to go by January 15th.

That balance that I noted in the summary sheet, that's available in order not to return it to the federal government or the state.

We have to spend it by January 15th.

Well, that's it.

We can continue the program.

And then, you know, see if we can disperse it down to the 350,000.

About 70, 71, 500.

If it's possible to

to change the definition.

I mean, you say it's open to everybody.

It might be, one suggestion might be to open it to only non-priority businesses.

Focus on those areas that haven't been previously.

Christine, you don't have their names, do you?

Who?

The current applications that are outstanding.

I know there are some farmers on this next round.

Is childcare a possibility for this?

Well, you know, that's been healed.

You know they've been part of the big fund.

Yeah, so.

Because people can't work and

Everybody who has applied that was eligible under the criteria has been funded except for one pending application.

I saw a list somewhere that had a business listed twice and one time they listed a certain number of employees and then they listed it again with 51

A larger number of employees.

Was it on the pending list?

Yes, and we assume that it's a suspect organization.

That was through an interest form.

That was a big, for me that was a big direct play.

I can't even just say in correct suggesting that we had an applicant that maybe just wanted a home-based business, but home-based businesses are ineligible.

Yeah, I think that's part of what we're talking about.

I mean, a hair cutter is a home-based business.

And of all the applications that you've received,

IV have been declined for not meeting the V. Five have been declined.

Three of those were because they were role-based.

One of them is because they did not have a COVID-related loss in any way.

And the fifth one was because they were not motivated in Nelson.

Yeah, I think I like Ernie's idea on that one.

Non-priority, and I say we get rid of the home-based.

I mean, we allow home-based businesses.

That's way off.

Well, you can borrow those right now.

Well, I'm in there, I'm pretty sure.

Now, they can apply for $1,000.

They can apply.

They can apply for $500, $1,000.

The lowest tier based on number of employees goes up to $5,000.

And then it's tiered based on number of employees, so they can request a grant for $10,000.

Well, you know, we could drop those numbers down some.

It would be my suggestion that we allow non-priority and home-based businesses to apply for these grants moving forward and remove, with Mr. Harvey speaking up, the priority businesses at this time.

Because they've had an opportunity for how many months to apply?

Since the beginning.

Since the beginning?

Alright.

And I think that would be a good change of pace.

One of the problems that that's not going to really help with is how to get the information to them that might fall off.

And that's tough.

And again, like I told you prior, it's the same people who didn't apply for the BPP.

And how we can, honestly, we do need to put a little bit of pressure on the, what should we call it, the Chamber of Commerce.

You know, I know that they have not done no distribution.

That was what I was told.

I mean, you know, I would say the Builders Association, you know, maybe that might be what we think about them.

They're not really impacted.

That's right.

And several of the people that did apply, it was after we reached dioceses several times to convince them to apply, right?

Because a lot of folks that are applying for this program

are concerned that it's going to be a really rigorous process, lots of documentation, lots of time, and they don't have the staff capacity, right?

So a lot of folks who were finding this smaller, especially one employee, two employees, they said, we almost didn't know why, because we didn't have the time to apply for this grant.

Right.

A D.I.A.

That's one thing we've done very commonly.

The verification process.

If it helps, I can tell you what we did to the market program.

So we did a direct emailing to businesses.

We did a Facebook ads that were directed towards Nelson County.

How many original letters did you remember?

The original, I'm sorry?

So that is my suggestion.

Here's one right here.

They've got 11 employees.

Right.

Well, they have to still prove that they have 11 employees with the F-21.

You can't just, I can't just go... You can't do it.

That's proven.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, if you are, then, you know, we can get the cobblestone tyranny and we can go to Pittsburgh.

You can't just falsify having full-time employees.

And they also still have to prove loss from the prior, what was it, six months?

It would be increase in expenses due to COVID, so things like sanitation and cleaning, or even the documented loss.

I think this time of the year we'll have some little bit more of an accurate depiction with the suggestion that Ernie had.

Yes, right now it is open to all priority and non-priority employees.

So it would be a matter of re-pushing out some marketing to say non-priority only.

We'll work with the language, obviously, what that means.

And then home-based is now the eligible one.

Then we can put a cap at it, you know, 26 and up, 20K.

If they can prove that they have X loss, then they get X number.

They apply for

Or they prove they have a $3,405.

I mean, it's right there.

They just had $3,405.

So their check was $3,405.

Is that right?

I think it's a great idea.

I don't think we should change the rules right now.

We've got to expend this money.

By not changing the rules, you're not referring to not opening it up to what we talked about, right?

