Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session   3/10/2025

Chief Operating Officer, Christy Schiffler, Chief Financial Officer, Jacob Sumner, and Assistant Chief Financial Officer, Andy Bowman.

We're also joined by our Clerk, Leonard Orkison, and Deputy Clerk, Robert Morris.

And also, please welcome the Albemarle County Police Officers present today, Officer Tayden Kainter and Officer Tyler Wong.

We also have our County Attorney, Mr. Andy Herrick, standing by.

and I will leave you here from our Fire Rescue Chief, Mr. Eckerson Nicholson.

Ah, there you are.

I'll ask our Chief Finance Officer to take a second, since this is our first work session, Mr. Chair, and introduce, he or Mr. Bowman even wanted to introduce our team members that are here from Budget and Finance.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I do want to introduce our Office of Management and Budget staff who's worked diligently over the past several months on not only producing the document, but also working closely with staff and the executive's office to get us to this point.

We have Thomas Unsworth, T. Mitchell, Laura Van Zandt, and Bryan Davison.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Ms.

We also have, assisting us, thank you, from our revenue administration office, Jim from Matheny and Robert Wilson, who are helping us with our revenue projections.

Lots of brains here.

So this is the first work session for the fiscal year 26 budget process and I always like to start every work session with the entire path ahead from where we are today through the adoption and appropriation of the budget in May.

There are many meetings to be had and that list is going to start to get ticked off very quick in the next couple of weeks.

Today we have a work session that will focus mainly on general fund revenues, the non-departmental chapter in public safety.

and no action is going to be requested from the Board of Supervisors today.

This is an informational work session.

That will also be true on March 12th and March 17th, just for information, no action.

That's going to change on March 19th, where the Board will be asked to take action to propose a budget and set a maximum rate for advertisement.

What that means is the Board will advertise a tax rate.

They can adopt that rate or less than.

They cannot do more than that.

for both the real property, personal property, and any other rates they can choose.

So that is really where we're working for is that really over these next few work sessions, so staff can support the board so they can feel as comfortable as they can with that decision that happens on the March 10th, knowing that's not a final decision, but that's an important milestone in the budget process.

Just for the process and how we work through our work session, staff is going to be presenting information in small chunks.

It's going to be more detailed than the county executive's presentation, but it is not going to be detailed as the 300-page document that we have out there.

We will allow as much time as we can for the board to have discussion, so there will be a time for staff to give a brief presentation.

The board will go through their order, questions, comments.

We'll be taking notes on everything.

If there is not a question we can respond to on the spot, that will be posted on the website for transparency for anyone who is here or listening who wonders what the answer to a question may be.

The other real big thing we're listening for is any potential adjustments the board may desire to the county executive's recommendation.

Rather when those come up, rather than kind of discuss them one by one, our approach in the past that's worked for the board is to bring them back as a package and then on the fourth work session evaluate what options may be to address that package as a whole rather than to address kind of an up or down on every single item as we work through the budget.

So we'll be taking notes on both of those, and we'll make sure we end and begin each work session very clearly, particularly on what those lists for potential adjustment items are.

So the agenda for today, we're going to start with the total budget, and then we're going to go through in general fund revenues.

We'll go through our non-departmental chapter, which is, again, out of order, but this is the chapter that signifies what the transfers to public schools and capital will be.

And so today is really what is the basis of those transfers.

A week from Monday will be what are those transfers from when the public schools are here, and we discuss the capital program as well.

I would recommend a break at that time if the board would desire and then we would focus as much time as we can on public safety.

I'm hoping that we can be about 90 minutes into the work session and split that difference because this is such a significant driver in the budget.

I would allow as much time for both the chiefs to tell their stories and also for the board to engage with that given that is where the majority of the recommended tax increase is supporting.

So stepping back first to the 30,000-foot view level before we dive into the document, this is the board's strategic plan adopted in October of 2022.

This is the roadmap and the basis in the Yellowstone, North Star, pick whichever analogy you'd like to that we use and develop in the budget.

How are we aligning our expenditures and those changes to what are those things that will drive forward the strategic plan?

