Board of Supervisors Work Session (Joint Work Session w/ School Board)   12/7/2022

Claudette, Ms.

Borgerson, whenever you all are ready.

We're ready.

All right, it is, so I've got it right at one o'clock.

So good afternoon, school board, welcome, work supervisors, supporting staff.

We're very excited to be here.

It's so nice to be in person again, after so long of not being able to do that.

So I would call to order the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors meeting one o'clock p.m.

Wednesday, December 7th.

We're in room 241 of the county office building.

Well, we're special.

Thank you.

So we have present our supervisors, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District,

Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District and myself, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District.

We also have present our County Executive Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Clerk Ms.

Claudette Borgerson, our Senior Deputy Clerk Mr. Travis Morris.

I'd also like to thank and welcome, introduce our Albemarle County police officers, Officer David Sprouse and Officer Andy Munsey.

We appreciate what you do every day and especially you being here.

We sleep well at night knowing that you are protecting and serving us.

All right, Vice Chair from the Rile District, Ms.

Katrina Kallsen.

from Barbana District, Julie Lee, Jewett District, Cape Cuff, and from Join, the entire county of John L. Caro.

And from our staff, we have our superintendent, Dr. Matthew Austin.

Oh, okay.

So sorry, right?

Scottsville District, the south side of the county.

Can't forget you.

Ms.

Ellen Austin.

and our superintendent, Dr. Matthew Haas from our financial department, Ms.

Rosalyn Schmidt and Ms.

Naya Kamuzawa and also our county attorney, Mr. Ross Halden.

Oh, and this one person, Ms.

All right, we are required to adopt a work session agenda for this meeting.

So the floor is open for a motion to adopt the work session agenda.

Second.

I heard Supervisor McKeel first and Supervisor Andrews, you will click on the second.

Ms.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

Ms.

Bea LaPisto-Kirtley?

At this time, I'll turn it over to Mr. Andy Bowman, the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, who will lead off the presentation for the financial handbook.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

Thank you, Chair Price, for the introduction.

I will kick things off with a few speakers from both government and public schools who will be speaking today.

But I'll start to echo the chair's comments that it's very great to be here with you all in person, one that's a sign of the progress we've made during the pandemic.

Secondarily, I want to take a moment in my introduction as every time we get ready for a joint meeting and prepare for this, I'm reminded by our staff, many of whom are in the back, that they'll tell me, we're meeting from your car.

And I remember that very well.

It was a little over two years ago today.

Many of you all were on that call.

Others of you were not.

and as much as people praised my quick thinking, resourcefulness, that wasn't the true story.

I was actually, because where am I going with this?

I'm probably just disappointed.

I was bailed out by the collaboration that exists between our county government and our public schools, because I knew through my regular communication, so fortunately from the time I lost connection on a beautiful fall day,

I was able to get that one done because of that collaboration.

Now, the good news for me, that's not a one-time event because I'm very fortunate all throughout the year working with Dr. Haas and his team and Chief Operating Officer, the collaboration happens all the time.

Usually, fortunately, it's not as embarrassing for me as it was that one day.

So, to start with that, that goes to a lot of the work to, again, thank all of them for the thought and the work that goes into this, preparing for this meeting.

the budget process, strategic planning, and just coming to the table with our different ideas.

So, with that thank you aside, I will go on to the next slide to really bring where are we today and how we're discussing this.

So, this is a graphic of the Board of Supervisors Adopting Strategic Plan that was approved last October.

Back on November 2nd, we had a goal of 1 through 4, and also goal 6,

Today is about educational learning.

And though the school board strategic planning process was ahead, they adopted their strategic plan in the summer of 2021.

The Board of Supervisors in their objective statements under the program 5.1 acknowledges the collaboration and the partnership with the public schools as part of this strategic plan.

So today is really going to be speaking about that objective five, and we'll continue discussions next week with the Board of Supervisors on the other goals, just to kind of frame where we are at high level.

As we prepared for this meeting, we had a few ideas of staff in mind for our desired outcomes.

First, to make sure that we had a shared understanding of how we got to the present and where are we in our long range financial planning and as we build our annual budgets.

Next, really providing the opportunity for the public schools to tell their story of the long-range financial plans they have been preparing over the last several months, and for the Board of Supervisors to have that opportunity to engage and learn the work they've been doing.

And then third, we'll spend some time for just some discussions around strategies and next steps from today and other things the boards may consider.

I'll note, as I did in my comments to the board last month, this isn't a budget discussion.

We'll hold those in February, March, and so on.

So while we'll have some numbers and charts and graphs today that I'll be sharing, it's not going to feel maybe as much of a budget work session as it would when we'll be in a few months from now.

It's about the long range financial picture.

So to achieve these outcomes, we have kind of five steps to the agenda.

I'll begin today with a historical review of the CIP for where we've been for the last 20 years or so.

Then I will share an update on where we are as of today building our CIP for fiscal year 2040-28.

It would be recommended by the county executive in February as part of the annual budget process.

I'll then turn it over to Ms.

Kumazala who will walk through the public school's capital and operating five-year financial plan.

And then a break is intended at that time before we come back and talk about next steps today to tee up some additional board discussion.

As Chair Price mentioned in the beginning, I will take, and Maya will as well, some deliberate breaks just to pause in case there's any questions to clarify content or any other follow-ups that we can note.

A lot of discussions around future strategies and policies, we're even tending to allow as much time as we can at the end of this meeting, not the end, but the back half of this meeting for that board discussion to take place.

And so as we get to those points, we'll make it very clear as we're coming to those.

So with that said, I'm going to start off with a historical review of where we've been in CIP over the last 20 years.

This goes back and looks very far in the past about where has the county's annual adopted capital budget had been since fiscal year four is 23.

I'll clarify that when we talk about the capital improvements plan, we are talking about a five-year period.

This is really just about the very first year of the capital budget, which is the one that the Board of Supervisors

So some takeaways as we look at this trend and where it's been.

We see first to kind of chunk this into a few periods of history.

We have the pre-Great Recession in blue with that trend line where we can see that's at least in the late 2000s that's what the capital budget looked like.

We then see a period in orange in the Great Recession in the initial years of the recovery.

where due to the overall economy and the decisions that were made at that time, you see there was a relatively flat capital budget and that was much smaller than the capital budgets that preceded it.

Since that time in Orange, we've now been since fiscal year 15 to fiscal year 23 on a gradual upward trend as where the CIP is.

And we can see that in fiscal year 23, the county approved its largest capital budget and appropriated its largest budget in recent history.

Although as you look at this chart, and many of you know this because you live this based on your time in the community or serving the boards themselves, that something unusual happened at the start of fiscal year 21 and then to 22 and 23.

So in the next slide, I'm going to take a moment just to remind us all of what actually took place during that time.

Taking this out kind of one block at a time, about three years ago, we were working through a proposed fiscal year 21 to 25 CIP, five-year plan.

In the budget process, that total CIP totaled $211 million, about $89 million of which was for the public schools, about $122 million of which was for the county government.

Historically, both boards had prioritized the maintenance and replacement projects to ensure we're maintaining the county's facilities and our assets.

That made up about 42% of that number.

That plan at that time, as we were in, as it was introduced in February 2020, was contemplated a one-cent real estate tax increase from fiscal year 20 through to 25 that could be anticipated.

However, as we all know, this plan was never adopted in the pandemic because as we turned the page to March, we all had to dramatically readjust.

So that brings us to the fiscal year 21 annual budget, where that was a total budget of $18.2 million.

Now that's just one year, and that number of $211 million is five years, so I'm using different time periods.

I just want to clarify that.

We redid that entire budget in less than two months due to the pandemic.

Many projects at that time, due to the uncertainty in the economy and even the counties and really every county's ability to access the financial markets, we paused those and came up with a plan to reevaluate that in three and six months increments to make sure that we were being agile and respond into situations as they changed.

Due to that high level of uncertainty, the OCIP was adopted for that five-year period.

But we did put our, what we call the 366 plan in action because as soon as January 2021,

eight months after budget adoption, we unpaused $34 million of those projects.

That 366 approach continued into the fiscal year 22 annual budget process, where we had a capital budget totaling $57 million.

There's some additional projects that were unpaused, projects that were paused then.

Anyone who didn't make the cut in fiscal year 22, I say anyone, any project, would then come back to be considered in fiscal year 23.

And once again, there was no five-year CIP.

We all acknowledge when fiscal year 23 came around, we really did need to recommit and go through that long-range planning process, regardless of where we were in our uncertainty.

So that brings us to where we are today.

We have the adopted CIP totaling $298 million.

That's $153 million for the public schools, $117 for county government.

And there's a unique placeholder of $27 million related to strategic plan implementation.

And what this is, is the Board of Supervisors had the foresight in last year's budget process to know that in the coming months, they would be updating the strategic plan.

And the idea was to not fully utilize the county's capacity, knowing that we went through that work and that may generate additional projects that they could be in if there's been 24.

and so on.

So that $27 million is planned to be planned out in this year's CIP and I'll speak more to that later in the presentation.

Once again, maintenance and replacement is a critical part of our five-year CIP.

This plan differs that no real estate tax rate increases were anticipated as part of the adopted CIP.

So one takeaway that may not be as obvious showing this, if we compare kind of the red column on the right, I'm sorry, to the left, to the blue column on the right, and we begin to look at those numbers and how they're different, where we moved from a $211 million CIP increasing over $80 million or 47% to a $219 million CIP.

We see the change in investment to what that looks like, and we can see there's that difference in real estate taxes.

So for anyone who may be listening, a fair question may be, what changed to create a larger CIP?

It was not an accident.

There were several things that took place during that time.

So first of which is during this period of the pandemic, we've placed a major focus on our debt management in the Department of Finance and Budget.

We've been fortunate that in June 2021,

We did a refinancing and a bond issuance.

The first one the county had done in 40 years that resulted in very favorable rates due to our triple AAA boundary.

We also repeated that again in March of 22 for that refinancing.

But the story is more about just favorable interest rate environment.

There's a lot of intentionality and effort that went behind that.

So we talk often in the Board of Supervisors about how we need to think creatively and re-engineer what we do and work different.

So this is a story really about where we've been in the Department of Finance and Budget to first begin to change how we're structured organizationally.

The Office of Management and Budget and our team used to be part of the County Executive's Office.

We were moved under our Chief Financial Officer to align our work efforts to make sure we were working on comparable priorities and to support each other in our shared knowledge.

We created a new Office of Treasury Management by taking existing positions and creating that intentionality to focus on our debt management and capital budget in a way that we hadn't done prior to that time.

All of that work positioned as best as possible so that during such a tumultuous time in the pandemic, we were twice able to reaffirm our triple AAA mod rating, the highest rating that the localities can obtain, to go through that process.