I've got a business that does three to four million dollars a year.

I was at about ten employees, now down to only two at the shop and two inside.

But I didn't, you know, I want my mind full.

And so, and now I've got to, you won't believe what I have to do to accommodate all these ones that got this big funding.

The way it works now, if a person comes in to use my restrooms, because these drawers and things don't have enough rooms, and they're not tailored to their public restrooms, so the person comes into my business, uses my bathroom, I'm required to go on in and spray that bathroom down, wait 15 minutes,

Go on and clean the bathroom and then wait 30 minutes before someone else can use it.

Now does that make sense?

The other thing is, I can stick a port-a-jaw on both sides.

I have no regulations whatsoever.

I mean, it, and it's got a lot of, they certainly want to penalize me or do something about it.

So, she's looking for an extraction.

I suggest we roll with the party and open it up to home-based businesses.

If you want to get rid of the priority, I'm not against that idea.

But I definitely do agree.

And I think that there should be language here that we are targeting the non-priority businesses so that they know that they're the ones that we want to apply.

It's really just taking the program that we had and changing the focus of it a little bit.

And any suggestions that you all have for how to better target those home base?

Yeah.

I mean, another simple solution, I don't know about y'all, but I've been sitting here writing down names of individuals in the community that I'm calling my stuff today, tomorrow, and just saying, hey, did you know?

Here's how you apply.

And I think we all know enough people.

In our community, we can reach out to people.

In addition to what they're doing,

But no offense to what was done, but obviously that communication did not hit with everybody.

And there are people out there that probably still have no idea.

I wish we had a way of counting how few people saw it on our county website.

Because I guarantee you not very many people saw it.

You probably had more luck with your Facebook ad than we had on our county website.

But that's a whole nother.

You know what I'm saying?

Right, Grace?

If you don't have a business license, don't qualify anymore.

If you don't have a business license, don't qualify anymore.

If you don't have a business license, don't qualify anymore.

I don't have any idea how to do that.

Well, I could ask for her to be involved.

Alright.

I think there should be an issue working through Jesse.

Are you?

Are you?

You can take my spot.

You can take my spot and you can see it.

Are you comfortable?

Yeah, we will make sure that you get a list before we do the next thing.

And thank you so much for joining this program.

I think we just need more endorsement to do that, yeah.

And then after that, potential uses, we still have 70, no that's wrong, we still have about 100,000.

We have 142 right here.

Right.

Do we have enough?

Okay, three days.

As I said, we can still do that cost allocation plan with any balance.

Okay, got it.

You can't ignore it because we were

Yes, sir.

Our current publics will be decertified June 30th because we're still running ahead of several.

And so the state will decertify all the credits and not replace them.

Sorry to interrupt.

Let's just table that and we'll do it after.

Okay, so for the presidential election, we had CARES Act money.

We also applied for two grants, one from the Center for Tech at Pacific Life, and we also applied for a grant and received it from Marvel's Fortune Makers Democracy Commission.

And these funds allowed us, among other things, to rent the entire first floor of our building, which we used for early voting and storage of over 1,000 ballots and all of the first real equipment that we had to gather, PPEs and new ballot boxes for that first day.

Some of you came through my office during early voting and saw the float and saw the storage areas that we have.

We feel strongly that going forward early voting is not going away.

And we feel strongly about meeting that digital space.

In 2021, right now, we have three elections on the calendar.

We'll have the June primaries and because of redistricting being later this coming year than it normally is, they're moving the House race

to August from the June ballot.

So we'll have another primary in August and then we have a gubernatorial election in November along with three of the election districts electing their board of supervisors and their support.

So 2021 is going to be busy for us just as 2020 was.

So we probably feel that we need that space on a year-round basis.

Jessica also mentioned that our agenda for this segment is to go off.

It runs very well, and firstly, we will send you on up the road and see if you can get us some others.

Well, we voted in 2010's early voting.

We processed and issued 1,945 ballots by mail, email, and fax.

And we got 1,152 of those returned by mail.

Some of them brought them back in person.

And we, in my office, we voted 3,553 voters in person during the early voting session.

Who do you think the vote should be coming in?

Will it show up on the code for that?

It shows up in Central Avenue.

Central Avenue becomes a precinct of its own.

So if someone from the Roseland precinct voted

It wouldn't show up in the central absentee precinct.

Right now, our registered voters have grown to the most it's been.

We have 11,725 registered voters.

We process 3,758 voter registration applications and updates so far this year.

Jackie, the lease agreement mentions the increase in the security deposit.