Not all of those will take funding in the same way as others do, and this budget really speaks to that, where those first, on the left, those three boxes of safety and well-being, workforce and customer service, and education and learning really drive where most of the dollars go in this budget.

I also like this visual with workforce and customer service at the center because as we've seen, when we are more successful in that and the recruitment, retention, and training of our staff, it helps support all of the other goals moving forward.

In addition to the strategic plan, just a couple more refresher slides for the board and for the public who may just be tuning in the first time.

Obligations have been a very large part of the budget for the past few years.

This is a board slide over the last three budgets, whether it be FEMA Safer grants, implementing other programs, our core systems modernization, new capital facilities.

All of that has been part of the budget that leads to where we are in fiscal year 26.

That will continue into next year from the county executive's presentation where there will certainly be obligations out there, but the ones in this fiscal year 26 loom very large compared to other budgets in recent history.

So staff in preparing this recommended budget is taking a look at the strategic plan, the obligations, the board's adopted financial policies, our economic outlook, everything that we see on the slide to put together what is the total recommended budget.

So now I'll get to the first part of the budget we're going to go through together today, and that is the total budget on page 50 and 51.

The total budget, it rarely represents every dollar that passes through the county every year.

That is true for our operating budget, any debt service, the capital budget, and any grant funds, both for us and the school division.

The total budget is not though a great comparison in terms of what is the story year to year taking place and this is a good example this year where we look at what is the actual change in the budget.

It is essentially flat, a less than one-tenth of one percent increase in $190,000.

You explain why that is because this is a year where we have a recommended tax increase.

If we look at our revenue size on the general fund we can see our local revenues tax and other local revenues are about $46 million.

Total budget is not a great track of what changes year to year because of the capital budget.

For example, last year the Southern Elementary School was appropriated for construction.

That doesn't get appropriated again.

Those funds roll forward year to year.

So just taking out the revenue from that essentially explains why we are relatively flat.

And so again, total budget's often a headline.

It's part of our story.

But again, we don't focus on the total budget very much because of the year to year nature of fluctuation that can happen in the capital budget.

What we instead focus on is the general fund.

I'll just do a quick look to the board because we're about to dive into the first content so far.

Are there just any questions or anything that anyone has to date about process or total budget before I dive into this?

I will say in this chapter, I say short staff presentations.

This is going to be one of the longer ones.

I'm actually going to break this into two.

So I'm going to talk about our tax revenues, and then I'll take a break, and then I'll go in to talk about state, federal, and the others because there's a lot to cover, and I've tried to respond to as many of the board's questions from the county executive's presentation as I can through this material.

So again, with the general fund, we focus on this for three reasons.

It's where all property tax revenue is received.

is where the Board of Supervisors has the maximum amount of discretionary authority.

And it's the primary funding source for the public schools and the capital programs.

These are the rates that were balanced on.

Personal property in the upper right returns a pre-pandemic rate of $4.28.

Real property in the upper left is a $0.04 increase.

Food and beverage is unchanged because we're at the maximum.

Transit occupancy, we are not at the maximum.

And I'll go into a few more slides about what that could look like if the board wanted to explore that further.

This is the overall donut chart of where the dollars come from in the general fund.

Two quick observations I would share.

General property taxes and the big kind of dark blue piece is two-thirds of the revenues.

And then state revenue is in the light blue at 6% of the budget and federal is in the yellow piece at 2%.

Those two portions often when I talk to people in the community, they expect they are larger, but in the general fund, they are relatively small pieces.

So with that, let's turn our attention to real estate tax revenue.

This is revenue that is assessed by our county assessor and his team.

Peter Lynch was before the board in January.

He went through a very exhaustive presentation of how they assess property, what are their measures of success, all of the things that go through.

So I will not be repeating any of that today.

But by code, he is, and our office is required to assess property at 100% of market value, fair market value.

Before we dive into numbers, I'll put a quick plug for the real estate tax relief in elderly and disabled.

If there's anyone listening who is eligible or may be eligible or knows someone, this is a program that can provide relief for applicants who are 65 years or older, may be mentally disabled or not using their property as a business and the other criteria.