We've also made investments in our procurement office, and we've looked in partnership with the schools about how we manage our capital projects with building services and facilities for landing construction, with the intent to improve the execution and service delivery to our residents.

In addition to that, we've really taken a step back from business as usual to take a fresh look and revisit all of our planning assumptions, whether that be how we borrow, how we balance our cash versus our borrow proceeds and all of those assumptions in partnership with our financial advisor to make sure that we were modernizing and using the best information for best practices right now.

And I think in short, every tool in the toolbox we were trying to pick up and use to figure out how do we both simultaneously navigate the uncertainty of the pandemic

and then also move our community forward through these capital projects as they run pause to move forward.

We certainly appreciate the board's support as we've begun to work differently to help make all of this possible.

And that really goes to my next point.

That's sort of the staff story, but a large credit goes to both boards for their investment of revenues to make a larger CIP.

Both boards in the last budget process leveraged federal revenues, the school board through the indoor air quality funding they received from the federal government as part of modernizing the school's HVAC systems.

and also the Board of Supervisors invested some of the American Rescue Plan Act funding to support county projects there.

And also in addition to that federal funding, there was one-time funding that both boards invested into the CIP to create a larger total and more projects to move the community forward.

So the third thing that was very different from where we were 2011 were some intentional policy decisions the Board of Supervisors made in the fiscal year 23 budget process.

I'm framing this as the diversification and investment of tax revenues.

This last budget process, the Board of Supervisors had a moment to look at all of the county's rates, enabling authority that was given to them by the General Assembly.

How do they balance that as they have to weigh all of the decisions in the budget in terms of what is the impact in the overall economy?

What is the benefit to citizens?

What is the impact to tax rate?

I'm sure all the other dozen things elected officials have to think about making these decisions.

So as a result of that, the Board of Supervisors increased the food and beverage tax rate, the transient tax rate, and prior to the budget, increased the cigarette tax, which had the first full year impact in fiscal year 23.

That investment would have been the equivalent of 3.3 cents on the real estate tax rate if the Board did that instead.

The Board chose to use these other revenues to again diversify the county's revenue structure as part of our financial management strategies.

Next is a term of the effective rate increase that the Board of Supervisors is very familiar with as we talk about the decision on the tax rate.

But to define what this is for anyone who may be listening who is not familiar, is that in calendar year 23, we had a strong reassessment with an average property value increase of over 80%.

Due to those rising property values, the board was faced with a policy decision to maintain the current rate, which would have an effective tax rate increase, whether the property values were flat, or to select a different rate, and also the decisions that would happen in the budget related to that.

So the effective tax rate increase was a 6.6 for calendar year 23.

So these two actions together, it didn't all happen via real estate tax revenue or necessarily real estate tax rate, but those two together resulted in an investment of 9.9 cents that went to fund the capital program, the county's debt service, as well as both school and county government operations.

So that is the past, covered 20 years of history in four slides.

I just heard you say the 6.6 effective rate, so I'm assuming it's about $14 million.

Yeah, the current value of the penny is just a little 2.4 million.

So it's 2.4 million times 9.9.

Andy, back to that slide.

Just to be clear, I think it's the 6.6

When I was before the school board on October 27th and before the board owned supervisors on November 2nd, I shared this slide about staff's approach.

So this is the different formatting, but the board has seen this information before in terms of where does staff's process from today through February as we begin to have our thinking building directly to CIP, the county executive will present in February.

So what I'm going to do next is begin to walk through these five points with a little more detail and a little more information than we had at that time.

So first, we have said our starting point for the fiscal year 24 to 28 CIP will be the adopted plan.

So that adopted plan makes an assumption about projects that would begin to fiscal year 24 through 27, which in the old plan was years two through five.

Now we are going to move this up through year one to four and make sure that as we work through this, we are finding a way to keep that plan intact based on what the board had previously approved.

Year five, we have at this point, as a starting point said, we'll make sure that we maintain our obligations and maintenance and replacement programs because those are things historically the boards have prioritized.

And next, the current CIP contemplates the construction of a third school, which would be a second elementary school.

The design of that is in fiscal year 27, the construction is in 28.

So we are contemplating that that construction would be budgeted for.

The big caveat I would have right now is that we have not yet balanced that plan right now.

This is a work in progress.

Sometimes when we present recommendations in the budget and the boards get to consider them, I've heard board members refer to them as kind of wet cement.

To extend that analogy, we're not at the point of even pouring wet cement, we're still mixing the ingredients.

But to be very transparent where we are in the process, I'd like to share with you all what we're seeing today as we talk about some of the things we're solving for as staff or thinking about as we try and balance this plan.

So the second point is knowing that we are in such an unprecedented time and few areas with our project costs and our interest rates.

So what are some of these numbers as best we know them today?

uh that uh how that looks and so our team in partnership with fiscal services with the expertise available from building services the county's facilities planning and construction what is all the data that we can grab to get the best information we have to inform this and if we had to stop today we would look at our current projects in fiscal year 24 to 27 and say we probably need about an additional 30 million in updated cost estimates just based on reflection of what's happening to the market at this time and that's the number

We will continue to scrutinize as we get closer and closer to February as we give you information.

The second point B is that our borrowing costs and the new interest rate environment are very different.

The county's bond rating allows us to get the best rate possible, but that is always relative to the market.

So as a comparison, in our adopted CIP, $1 million of debt service that we pay annually, for example, over 20 years of life of bond, that would buy $13.1 million of projects.

As of what we know today, I've broken this out in two different scenarios.

The first is lease revenue, which we can think of as the way the county traditionally in most years issues its bonds.

$1 million of debt service would only buy us $11.8 million worth of projects.

An alternative would be if the county were to issue general obligation bonds after a referendum.

This is what happened with the school referendum in 2016.

The county would be able to get a better rate of about a quarter percent based on coordinating with our financial advisors.

And that would stretch that dollar a little farther with $1 million of debt service would then buy $12.1 million in projects.

So that's the difference as we know today in those two scenarios.

I'll say this interest rate environment is sort of the double whammy because not only are our dollars and debt service not able to go as far, those dollars for the project we're buying are not going as far because cost had risen so much.

So the third thing I'll mention that we're trying to analyze right now is the timing of projects because we're in such an unprecedented time in the availability of raw materials when things may arise.

So what we try and do in modeling with our Office of Treasury Management is how do we make sure that as we're executing projects, we're not borrowing too early and paying interest when we don't need to, or borrowing too late, where we're creating a short-term pension in the county's cash management.

So there's not really a dollar I have on this one.

No worries.

Just to clarify, since we're here, so the difference in the general obligation bond is $300,000.

I'll say it put a bond out was about $60,000, $30,000 to $60,000 last time.

Looking to the schools, because my memory is not there.

any more, but I feel like it was about $60,000 to do the cost of putting it out for election.

I'll clarify that the cost of issuance for bonds would be reflected in the number for the $11.8 in the $12.1.

What is not included in that number?

Is that approximately 60,000?

I actually had our analyst look up, and so it was actually a little closer to 40,000 for the operating cost for those educational materials and everything that went out to educate the public as that referendum approach.

That would not be included in that number, but that would also be relatively small in the total impact of these decisions.

So moving on from number two, this brings us to the next step, which is literally today where the, uh, we have the December 7 joint meeting.

The school board is going to talk about their $318 million needs-based requests, and I'll share for perspective.

If we took right now the adopted CIP from 24 to 27, if we updated the school's portion for inflation, as I discussed, if we added in that year five for maintenance obligations and replacement and the construction of the school, that total would be approximately $182 million.

Again, there's a fluid number that will change, but just from perspective on where we are right now, we're aiming to solve for it.

So I have a couple more points on the use of the strategic plan and placeholder, what the county's debt capacity may be, and how we may get other projects and strategic plan.

That's really for later.

I don't want to get into that now, because first, it's really an opportunity to allow the public schools to really tell their story, all the work they've been doing in the last few months, and to give the Board of Supervisors that opportunity to engage with the public schools.

So I'll look for a show of hands, and seeing none, I'll then turn it over again to

Ms.

Good afternoon, I'm Maya Kumazawa, Director of Budget and Planning for Albemarle County Public Schools.

This afternoon we'd like to provide an overview of the long-range plan for Albemarle County Public Schools.

An adequate built environment is a critical resource to foster high quality teaching and learning.

As our county continues to grow, several schools are out of space and many schools are aging.

Investments are needed to support our students.

So to reiterate, we did our best to streamline this next portion to allow time for discussion.

So I'll pause similar to Mr. Bowman for clarifying questions at specific points in time.

But we do ask that you hold the more in-depth questions or discussion to the end.

We've also focused this part of the presentation on the financial matters identified in the letter from Chair Price, Chair Page.

And we do look forward to future opportunities to discuss some of the other topics that were mentioned.

We start all of our school board work sessions with our strategic plan.

We've expanded that practice for this joint board meeting to include both strategic plans.

We've identified the goals and strategies of each strategic plan that these long range plans will advance.

The school board, as Mr. Boban mentioned, adopted their strategic plan in 2021.

The plan has three overarching goals, thriving students, affirming and empowering communities, and equitable and transformative resources.

Our capital plans most directly relate to the third goal.

The relevant objectives and strategies of that goal are identified here to the right.

The Board of Supervisors recently adopted a strategic plan that is also shown here.

The obvious connection between the two plans is Goal 5, but we also feel these plans advance both Goals 2 and 3 as well.

We will ask you to reflect on how well these plans support both strategic plans during the discussion session, so please keep these in mind as you listen to the proposed projects.

I'll begin with a quick review of how the school board's request is developed.

The Long-Range Planning Advisory Committee, or LRPAC, which comprises members of the community appointed by both the school board and the superintendent, meets about 12 times a year to develop CIP recommendations.

A comprehensive report is presented biannually and updates are provided annually.

The school board receives the recommendations and formally approves their request from the board of supervisors.

Throughout today's presentation, you'll see I'll be referring back to the 2021 LRPAC report and also provide updates that we have since that report.

Capacity recommendations are built upon several data sources that include historical trends, enrollment projections, development pipeline information as provided by the Community Development Department, and population forecasts.

Enrollment projection is our key data point, and we use this as a comparison to our available capacities in our school buildings.

These are updated each year, and here's a look at this year's projection.

On this graph, you can start with a solid green line.

That's our historical actual enrollment for K through 12.

The dashed blue line is the budgeted enrollment during the timeframe, and then the dashed orange line is our projection moving forward.

Before the pandemic, as you can see, we had a steady increase in our student enrollment, and we did see a decline for the 20 to 21 school year with the pandemic.

Immediately after that decline, though, we began to see enrollment increases again at a similar rate to pre-pandemic rates.

We continued to project a steady increase over time, as shown by the orange line.

Over the next 10 years, we anticipate to grow by over 10%.

Not only are our schools filling up, but our school buildings are aging.

