Planning District Commission Meeting   4/10/2025

Anyone who will bring the paperwork to me and the TJPDC to order.

Hold on.

Yes.

Mr. Gallaway, Mr. Pruitt.

Here.

Chair Ryan.

Here.

Chairman Smith.

Here.

Mr. Lewisby.

Here.

Mr. Higgins.

Here.

Mr. Barlow.

Mr. Manning Woodward, we will let him speak.

Yes.

Mr.

Chair, next would be to... Could we have a motion for electronic participation for Mr. Green?

Okay.

Second, Mr. Green.

All right, all those in favor?

Very well.

You need to know where he is.

Is that me?

Okay.

Yes, I had a medical procedure today.

Well, thank you.

Excellent.

OK, we will now move on to our presentation.

Do we have any comments from the public?

Sorry, there's only two minutes.

Would anybody like to hear from the public?

No?

Seeing none, we will move on to presentations.

I'm serious on the city.

Let's say you can visit.

Yeah, at that time.

Thank you.

And it's okay if you have a right.

So that banner goes away, too.

Full screen show.

Are you done?

We're all starting there.

That's it.

I'll advance your slides.

Okay.

Just let me know when you're ready.

All right.

Good evening, Mr.

Chair, members of the commission.

This is your bi-annual update on the activities of the Regional Cigarette Taxation Board.

TJPDC serves as the administrative board over three years now.

Just kind of a recap of how it works.

The board was established in October of 2021.

You can see there a listing of the members.

We are up to 10 member jurisdictions now.

Jurisdictions within the TJPDC boundaries and six other boundaries outside of our borders.

Local taxes became effective in January of 2022, which really started our day-to-day work that we did.

We were the contractor, the administrator, as I said, for the board.

We worked with approximately 25 equipment groups.

Really, Gretchen worked out how they worked on a daily basis.

But the distributors submit continuing reports,

who else on their sales of cigarettes, Michael Ehrlich from the community of detail, their clients that they serve, and then they're also preventing revenue that is collected from the sale of those cigarettes back to us and then we turn that around to the member jurisdictions.

So as I said, you get EDC tracks and reconciles the revenues, the traffic tax sold, the purchases of stamps by distributors from the State Department of Taxation,

And then again, on a monthly basis, we're turning the money that we receive from the distributors around back to the localities that are members of the board, minus our administrative expenses and a minus or 2% discount that the distributors get to take forward for their trouble.

Next slide, please.

So to give you an idea of some of the most recent numbers that we have,

To share with you with regards to the revenues that are generated by the sales of cigarettes in the region, January revenue was a little over $260,000.

I can see there for the first six months of the current fiscal year, every December, about 1.7 million, so already close to $2 million for the first seven months of the fiscal year.

And that's all under the five million pack of cigarettes that have been sold.

And I've been watching our administrative costs from the time we spent setting up and ending some of the initial days, getting things up and running.

And those administrative costs are really coming down.

So that 66,000 is what we are today.

But we're down to about $9,000 a month when we look at that.

You know, that against the revenue that's being taken in, it's about a 4%.

So I think that's a pretty, pretty low-cost, like, administrative study that's leading us to enter into the program.

Overall, and we'll get into some of this in the upcoming slides, across the region, across the tenderization, tax sold and the revenues are continuing on a slightly downward trend.

We've been seeing that since the implementation of the taxes in the localities, which I think

That's what folks are looking for to reduce the need for the prevalence of COVID-19.

And again there I mentioned the expenses fluctuating about $9,500 per month, and again those expenses are spread monthly across the participating jurisdictions.

Next slide.

All right, so we'll go look at some of the numbers and some of these neat graphs that Gretchen has put together.

Just a graphical representation of the pack sold between July and January across three fiscal years.

So again, we started in January of 22.

So you can see what those numbers look like for each of those seven months.

In regard to the blue light is this feeder 23, the orange 24, and the green is 75.

So we'll kind of look at it sideways, and again, you can see that things are

Overall in the data.

Just to give you a better portrayal of the current fiscal year in terms of the number of packs sold.

This is a graph that shows all of the jurisdictions and the number of packs of cigarettes that have been sold.

You can see Augusta County continues to be the largest seller.

You couple them with Albemarle and you get about half of the sales just with those two jurisdictions.

and then coming to our bounds is the, you know, our TJPDC jurisdictions, Charlottesville, Fluvanna, and Greene, and then moving on up from USA to eight or nine o'clock on the other jurisdictions that are one of them.

Next slide, please.

Moving back to a kind of across three fiscal years comparison, which is the applications of the revenues that have been collected.

This is going to be the net that goes out to the jurisdictions, again,

and subtracting out our expenses in that dealer discount.

So for that July to January of each of those three fiscal years, I think you could more easily see how that downward trend in revenue is occurring.

You'll notice a couple of exceptions to that.

Augusta County jumps way up in the current fiscal year.

That's because they increased their tax effective July 1 of last year from 15 cents to 30 cents per pack.

You'll also see with Orange County, a big jump up there.

Beginning July 1 of, I don't know, maybe 23, they increased the tax from 12 cents per pack all the way up to 40 cents per pack.

So a little bit different picture there.

Fluvanna, they seem to be kind of our even Keough County.

Seems like that their pack sold and their revenue stopped fluctuating a little bit.

Wait till the Wawa comes in.

There you go.

Anecdotally,

I've been saying this for a couple of years, if you've got a Wawa on your sheets, that's what you sell.

And we saw with Greene County, when the sheets closed for several months.

Next slide.

And then this is just the current fiscal year, seven months allocation.

Again, even though Augusta County is our top seller in terms of the number of packs,

because they do have a 30 cent rate as opposed to a 40 cent rate, their revenue is not as high as Albemarle's and Bloom.

Next slide, please.

All right, so just a couple of things as far as the board and some of their activities.

You may have seen on the charts a town with Mount Crawford.

They are the newest member of the National Cigarettes Hospital Board.

They joined effective January 1.

We've got another jurisdiction that we just need to request from to join our board that the board will actually take up its next meeting probably this month.

Current chair of the board is Jennifer Wetzel.

She's deputy county administrator in Augusta County.

Again, our next meeting is actually April 21st.

One of the action items we're going to have at that meeting is every year in the spring, the board is required to approve

a budget number that is recommended as part of the TJPDC budget that you would consider.

And so we're anticipating that there's going to be everything with the pass through expenses and everything about $3.4 million as far as that budget.

I guess since I was here six months ago, the board has approved some changes to policy on what the members are required to do when they join the board.

There are some upfront expenses that they pay

based on the percentage of their population in the jurisdiction as it relates to the population of the board's region as a whole.

We every year ask the distributors to register with us on a calendar year basis.

They are issued a permit, a permit number that stood for one year.