If you know anyone who may be eligible or would like to pursue this further, please contact the Department of Finance and Budget and we will assist you in the process.

So get into some actual numbers.

The real estate tax revenue for next year is projected to increase $29 million or about 12%.

The primary reasons for that is the recommended tax increase, which is $12.4 million of that increase.

We also had an increase in the overall reassessments in calendar year 25 from calendar year 24.

That's a 5.1 increase.

Again, Mr. Lynch told the board in detail about that in January.

We also have every year an impact in new construction land divisions where property values are increasing not for reasons of the market but changes have happened to those properties and that is factored in that number as well.

The tax rate as I said is recommended at 89.4 cents per $100 assessed value and this next term is going to be part of the board's budget ad is the lowered or the effective tax rate.

What this tax rate means is that if the board wanted to set a tax rate that would offset the increase in reassessments only, that rate would be 81.3 cents for $100 of value.

That is one that would not include any changes due to new construction or land divisions or those others.

It's really just the reassessments.

And that is something we are legally required to include as part of the publication and advertisement process.

The next slide speaks to what is the value of the tax rate.

Right now, all available revenues are programmed for expenditures in the budget, but as the board, if they were to consider scenarios, whether that be adding to or taking away from the county executive's recommended budget, if that real estate tax rate was adjusted, for every full penny would generate $3.1 million.

If it were to be allocated by the split that we have with schools and county government and the capital program, those are the amounts shown on the slide.

If the board wanted to make other non-dedicated splits, about each tenth of a penny is a little over $300,000.

So that it can be, depending on what the board desires, that can be a split that we examine in future work sessions.

Moving on from real estate, I'm going to go into personal property next, and I'm going to go into a little more detail, because personal property is a broad category that includes many small categories within it.

These properties are assessed using the clean trade-in value based on the J.D.

Power Car Guide that's published in January.

The state of Virginia allows us to use a few different methods and this is the one the county has adopted and had in place for some time.

Other personal property that's not in that car guide would be subject to the percentage of cost basis or something similar depending on the state code.

So there is tax relief for personal property, but it functions very differently than the real estate tax relief.

Where real estate tax relief is for the elderly and disabled and is provided locally.

Personal property tax relief is provided by the state.

We've received about every year an amount of about $15 million that gets applied towards individuals' vehicle tax bills.

So the way this works is if you have a vehicle assessment that is $1,000 or less, you do not receive a tax bill.

State tax relief covers that.

If you have a vehicle above that, the first $1,000 to $20,000 worth of that vehicle in the county, you receive 42% tax relief.

And then if you have, for any amount of the vehicle over $20,000, there is no relief.

So as an example, if you had a $20,000 car, you would get 42% tax relief.

If you had a $30,000 car, the first $20,000 would get 42% tax relief.

and then the amount from $20,000 to $30,000 would be taxed at the full rate.

This is a unique structure that exists for personal property and how those are allocated is not available for other taxes in terms of the regressive nature of them.

I'll say that amount for 42% if you look historically that does go down over time.

because as our population grows, as businesses open, vehicles are added.

Sorry, not vehicles.

This doesn't apply to businesses.

As the personal property increases over time, the amount of that flat amount from the state revenue can't go as far around the total pot of 118,000 people in the county.

So taking a look at the different components of personal property, personal vehicles is the overwhelming majority of this.

Almost 88% of the revenue comes from that.

They are taxed based on that assessment method and they have the tax relief applied to that.

But there are some smaller categories and historically the Board of Supervisors has had the same rate for all of these categories.

So first up is business tangible personal property.

That makes up 11% of personal property.

It is assessed the exact same as personal property.

The difference is there is no tax relief from the state.

so if you have a business and your vehicles you don't get a share of that 42% or that amount for less than a thousand dollars that I discussed on the previous slide the other limit the state has is that must be the same rate as personal property the board cannot set a different rate for business property and personal property

The other much smaller group, and there's a very long section code with all different categories of boats, airplanes, manufactured homes, and others, they make up less than 2% of personal property tax revenue.

Every category has a different assessment as prescribed by the state code.

This is another one where the rate cannot exceed personal property or in some cases the machinery and tools tax rate.