Capacity and building conditions often go hand in hand in the analysis for recommending increased square footage and renovations to existing areas.

We have 77 trailer units in use division-wide, and over the next five years, as shown in the column on the right, we project that more than half of our students will attend a school that is over 95% capacity.

We use that metric as part of measuring the success of our strategic plan.

On the far right, we show a table showing the age of each of our school buildings broken out by level.

Our newest schools were built more than 20 years ago, and our oldest schools were built more than 80 years ago.

This brings me to the school board's approved CIP request.

Here's a summary table of the requested projects, and they're listed in priority order.

The projects listed here largely reflect the recommendations from last year with the Lambs Lane Study recommendations added in.

The total five-year request totals $318 million, and as mentioned before, this may shift based on inflationary assumptions

and our ongoing work with county staff.

Today, we'll be providing updates on some of the projects, in particular those requested by the Board of Supervisors.

A more detailed presentation of this request was provided at the October 27th School Board Work Session for anyone who's interested in referring back to that for additional information.

As a note, High School Center 2 and Mountain View expansion projects are included in the current FY23 capital budgets and thus not listed in this five-year CIP request, which begins in FY24.

We will begin with a look at elementary school enrollment.

You see here that we have three small schools, five medium-sized schools, and five large schools.

The five-year projected enrollment is in the dark blue, and you can compare that against the current capacities at those schools.

We currently have on the far right two schools that are outliers.

They're Baker Butler Elementary School and Mountain View Elementary School.

Their enrollment is projected to be close to 800 students in the next five years, and their current capacities are less than 600 seats for both of those schools.

So those are the two elementary school districts that we'll be focusing on in the first two project recommendations.

The first project, elementary school number one, is to construct a 500 student school in the Mountain View district.

This is the recommendation of a master plan study to relieve overcrowding at Mountain View Elementary School.

If approved, we would begin design in year one and construct the school in year two.

This would cost about $44 million and the school would be open to students in the fall of 2026.

Here's a closer look at why this project is being recommended.

School has historically been over capacity, and in recent years we have provided temporary capacity relief in the form of trailer classrooms, as indicated by that neon green shaded area.

As I mentioned earlier, though, not only are there needs for providing additional instructional seats, there is a need for renovations such as expanded cafeteria space, improving outdoor space, and parent drop off areas.

We're underway to provide some needed expansions at Mountain View with a current CIP, but a more permanent solution will be required as enrollment is projected to increase steadily in this district.

There are currently about 2,400 approved residential units in the pipeline, including Southwood Phase 2.

Student yield rates do vary depending on the type of housing and the cost of each of the units.

But on average, the student yield in this district for a single family home is about 14%.

The next project recommended is a new elementary school in the northern feeder pattern.

There is a similar story at Baker Butler Elementary with growing enrollment at an already large school.

It's a bit more complex in this area since Baker Butler is only one of several northern feeder pattern elementary schools.

As you're aware, the 29 North corridor is our most dense and quickly growing development area.

And there are over 8000 residential units in the pipeline.

When you look at the entire northern feeder pattern, not just Baker Butler.

We recommend that a redistricting study take place next year to analyze the entire feeder pattern as a whole, then implement a partial or phased redistricting the following year.

This would provide immediate capacity relief to Baker Butler and also fit within the available funding for building a second elementary school in the latter part of the five-year CIP.

The new school is recommended to be open to students in the fall of 2029.

The cost of this project is estimated to be a little over $50 million when we consider the inflationary impacts of those later years.

Here is one snapshot of some of the data we used to support the recommendation.

Our northern feeder pattern elementary schools include Agner Hurte, Baker Butler, Broadus Wood, Greer, Holly Mead, Stony Point, and Woodbrook.

The top table on this slide shows the projected enrollments at those schools.

And then the bottom part of the slide shows the projected capacity conflicts for each of the schools.

If you home in on the very bottom row and the whole slide, you can see that there are overall as a feeder pattern, the capacity conflicts are not necessarily growing.

And you can see that there are available seeds in some of our schools.

However, as you're aware, given our geographic boundaries, which do include very rural areas, and also where our student density currently exists, redistricting on its own will not mitigate the future capacity concerns.

We do think, though, that it's a reasonable intermediate solution.

So this is a review slide of a summary of both of the projects combined to see what it looks like on a combined timeline.

So given the funding constraints of not building two elementary schools immediately, we have proposed a staggered scenario.

As mentioned previously, next year, the design for elementary school number one would begin, and that would happen in parallel to the redistricting study for the northern feeder pattern.

The following year, we'd implement that partial redistricting in the northern feeder pattern to address the overcrowding at Baker Butler.

In year three, the school mountain view would open and that boundary would be split so that students would attend the current mountain view elementary school and the new elementary school.

Also in year three, we would begin the design for elementary school number two and the northern feeder pattern.

Note that the redistricting study for the northern feeder pattern would take into consideration both the near-term and long-term recommendation that wouldn't move students more than one time, and they would also finalize the site location as a part of that work.

Ready for me?

You mentioned single family 14% meal.

That's an average ratio that a consultant has developed based on historical patterns that if you build a single family home, that would produce 0.14 students for each single family.

So next I will discuss two more projects which are the high school renovations and the Lands Lane campus study improvements.

The Albemarle High School and Western Albemarle High School draft master plan was recently completed.

This master study builds upon a study done in 2017 called the High School Facility Planning Study.

The study focused on improvements to align the division's design imperative such as transparency, sustainability, flexibility, and spaces built for student learning.

Feedback from stakeholder groups, including students, administrators, community members, and staff were used to identify and prioritize the projects recommended in the study.

As these are long-range plans, we do continue to solicit feedback on these projects, so please feel free to visit these links that are on the slide.

Here are some photos of proposed renovations in the corridors at the schools.

The image on the left is an existing corridor at Albemarle High School, and the image on the right is a concept for a renovated corridor.

Similarly, here's a proposed before and after concept for a learning space.

The full scope of the study's recommendations at the two schools include improvements to bathrooms, daylighting, ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act improvements,

Dining Commons and Plazas, and Athletics Wing Classroom Edition, improvements to collaboration zones and CTE and makerspace expansions, exterior window replacements, special education improvements, and performing art space improvements.

These scenarios show the projects that can be achieved with the current level of CIP funding, which is on the left, and the proposed CIP funding of $36 million that began in FY23.

The projects prioritized for the current level of funding at AHS include breezeway and hallway improvements and a level two corridor connection in classrooms.

At Western Albemarle High School, the prioritized projects include corridor improvements, outdoor learning spaces, commons improvements, window upgrades, and athletic wing commons.

The Lambs Lane Master Plan was completed earlier this summer and serves as a guiding document for the Albemarle Journey Career Campus for the next 15 plus years.

Incorporating input from students, staff, and the general public, the study looked at several key components to ensure a comprehensive study.

These included security and safety measures, future growth patterns, and land development opportunities.

and improved sense of wayfinding and placemaking and environmental factors.

All these components were reviewed through a lens of equity to ensure the entire community benefits from proposed improvements.

This is a new project recommended by the Long-Range Planning Advisory Committee.

While the entire master plan extends well beyond a 10-year CIP, the proposed improvements are thoughtfully sequenced to ensure that the most immediate needs

address first and that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.

The study identified traffic congestion as the biggest issue with the existing campus.

As a result, a proposed loop road that will provide a second means of access between Lambs Lane to Rio Road was identified as the most urgent.

In addition to alleviating traffic congestion, this proposed main loop road will provide a secondary route for emergency response vehicles.

Additionally, this loop connector road will provide facilities and access ways for pedestrian and bike traffic, landscaping and green space, and improved stormwater management.

So to make way for the main loop road project, a relocation of the AHS field house will be necessary.

Additional five to 10 year recommendations include reconfiguring parking and bus loops for Greer Elementary School, Journey Middle School, and Albemarle High School, creating a central campus green athletic complex, and relocating the vehicle maintenance facility.

I just had one point of clarification.

Definitely, what is that?

The high school.

Those are improvements in existing corridors.

Roslyn Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer.

I think there's two things going on.

First is renovation of existing corridors.

High school students don't use lockers anymore, and they're very narrow.

And so how do we repurpose some of those, a large amount of the circulation space in the schools for better?

gathering and instructional opportunities.

And then there is a second level corridor in Albemarle.

If you've been in Albemarle High School, the second level doesn't connect.

It's not a full loop.

And so this project would connect the second floor, pick up some additional classroom space and improve circulation for a very large school.

All right, almost there.

This is a quick snapshot of other requested projects that we're not going to go into detail today.

They do include middle school renovations, elementary school renovations, elevator additions, a new data center, and land acquisition for elementary school number three.

The details of these projects can be found within the 2021 LRPC report.

And finally, our ongoing programs, which include our maintenance and replacement programs.

So this request includes fully funding the plan transfer for project management responsibilities as they shifted to our building services department.

Our facilities maintenance and replacement program, which has been significantly impacted by rising construction and labor costs, and they will continue to be impacted over the next five years.

The school bus replacement program, which includes a recommendation to purchase electric school buses as part of both board strategic plans and maintaining our network technology infrastructure and previously established life cycles.

In summary, here's the full CIP request again, alongside a 10-year plan at the bottom.

They include nine prioritized projects and are ongoing programs.

In year six through 10, we anticipate continuing improvements as per the Landsland campus study recommendations, a project to address high school capacity, implementation of a middle school study that we are currently working on, and a third elementary school, in addition to administration and athletic space.

Here are the operating impacts of our CIP projects, including our current projects.

In the next five years, we anticipate operating costs for High School Center 2 to begin in FY26, and new operating costs for Elementary School Number 1 to begin in FY27.

So we'll shift gears to look at our five-year operating forecast and plan.

As you're very well aware, the purpose of a five-year forecast is to ensure that our capital and operational decisions will ensure long-term financial sustainability.

And it serves as a planning tool to guide and supplement our annual budgeting process.

As you know, there are many unknowns and assumptions are made as of the best available information as of today.

About 68% of our revenues comes from the transfer from Albemarle County and about 27% of our revenues comes from the state.

Since both boards have received information about our local revenue forecasts, I will focus on state revenues today.

In a typical year, we see that there are six factors and decisions that drive our expenditure budgets.

For the purpose of the five-year forecast, we will assume increases in salaries to stay competitive within our markets, increases in healthcare contributions to fully fund our healthcare fund, no changes to our class size ratios, and increases in operational obligations and inflation.

And as well, as you saw, we will include operational impacts of proposed CIP projects.

About 27% of our revenues in the current FY23 was budgeted to come from state revenues.

There are various categories of state revenue sources, the most significant of which is standards of quality, or SOQs.

SOQs prescribe the minimum standard that school divisions must abide by to receive that funding.