So we completed that process shortly after the beginning of the calendar year.

And again, it's about 25 distributors that will be

are working with them.

And then the board has been talking some, and I don't know if I had presented this to you before, there's supposedly a new product that's going to be coming to the United States at some point this year.

It's over in Europe right now, and it's referred to as a Do Not Burn product.

Instead of there being an igniting of a cigarette, this is a smaller cigarette that gets inserted into a little device, and then the tobacco is actually heated.

There was legislation not this past session but in 2024 to address this coming of the new product and how it will be handled.

And it appears that these products will fall under the definition of a cigarette.

So should they show up and should there be, you know, they're showing up in retailers, I have to really look and see if that's something that's taking any additional action on the local level.

It would be subject to taxation if we started a state, current state law.

Next slide please.

Yes sir, you're right.

I think I just got one more.

All right, well, the last slide, I was just going to talk a little bit, and these slides are in your packet, but just a little bit on compliance.

We have a compliance agent who works on a product that makes and sits out in the field, working every day with retailers to make sure they have properly stamped cigarettes that they have for sale.

Those are very distinct.

BRCTD, Orange Stamp, that actually covers the state tax of 60 cents per pack, as well as the tax for any jurisdiction in this region.

He does a great job working with retailers who may be out of compliance to get them to be compliant in a cooperative way.

And so far, we have not had to

Sees any products for getting out of compliance because the work they do is going to get them in compliance.

We do have procedures in place and process in place should we make seizures because then the retailer would have an option to appeal a seizure of that product.

We got about 250-some retailers across the 10 jurisdictions that we're working with.

over maybe over a thousand square miles across that area as well.

It's a large territory to cover.

And then, you know, as far as compliance on the distributor side, they have a process in place that if like today is the 10th of the month, the distributors are required by the 10th of the month to submit their reports of sales and stamp use, as well as their revenues for the previous month's two months.

So if they are late, we don't have their information post-Mark 2 by today, if they're sending through the mail, they get a late notice.

If they're late a second month in a row, then we assess a 10% penalty.

And if there's a third incident on the road, then the distributor would be put on probation.

Again, I put knock on wood because we have

Yet to have to assess a 10% penalty and put in the funding for the issue.

So I think, again, Gretchen deals with this, and she does a very good job of trying to cooperatively help people to make sure that we get the reports in on time, like today, when she sent an email or two to folks to say, hey, the reports are due today.

So I think it's a pretty smooth running program.

Got it.

10 jurisdictions, maybe 11, you know, very soon.

And it seems to run well.

We don't hear concerns from board, concerns from localities about anything that seems to be going on out there.

There are localities with the cigarettes or anything related to the work that we're given.

Yeah, so seeing the town crosser joining the board made me realize I

So in your case in the town of Scottsville, you know, how you had a cigarette tax.

So, you know, that prevails in the town of Scottsville.

They could also let Albemarle's tax be part of the tax on cigarettes in Scottsville, but that would be an action that they could take if they wanted to.

Just out of curiosity, what is the full value of this tax rate?

Yeah, most of the reporting, when the law was written, when this was passed, students already had the authority to levy cigarette tax.

If anybody is, I believe January the 1, the year they passed the law, they were frozen.

So Charlottesville, they were 55 cents per pack.

There is an interesting thing.

So I was talking to one of my, because we were, as part of our budget, of course, you know, we were basically a tight budget.

Stat briefed us on, here's every local tax you have, and here's me showing how you have no authority in any of them, except for these ones that you're looking, right?

They didn't actually brief us on the cigarette tax, but one of my peers on the board said, well, we already know the cigarette tax, because that's set by a state that's controlled by the board, we can't do anything about it.

To which I said, I don't think that's true.

My understanding is that we still control the tax rate, there's just a desire to walk and walk with the surrounding localities.

So I first want to make sure I correct them, right?

Like I, we can change it if we want.

It's just, if you're not in 40, then you're kind of screwing yourself or screwing your name.

So 40 is the cap that is imposed by the state.

Because Charlottesville, it's kind of like their grandfather then.

They can't go up.

Very well.

Thank you.

I am pleased to introduce in-person.

You guys met her virtually before, but I'm pleased to introduce some in-person.

Taylor Jenkins, running director of transportation.

Hi everyone.

Today I'm going to talk to you all about the MPO's Unified Planning Work Program, which is essentially the MPO's operating budget that identifies all of our class programs this year.

So next fiscal year, on the end of July 1, the CPWP will identify and outline all of the planning activities that the MPO staff will be building in the next fiscal year.

This is the MPO's budget and work plan, and so that includes staff salaries, that includes professional development, travel, and software.

All of those things are part of the MPO's operating budget that are captured in this work plan.

It also identifies the major regional priorities and deliverables.

So ideally you should be able to look at this work plan and identify the work that's happening in the region as our staff would be involved in that through their work.

Federal law requires that the MPL planning process addresses 10 specific planning factors.

So all of our work is centered on these here that you see on the screen, including safety, maintenance, travel and tourism, environmental quality, and just to name a few of them.

And in addition to those, the last long-range transportation plan that the NPO conducted in fiscal year 24 when it was adopted had an extensive public engagement process with the community and identified additional framework lenses for our work that weren't already captured in the UPWP.

So the ones that you see in blue on the screen are the ones that we recommend adding to the UPWP just to bring it in line with our long-range transportation plan and the community vision for the transportation work.

Two federal agencies primarily fund the MPO's planning activities, Federal Highway Administration, that money is administered through VDOT, and the Federal Transit Administration for transit activities that is administered through DRPC.

VDOT also receives state planning funds from FHWA to support the MPO's work, and so you will see that also reflected on the budget.

That's interesting.

Next slide.

So this is the overall budget for the fiscal year 26 work program broken out by the funding source.

And so you see the 80% federal, state, and local, and there's also fiscal year 24 rollover dollars that are captured in this budget as well.

Anything that you see in red is there because we do not have our final numbers yet from our state and federal partners, unfortunately.

So we have most of our budget from VDOT, but we do not have their state planning and research budget yet, and we also do not have

the FTA-5303 funding allocations yet, but that should be coming shortly, hopefully in the next week or two.

This is the UPWP funding by program task.

So there are three different tasks that are captured in the UPWP, including program administration, well-range transportation planning, and short-range planning.

A handful of the administrative changes that we made for this UPWP

We specifically removed line item budgets from the document to better align with other practices of other MPOs in the state.

So we were one of the only ones that continued to break every single activity down by subtasks, which created a really heavy administrative burden on our staff anytime one of those might have fluctuated a bit.

We removed those from the document.

We increased our budget allocation to program administration to 25% this year.

to make sure we are adequately capturing the amount of time that it takes to staff committees and things like that.

We have typically underestimated that in the past, but we wanted to bump that up, just go around.