I'll speak about machinery and tools in just a case but right now if the board wanted to set it rate for any of these it would be different it would need to be in a downward direction or the overall personal property would need to increase further finally moving to machinery and tools which historically has had the same rate as the county that rate under the state code cannot exceed the personal property rate

We're going to adopt a lower amount, but the county's practices to add the same rate for all of these revenues.

This is really for equipment used in manufacturing process.

It's the most common type of business.

The total is just about $700,000 and is only made up of 30 taxpayers.

It's a relatively small group in our overall tax base.

For personal property, machinery, and tools, the math on the split, just like we had for real estate, the value of a penny is much smaller here, just under $100,000, and those splits are shown on the slide based on the 54-36-10 allocation.

So moving on from personal property, I'm sorry, not moving on yet.

I wanted to talk about the history of the tax rate and where we've been.

So this shows that actually since the 90s, the county had a personal property tax rate of $4.28.

Many on this board or listening in may recall that in 2022, there was a dramatic change in the value of used vehicles that was really unprecedented.

And at that time, the board dropped the rate about 86 cents or 20% down to $3.42 to offset that unusual increase.

That rate remained that way through calendar year 23 before increasing back over the last two years to the previous rate of $4.28.

So there's a history, but what I've asked our revenue team to do is just to take some of the most popular vehicles that are in Albemarle County.

What would happen to their tax bill over this entire five year period?

and these are, we picked five of the most popular vehicles and two of the higher end ones and of these seven, I should just clarify, everyone's individual experience if you're not one of these vehicles will be different but at least of these five of these seven, only two of them have a higher rate than they had in the prior year.

Those are the Ford F-150 and the Toyota RAV4.

and so again we can see that in some ways as we show about the big increase in values and how that fluctuated you can see how this normalizes a little bit more over time with how that tax bill plays out.

Thank you again to our revenue administration team for putting together this data.

So moving on from property taxes I want to talk a little bit about the other local taxes out there before I open up to more questions.

One of the things we use and weigh on quite a bit in our economic projections is a report from Dr. Cheryl Bailey, who was before the board this fall.

We stay engaged with her throughout the year.

Actually, she was emailing with us this morning to kind of give her thoughts of where we're headed.

and really her kind of advice back in the fall was it's prudent for us to expect to slow down in the economy.

Really the conclusion I keep coming to in the picture in my mind from her presentation was the partly sunny, partly cloudy.

There really are mixed signals in the economy both ways and we just need to continue to watch and stay very vigilant in our key indicators and see how that plays out.

An example of how partly sunny and partly cloudy plays out in our other local taxes, these taxes on the slide make up more than 90% of the taxes we collect.

We can see in our consumer taxes, primarily sales, food and beverage, and transit occupancy.

We projected in the current budget a slower rate of growth.

Coming out of the pandemic, these were growing at historic high rates, and we knew that would not last forever, and we began to ratchet down what those projections would be.

Year to date, we were very close to the budget, and things are playing out as we would expect to.

And so we are forecasting still continued growth, but not the growth that we saw at the rate coming out of the pandemic.

The next category is other business driven taxes, primarily that's business licenses and bank franchise tax.

This is one that actually we are projecting to perform very well based on what has happened to date.

This revenue, like many, is very backwards looking.

The revenue we collected is really based on the prior year gross receipts and we have not received anything this year to really make a meaningful change.

It's really based on the backwards activity we saw last year in fiscal year 24 and the other economic data we have at this time.

Moving from these revenues into just options for the board out there, I want to highlight this slide right out of the budget on revenue diversification.

And this shows for the last three year or last two years of actuals, the current budget and recommended and then in five year increments going back, how have the county's revenues diversified over time?

What we can see in that top blue line all the way back in fiscal year three, the amount of the funding that was relied on property taxes is less than it is today.

That's really due to a couple of changes.

The first, the most notable one is that gray line, the second from the bottom.

State and federal used to make up 18% of the budget and now that number is down to 8%.

So that has been a dramatic change as funding sources have shifted over time.

The second notable takeaway is we can see that other local taxes, those very taxes I was talking about before with sales, food and beverage, transit occupancy, business licenses,

That has shifted down from 23% over the budget gradually now to just under 18%.