SOQ funding is generally provided by the formula shown at the bottom of the slide, and that's primarily driven by our local ability to pay for Albemarle County and projected student enrollment.

For state revenues as part of the financial forecast, we're assuming a constant local composite index or LCI, no major changes in funding formulas, growing enrollment, and increasing position costs for funded SOQ positions.

This is one scenario for our five-year operational forecast.

We anticipate significant costs, at least in FY24, to address compensation and operational inflation.

We do anticipate that in future years, compensation increases and inflationary increases will stabilize to reflect that of historical levels.

In FY24, we are starting off with a funding gap of a little over $5 million.

That funding gap grows significantly in FY25 and 26 due to slowing local revenue growth and then stabilizes again in years four and five.

This slide is here to illustrate the options that the school board has for balancing our operating budget each year.

These are not necessarily new and are the same options that we have in a typical year.

We can increase revenues.

The projections will be finalized over the coming months.

On the expenditure side, we can limit new proposals, including limiting July 1st pay increases.

We can reduce services.

This may mean increasing our class sizes.

As an example, for a sense of scale, increasing our class size ratios by 0.5 would result in about a 15 to 16 FTE reduction.

We can reduce transfers that we have in place to our capital replacement funds, such as our transfer to our vehicle replacement fund, which is currently about $200,000 a year, or transfer to our learning resources or textbook fund, which is currently about $600,000 a year.

We can also reduce inflationary increases, which would result in a reduction in services that we provide.

These are budget decisions that will need to be made during this and future budget development processes.

Thank you.

That's it in terms of the presentation from the school board.

I do have a question.

It's probably better to ask it now, clarifying why.

Can you go to your operating impacts, CID operating impacts slide?

So the operational impact to Center 2 compared to opening a new school, more expensive to open Center 2.

My assumption is, as I've understood in the past, that you open up a new school, you have staff that come from another school.

Whoever moves from one to the other doesn't really change your operating impact as much.

is the center to all new staff or there's less staff transferring there, there's new positions.

Can you just talk to me about, because I understand a center to have fewer students than a new elementary school.

The 1.3 million that you see here represent mainly sort of those overhead or administrative costs of staffing in new high school, which provides, which has a different set of staffing standards than in elementary school.

So for example, because while high school center, two would pull high school students along with regular teachers to that center, there are additional costs such as a counselor

or a nurse or an OA that is sort of provided as a baseline for the staff at high school center too.

For elementary school number two, the reason why that cost is lower is because a lot of the elementary school standards, for example, for school counseling, that is driven by projected enrollment.

So as we project enrollment at Mountain View, we would add certain staff

to Mountain View, the existing Mountain View, and that staff should be moved over to the new Albemarle.

Yes.

So I call it something different, but it's effectively and you're saying that since those admin costs are higher than what a teacher's salary is, that's what the difference is.

So you're top heavy at those.

I mean, I'm not saying that negatively.

There are also higher transportation costs to move to get students to that center.

I think it would be helpful for me just to have the break out at some point.

So I'm not looking, you know, like, oh, it's definitely going to be one principal or two counselors or what have you.

It's always helpful to see that, especially when elementary school one and two and then the comparisons that I'll probably be looking for there.

I hope that other folks would find that helpful.

Let me just add on to that just a second.

So I would also be interested in information, just very general information about the center, how the students go to the center.

In other words, do you have students at the center five days a week?

You know, we talk a lot about how there are only certain days of the week.

I guess I don't have details about it, but there are some students that are there every day, all day long.

I think it's worth noting, Mr. Gallaway, as well, that I don't think the enrollment will be that different between the elementary school and the center church.

You had mentioned that we wanted 400 students.

That's helpful.

That's helpful.

In light fashion, like I asked this question of VDOT yesterday, that they have a whole methodology of contingencies and all this stuff when we're seeing huge transportation product increases of elders.

And I'm sure this methodology is very exciting reading, but as you come up with $40 million or $40.2 million, you know, the cost of the elementary school,

um you know there's it's very difficult when you look at construction only costs versus then any other costs that go in and above it's a land acquisition things like that so if there is a way to show um that 40 million or 45 whatever the number is how you arrive at that number a similar itemization um

I mean, I see that you factored in the 5% inflation.

I presume it went up $3 million, I think, for one of them, for the cost increases that we're adjusting.

So I'm glad that's in there.

But again, it's just the same type of thing.

All right, $40 million.

$10 million's this.

$20 million's that.

The construction costs are that.

Because if you take $40-some million and you divide that by 72,500 square feet, the price per square feet,

If it's not just construction, it can be very misleading when you look at other construction costs per square foot around the state.

So I need help understanding why an elementary school is costing that.

Not that I don't think it's expensive, I'm shocked it's not higher, frankly.

Again, it's just if I had to explain to somebody that said, hey, why does an elementary school cost $40 million?

I should be able to say, well, $25 million is the cost of the construction, $10 million is the site acquisition, project management costs are a percentage of that.

So that's the kind of breakout I'm looking at so I can understand the costs that I can tell the full story of, yeah, here's why it costs $40 million and here's why it costs $820,000.

And the other thing I would just add, not to try and change the topic completely, but you mentioned that getting students to the centers was very expensive.

And I understand that.

There are discussions that could be happening around our local environment because we're talking about high school students.

In Albemarle County and certainly in the city, we're looking at new ways to move folks around transit.

It would be really great to be able to have that as part of the discussion about how we can help in those discussions around transit and what, you know, our micro transit rather than just leaving it all up to the school division.

And I don't know if it's valuable with this, maybe it is this budget season, but I think it's a fair statement to say our current superintendent is a little more flexible with movement of students around the high schools further wise than just centers.

So the dual enrollment with PVCC, I know somebody could be a Albemarle student, but actually be at Monticello more frequently than they are in Albemarle.

That helps with capacity.

So I know it's not just the center model that's helping with that.

However, I wouldn't know about that necessarily if I didn't have a child participating in it.

So what you're seeing, some can help tell the story or understand the story further if there are other programs that helps with that maybe fluidity amongst the high schools, I think.

It could be useful to understand and know as well as we think about adding Center 2 and Center 3 and the costs involved if that's a fair question.

Yeah, we'd like to really commend Ms.

Kumisawa for the really wonderful presentation that you made for the school board and to tell our story.

So thanks so much to you and to Ms.

And I'd like to thank Mr. Bowman and Ms.

Kumisawa for your presentations today.

speak briefly, and I would ask that we allow the school board to go first with questions, comments at this point.

Mr. Bowman?

I'll just say we do have about four more slides of staff content before we really open the board discussion.

Okay.

Well, you would never do that, Mr. Bowman.

If anyone has any questions now, we'll take them.

This fourth section is really the last part of the staff content are these next steps from today.

So to go back in time, it was about 45 minutes ago we were looking at this slide.

When we were looking at step three, we've heard from the school board and what we heard there, but what I'm talking about next on four or five, and then I will be joined at the end by our CFO Nelson Burch about really kind of where do we begin to go from here and open up to board discussion.

So step four is what I alluded to earlier, the strategic plan placeholder that was included in the CIP.

Again, this was undesignated in the last year's budget process, knowing that the board would adopt a strategic plan.

And I'll say in the Board of Strategic Plans discussions across all six goals, there was a long list of ideas that came out of that.

I've only noted a few examples.

These are just examples that was not Board consensus.

These are just things to think about as we prepare the budget.

The Board has asked staff as we prepared the Board set the direction of the goals and objectives.

Now staffs who prepare the budget are looking at those projects and initiatives that move the strategic plan forward for future Board discussion and revision.

As an example, with the pocket products, meaning kind of a small part that would serve in the urban development area, within the rectangular fields, economic development initiatives, or one thing that we are doing in county government, a little different this year, is to have a more structured community nonprofit proposal for capital processes.

The board's made contributions to agencies such as the Center of Belvidere,

Boys and Girls Club, this is kind of bringing one process to consider those all in the context of everything.

So that's really $27 billion across six strategic goals.

And that's a combination of cash funding and borrow proceeds.

So that is one, as we take the board's updated strategic plan and work towards February, we'll begin to plan out.

So point five is sort of a what if.

If we work through this plan,

If we move forward our starting point, as I mentioned in number one, if we find a way in number two to address our project costs, our increased borrowing, and all that as well, we've allocated a strategic plan placeholder, but we know these communities are bigger than just that.

So to the extent possible, how would staff go about comparing the recommendations for consideration in spring if we were to add something else?

So there would be a number of things we would consider.

But as a start, we would look at the county's financial management policies where the county's debt capacity is.

So the county does a regular review of our financial policies.

Most recently were adopted, updated, reaffirmed in September 22 very recently.

And so there are two key ratios that we look at our debt service capacity.

One is looking at outstanding debt to our assessed values.

That's not shown here because right now we project to have more headroom.

I'm looking for right now where is the tightest amount of headroom we have.

And so this is our debt service as a percentage of our general fund and school revenues.

To explain what these lines mean, the blue line is where we are now in Marl County.

And as we update our assumptions for the projects included in the CIP, at the time when we borrow from them, interest rates and all of those reimbursements happen, that blue line will change.

This just happens to be where we are right now if we stop today.

The red line is that 10%.

Now the 10% won't change, but we've made our best estimate today in terms of where we think the general fund and the school fund will be headed in the next five years in the context for a long-range financial plan.

Certainly as we get the results of our December tax collection, our calendar year reassessments, other changes that are happening in the economy, we'll have a better update to that number when it comes to the time of the recommended budget.

There's a third line on here that I've added just as a scenario.

We could run lots of scenarios.

What we've done is we pick one today to say, what if we use debt capacity to 8%?

When we looked at the slide last year with the CIP advisory committee member, many of those board members were there.

We actually did a scenario that went all the way up to 10%.

So what would our capacity be there if we didn't add in?

The consensus from many members was we really shouldn't plan to go to 10%.

Given the uncertainty that we're in, given just the uncertainty whether it's inflation, project cost, all of those things that may be unknown, a plan to go to 10% wouldn't be what these individuals at that time would recommend because we're in such an uncertain time.

And we've gotten through the pandemic where we are because we have that flexibility to be agile and nimble.

and going to 10% takes that away.

And so this is a scenario to say, what if we just went to 8%?

Now I could have picked eight and a half, I could have picked seven and a half, I could have picked nine and we can run scenarios in the future.

This is just for illustrative purposes based on what we know today.

So if we went to 8%, there would be another $37 million on the county's financial policies that could be borrowed.

That capacity is not planned for at this time, because as everyone at this table knows very well, that is not free money.

And we have to think about the other financial side of not just the borrowing, but how that gets repaid.

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Bumman.

In addition to other factors, can you address if there is a percent of general fund

I can speak to that, Chair Price and Elsie Brooks, the CFO.

So this is really it right here.

I actually called Davenport our financial advisors this morning just to confirm some things in my understanding.