And we also reduced our budget allocation to long-range transportation planning, just because we're not in a long-range transportation plan here.

We're not updating that plan, so it makes sense that more of our money would be in that short-range plan.

And the final administrative change that we made in this document, just tweaking some of the names, task one was changed from administration to program administration, and task three was updated to include local, state, and federal agency assistance to make sure we captured that accurately.

These are the subtasks that are included in the UPWP.

The only thing that's not in the document is the actual budgets.

But we are still maintaining the line item budgets internally to make sure we can track the amount of effort that our staff are putting into the tasks that they're doing to make sure we're still aiming and hitting where we wanted to hit the lead.

So for programs and administration, that includes staffing committees, any reporting and compliance requirements, updating our plans for public outreach, Title VI, and then that professional development line is also in there.

For long-range transportation planning, that covers subtasks such as our comprehensive safety action plan that we're carrying over into the next fiscal year that should be finishing up by about mid-fiscal year 2026.

Updating our travel demand model, starting a scope for the travel demand management study, DRPT is updating their coordinated human services mobility plan and our staff will be participating in that update, and then any minor things that happen with the long-range transportation plan.

One item that is not currently captured on the screen right now, it has been an update since this was put together, is the three-notch trail.

So that is one thing that is captured under tax sheet also, which is not on the screen right now, but that is in the document.

Task three for short-range transportation planning.

This is our largest percent of the budget for next fiscal year.

That includes an update to our transportation improvement program, or the TIP, and also participating in a STIP update with the state.

That's also happening next fiscal year.

Any of that technical assistance to a region for things like smart scale applications, participating in project pipeline studies, STARR studies, and also doing our annual performance target updates.

And we have a contingency line at the bottom just to be able to capture if someone starts

One of those specialty studies that maybe we didn't know about when we first wrote the UPWP that our staff need to still participate and offer support for those.

All right, and then where we are as far as our approval timeline, we are preparing to take the final draft of the UPWP to our committees starting next week.

So that kicked off last month.

I believe we had our first meeting of the Master Plan Technical Committee.

So the 24 month process has started.

Taylor, good presentation.

I was just wondering, for those of us in the rural counties, you know, the

Street Smart Program.

Smart Scale?

No, not Smart Scale.

Safe Streets.

Safe Streets often seems more performative than substantive.

So the same streets and roads for all program actually has two buckets to it.

And so right now we have a grant under the planning and demonstration activity sort of side of that federal program.

There's also an implementation side.

And so the purpose of us putting the faction plan together is to encourage and support the local jurisdictions and doing applications for the projects that we identified in the plan.

So the rural counties have to be proactive in putting forth entities for amelioration by the safe street safe.

I'm blanking on the name again.

They would have to be the lead applicant.

We would not be able to apply on behalf of a local jurisdiction for them to be recipients of the funding.

We're involved in the planning process and then the staff from local jurisdictions have been on the state board committee and have been working through the plan with us to make sure that it's identifying your priorities are coming to all of your governing boards within the next month.

We were just recently at Nelson for the first round.

and then anything that jurisdiction applies for implementation funding for has to be in that plan.

Mr. Woodward, do you have any questions?

The only other thing that I would add, sorry to interrupt, is that program admin, I think it's important to note that we did increase the amount of funding going to program admin, but part of that was to capture, as you guys know, the PDC's indirect cost rate has been coming down because we are doing deep dive into what programs we will reimburse us for versus having those be administrative expenses.

And so the MPO funding, it is eligible for us to have laptops if that person is primarily 100% working for the MPO.

Technology, our GIS software, parts of our audit, as long as it is directly related to work with the MPO, it's reimbursable under that.

So we had to increase that admin bucket, but cover some of those charges that we were covering administratively as an organization.

Thank you, Ms. Jackson.

Next, we have a consent agenda.

Are there any changes to the consent agenda?

If not, may I have a motion to approve the consent agenda presented?

Okay, all in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Alright, on to the whole business.

We have none.

And I'll do a quick introduction.

As you guys well know, we contracted with Gallagher to complete this study.

We've been working with them very closely and then also meeting with the finance executive committee to seek their direction and get feedback and get recommendations on implementation of recommendations of group study.

So Sherry is here to present the full study findings, as well as several of the options that were considered.

And can you all hear me OK?

Yes, we can.

Okay.

So thank you for having me tonight.

And we're going to review sort of the results of the compensation study and some recommended option for implementation of a revised salary structure.

So to start with, we like to talk about our methodology first.

And what we do is when we're determining which positions to go out to the market with, we look at the current jobs that you have.

You have 19 at the Planning District Commission, so we did go out to the market for all 19.

However, what we do is make sure that they are representative across a significant portion of your employee population.

It represents all levels.

across the organization as well and all functional areas that are within the commission.

And also positions that are difficult to recoup for or high turnover exists and again common in the marketplace.

And again, since the planning commission has 19 jobs, we did go out to the market to look for data on all 19.

One of the first steps we took was to conduct a custom survey.

And 25 of your comparable organizations were asked to participate.

We sent out an email with a link to that survey information.

Nine organizations responded.

It's about a 36% response rate.

That is pretty typical for what we're seeing right now, especially around the time we launched it where organizations were going into budget.

A budget season.

So on the screen you can see the cities, counties, and commissions that were asked to participate.

And those with an asterisk next to their name were the ones that did send in data for us to be able to aggregate.

We also sent it out to housing development organizations, Department of Transportation, and then other industries as well.

Once we send out the custom survey, the next step we take is we look at published survey sources that we have available to us here at Gallagher.

We use three of the largest published survey sources, CompData, Mercer, and Willis Towers Watson.

They're conducted by reputable salary firms.

They're on an annual basis.

So they are third party firms.

The data is not self-reported.

So we do not use sites such as Glassdoor or Salary.com because we do not know how they collect the data.

And typically they'll collect the data based on titles instead of looking at the roles and minimum qualifications.

So we make sure that when we go out to collect the data that it is from a reputable firm and that

As you've described your role, when we look at how the survey sources describe that role and the minimum requirements for the role, there's at least an 80% match in duties and minimum qualifications.

And for the custom survey, we also at Gallagher have to follow the same Federal Trade Commission guidelines that these three largest survey firms have to follow as well, where we have to have at least five matches per title.

in order to aggregate that data back to you for results.

Once we've collected all of that data, we do have effective dates and we age the survey date forward to a common effective date.

Since survey data is typically collected in the beginning of a year and then the results are not available until typically the fall,

We make sure that we age that forward to a common date.

And we did that to compare your salaries to March 1st, 2025.

and we use the World at Work prevailing market trends.

So World at Work is a well-known HR professional organization that conducts a survey that asks organizations what they move their base pay salaries by and what they move their salary structures or salary ranges forward by.

So World at Work and then they break it up by state and industry.