What are you paying now?

I can.

OK. Our current rent is $1,500 roughly per month or $18,000 a year.

I don't think she would require any.

Okay, what's your request?

That would be an additional cost of $300 per month.

No, no, total for the year.

Total for the year $4,143, approximately.

It's listed on the lease account, which is make a motion to approve the proposed lease agreement.

And all that information is spelled out in the agreement.

I think you could approve a proceeding with a release at the cost proposed and then authorize the kennel staff after the county attorney's review to execute the agreement on behalf of the board.

So the motion is to proceed with authorizing the expanded use of the entire first floor

I couldn't have said it any better.

Thank you.

Is that what you wanted to do, Mr. Barton?

Say yes.

All right.

Roll call.

Mr. Barton.

Yes.

Mr. Reed.

Yes.

Mr. Barton.

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford.

Yes.

Mr. Barton.

Thank you, Jeffrey.

Thank you.

Great job.

You're talking about the FOBER and all of those requests, what?

You're talking about the EMS?

Basically, that was the question.

I think the motion would be to continue the business assistance program and authorize county staff to pursue the additional options of use of CARES Act funding that we just submitted this afternoon.

Yes, I like all of that motion.

I just want to add whole businesses can apply.

I did.

Okay.

Is that true?

I don't think that's true.

Mr. Barton?

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford?

Yes.

Mr. Reed?

Mr. Barton?

We wanted to bring this back to the Lord's consideration, including the package cost for $500 for full-time employees and $250 for part-time employees at a total cost of $44,405.63, and optionally

A thousand dollar bonus for full-time employees and $500 bonus for part-time.

That cost is $88,800.25 and when you blend in the cost to

Lou, the sheriff's department, who has done stuff to compliment the $1,000 and $500 more option they took across would go to just over $100,000.

Yeah, I'm sort of not doing this today, you know, like, maybe, certainly, we, I think that Grace Grawick, the County Police, certainly works very hard and deserves this consideration.

You might want to wait until January and consider this as to an actual budget decision so we can report, at December ratings, which are half the tax year, just, you know, coming in,

I'm sure that the Treasurer's Office is still backlogged with payments.

We have a better gauge for what the President hears today in January than we do today.

So we can bring this back, whatever the pleasure that the Lord will leave with.

I think it's worth thinking about.

I definitely agree with the January date.

I think that's the most appropriate.

Is that what you're saying?

I'm comfortable with it today.

I was going to say we're being better informed as to where the budget stays in January than we are today.

We try to follow other jurisdictions and we have a long spreadsheet around the world.

The initial, I think, 25, 26 local counties responded.

The initial responses were, I think, only Louisa and Green County were giving increases and those were the cost of living increases in local counties.

So those would be ongoing.

each fiscal year there wouldn't be one-time expenses.

It really was informative to get it all in page suspension.

As far as I know, the taxes would be taken out of it.

Maybe 80%?

That's my best guess.

It varies.

Yeah, some of them may be.

Yeah, I'm against the bonus.

It's not beneficial to the

I'm an employee because it's just a one-time deal.

I'd much rather wait and when we do the budget that we take that into consideration and put it into a raise that will build everything now.

You know, I understand the color.

The problem with bonuses, and it's always a dangerous thing, I know in my business it's not the same thing.

I don't like having employees getting used to getting bonuses.

I'm sure they would understand.

Our employees globally here would understand this is not an individual thing that you get yearly.

My main concern is more along the lines of what's going to happen in the next 30 days.

We have the opportunity to wait 30 days and see, you know, we can have a better answer on how much that dollar could be.

This is coming out of the careers, correct?

Well, there's one thing you've got to do.

You've got to do the search for it.

We did that.

Yeah, that's done.

Probably about half.

I'm hesitant in this.

And the other side of this is we have the world all losing jobs, you know, and we're going to be giving out bonuses on our side of things.

And I agree that there's definitely some critical places and the government employees are very critical in how hard they work.

It's just hard.

I think either of the proposals have merit.

I can only remember one other time that we did a budget.

What's been happening here?

It sucks.

We can prepare numbers if you want to consider a percentage increase at some point during the fiscal year.

A one percent above

What we plan on doing is what I was trying to say.

Well, I've tried to keep it pretty quiet.

I don't think anybody soaps up.

Okay, which board for the census?

Clark Candice really wants to step back.

They would just get the same percentage as everybody else part-time.

Yeah, and we're going to have to look at our hourly rate to make sure we're complying with the minimum wage increases that are going into effect, so we'll be looking at that to make sure we're in compliance.