And what I want both boards to understand is this is not just a metric that doesn't mean anything.

This 10% is saying if we went to 10%, that's taking away flexibility in our budget, in our operating budget.

So the higher you go, the more fixed your budget becomes.

That's why 10% is where triple-triple A's perform.

And that's also why we have kind of committed to say 8% seems to be a reasonable level that we are able to manage through any of the changing economics that might happen.

And so as Andy kind of alluded to, and you all might remember from his presentations, he's given to both boards.

Our current five-year plan, it assumes continued growth, just a slowing of economic growth.

It does not consider an economic decline where our general fund revenues actually decline.

If that happens, that's going to eat away your capacity.

And that's why you don't go to the 10%.

We need that flexibility in there.

And I'm hopeful that that answered the question that you had.

That absolutely answered the question.

And if I were to just eyeball looking at that as of

the date that's being used, are we at somewhere between seven and eight percent right now?

Yes, in year five in our projection there.

I'll elaborate to explain that and

In our plan, because you can see this trend goes up over time as the courts project is being constructed and borrowed as the schools are being constructed and borrowed board.

That is why we see those that line increase in fiscal year twenty five.

That's the way I would interpret as of today is, and that's why there's 37 million.

That is the place that the board to choose to go.

We then, as you just indicated, all of our projections are based on increasing revenues.

And if there is a recession and a downturn, then we would find ourselves above the 8%.

The idea is to never get to 10%, but the closer we get to 8% or 10%, the less flexibility we have for any other projects.

Thank you for elaborating on that.

So this is just the capacity.

There are some other considerations that staff would consider as we prepare recommendation.

First, just to restate, to go to 8% capacity, we'd have that capacity of $37 million.

But then we have the related funding required, and this is what would need to be identified.

First, 5% of a project or projects of $37 million is what we call a pay-as-you-go funding where, for all kinds of financial reasons, we would not plan to borrow 100% for that project.

We would need one-time funding of $1.85 million to actualize that $37 million group of projects or project.

More impactful would be the annual debt service that we would pay each year of that life of the bond, which for the most part is in 20 years.

So if the county took what I call maybe the more traditional or least revenue amount of that annual debt service payment on $37 million would be $3.13 million annually.

If we were to take the general obligation route, because we get a better rate, there's a slightly more favorable impact there where that rate is $3.06 million that is paid on debt service annually over 20 years of the life of the bond.

The funding source would be a future discussion in the fiscal year 24 budget process.

We're really not talking about it today because it's not the intent of today's meeting on that particular question.

But all of these numbers are really where we are today and as we get better information we can bring this information back in the budget process to where we are.

I'll acknowledge that these points of the capacity and related funding are not the only considerations.

We will need to consider, to the point already made, about future flexibility.

As I'll jump back to this chart, we know in the out years of that CIP, we'll be constructing that third school.

That will have debt service and tax that will continue because we are 29 and 30 and so on.

So that's information we don't have today, and what we could certainly bring forward back there is when we're issuing 20-year bonds, that also will extend view on fiscal year 28.

Now, obviously, when we get in five-year planning out in the year six and seven, that becomes very foggy and hard to know, and even in a more stable time.

These are just things that the board would need to weigh as they are considering the next CIP.

The other consideration that Ms.

Kumazawa spoke to is the related operating impacts that we would need to fund for burning projects.

This is just really speaking to the capital side and the ongoing debt service payment.

Certainly if we're opening facilities and constructing them, we would make sure that we're able to operate this.

And then finally, what is the county's ability to execute?

We certainly know what that looks like in present.

We've done things that may be, you know, to kind of improve our throughput.

But as we look at what a CIP in a certain size looks like, as that gets bigger, that's another consideration we'll have to factor in.

Again, not an answer today, but these are some of the things that staff will be weighing as we prepare the recommended CIP.

He only gives me one slide.

So thank you all.

This is such an important topic and it's going to be great to hear the discussion from both boards.

While I know there's been some concern about the process, what I want to make sure and reiterate to the boards is this is not the end and the final decision for any of the schools or other needs that we have.

These discussions really are a way to inform Mr. Richardson, who has to present a balanced budget to the Board of Supervisors in February.

And so this discussion and the conversations that you all have helps to inform us and how we can be better prepared to address whatever the Board of Supervisors desires as part of these conversations, recognizing the needs across the county for various things.

But today it's focused on the schools.

And so as Ms.

Kamuzawa and Mr. Bowman has mentioned, we are really in a five-year planning phase of where we are.

We do not yet know what fiscal 24 revenues are going to look like.

Our biggest revenue happens in January.

And that really is what sets forward what we actually think the next five years is going to look like.

We're using last year's projection and updating it accordingly.

And so that really is a place that starts the effort of what are we going to put into that fiscal 24 operating budget and capital budget, and then the next four years on a planning cycle for the capital program.

So once Mr. Richardson prepares and Dr. Haas prepare their budgets in the February timeframe, then there's a significant board deliberation and work sessions as you all are very familiar with.

And that's when the board can refocus or redistribute revenues or do things differently from what they see, from what you all see in Mr. Richardson's proposed budget, which will incorporate the schools.

But I wanted to spend just a few moments and talking about some board strategies on how in the event that you want to go higher with respect to how much we are funding in the capital program.

What could that look like in terms of where do we grab additional funding?

in order to support additional capital expenditures.

We already have, it's not quite balanced, but the next four years is pretty spoken for.

We have an adopted capital program.

We're making the modifications as Mr. Bowman mentioned.

But there is the 28 that we've got to incorporate and all the other things that Andy talked about, which I won't go back into detail.

So that next five years is going to be influenced by that 2023 reassessment.

We talked about the 10%.

That really is where, that's the indicator we're watching because that's the one that we are bumping up again, that debt service as a percent of our operating budget.

And so that's the one we're really going to be watching and where we're going to want stability in the event our budget grows higher than we expected.

So that is one thing that's going to be different and what you're going to see from Mr. Richardson's proposed budget than what you saw today.

We don't know that yet, and that's what's going to change.

But the other options down here, so that's kind of a gimme that's going to happen regardless of any intentionality set or direction set by the Board of Supervisors.

The Board always has the opportunity or the option to increase tax, the tax rate.

We heard today that we have effectively increased taxes

in 2023 to the equivalent of 9.9 cents, you just didn't increase the tax rate.

And so there's always that option to do that in the event the board, the board might choose to do so.

The next one, and this is the one where you'll get a lot of passion from me, is investment of one-time funding.

But we've broken it out into two different categories.

The one that the boards are used to seeing is, let's take some one-time funding that we have from being good budget stewards.

We've done something good this year.

Maybe revenues came out better than expected.

Maybe expenditures came lower than we expected.

But there's a variance there.

We're going to plug that back into capital.

That's the one that we're pretty good at.

The next one is the one that we are talking significantly on the county side about how can we do things differently in order to save money to plug into other things that we want to do.

And this takes a lot of leadership intention and a lot of analysis and a lot of understanding your business in order to figure out how might we do things different.

And let's reprioritize some money and put it into the capital program.

The school board has the ability to do that, even though we have the 60-40 split and the 10% and all of that.

There's a formula.

You still have the option to say, you know what, and I understand Ms.

Kimazaya just told you that there's an imbalance in the next five years of your operating plan right now.

Well, there is for the county side too.

There's some creative things that we can probably do on the operating side.

to give us some savings that we can plug into something that we want more.

And I think that that's the point I want to make is that effort and that energy of what does that look like?

I'm not the expert on that, but I know that there's always places that you can become more efficient and using that to help you with something that we want more, which might be capital.

And then the last one, I think everybody is aware that this one might be harder than we want it to be because we need General Assembly support.

But is there an opportunity in the future that we'll have some dedicated funding that's supported by the General Assembly that can be used for school construction?

So that's out there as an option, but I know it's a little bit of a bigger leap.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Okay, we aren't going to be as formal as the supervisors usually are in calling people that name, but we'll just sort of open it up to the school board in general.

I just want to thank the supervisors for listening to our concerns as one of the new schools is in mind and

Chair Page's district that meant to give relief to the Mountain View students.

I hope you understand how this also affects student outcomes, which is our main concern.

We want those students to do well.

We want the teachers and the staff to have some relief.

Thank you, Ms.

Thanks.

I'll jump in.

I just have one comment or request and then something about funding.

First of all, I want to extend my congratulations and my thanks to the presenters today.

Obviously, a lot of hard work went into this and it was very well done.

Thank you very much.

I think each of the supervisors over the course of the last year have heard from Dr. Acuff and me, beginning last year when we were meeting and handing you the Long Range Planning 2021 book.

And we were talking about the fact that both schools and the county need new, ongoing, consistent, and sufficient revenue streams, to your point.

to pay for our CIP projects.

I know supervisors Price and Bea Stowe currently heard a lot about this during last year's 2021 CIP committee meeting and they kept getting brought up and brought up.

Ms.

Birch, I wish you the very best in terms of figuring it out because it's something that we really need and from the community side, I know that's equally as necessary.

The other thing I just wanted to mention was the school renovations projects.

The Long Range Planning Advisory Committee gave us a number of $106 million that need for reparations and renovations in the elementary schools, which is the biggest chunk, the middle schools and the high schools.

And I thoroughly understand that we were given

$2 million a year for the first five years of the program.

And this is intended with a certain amount of humor, but at $2 million a year, that's going to take 53 years.

So it would complete in 2075.

Hopefully, my daughter will be celebrating my 123rd birthday in terms of memory.

And that 22-year-old girl right now will be 75.

So in terms of stepping up the funding for the renovations, it's not going to be probably in this particular budget, but I would like, I just want to ask you to keep your eyes on this particular issue because at that point in 2075,

The average age of our schools, excluding the three new ones that will be built, will be 100 years old.

And I think the love, entropy, you know, kicks in that if you're not painting the wall, it's going to start to qualify.

So that's just a request on that particular subject.

Well, just to add on to what Jono said, I think you've all probably heard of this before.

I mean, one of the reasons that we went with the center model was plus renovating our high schools is that the overall price tag was considerably less than building the high school.

And so we have, you know, on our side, you made a huge effort to economize in terms of capital costs.

but so far we don't have either one.

So it's challenging when we have so many of our students in trailers.

So totally off the wall, not off the wall but another concern I have and it's sort of almost outside of this at the moment is we have an advisory committee for environmental sustainability that Diantha is also a member of that we are working to see how schools can

make accommodations to the county's climate action agreement.

And so far, all of the climate friendly things that we have done, putting on solar panels, windmills, we've done not with cash outlays, but with power purchasing agreements.

And we've had LED lighting.

We've done all of this without cost.

And we have

with the new addition to Jose Elementary, the marginal cost of doing all geothermal as opposed to rebuilding, getting a new boiler made it cost efficient to do that.