So we looked at public sector in the state of Virginia.

So actual salaries moved by 2%

For the year and salary ranges move by 2.7.

After that, for the data that we collect, both in the published survey sources and in the custom survey sources, we geographically adjust all that data to Charlottesville, Virginia, so that it is we are comparing apples to apples on base salary.

Now, we do that by the cost of labor, because it does refer to the difference in pay or the labor market.

from one job from one location to another.

And then we run it through an additional outlier analysis to determine if the matches we made were appropriate.

So anything outside of about a two standard deviation, we'll revisit those matches to make sure they're appropriate.

and if we think after revisiting the scope of work, the minimum qualifications and what we've matched according to the salary surveys and also the custom and we go back and ask questions on the custom if we find something outside of that two standard deviations, we may choose to include it if we do think it's appropriate or we exclude it if we really think it's not an appropriate match.

So once we do that, we compare your actual base pay salaries to that market data.

A positive figure will indicate that you pay above market.

A negative figure will indicate that you pay below market.

And then we sort of put it through these guidelines of whether you're highly competitive against the market, about plus or minus 5%, all the way to significant misalignment or plus or minus 15% above or below market.

Jobs that have that significant misalignment could be for different factors.

It's not necessarily, not that the matches were bad.

It's factors, it could be performance, turnover, longevity in the role, any kind of job change that would have affected it.

So there's very different reasons why a position can look like there's significant misalignment.

So overall,

The commission looked about 12% below the middle of the market.

So that's a 50th percentile of the custom market.

So when we went out to those agencies that you saw on the earlier screens, you're about 12% below that middle of that market.

And then when we combine that with the published survey data overall, looking at all those salaries, the commission's about 15% below the middle of that market.

When you're looking at your current salary ranges compared to the salary ranges that are in both the published survey sources and the custom, you can see that there's significant misalignment at the midpoint of your ranges as compared to both the custom and the overall when it's combined with the published as well.

The next couple of slides and we'll just go through these real quickly just shows by title

How it fared against, how your titles fared against the market and sort of where you're aligned against both the 25th, or the 25th percentile, excuse me, the middle of the market, which is that median value, and then the 75th percentile of the market.

And typically someone who is established in their role, somewhere around probably eight to nine years of experience in their role,

should be at that market median value and should be competitive with the market.

That's sort of how, when you think about it and when you think about where someone should be against market, that's a pretty standard place after about eight, nine years in their role.

And we really quickly showed, this was the data, again, that we received back from the custom survey market

We followed the Federal Trade Commission guidelines on at least five or more matches per title.

And so we did get a little bit of return on that data, but not much.

So the next step after we gather all this data and talk about where the commission would like to be compared to against the market and how competitive you would like to be with being able to recruit and retain top talent, we move into the salary structure development.

And here we came, we have three options to begin with of how we developed to start talking about where the commission would like to be.

Option one,

The structure was developed using the base pay salary data from the surveys at the combined market using the 50th percentile, sort of that middle of that market, that median, with range widths, you know, from your minimum to maximum, about 35% off-wide and weighted for, you have multi, a couple of roles that are multifaceted.

And so we weighted those roles based on the percent time they spent on each of those sort of duties under those roles.

Option 2 was developing a structure using the same criteria but around the 75th percentile of the market where you would be leading the market at that option number 2.

Option 3A

is where we looked at the market data and to be competitive and maybe lead the market just slightly in order to recruit and retain your top talent is we found a place in the middle of the 50th and 75th percentile.

And again, making the salary ranges about 35% wide and weighted for those multi-world positions.

And once we looked at all that data, and again,

talked to the finance committee.

We came up with an option 3B, we like to call it.

It is a structure developed between the 50th and 75th of the structure.

But we started looking at career paths within the commission and thinking about how long someone would stay in a role.

And so we sort of looked at the salary range widths and brought some of them into about 25% knowing they would only stay in the role two, three years and then move on to their next step.

And then all the way out to 50% wide where someone may stay for an entire career within that position.

And it gives them room to grow from minimum to midpoint through to the maximum.

And of course, these roles are weighted for those multi-role positions again.

Now when we talk about implementing and how do you implement these options and how do you level set your employees within it, we base it on the following strategy.

One, that no pay cuts will occur.

So if someone's within a range, in the correct range of the position or beyond that range, we say, great, keep on moving forward.

We never suggest pay cuts.

We also go on the assumption that employees will be paid within the new salary range, meaning no one will be paid below the minimum of that

New salary range.

Then the first go around, we assumed a one and a half percent year increase for time and seat.

It's how long someone's been in their current role at the commission.

And again, this was subject to change based on the review.

We also assumed some waiting for prior experience outside of the commission when you were recruiting that person in.

And the first implementation options for options 1, 2, and 3A, we had assumed about 25% for transferable skills, 50% for prior relevant experience in that role, and then 60% for time in the organization in another role.

If they started their time at the commission as a Planner 1 and now they're a Planner 3, we did give some weight to that being as an internal role.

Then to cost this out, the first cost we look at is to bring to minimum to make sure no one is below the minimum of that range.

And then we start using the weighting for the prior experience and the time and seat adjustments of that one and a half percent in the weightings for prior experience.

And we bring that all together for a cost.

So on this slide, you'll see the implementation costs using the additional experience years included.

For option one, it was about $254,000.

Now these are one year implementation costs.

Option two is about $438,000, just under that.

And option three was about $344,000.

So when we came and went back and revisited for option 3B, the commission looked at

sort of a different weighting and they assumed, decided to assume a 2.25% for every year they've been in their current time and seat and also the first and then put in a 3% COLA adjustment first and then to see what the cost would look like and then went back to the weighting of prior experience where they weighted at 10% for prior transferable skills and prior relevant experience and 15% time

for the time and organization in another role.

And again, same costing options of bringing to minimum and then bring to position and range with that time and seat and additional years of experience adjustments.

And making those adjustments, the overall cost to use have the combined salary ranges between the 50th and 75th percent of the market with the range widths a little bit adjusted for the career paths and weighted for the multi-role positions.

and all of those adjustments, the total cost for a one year implementation is about $268,000.

Here's what that structure would look like upon acceptance of this salary structure and the implementation plan.

Each title, each role would have their own individual salary range based on that market.

and again waited for the multi world positions.

There is an additional part of the presentation that goes into the survey responses that we got related to the rest of the compensation that we offer outside of base salary.

I'm wondering if you couldn't, at least for my benefit, perhaps that of the other commissioners, work up the tables on slides 10 and 11 to incorporate

Yes, it would.

That'd be great.

And then you could just indicate what the sample size is for each of those entries.

Okay.

Earlier in the presentation, you mentioned 25.

That's our customers.

That's the survey that we sent out to our competitors, other plant and district commissions, other local governments.