Now a question that may be on the board of the public minds, what can we do about that orange line in terms of the other ways?

Because the board has taken advantage to diversify revenues with the TOT tax, transit occupancy, and the meals tax in recent years.

But unfortunately when we look at what the board can do from here on other local taxes, unfortunately the answer is not very much.

and that is due to the Dillon rule which this board understands well it's really that our governing body can only do those things expressly given to it by the state so this is a chart of all of the other taxes that are made up in the other local tax category what amount is brought in in fiscal year 26 recommended what is the rate and then what is the maximum allowed by state and I'll share that in just about all of these we are the maximum rate with a few exceptions

Same with business licenses, we are the maximum for everything we have in existing categories, so there's a very low likelihood that we're missing any opportunities there because the rates we could increase are not for businesses currently in the community.

Those businesses would be very small as well.

Consumer utility is the third one I'll skip down to.

We're under review right now.

It's going to be a very small impact.

That total budget is only $4.6 million, about $46,000 every percent.

This is paid on utility bills based on a complex calculation.

This is one we're looking.

Maybe there is a little bit of headroom, but for perspective, it would be the order of just a few percent would be less than the impact of even a tenth on the real estate rate.

So we're reviewing this to make sure we haven't left any stone unturned.

That is one that we're continuing to examine and we'll report back should there be an opportunity.

The other one that I'll highlight is transit occupancy tax.

That comes into the general fund at $5.4 million.

That is 6% of the 9% rate.

The other 3% goes to a different fund.

So every percent of that is around $900,000.

And the board may wonder what would it look like if we were to increase that rate.

so just for perspective if it helps the board our staff pulled just selected comparative rates about where we are with other localities this does not include North Virginia does not include Virginia Beach because people who may be traveling to those areas may have different maybe making different choices or different reasons for that but we can certainly provide anywhere else in the state if we need to we pulled Montgomery County where Virginia Tech is located

and then kind of grouping together these kind of midsize cities throughout the state and the counties that surround

so two observations is that you know not exclusively but those other localities tend to stay together in their rates and then also knowing that Albemarle and Charlottesville are currently both at nine percent right now the city managers recommended budget did not include a rate to that and that is one that would you know we want to consider what I've talking to our tourism experts in the past individuals will rarely make a decision about where to go based on the tax rate

But if you were a business or professional organization or someone deciding where to hold a conference or some other event, that would be a consideration that you would.

It probably doesn't drive your decision, but it would be part of the math as they go into their planning.

So share that from the board's perspective.

That being said, TOT is not something I think I have an appetite acting on unless we're confident we can do so in mock staff with Charlottesville.

And given that they have a surplus, even as I raised this during previous conversations, I figured this was not something we would get movement on.

I do appreciate kind of the full listing of all the different

and particularly, you know, this board has probably been brief

About $4.

I'm sorry.

Currently, we are at $3.96.

And just as I'm recalling, every $0.10 is roughly a million.

on slide 18.

You listed boats, airplanes, manufactured homes, that include RVs?

Those are captured in the vehicle.

transient occupancy tax was already answered.

And if Charlottesville is not going to go for it, then not a good idea, I don't think, for us.

Yeah, I think part of it is just the fact the board is not able to increase those taxes with very limited exceptions, such as the food and beverage tax.

And so when the board has made decisions over the last 23 years on this slide, the real estate or the personal property, like real estate, has been the one that's been changed.

So it hasn't really been that option to increase those revenues.

All right, so that other local taxes, that's very limited.

Oh, sure.

Thank you for your presentation.

I appreciate it.

Very concise.

I only have two comments or questions, I guess.

You talk on slide eight, financial policies.

I'm still receiving questions from...

some other board members, not this board, about why our AAA bond rating is so important.

Because we have policies that are created to protect that AAA.

Sure.

I'll be doing the same thing on Wednesday.

Oh, okay.

I'm sorry, Monday.

But the short version, for anyone who's listening, is one, it provides the board to get the best possible interest rate when it's issuing bonds that we've paid back over 20 years.