Let's do a look at that next one.

Okay, thank you.

I was just going to say in terms of the sheriff's department bonus, the comp board gave us some guidance that said it needed to be as close to December 1st as possible, but could be given no later than December 31st.

So we consulted with the sheriff's department and they opted instead of doing a separate payroll close to December 1 to just go ahead and get it with the regular payroll at the end of the month.

We got the credit from the state to us

One percent hasn't been authorized.

That's what y'all said.

Wait until next month.

Maybe you have to do insurance, right?

No, we already did that.

That's all I wanted to talk about.

Okay, perfect.

So we don't have to do that.

Right.

There's a thing that we feel, if we some converted this...

I'll let you down, Nick.

I move that for Nelson County, the Board of Supervisors convene in closed session to discuss the following as permitted by Virginia Code Sections 2.2-3711, A.3, and 7.

A.3, discussion or consideration of the acquisition of real property for a public purpose or discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body.

I cannot be moved to get pursuant to the requirements of section 2.2-3712 of the Code of Virginia that the Nelson County Board of Supervisors certify.

And the closed session just concluded.

Second.

Yes.

Yes.

Mr. Fuller.

Yes.

Mr. Redford.

Yes.

Mr. Martin.

Yes.

All right.

Is there anything else coming before the board tonight?

Are they doing reports and all that?

We're done.

But I want to ask a question.

The school board, we talked about meeting with the school board, and they said that they would like to have a virtual meeting.

You called me up, I think, and I said, no, I don't want a virtual meeting.

And the thing that she said to us,

You know, sharing information and capital improvement in the future of the schools.

I'm ready to meet, but I'm not ready to do it perfectly.

As I told you at the front, I don't want to do it virtually, but I do want to meet with them.

I just handed y'all out the health department's current metric that was just received today.

We just went to the

First page, you'll see at the bottom, you'll see the seven caseloads a bit on the rise, 26 new cases from the 30th of November to the 7th, and our percentage volume on the rollback of our seven-day average is almost 15%.

And the report shows the metrics and information statewide, and as you'll see when you have a chance to look at this,

that the entire state has seen an uptick in the virus.

And we've had a couple staff who've been diagnosed with the virus and a third who's actually leaving the county reported today that they have been impacted by the virus.

So basically we discuss it and the kidney is

Typically following up with memos to respect everybody telling them this or that.

We don't mention employees' names, but just it sort of helps to assuage people's concerns when we tell them things about this.

We've had another incident saying here's where we are and this is what we're doing about it.

I reported on, we reported on the Caris Act funding this afternoon.

The tunnel will be down to either this week, tomorrow or during the weekend, completing this additional surface treating of the Western Trail and closing out the project.

We're not doing it whatsoever until the spring and just closing out the project.

VDOT wants the project to be over.

So I don't think the contractor is going to do it because it's weather permitting and the temperature is not right.

We can't do it.

So it's more probable that we're just going to close out the project and probably rebuild as just the county in the spring.

No, but the county would have to incur the entire expense with maybe less than what we would incur right now.

And as you all probably have heard about this on the media attention that when we opened up the trail, I think the weekend of the 21st, next weekend, several thousand people decided to converge on the county and hike the trail.

Well, I think Claire said more like 6,000

I had reported 8,500 but there must be something wrong with the counter.

Thousands of people, we had photos, one of the issues was people just parked anywhere and everywhere and that was an issue that we dealt with last week.

I think it's the weather and the excitement is sort of over.

Which I was going to say that one too.

Trado, 500 feet or whatever.

The first is a process we like to assess that's good.

The entire river water system, the system is operational, but the tank, the elevated tank is not down.

We're processing a change order for that.

And one of the things that has to be done is some additional valve work to ensure the heritage center has a constant flow of water.

Because the way that has been done,

is the tank had to stay in place to ensure they hadn't supplied the water.

But I just saw the data from the engineers and the chain tours being processed and they said, yeah, that has to happen.

And then hopefully by the next board meeting, approximately, that'll be over.

And it's quickly come off by the chip.

I haven't read Mr. Hunter's email, but he sent him an email saying they took him down.

So that was very appreciative.

General Reassessment is still in process.

The assessors are actually working in the bridge room.

So that's begun.

Piney River water system is sort of back and forth.

We're going to send that contract out tomorrow to refurbish the Simcoe pump station on

The budget for next year is still just an initial development.

As I mentioned earlier, the draft audits that we're seeing, we're looking at any comments of Candice and some comments to the auditors.