That is not the market data.

OK.

So yeah, some clarification about sample size for each of the benchmark positions.

OK. No questions.

Are you ready for the rest?

Okay, sure.

So on the screen, so the next part of this is we did ask some benefits pay questions, leave, how much leave time to see how comparable your organization was.

And these are the nine organizations that answered our survey, both for salary and the benefits questions.

So here, this is sort of we grab some organizational data to make sure to sort of look at size.

And we looked at your annual payroll operating expenses, you do have pass through revenue and the annual gross revenue, the number of sort of median number of full time employees that are work more than 30 hours and then less than 30 hours.

The next question we asked was about base salary increases for executive and management positions to see how comparable you were with these organizations.

And as you can see, the median cost of living for the other organizations was 3%, and the planning commission was about 3.2%.

So just slightly more than everyone else was great.

Merit, other organizations gave out a 2.5%.

and then also internal and equity market adjustments.

They were not done by these other nine organizations, but the planning commission did do a 2.6% adjustment effective most recently of July 1st of 2024.

And then we broke it up between into exempt and non-exempt and it showed a relatively the same results.

COLA adjustments were about 3% merit, 2.5% for the other organizations.

and the Planning Commission at 3.2% and with the internal equity market adjustments around 2.4% and I believe it was 1.2% for non-exempt, 1.27%.

So what we also asked was what other type of salary structures these other organizations use?

and did they have established pay structures for the executive management exempt and non-exempt aid organizations did have established pay structures and only one organization did not for any of the groupings.

And the red outline just real quickly shows how Thomas, the planning commission, what their answer was as well.

So the type of pay structure, as you can see, five organizations for executive and management do have open ranges.

And then five of those organizations also, they have the open, for exempt, they also have the open ranges, excuse me.

And for non-exempt, four have open ranges and three had pay grades with steps.

So most organizations are going with open ranges.

Here we asked about variable pay programs, maybe annual bonuses, performance bonuses, incentive pay.

Five organizations do offer some type of variable pay and four did not.

Here we asked how organizations approach their paid time off for personal vacation leave

You know, did they have separate banks of time or did they combine them all together?

Eight organizations said that they had separate days for vacation, sick and personal and two does a combined bank of time.

Here, does the organization's differentiate league based on employees length of service?

And all 10 organizations said yes.

So for the purpose of determining employees' annual leave allotment, does your organization give credit for an employee's experience outside of the organization?

The majority said no, but three does give credit to their employees for relevant experience when they're trying to determine how much annual leave they get.

Overall, then we asked them how much sort of median number of days did they get for the different types of leave from and during different time periods of service.

So for zero to four years, the Planning Commission is comparable on vacation leave with 12 days sick leave.

You are more competitive at 15 days and bereavement and paid holidays were the same as the other organizations.

for five to nine years, comparable on vacation leave, bereavement leave and paid holiday.

And again, you're more competitive, you give more sick time leave than the other organizations.

For 10 to 14 years, again, comparable vacation, bereavement paid and competitive, more competitive on your sick leave.

15 to 19,

This is where we started to see a little bit of difference.

Again, more competitive on your sick leave and the same for bereavement and paid holidays.

In vacation, the other organizations start to give a little bit more vacation time.

Same for 20 or more years, a little bit more vacation time with your compared organizations.

You do give still continue to give more sick time and then competitive with bereavement and paid holidays.

So this asked if your organization allows employees to carry over or bank or donate unused leave time.

Eight of the organizations do allow carry over.

Only one organization did allow for bank time.

The Planning Commission does not.

And six organizations along with the Planning Commission does allow donation to other employees for if they have some time left over.

I'm sorry, no, you do not allow, sorry, I read that chart wrong.

I apologize.

Three, do allow their employees to donate time.

Here for retirement, is your organization a Virginia retirement system entity?

Entity, excuse me.

Six said yes, and four are not part of the VRS.

We then look to see how competitive premiums are for medical, dental and vision costs.

As you can see, employee only, you're competitive with others in this area.

For employee plus one, you're still relatively competitive.

And with employee plus family, median monthly cost for employees does go up a little bit higher for the planning commission.

A little over $1200 where the other computer organizations are around $945.

And then the median annual out-of-pocket maximum, the other organizations are around $7,000 where the planning commission is about $10,000.

Here, does your organization contribute to an HSA or an HRA?

Four organizations do not like the Planning Commission and two do contribute to an employee's HSA or HRA.

Then we asked a question about flexible work.

Does your organization offer remote work, hybrid, sabbaticals, compensatory leave?

Nine organizations, all nine organizations said no to 100% remote work.

Nine said yes to a hybrid model.

Five allow for flexible work arrangements.

The majority of the organizations, eight do not allow for sabbaticals and seven also do not grant compensatory leave.

If there's any questions on that, those were the questions that went out in the custom survey.

Sometimes online organizations answered the question and sometimes they did not.

I do have a question that, and this may be, this may not be extracted in a way that's meaningful, but it looks like, can we go back to the chart showing

I guess median, what are we looking at?

The pay practice and benefits summary by the organization data and then looking at the organization.

I mean, I think we can all, I mean, how tight is our median there?

Because it seems to me that you can extract from number of employees and annual operating expenses and annual payroll median

being very closely in line with us that we're really talking about the clustered planning district commissions and similar creatures, right?

I mean, as being the median, it is in the city of Charlottesville, the city of Richmond, and you've got a hell of a lot more than 18 people.

I mean, they're way out there.

And I would imagine that most of these planning district commissions have somewhere between 14 and 22, give or take.

So we certainly can take a look at that and I'm happy to.

Because we use medians and not averages, typically when you use the median, it accounts for those outliers, right?

The very high ones.

So if we took those out, this would probably adjust a little bit, but it would not be a drastic adjustment.

You wouldn't go from like say the 18 full time for 30 plus hours.

You wouldn't all of a sudden see that drop to say like four or maybe go all the way up to 150 or something like that.

Yeah, I guess what I'm addressing is even

In one sense, what is the comparability of these much larger organizations?

Charlottesville, it would exclude sort of public safety because... Well, I was just using that as a large department that has nothing to do with us, not that specific, you know, I mean, they don't care about, you know, there's no point in talking about the maintenance staff in the city of Charlottesville and the maintenance staff of the Townships and Planning Commission, because I think I'm looking at the maintenance staff of the Townships and Planning Commission right now.

So, for example, all right, that was,

Any other questions?

So the executive committee did meet on this.

And its recommendation is, well, let me back up.

In kind of the philosophy aspect, the sort of general thinking was that the TJPDC should be

Lee, if we want to present ourselves to the surrounding communities and counties as being sort of the experts, I think it's pretty important that we be a little bit ahead.