But going forward, we have three new schools that are going to be constructed in the next five years, seven years, and

There's a cost involved with doing them going forward that is not currently built into our numbers.

And so the issue is how wedded to a climate action plan is the guarantee because it's cheaper for us to build a school that's not as efficient.

Anyway, that's just a comment.

So the goals that we have in that committee, with the exception of how do we craft educational programs to educate our kids about climate and, you know, those are part of our

Portfolio already.

But the other element I think we should consider as boards, how much are we willing to invest in that?

I mean, even our electric buses, I think we have two, we have four coming.

Four coming, all of them have been granted because a school bus cost is about $100.

And we, what, do three to five buses a year replacement?

The electric bus is at 300.

And so there's no way it would move that.

So these are just considerations.

I just wanted to add on to what John and Kate were saying about the renovations and how

I think it's we sort of see them as separate items next it seems for funding and the renovations are sort of easy to write off I think but it was a big part of the equitable component of that so that all of our high school students get a more modern education rather than whoever 300, 400

decided to go to the centers.

I'll piggyback.

I'm not going to say a lot because I know that Jono and Kate can speak very eloquently about our capital improvement projects.

And I will second and triple and third, or triple and then quadruple the climate action plan and having that in our mind.

It's something that's very important to me and Kate.

and I'd like to see that incorporated on Judy's comments.

I know there was, I think it was a question from Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley about the corridors.

And I always, when I see those, and since you guys don't have the benefit of sitting through these board meetings, when I see pictures, sometimes it doesn't resonate with me.

I used to teach, I taught in a basement.

So I was like, you know, it's like, why do I need a fancy building?

That's not what it's about.

But there is more to be said about hallway structure.

actually ties back to safety, especially at a high school level.

It can come down to really simple things like where bathrooms are placed that can have a really big impact on how the school day functions and how kids in those schools, whether or not they can go hide in a bathroom that's not easily seen by teachers in hallways that are really intricate.

So it's beyond just

It looks pretty.

We want pretty spaces.

And that's just one example of where we've done thoughtful consideration around why we think these are important components of modernizing our buildings.

And I'm using that example because my mom, who's a teacher, has to monitor bathrooms because at high school,

People go to bathrooms to potentially maybe do, you know, whatever they want to do in the bathroom.

And it's really hard when you don't have open spaces where you can really easily see.

So it's beyond just looking pretty.

Just on the corridors, I mean, Albemarle High School, the core building was built

It opened in 1953 and it had a capacity of 800 students.

And the hallways are built to accommodate 800 students.

We've got 2,000 students.

And so removing the lockers at least gives a perception of more space.

Evidently, we can't take them all the way down to the floor and actually increase the size of the hallways.

But we can put benches, alcoves with plug-ins or people's laptops.

We can have sitting spaces.

There's an appearance of more space.

And I just brought up my comment because I didn't see the difference as in paint.

And so that was very confusing to me.

And I wanted a clarification because I realized that you wanted more in the corridors, but

Other comments from the board?

Maybe I'd just like to re-emphasize especially about our innovations.

Like Ms.

Lee was saying, the original idea for renovating our high schools was really a part of the center plan in the beginning.

That we'd have the centers being built and then all of our existing high schools would be renovated to allow all of our students to have, like Ms.

Lee said, a really good education.

And maybe just to re-emphasize what Mr. Alcarra was saying, I'm pretty sure that if we wait until he

until he's 123 years old.

He won't be able to attend any of the ribbon-cutting ceremonies that we'd have for any of those renovation projects.

So I really hope that we're able to really, really work on those renovations far, far ahead of him being 123 years old.

So I think that would be the main thing that we have unless any other board members would like to contribute anything else.

Thank you, Chair Page.

We'll go through our order.

Yes, thank you.

First of all, I just want, because we haven't really had an opportunity even though we get together occasionally, I just want to thank the school board.

You all have lived through one of the most challenging times in public education.

I just want to thank you all for your hard work and how you negotiated the masking, the vaccinations, opening and closing schools, and all of that.

And I know that a lot of people in the community have concerns, but I really do appreciate your hard work.

And just to move on to sort of the more current discussion that we were talking about, Andy gave us a really good historical perspective.

on where we've been and sort of catching us up to the future.

Maya did a great job.

I think our staff has just really presented a lot of really good information that was sort of a drowning in information a little bit for us.

And I just want to take a minute to make sure that we would love to have this presentation.

I know many of us would like to have a copy of that if you could send it to us electronically.

We talked a lot today about diversifying our income strengths, our revenue strengths.

And we talked a lot about, or I heard a lot about doing things differently, trying to be innovative.

I think that that is really important.

Certainly, I know both boards have been thinking about that for a good while.

I would say that I want to get to an example of how we might be able to be more innovative in looking at our needs going forward.

And I'm going to use the Lands Lane Campus

as an example.

And I do want to start off the discussion about the Lansing campus saying we really appreciate the school board and the master plan work that you all did.

That was really critical because, of course, you all know that the Lansing campus has somewhere around 23, 25% of all the students in Almarc County Public Schools.

It is a big chunk of your population in one place.

The Board of Supervisors recently received from our staff an email that talked about how we could do some things differently in thinking about the Landsland campus and how it fits into our CIP.

And I don't want to go into a lot of detail today other than to say that, thinking through things differently, the biggest starting point for that work

is our roads.

The loop road through and then the road, what I would call and I think maybe the folks that represent that area, live in that area, we say Georgetown-Verix Road, Hydraulic as it goes into Rio Road, that whole area is terribly congested right now.

It is dangerous and it really needs addressing.

And if so though,

The thought would be to be a little innovative about this.

Let's look at how we can work together, perhaps using revenue sharing money, smart scale funding, transportation funding from the Board of Supervisors to make perhaps that happen.

But the Board of Supervisors need to talk about that first.

So I don't want to get us down into the stream today, but I'm just saying that could be an example of how we could work together

to do some things differently.

Because if we just keep thinking and doing the same thing, we're not going to move ourselves forward.

We just got to start thinking out of the box.

And let me just see my notes here.

I do want to just compliment and say I agree definitely with the school board members when they talk about renovations and modernizing and how that changes outcomes for students.

It also changes teachers.

If we're looking at trying to recruit and retain teachers, I can remember when we popped the windows in over at Greer and how really positive that was for the teachers and for the students.

And certainly, Katrina, I appreciate what you were talking about, about how we structure our schools and the changes that we can make that can change outcomes for students.

So I really appreciate it now.

I guess that is all for right now.

But I really appreciate this discussion and I look forward, I hope you have many more.

Mr. Bowman, you can correct me.

Well, and it's yesterday and I just, so I missed it.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much, and I will just, a couple of brief things.

As a student at Albemarle High School, graduating in 1967, there were 1600 of us before those additions in the 90s, so I fully appreciate what always

and without the second floor on the H. And you need to get from here to there and maybe hit the bathroom on the way.

It was a really fast eight minutes to get to the next level.

And we were there nine to three with six classes.

So there was not a second to be wasted back then.

So I do and also for 15 years taught in a basement level computer and science where it had been a former storage room and the window was

One of those three lights behind Kate over there at the ceiling where the playground was out there.

So that is another thing where I do understand how important white walls and bright lights and pretty pictures from the National Gallery and things really help to make a much more pleasant place.

I just have a couple of sort of short questions in a way.

I know you all are watching the federal dollars.

I know there's been things I'm trying to, whenever I capture something, send them to

Nelson and Jeff and Matt unfortunately bury them with stuff that then they have to figure out if it should go in the trash or go to somebody else.

But I think that those will continue at least for a couple of more years as far as opportunities for improving any phase of climate change, whether it's school operations or improvements.

Unfortunately, these things don't have a tremendously long lead time.

So all the work that you're doing on some grant

Hopefully all that can be saved and captured and copy pasted in new format into the new one in order to meet some of these really short deadlines that are provided.

And someone can get back to me later if this is completely inappropriate for today's discussion.

But when we were talking about transportation and the cost of transportation, I know you all have been struggling with all the school traffic and the parent traffic, et cetera.

Is there a sort of light at the end of the tunnel on that?

as far as getting the kids back on the buses as soon as you have more drivers.

And that is something that could have followed up some other time.

And I guess the uncertainty that I hope we will all keep an eye on is what the state budget is going to do to us.

Because every time I hear somebody mention SOQs, I start to cringe because that seems to be a place where there is a little just enough lack of understanding in the general population about what that means for the legislators to be able to

Oh, let's just give them only 20% of what it really costs to do the job and say we're doing everything.

So this is the season when we all have to get ready to do those midnight contacts and really fight our way to get things that our community needs.

And I'm happy to help with that and look forward to more detail.

As everyone has said, I'm one of those folks who really love the detail down the list of

to get confidence because our constituents, all of us, are not satisfied with, oh yeah, it's going to be fine.

We have to have details to be able to share in a very concrete way, even if it's something that changes.

Here's where we are right now.

This is the plan.

We're going to talk about it some more and probably readjust it in May or July or whatever, but having those very concrete bits of information is really, really helpful.

Thank you.

Yes, very good comments.

And I do agree that the school boards that they've gone through in the past couple of years have been trying, very, very trying.

And I commend you all because as a former teacher and administrator, I've gone through renovations, I've gone through personnel in the cafeteria, everything.

all within trying to keep everything within a budget.

Someone, and I don't know who said this, but we can do anything you want.

We just can't do everything.

And so we really have to look at where, what your priorities are.

And I think there are other opportunities maybe that are coming up hopefully for the state.

I don't know about that, but whenever we have, those are the things we, whatever budget we are given doesn't, we have to work with, but priorities, we prioritize and we have to have balanced budgets.

And I think you all, you're in the same position.

You have to prioritize, you have to have a balanced budget.

I think we've done a great job regarding the pandemic and being able to save monies and use monies from the federal government, state and everything.

But I think it's just a matter of prioritizing what is most important to you within the budget that you have, because we all have this limited amount of knowledge.

So what's the most important thing?

Shutting things off one at a time, putting in priorities, which is what we do also.

We can't have everything we want, either.

Thank you.

Thank you for the participation today, really.

And the presentation was fantastic.

Thank you, Chair Price.

So part of my role is to anticipate all the questions I think Supervisor Andrews is going to ask.

I think a lot of the questions I'm going to ask

Please answer if you have it now, but if need time to get it, then tell me I need time.

But the answers are such that at least from my perspective, I will need and be able to make decisions about our budget that's coming up.

So this is supposed to be our CIP process.

So I think it's important for both boards to have a clear understanding of what the playing field is when we go in to make some of those decisions.

So my questions are in that spirit.

Philosophically, if I could write a check and stroke it to the schools, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Part of the reason I ran for the supervisors was to help figure out how to pay for school and get more resources to that school division.