Hopefully David Foley may be scheduled to present in January because they're going to

give it to us hopefully this month, final copy.

I don't think, just a little bit I looked at it, not really, not a great expert at it, didn't have that much experience.

Another good year, basically, yeah.

And if I may, you know, Mr. Waterfield, what he reports to the board, I don't have any recollection of him ever contacting my office about that property he keeps bringing up.

Well, if I may, the history of that, as I recall, is that he didn't mention Jennifer Welcher, who made the appearance in the office, and I know Jennifer.

She did call me a few years ago and say, warehouse, there's a room to clean that property up, but the county will help them.

by the way of the tipping fee if they clean it all up.

So we said absolutely clean it all up and they did.

Paul Truslow just went down there last week at my request and said it's still clean.

There's maybe a tiny bit of trash but that's not... Where?

Where?

It's somewhere off...

I'm not sure.

I can attest to what I never heard anybody, particularly him, say.

There's this toxins laced up on this property down there.

Every day.

You want me to send them to you?

I get two at 6 a.m. every morning.

I just want to be the best friend of the day.

It's number one.

We're ready to adjourn for that.

What do you think about this Mr. Carter?

The suggestion that Mr. Carter made is that we

They're in January.

We need to see plans first before we do that.

Well, it's not budget.

Budget is not what we want to do.

We need to acknowledge their priorities in that meeting.

Maybe wait a little bit until we have a better handle on next year's budget so you have insight into that.

I think one of the things that discuss the features of this course, the thing that people like to point out is about whether to consolidate or not.

I mean, are you looking for this?

Let's see if I can answer that.

Okay, will you?

So the facts will be, as it was in that report, is the school enrollments continue to decline, decline to further.

Rockfish, for example, has less than 258 students over there.

Potential savings for consolidation, potentially using Todd River as a facility, maybe expansion, maybe not.

could be subject to the study of as much as $6 million that would come back to the county.

And then you have the ability to have no state relationship.

County offices.

Isn't this what you would have a strategic planning session on?

Is that your priority, to do the planning?

Yeah.

I'm sorry?

Have we given the approval to do the setting?

No.

But you may have other priorities as Mr. Reed was saying.

I can see the two chapter secrets and the nemesis but the board needs to have your priorities.

It can't just be always about the schools.

I'd like to feed this board and say okay we want to do this today.

And I believe that you believe that, and I believe that that's your opinion, but it's not the entire board's opinion.

Right, well, you know, but it's not that I'm laying out an opinion.

There's lots of, you know, evidence that there was somebody that people didn't add anything to this study that you're talking about doing.

I don't think we ever did offer this stuff.

Because we wanted to talk to that school board.

We wanted to talk to the school board.

Well, I wanted to have more information on my side before your side.

What side?

The school board, before we do that, because if they're not going to approve of it, if they're adamantly opposed to it, it would be really good to hear from the school board, not the school board, from the superintendent's school board.

But you're asking their opinion on something that you're not going to have the full opinion on.

Well, yeah, they have an opinion.

They don't want to close anything.

But that was also the same opinion back when they had the all-in-one situation.

But we need to show them, OK, here's what's happening to your money from the state.

But we need to do it and get it together in light of it.

No, it's not.

But light it or not, we need to hear what they are projecting.

And we should get that.

And then we can say, well, this is what we're doing.

You were looking for a multiple journey, right?

I don't have any correspondents.

I think we should set a plan for us meeting with people.

I think we should, you know, the school board has proposed words and you said yes, we have to meet in person, but we should do it as soon as it is comfortable.

I don't think December is going to be good, but I think to say it would be possible, it's possible for us to meet them before our next person provides.

Yeah, our next supervisor's meeting is in January.

It would be possible to meet with them before that.

It would be possible to set a date sometime around there.

We could do a Google poll that say, you know, we're open to meeting sometime here, schedule's permitted.

Let's see what we can do.

That's what I would like to do.

And I like to set up some kind of a process where they have a certain amount of time to do the presentations they want to do.

We have enough time to talk about what our priorities are, and then we can spend time just talking about it.

And then no decisions are going to be made.

We're just saying what's on our minds.

We're getting together.

The next time we get together, we'll be talking budget.

But we're going to be taking steps

Yes.

Mr. Reed?

No.

Mr. Rutherford?

Yes.

Mr. Barnum?

Yes.

Mr. Barnum?

Yes.

You don't want to believe him?

I want us to be able to put something in process that we can talk about.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It has to be ready to roll.

I'll see you all later.

Thank you for the award.

Which award?

I think you're going to see me later.

You already see it.