Obviously, the number was a pretty big jump, you know, if you went to the 75% at 400,000, and so there was a lot of conversation back and forth with a decision that, you know,

probably option 3B would be the route to go.

It's a little less expensive than option one, which was, I mean, a little bit more expensive than option one, but certainly less expensive than option two and three.

And the executive director believes that she can accomplish this probably in a one-year period versus a two-year period, and I'll never speak to that.

But we did talk about making sure that

This would not have an impact on the ask to the localities.

That it would be something that we would be able to achieve from our current revenue sources.

And I think that's been very important given uncertainties that are bound to hit localities in the next year.

Keep that in mind.

I'll let the other members speak if they'd like to.

Well, I've been an advocate in the math.

I've been here 14 years and two months that our folks need to be paid more.

So I'm in favor of B.

The big question is

And I don't think this precludes answering your questions, for example.

And I think both of you asked excellent questions in terms of what is the mean and where does it fall.

And ultimately, I think that when you look at the cluster of the groups that you have in place, and the fact that we're not targeting the high end, and it is the mean of those to begin with, 62.5% is probably a reasonable number, regardless of what we have

Not to say that we can't get those numbers, and I don't think that precludes, you know, giving you kind of the general go ahead of figuring out that calculation to see if it's there.

I don't know that we, I mean, I think you have this listed as an action item today, but I don't know that it precludes having to make that decision without that information.

Maybe it does, to get there.

I've already prepared the FY26 budget.

We are still waiting for things like our DRP FTA money and our mobility management grant to see what the draft SIP says.

So there are still some unknowns in that budget.

I feel fairly confident that I can do this in one year.

What I would have to do is get confirmation of all those extra revenue sources, and if for some reason they come in lower than we're anticipating, I would then have to bring to you in May the option for doing it across two years if I can't balance the budget.

We already have a very lean operating budget.

There's not a lot of that in there that I can cut from, so there's not a lot of expenses I can cut, so if we don't secure the revenue, that would determine whether or not I have to do this over one or two.

Right now, I'm within $10,000 of balancing the budget, though.

So if all of the grants come in, what do we anticipate?

We should be okay in one year.

Is that included the 268?

That's the 268.

And you're at $10,000?

So was there any conversation on the LEAD benefits and flexibility piece of this and its impact?

I mean, I think that to me, there are things that are, I mean, despite our

Absolutely schizophrenic housing market and the expenses to live.

I think these quality of life issues, I mean, leave and even sabbaticals and compensatory time.

And am I missing something?

Is there some statutory regulatory thing that puts bereavement leave in three days, no more, no less, or is that just what everybody does?

Was there some reason that everyone does that?

Because that just seems to be a

So I mean, what sort of conversation have we had about that?

No, not in this process.

This part is for getting to the budgeting part of the salary.

We did bring to you guys last month the health insurance in order to offer additional options under health insurance.

And then we intend, as part of our work through the fall,

to be coming back to you guys with a personnel handbook again asking for additional changes related to this information that we found.

It seems to me that recruiting, you're shooting yourself in the foot by not accommodating lead based on experience.

I mean, that's asking a lot of somebody who spent 12 years somewhere as a valuable employee, well, you know, to hell with that.

We're going to treat you like you've been here for six weeks with your time off.

Well, beyond 20 years is where we start to be different.

Well, no, what I'm saying is if you don't make accommodations for somebody who's got 15 years of experience elsewhere,

and you're backing them up to probationary employee all the time.

Yeah, so I think in general, the benefit package, we are kind of doing as we are amending the handbook and bringing forward potential changes and offerings there.

So just in terms of the bandwidth of what we can bring at which time so we haven't been able to

to look at everything.

Well, because it occurs to me, because things can be, in terms of real dollars, the organization be less expensive.

Well, I think to your point, in terms of attraction and retention, that's a good thing, I think,

You saw from the study that we were right in line with pretty much everybody.

Except that.

And that's probably a very small additional charge.

Right now it was salary and health insurance.

I don't know what it means for hiring a very experienced HVAC tech as opposed to a friendly HVAC tech.

So some other things to cover tonight.

I think the question is, knowing what you know right now, if somebody is willing to entertain a motion to approve Plan 3B,

I think you can look at the overall aspects and say, you know, if the philosophical objective of the TJPDC is not to be in the middle of the pack, that option one, which is 50% option, it's really what you're there, isn't as attractive, and option B, 3D is, you know, a very nominal increase in relationships just going right to option B.

And that's just kind of the way they faced and did the adjustments from that.

The question on 3D is, I assume that we're coming in lower standard range, which I guess is just a way of saying that we're at a broader range

Well, it's more than just the range.

So there were three or four different variables, levers.

So one difference between 3A and 3B is the range.

Another difference is how much credit we were getting for prior experience before coming to the TJPDC.

So we had to play with these multipliers to see what makes the most sense.

And in some cases, there were really outsized additions or over weighting prior experience, because we felt like a lot of that prior experience was required in order to get this role.

So it was accounted for in some way.

So we changed some of those multipliers to be a little bit lower.

And we wanted to make sure to value time in the organization greater than time outside of the organization because of the institutional knowledge piece.

So some of those variables changed in order to get from 3A to 3B.

And then how much percent for each year in SEED?

So it was at 1.5.

Industry standard is somewhere between 1.5% and 3.3% per year.

We went with right in the middle 2.25.

In the 3B option, the 3A option was only moving people 1.5% for each year in seat.

And while the increase is 22%,

You can imagine that's very different at different levels based on the compression that's within our organization.

And so we have made a very concerted effort in the last several years to make sure to be bringing up the minimum that we bring people in.

But what that has done is we haven't moved to the higher end up and we have a very, very tight where there's almost thousands of dollars difference where if I move a person up, they're going to be making more than the next person who's been there five years longer and has a different title.

So we really needed to stretch the entire

Go ahead.

Questions?

We have a second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Woodward?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Phil, we got one.

You do receive space, you go again.

All right.

The chair votes aye, and the motion passes unanimously.

Thank you for all the hard work.

Ms. Fallon and Gallagher Group, and I know the staff for a lot of time in here as well, too.

So we really do appreciate this, and it helps to make sure that we're more competitive in the marketplace.

Thank you.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I don't understand.

Thank you.

Yes, we need to appoint, it's hard to believe that you want to be here soon, and we need to appoint the nominating officers for the TJPDC here.

And I put in the executive director's report.

I can pull that up if that is helpful.

I don't think we need it for this, but I did put a list of the last six fiscal years who served in each of those positions, chair, vice chair, and treasurer.

Great.

Okay.

All right.

Next, D'Oronzio volunteers.

How about another one or two?

I know Mr.

All right, well, I think we have an MBA.

Do we have to take a vote on that?

All right, very well.

They've been, you know- Yes, and then I will help you guys organize a meeting amongst yourselves to be able to create this link so that you can present it in the next.