That was unabashed about it when I ran.

And, you know, I've learned some things since I've been over on the supervisors that I think it's important to have a sound financial team.

and follow the sound financial practices.

So I think I understand more than I did then as a school board member just saying, hey, go raise taxes, what having that AAA bond rating means for us, not just for our school division but for our county.

But I don't want anyone to think, as we start to see emails already come in, that our Board of Supervisors is not funding schools because we're stingy.

I think that's important to know as we go through this budget cycle.

So I'm going to ask questions so I get the full scope.

I understand what our baseline is.

We don't raise taxes.

I can't do that.

The reason I ask is we're going to go into a budget cycle and some people are going to say give the school board their $318 million.

So that's the question that's coming next.

We have a capacity level from a strategy standpoint that says we're not going to go over 8%.

So that we need to know.

Now, I'm asking because let's say property values don't increase and we don't get more revenues, what's the flat?

As it is today, we'd have to increase taxes.

1.5?

Penny and change would take care of it.

We can certainly follow the exact number that is.

That's just general value to give you some perspective.

And that would have to be fully dedicated.

Yes.

Yes.

And thank you for clarifying.

That would be for fully dedicated to the capital debt program.

Otherwise, it would go through the normal split and then you wouldn't get as much.

And $318 million?

You can do it in chunks, I guess.

$37 plus another $150 million.

That would be $90, $120.

Is that about $0.06, $0.07, $0.08?

That's one I'm going to ask to do more math on and make sure I don't misspeak.

And then my follow-up question, if we did the full $318 million, where does that put us on our chart for the 8%, the 10% relative to that ranking?

See, we have to have that perspective.

because part of this is not necessarily desire.

We've made a commitment to stick to our financial strategy within that 8 and that 10%.

So we need to know the requests and how it falls on those charts.

Because then the question becomes not what's your willingness or your political willingness, it becomes what's your desire to leave a financial strategy or not.

And to me, that's not necessarily political will.

I think that's a different scheme.

Financial philosophy that we've never explored before in this county.

I don't know if you can.

Because the question is, is it dedicated to capital?

But then the way that the capital adds to our operational, if we only could raise revenues through tax increase, it would have to account not just for the CIP cost, but the operational costs as well.

So in theorizing out what the tax rate increase would need to be, I hope that can be factored in.

And if it comes during budget time, that's great.

But I need to know what the field is.

I know where we're at.

I know our baseline.

So I need to know, well, what are the other options?

We could put some scenarios together for discussion.

So I guess the other conversation, and maybe this is a bigger conversation outside of budget,

In your long range plan, the school division's long range plan, they do a good job of trying to differentiate what's a renovation and what's a maintenance.

And frankly, I don't understand.

I understand what they're doing.

I understand their point.

I understand what they're saying.

So I'm not saying I'm not disputing that they should do it that way.

But, you know, we were talking about renovations in 2013, 12, 13, 14, 15.

It's almost 10 years later, and we're still talking about renovations.

So how do we get renovations?

Because some on the list in the long range planning to me look like an HVAC cycle.

You're going to redo bathrooms.

You know, OK, if you're just renovating a current bathroom, that probably should be maintenance.

If you want to move the bathrooms, then I guess that's a modernization or there's a different piece.

It could tighten up our CIP, but if we don't start getting some of the things that are thought of as renovations in on a normal CIP cycle, like an HOA, if it's time to replace the tennis courts, replace the tennis courts.

You got to have the discipline to stick to that.

And I'm trying to think of a way to get some of these renovations thought of in a normalized cycle that don't always get booted.

The best example on our side is we booted down window replacements of this building for how many years when it should have been put on a CIP cycle that said you need to replace your windows in year 20, do it.

Right?

And then the board 10, 12 years ago said, no, we'll keep moving that down.

Now they, I'm not questioning why they did it.

They did it for good reason, but then you get other things and it stacks up and you can't crawl out of it in one given year.

And it takes, you know, until John is 123 to crawl out of this hole.

So how we think about the maintenance in the renovations and what the school division, I think once

In renovations, you know, the fact that we didn't have school buses in our CIP was always just crazy to me.

And we've got CIP that's in our CIP now.

So that was a mind change.

That was a mind shift to get us and fire engines and things like that into the CIP where it is a capital improvement expenditure.

So how some of these things that are in your renovation side, let's stop trying to convince each other what's a maintenance item versus a renovation item.

If you're going to do bathroom or hallway improvements, it should be done on a cycle.

And if there's educational value to doing them differently than just putting fresh paint on them, then that should be factored into the project.

And I don't know if that helps get us anywhere.

It certainly doesn't change the needle on cost.

Maybe it does because you're doing it at the same time you're doing other projects and there's some economies of scale for doing it that way.

I don't know.

but perhaps there could be a different, we just I think need to change our mindset on how we think about these renovations and the maintenance items.

Any of the plans, because I know the Long Range Plan Advisory Committee's report, you know, that talks about capacity studies, long range planning.

I don't, anything that's been completed to date, it would be helpful if that could be sent to us.

For example, they recommend in the middle school to want a capacity study.

I can't imagine middle school capacity study is one of your highest priorities because that's not where you have a capacity issue.

But if there's any capacity studies or a lot of the plans and recommendations in the long range plan site

complete, study, implement.

And I don't know whether we're at implement stage, but it would be very useful for me to have at least, and I think everybody to have, what those completed ones are as we think about the projects if we're going to attempt to get more revenue.

If they're completed already, where are they?

I've tried to find some and I forget how to obviously get school information.

I'm just using today as a way to go, yeah, if there's anything here that helps explain, you know, I feel like I have a good understanding of why the elementary school capacity issues exist and what's going on.

I mean, Baker-Butler, you're basically reverse redistricting what we did in 2013 when we moved Holly Mead-Keebs to Baker-Butler.

How are we going to suck them back out of there?

And Holly Mead's under capacity.

So when you think about your long range plan, I don't fully yet comprehend or understand your strategy with the two elementary schools relative to your redistricting plan, but the way you guys are talking about it sounds like you obviously do.

I think both boards have to do some work and I think the county executive and the superintendent will do as well because I think

I think the part I would like to commend the county executive and superintendent for the partnership that they have and the relationship they have because there's a lot of years for that.

We all have to deal with the fact that costs have increased tremendously.

And we have to rethink how we can work together

As we move projects forward and not always thinking about separate facilities for each thing that we need.

I don't know enough about your data center, but the thought popped into my head when I read about the data center.

As recommended, it is.

We're on the same path.

We don't do that.

We're not.

None of us are going to.

Costs aren't going to go down, I don't think.

So, you know, the supervisors will be getting a facilities study that's going to be coming to us with next steps and recommendations about how we use our space.

you know we've thought out loud all of us have thought out loud about the the other space up on Berkmar and what could be rehoused there and when we start thinking of using that space to our advantage we have to team up

and think about, okay, what are their needs?

What are our needs?

What can we call one project?

And perhaps that cuts the cost by 20% in the total versus if we did two standalone projects.

I don't know how we get to that, like where that happens, but that has to happen.

I mean, we had a bridge, pedestrian bike bridge that we were going to use to connect Pan Tops to Willam Mills.

I mean, that project costs when I'm $16 million.

12 million to 40 million dollars.

Now it's a bridge, you know, there's some engineering things there, but every single smart scale application project came back with a 30 to 40 percent increase in it.

So we've got to figure out how to absorb that 30 to 40 percent and

I have to think there's something in trying to combine efforts, and maybe we have a building that is able to house everything that ultimately allows it to work out.

So I'm just calling that out.

This is my chance to say, hey, I think that's worthwhile of pursuing.

OK, so I guess my last comment will be about

about taxes.

We saw where our effective tax rate increase was 6.6%.

We didn't equalize the rate.

So we have to all appreciate the fact that folks also are out there dealing with increased costs, inflation in their own pocketbook, and their taxes have in fact gone up.

We have compensation studies on both sides of the county and the schools being done where we know we're going to get hammered on how much we pay our people.

We've got a CIP that's completely, that we all wish we could fund with more revenue.

So, you know, when we think about increasing the tax rate, only in isolation of thinking about capital needs, we need to remember that we have to have the same conversation when we go, can we afford our people and what we need to pull off what we want to do.

because that increase is probably coming.

And what is that going to look like on top of the tax rate increase to cover the capital needs?

I would hope that both divisions can have conversations of what they're comfortable with.

I know that the school board doesn't make that decision.

I know that you don't do the tax rate decision or the increase but if we're going to work together on it then we should be able to realistically go okay we need two cents for capital and we need a cent for compensation and if that's the way that it's going to have to go then that willingness to say that is going to be out there we talk a lot about political will right and I don't think any of us are afraid of the political will it takes if it's if the community's saying we want you to do x y and z

and we can show them that it's going to cost X, Y and Z, then you make your case and then you let the voters kick your ass out if they didn't like the decision you made, I guess.

But we need to realistically understand what that's going to be on top of the fact that we've raised taxes 10 cents, we put in the discount that we did on the property tax, even though car value still went up.

I don't know what the net is, but it's probably still what, eight cents, eight and a half cents?

And that's a lot for a community to stomach.

So if we're going to increase the rate on top of values probably continuing to go up, we just need to be mindful of what the reality is moving forward.

And then the last comment I'll make this year, who knows which way the political winds will go in terms of the 1% increase for the sales tax.

But I don't think anybody sitting around the table is in opposition to that, because that's putting that 1% directly to school capital needs.

There were a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle at Vaco talking like they were in support of that.

So I don't know what falls apart when it actually comes voting time from touting education, but then not being able to vote education.

But I would use this opportunity to do a rallying cry for both supervisors and school board members to do heavy lobbying of the General Assembly as they go through the session to get that tool.

No sales tax.

I mean, it's still a tax.

We're still taxing folks, but we're not just going back and hitting the property tax, which is what we've been trying to do over the last couple of years.

How can we get revenue from just going back to the property tax?

You know, cigarette tax is one type of thing.

Getting transient oxygen tax is trying to get the folks that come here, you know, are here for a weekend and leave.

We should be able to extract something from there and not continually go back to the places where we live.

Thank you, Supervisor Gallo.

Thank you.

First, just to explain the comment.

Beginning of this year is my first year, and I followed Ned for six months, and we decided to switch the order and then put randomness to it.

I was excited to follow Ned again.

He's a hard act to follow.

And I ask all your questions because I'm starting to like it.

But I still want to make some comments.

I really appreciate the presentations by both school and county staff.

Very helpful.

I'm very glad that we're not finalizing things today because it's a lot to think about, a lot to work on.

I also appreciate that we're doing this together as full boards.

As a newbie, one of the things was that I really wasn't, I became aware that there had been a process where two people got together with two people and did things, and I like the idea that we're all discussing this, because I need to feel comfortable with it.