All right, now we're moving on to the executive directors.

So a couple of updates.

Out of the category here, we've had quite a bit of outreach from our local governments for specific local planning support, so I listed a couple of those in there.

Greene County reaching out to help support the Town of Standard Fills Housing and Community Services chapter of their comp plan.

Nelson County reached out, working on a support, a group to help support looking at regulations for short-term rentals of dwellings.

Town of Mineral reached out to us to see if we could potentially support the development of an historic overlay district

They did table their decision on whether they were going to do that.

They wanted to do some further outreach to the County of Louisa and then Fluvanna County working with their staff to help them with their surveys for their comprehensive plan deployment and helping them tabulate results at the end of that.

Regional Water Supply Planning, which you guys are familiar with.

We attended both the kickoff meetings for RPU 1 and RPU 2.

That's the middle James 1 and the middle James 2.

Nelson in our planning district is part of our PU-2.

All of our other localities in our planning district and Buckingham are part of our PU-1.

It was asked of the PDC to assume the role of the lead coordinating agency for our PU-1 since we are five of the six jurisdictions.

We did apply to DEQ for a small amount of administrative funds, about eight

$1,800 for this year and we can reapply again after the term of fiscal year with the next year's money.

And then also just noting that as a part of the FY26 budgeting process, I'll also be allocating some of the local per capita funds to support that planning effort, because as you can imagine, the $8,000 is not going to do it for a five-year planning effort.

But then we are also going to be working alongside partners to see if we can get more state level to support some funding for that planning process.

I have the data in here for both the DOTI 2022 and DOTI 2024 projects that are in there every month.

For transportation related projects, as we discussed earlier, State Streets and Roads for All, Comprehensive Safety Action Plan, we now have a draft burden that we are circulating for feedback.

We are coming to all six of your governing boards to discuss those and have been working with your staff to take and make provisions that have been requested.

That plan per U.S. Department of Transportation needs to be adopted by all six jurisdictions by June 30th.

So we're in that phase right now of trying to get it into its final draft.

And then that draft action plan will also be coming to you all in your May meeting for you all to adopt as a planning district commission.

The next transportation item is the Regional Transit Authority that had its second meeting, that board, newly established, had its second meeting.

They're continuing to work through some governing documents, adopting bylaws, looking at non-voting membership, things like that.

They are going to continue to meet every other month

on the alternating months of the Regional Transit Partnership.

So they'll meet every other month and then eventually the Regional Transit Partnership, the goal would be to sunset that and use the Regional Transit Authority as the main regional planning body.

For path and mobility management, got some great updates in there for you all on different activities that are happening in each of the jurisdictions.

Most recently, one that we're really excited about is working with Lumana County High School Special Education Program.

We went and did some travel training with students, had them learn how to make reservations on John's.

Next, we'll have mobility management staff doing ride-alongs, helping them learn to become independent after leaving high school and using John as a public transit.

They reached out to us to ask us to do that and us reaching out to other high schools to see if they would like to do that as well.

We've had a lot of great success in them saying we'd be very interested in that, so we're going to start

adding that as a part of the work plan for mobility management.

A lot of really good stuff happening there.

For other transportation items listed, staff attended the Mobility Management Summit.

We've been doing a lot of GIS training.

We've been sending folks to conferences and trainings, local VDOT days, things like that to make sure that we are staffing, training up our transportation staff as things change.

And then there's some really good environmental updates in here as well.

As you guys know, fellas have been doing a great job with these rain barrel workshops.

I just had another one last night, and now Albemarle, they have one up in Greene County.

21 people attended that one, really well received.

And then the last RRBC meeting was held today.

RRBC meeting was today.

So a lot going on there.

We are still waiting on some IAJA funds for the watershed improvement program.

WIP, we have not gotten a contract for that.

But we are told that it is coming, so we don't know when.

I believe that is all that I have.

Okay.

All right.

I'm sure it's been made by Mr. D'Oronzio.

Second.

OK, roll call.

Mr. Payne, Mr. D'Oronzio.

Aye.

Mr. Galloway, Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

Mr. O'Brien.

Aye.

Mr. Smith.

Aye.

Mr. Goolsby.

Aye.

Mr. Higgins.

Aye.

Mr. Reed.

Aye.

At this point, I will be moving in for everybody who's participating electronically into a waiting room.

Any members of the public that are here will export out to another room.

So this room will be used for that closed session.

All staff that are in the room will also leave.

So we'll be just commissioners in the closed session.

Mr.

Do I have a second?

Second.

Motion to move on Mr. Gjorgjiev and Senator Pruitt to come out of the closed meeting.

Mr. D'Oronzio.

Aye.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

Chair O'Brien.

Aye.

Mr. Smith.

Aye.

Supervisor Goolsby.

Aye.

Mr. Higgins.

Aye.

Supervisor Beah.

Aye.

All right, unless there's a motion to not do a round table session here, let's just limit it to like two minutes and go right back.

Great.

I think we're good.

I'll start us off.

So we had a additional budget work session that we kind of added in there, mostly to frankly talk about housing.

This is kind of the biggest panging chad of priorities that has not made it across the line.

There's a very publicly talked about like 3-3 split on the board of people who say that the housing tax fund should be funded up to $3 million.

and people who don't necessarily think that.

And additionally, the people who think it should be funded up to 10 million each have a preferred way of getting there.

I am one of them.

I wanted more taxes.

It's the simplest way to get money when you need more money, especially large amounts of money.

Supervisor Galloway proposed a one-year CIP funding that would fund it for one year.

passed that, and Supervisor Malek is interested in taking money from schools.

Those are the three different solutions.

None of those had support from anyone else.

And what we did do is we moved some money out of a long ago created reserve fund.

We moved $1.2 million out.

$1 million went to a housing cost fund.

And then $200,000 went to the emergency relief

Fung, which is mostly for like evictions and utility shutoffs, which was cool, but it is still not where we're at.

And it's probably going to be, I would say a central issue of the one primary that we're going to have and have people engaged with that problem.

Additionally, we actually engaged with data centers in a public way for the first time on the board.

This was a preliminary ordinance because we just never are

The code doesn't contemplate the existence of data centers, so they were allowed to buy right in industrial and light industrial zoning.

We implemented what's basically a stopgap measure, setting their buy right up to a certain size and a few other controls while we develop an actual ordinance for what we want to happen with data centers.

There was another, you know, this is unusual for Albemarle where we don't like to actually have votes because we're too polite for it, but we had another 3-3 vote basically on a pro-data-centered and anti-data-centered caucus, very roughly.

That's a little unfair, but on whether or not to further restrict them in the preliminary ordinance, which was fun, spicy.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Let's see.

City of Charlottesville has not voted to up its tax rate or up their tax rate to, I believe, 98 cents.

I have not been as deeply involved in the budget process as I should be, but you notice that half of the representation on this board obviously is because he hasn't, well that's three months he's been in a school meeting.

So there's that.

To your point on eviction prevention, one thing that I've noticed in my work on the Affordable Housing Fund and as chairing the CDBG task force is that we have noted

A lot of siloed eviction prevention and tenant assistance requests.

Yeah, the service provider map is too complicated.

Different people are doing different things.

Is there overlap?

Who the hell knows?

So there's some of that.

And also, the reason I'm sort of transitioning into the term landlord-tenant is one of the things that we considered years ago and are now reconsidering and is being sort of brought back from out of comatose is the idea of a landlord risk reduction fund.

The idea behind this is that you can give a certainty to landlords that this is sort of a stigma of subsidized housing clients damaging properties and you've got to show up with your first and last month's rent and that's hard to do but if you go to them and say the city will cover this and you have an inspection process anyway you know under section 8 that we can sort of manage this process a little bit

Pittsburgh had a similar program.

They allocated something like $60,000 to it.

Over seven years, they spent $11,000.

So it's really, yeah, but it gives release and movement.

It'd be a lot more interesting if there was actually any rental stock available whatsoever within the city limits.

But there isn't.

So there's that.

Great.

Mr. Haines.

Very briefly, this week's rainfall is most welcome.

Rain is in drought, of course.

Great.

You know, I can't complain.

I'm a property owner.

Our tax rate is $0.69 for $100.

Is that anticipated?

That's what they've advertised.

And they dropped our car tax rate from $4.50 to $4.00.

So I'm living large.

I'm at peace with the Lord.

You guys have your own problems.

What were your assessments?

They went up.

And you know, roughly?

Oh, I can't.

Some people complained of 7 to 10 to 15.

I just want to raise up something that I find fascinating is how I think the personal property tax

has much less political liability than people reckon it does, because it's green, anti-tax green, over here for pro-tax Albemarle, had a higher card tax than people.

And people weren't burning anything down over it.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

They're really erratic across jurisdictions.

It looks like our tax rates are going to stay flat for the year.

Exactly what we had last year.

It was 47.

47.

Yeah.

Which makes people very happy.

Yeah.

But you did have a big assessment.

Not this year.

No.

Next year.

So there's that.

I mentioned our planning commission.

It's very interesting because we have three new people on our planning commission.

We have two that have any experience at all.

But because we're in the process of supposedly crafting some short-term rental ordinances along with our other zoning revision that we're doing,

The Planning Commission kind of bemoans the fact that their considerations aren't always taken seriously by the Board of Supervisors, which is why we only have two long standing members on it.

But when they just previously got together to start work on the short term rentals, it didn't go anywhere.

And there's really

My opinion, no leadership on that.

Well, please let us know.

Well, I think that we're going to be ready to vote on our budget at our next meeting, which actually is going to be a week late.

It will be the fourth Monday of the month.

And our tax rate is 72 cents.

We're going to keep it at 72 cents.

We're looking to do a rebate and strictly really because of the assessments.

A rebate back to the taxpayers of 2 point some odd cents.

So it'll take our tax rate to 69 point something.

You know, I don't know, it really doesn't amount to a whole lot back to individuals, but it is what it is.

Something really interesting came up in the people coming to us about the assessments.

And of course, we try and explain that the supervisors really don't have anything to do with the assessments, but Lake Anna, it is unbelievable.

You spoke of short-term rentals.

There's some short-term rentals on Lake Anna that in the summer are getting $20,000 a week.

It's like going to the Outer Banks.

and we had people that came up from these subdivisions before us and they said, what's happening is those houses, if they are sold, they're selling based on the income from the short-term rental versus the real estate value of them.

So I'm not sure what the commission revenues office is gonna do about that.

They certainly have become well aware of that.

I think there's certainly something needs to be done about it because the majority of the folks live down there have no plans on turning their house into a short-term rental.

My feeling is short-term rental in that situation almost every one of those houses

at Lake Anna are in a subdivision, and those subdivisions have homeowners association.

I think that's something that the homeowners association needs to deal with, possibly with our help, if needed.

Some of them are smaller, so they don't have the income and older, so they don't have the income or any much built up in the account.

to do much as far as if there's any legal action or anything.

So anyway, but you know, the county's doing great.

A lot of other issues.

I won't go into any of those, but I think things are going well and we're happy with the budget that we've come up with.

About 60, between 62 and 63% of that is for schools.

It's gonna be round number $188 million.

They ran the gamut.

Some people, they were single digits, low single digits, just depends upon where you are in the county.

Some of them, we heard down at the Lake area in particular, some people were claiming that they were 30, 40, 50%, or some even more than that, if they had these things sell in their neighborhood, so.

How frequently do y'all reassess?

Pardon me?

Yeah, you have to remember too, the data centers that are coming, you know, most most of the income is going to be from the contents from the business personal property, but the real estate makes a difference too.

So, you know, we don't want to really mess with that.

And we feel like 72 cents is a fair rate.

Well, Fluvanna County, we're wrapping up our budget season.

We're coming down from an 84 cent rate.

It looks like we're going to settle at 75 cents for the $5,000 which is our maximum.

That will fund most of the sheriff's requests, social services requests, and all but about $300,000 from the schools.

That was, again, just because we put in a 75 cent maximum tax rate.

So that's a positive.

Of course, we had large reassessments ranging from 15 to 40%.

And there was a lot of angst in the community about that.

So even though our equalized rate was 69, 69, 70 cents almost, the five cent increase isn't really where the real hit came in, the real hit came in on the

on the folks that had a assessment of over 17% because that was really equalized.

And this was a little interesting math that I went through through this process is they'll say, oh, well, the average equalized rate was 25% as an example.

But you have to factor in the land that isn't in being taxed, right?

And when you factor that in,

The real number is what's the difference between your current number and the equalized rate, and that's a lot closer to the 17%.

So if you were at 17% of an increase and we equalized, then you would have paid no extra taxes.

But if you weren't there, if you were at 40%, then you're paying essentially that extra 23% plus the additional $0.05 that we're putting in there.

So pretty hefty increase for some people, for sure.

The good news is that we're getting closer to essentially being able to get to what I would define as a sustainable rate.

And the board's certainly well aware that most of the surrounding counties don't go through the sort of access that it does in terms of equalizing and where are we going to be and so on.

And they just try to stay with a flat rate.

And that becomes a sustainable rate.

So I hope we'll get there.

I don't know if it will, but I hope we get to that point.

Other than that, we did pass a meals tax, which was due for the county.

I would say the chunk of that was maybe predicated on the fact that WAVA was coming and that that would generate a nice chunk of meals tax for that for us as well, too.

So I'll leave it at that.

I'll take a motion to adjourn.

Motion passes.