There's deep love, and it's going to take some time.

I appreciate being part of that process very much.

as Supervisor Galloway said very eloquently.

A big part of this is coming back with sort of hard scenarios as to what's going to happen.

Not only how we would fund this, so what the

Gio versus lease obligations would be and how much that would cover as far as debt service and where we are there but also what tax rate implications that has, what inflation scenarios, one of the things that hasn't been brought up that was in the packet was a very long, I hope everybody had a chance to read it, annual economic outlook report for the county which was a substantial part of what this included and

And there's many levels on that, because obviously construction costs contingencies is one of the things that brought us to this point, I think, to some extent, because we look at the earlier lists and now look at what it costs to build a school a year later.

And it's mind boggling how much things change.

And there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding that.

But I hope we get as much as we can, some scenario planning to be able to

Focus on that.

I do want to start out also by saying,

I also support schools.

Said that when I was running for office.

I also support affordable housing.

Said that when I was running for office.

And support climate resilience.

And so energy concerns are really going to be important to me.

And what goes on the school roofs and other ways in which the schools are energy efficient better be part of this, I hope.

So I don't want to shortchange that.

But all of those considerations will be part of this process.

I appreciate your comment about the sales tax proposals to the legislation, but it won't begin particularly quickly because as far as further action, even if the General Assembly authorizes it before we can say, yes, we can use that revenue source.

So that also has to sort of be built into what would that do to us in terms of our time

The other thing that I felt, you know, that is really difficult to wrap my mind around, but it's pretty important is when we talked about capacity studies and projections, I have to say, you know, as a Board of Supervisors member, we are regularly brought proposals for development in the development areas.

But some of them are pretty massive.

Some of them are planned in the sense that we expected that as we hoped in the comprehensive plan that this kind of density would go into the space.

But getting feedback from the school is important as part of that process.

So whether we're talking about Southwoods or some of the other developments, how they impact the schools.

So, we'll appreciate having more dialogue in order to understand these capacity projections and what impact we're having on those as developments get around.

So, I will pass on from there.

I appreciate, by the way, Supervisor Gallow, it's very important.

As with all the others, Mr. Richardson, Dr. Foss, your staffs respectively, and particularly our presenters today.

We greatly appreciate and recognize the work that goes into preparing for a joint meeting like this.

Chair Page and members of the school board, we're so thankful to have the opportunity to work with you.

I will endeavor not to totally replicate the comments of the others, but these meetings are important, not just for county staff, school board staff, school board and board of supervisors.

but also to our public, both those here present today as well as those who may be watching online to give them a better understanding of the challenges that we face.

And one of the things that I am really focused on is the capacity issue in the schools.

So I'm equally focused on the capacity issues of us financially.

I'm fortunate to represent the Scottsville Magisterial District and Mountain View School in that district.

It's an extremely high level of concern for me, which is equaled by my concern for every other school in the county.

We all have those concerns, and we know that we have to do something to improve that capacity, and we appreciate the challenges that you face.

As other supervisors have indicated, these past few years for school boards have been probably the most challenging in the world.

In addition to COVID with schools openings and closings and masks and vaccinations, we've also had to deal with fights against equity.

And as a member of the LGBTQ community, I'm very appreciative of this county and both county level and school has done to protect those marginalized communities.

I'm really spending a lot of my thought process on that capacity, that debt service as a percent of general revenues because the concern that I will always have is that if we max our debt out to the capacity that we have identified as sustainable,

Then we are effectively like the household budget that is minimal monthly payment constrained and has no capacity for things that come up unexpectedly, which we see every single year come up.

I'm not quite sure how we can take into account, and I would ask our financial people to think about this and help me explain, or help me understand.

I kind of feel like after the complexity of Supervisor Galloway, I'm the 12 or fewer items in the express lane in terms of my understanding of some of that.

For example, when Ms.

Acuff mentioned that a new electric bus costs $300,000 versus, say, $100,000 for a diesel bus, the acquisition costs are substantially higher, but we know that the operational costs are lower.

And so if you can help me to understand a way that we can do some sort of a balancing between paying upfront a higher cost, but that gives us a lower cost over the operational time of that item,

That would be very much appreciated.

I also want to express particular appreciation to Supervisor Galloway and Supervisor McKeel, whose previous service on the school board provides the rest of our board and the county an experience and insight into some of the challenges that we would not otherwise have.

And that has been invaluable for us.

So I really want to express my appreciation for that.

I was listening to NPR on the radio the other day and so I would ask specifically to the school system, you know, you hear a snippet, a part of a vignette on the radio and they were talking about additional funding at the state level.

and that there's some sort of a grant process for that.

I didn't catch enough of the details, but I would really be appreciative of hearing back from the school on what this additional funding through the state may be for school construction and how that may tie in to both the competitiveness and our ability to achieve some of those funds.

But if we are, how that may help us, much like the body grants that built us so substantially in our broadband improvement.

and as I think several of the supervisors, particularly Supervisor Galloway mentioned, you know, we've got not just the tax rate and assessed value, the additional taxes that we've been able to increase, the comprehensive compensation study, inflation, and a study, an economic forecast, which is indicating to us that we should anticipate

At best level, very likely declining revenues over the short term.

We're all worried about the recession, and it just adds to the challenges we've got.

I do.

Of course, often I do.

Do you mind?

I just want to jump in and remind folks when we're talking about salaries and we have a study, compensation study, every

Every locality in the TJPDC district is doing it.

So we're talking about our, I just want the school board members to recognize, because we're aware of it, that everybody is looking at that and that is significant.

We're not the only ones.

So we just have to factor that in in our brains.

The other thing I want to just mention is Ned talked about the Burke Marr profit.

What was really great about that profit was, and I will compliment Kate on it, she made sure that that profit was county government as well as school division profit.

And going forward, as we're trying to work together,

That might be something that we want to make sure happens.

Maybe not relevant in all cases, but it is interesting because it's a very different proffer.

It's in the name of the school division as well as county government, which does allow us to start thinking about a particular piece of property in a combined way and how we use that piece of property together, maybe coordinating facilities or projects.

And I'll only add one more thing, Donna.

I think we have to also remember we talk about the forecast is not as strong as we would like.

We also have to remember that some of us around this table have lived through a time when the state said you're not going to get as much as we promised you and you need to get money back.

And that is very concerning.

Thank you, Supervisor McKeel.

Thank you.

This is fine for future response.

It doesn't require it now.

But I know that local government and schools both had lovely, very helpful survival money from the state through CARES and ARPA funding.

And is there any more of that on the school side that is going forward into future things?

Because I know that the local government has spread theirs out over many years.

So I would love to learn about that for future improvement charges.

And related to the discussion about

Maintenance versus renovation and capacity increases brought me back to the days of the CIP and above the line and below the line because there was a description of maintenance as these are the things you guaranteed to do and if that used all the money then that was all there was and certainly from the 2010 to 14 level we didn't do anything much but maintenance because it ate up all the cost

And it was a good plan.

Take care of your existing buildings is a very, very good plan.

But I think over the last many years, it's been refined.

So we're more careful about what it really means.

It's not just painting and window washing, it's structures and things.

So I'm sure staff would have a more coherent response about that and others may.

want to know more about it as well.

Any other supervisor comments?

So I know supervisors Andrews mentioned it.

We've all mentioned it.

I think it was in the packet today.

This is that economic outlook report.

If you haven't, please just making that request to read it and then schedule a time with me to explain it to me.

I have to tell you, this is one of the, you know, of all the things that I've read.

It's not that I've been doing this as long as Supervisor McKeel and Mallek.

So this is a heavy lift.

And there's a lot of things in here that I reflect on daily just to try to understand.

And it's critical to what we're facing over the next five years.

And when I say

To explain it to me, I think we all need to start sharing our takeaways on this and work collectively to understand it.

Because this is a semester class just in this document.

And we've been sharing it.

We've shared this at the Regional Housing Partnership.

I just forwarded this to Delicate Hudson, which was talked about when she was met with the Regional Housing Partnership.

And she's an economist, so I can't wait to hear her takeaways on it.

So I would definitely dig into that somewhat.

And then I think we'll obviously be together some other time.

Well, it's been great to have the opportunity to address one of our six strategic

We've got five others, and so, you know, financially we've got to tie those together.

Chair Page, I'd like to turn it back over to you.

Any final comments, if any, by your board and allow you the opportunity to adjourn?

Any school board members with any additional items to bring forward from the table?

Alright, well, I do have maybe one thing based on

Supervisor Galloway's comments.

He mentioned how his perspective of things could change from being on the school board to being on the board of supervisors.

And maybe they sort of helped me with that.

I would like to possibly have like some pros and cons about a tax referendum.

What would be some pros, some good points for having it and then some cons, some bad points for having it, if possible.

I'll say it today, that's not something I'm prepared to speak to.

I'd certainly want to discuss that with our county attorney and get up to speed on those specific questions.

I know that for certain revenues over time, there have been issues where revenues were required in the past.

For example, there's the food and beverage tax, at one point required a referendum that was changed by the general assembly recently.

Okay, thanks.

and then I do appreciate the time that we have had to have this joint conversation.

I was just going to say when we're talking about documents I would love for the school board to receive the latest orange dot report.

If you all have not seen it because that is Albemarle specific and our greater community specific

And it's very informative of where we are and where some of our community is.

It's already easy to have sent over.

All right.

Board of Supervisors.

I'm going to close the meeting.

Section 2.3.37.11a, which I will be doing next.

Under Section 2.3.12, we consider a momentary area of force and conventionality, including without limitation, Albemarle Conservation System Authority, Architectural Review Board, National Visitor Bureau, Executive Board, Equalization Board,

Rob Moore, National Heritage Committee, Pan-Pops Community Advisory Committee, Places 29 North, Community Advisory Committee, Public Defender's Office, Citizens Advisory Committee, Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, and Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, under subsection 3 to discuss and consider the

Mr. Andrews, Mr. Galloway, Ms.

Mallek, Ms.

McKeel, Ms.

Right, thank you.

And board, we will, let's take a brief recess before we reconvene.

Call us back to order.

We have a motion by Supervisor Andrews and by a noes.

We got a second by Supervisor McKeel.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Andrews?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

I have Albemarle Conservation Eastman Authority, John Moore, Rose Emery, Sherry Buttrick, and Annie Izzard.

For the Architectural Review Board, Frank Stoner.

The Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Board, John Wharton for the Tourism Community.

Equalization Board, Anthony Arsalie, Bob Beard, Evan Mayo.

For the JOT Board, Quetano de Campos del Best.

For the Natural Heritage Committee, Megan Sobata.

For the Pantops Community Advisory Committee, Judith Joyce, Henry Light, Michael Fraser.

I have a motion by Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley to appoint the named individuals to those respective boards.

Mallek, Ms.

McKeel, Ms.