The other big takeaway is that it is a sign that it gives you as much flexibility as you can in your operating budget.

You can think of the county's debt service payment as really its mortgage payment or its rent.

The less that is over that time, that gives more flexibility for the board to do other things that they would like to do in the budget.

It's both that financial flexibility and the increased affordability provided by the AAAA.

Mr. Sumner is our CFO.

Would you like to add anything to that?

You've touched him up.

I apologize if I stole your thunder.

The only other question I have in Israel, again, it's not a question, it's just for the public, anyone watching.

On slide 24, could you once again just share with the public the state and federal revenues that have gone from and how, because that affects the amount of money we have.

That does.

Certainly the state provides a lot of assistance, some to our public safety departments, to our department of social services, our constitutional officers, as well as some other general support they provide.

As that amount has kept up, or not kept up, I know that around the Great Recession there was a significant reduction in state funding that happened.

So we've gone from, in 2003, 17.6% is what?

to now in our recommended budget down to 8%.

That is correct.

Is that it for sure?

Yes.

Yes.

And I should clarify as well, this does not include any support one time like ARPA funding or CARES funding from the pandemic.

That's all accounted for separately.

All right.

And that's all I have.

Can I interject one thing?

Ms.

McKeel,

on the gray line that you're focused on, on state and federal.

I also want to remind the board, because this is fresh of mine from our recent discussions with schools, this doesn't include state funding for schools.

And this is just general fund for local government.

So for an example,

Last year when we went through the local composite index reset from the state, which takes a look at a formula county by county on how much state funding you're going to get for schools, Albemarle County lost $10 million.

in the last local composite index reset.

That only happens every two years.

And so one of the things that the schools is looking at is for the 27 budget, they're looking at next year, one year out, they're looking at, okay, every other year this happens, I wonder what's going to happen next year?

Because a lot of it is based on per capita income on a county basis.

And that $10 million was a game changer a year.

Great point, Jeff.

Thank you.

And lots of people refer to the LCI as the ability to pay, which is what we look like.

That's exactly.

The state has.

It's a finite amount of money.

You've got X number of school systems counties that are competing for that.

You're going to stack your county that has the most ability to pay with the expectation that they're going to put the most local funding in.

your county that has the lowest per capita they're suggesting that's where the state needs to help the most and Albemarle County last year they did not fare very well in that and then your school system turns to local government and says we've got a gap we need you to help us out and again that's not reflected in that but it's also it's a similar story

And just to comment, Albemarle County Public Schools and Albemarle County over the years have tried to impact that formula to no avail by the General Assembly.

They're not interested.

So I'm just saying that we have tried to get that formula adjusted and have not been successful.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

And specifically the

So the $20 million we send to the city, the state acts like that's in our coffers and they count away the FCI school funding when it's not.

In some years that can be beneficial to us, in some years that's been detrimental.

But the state certainly wasn't interested in just even changing that little nugget to take the $20 million and act like that's not in our coffers.

Well, they said you signed it, so you live with it.

It's essentially what they said.

But I mean, it could amount back when we were having that fight in 12, 13, 14, it was...

It could have meant the swing of a million, million and a half dollars, something like that.

Oh, absolutely.

No, no kidding.

I mean, I'm assuming airplanes get registered like automobiles.

Yeah, certainly with the airport here.

I'm just curious if we have a lot of, because of all the airplane traffic that we hear and all of the things that are out there, I just wonder if all those airplanes parked out there are actually registered in our county or some other address in some other low tax state.

Can you take that as a follow up?

Partly sunny, partly cloudy has been what we've had since October when Dr. Bailey was here.

But the stock market's going down.

The president's even saying that we might not avoid a recession.

He just attacked the CHIPS Act and trying to get that business, which that's a whole other thing now that just got put up into the tornado.

But are we really sticking with partly cloudy, partly sunny as our outlook, given the just, I mean, OK, pick it down.

today would be a great day to pick.

But I guess I'm not necessarily looking for the response to that other than to say we're game planning for a recession because usually that's a word nobody wants to say out loud.

Do you want to say something?

Sure.

Yeah.

One of the things with partly sunny, partly cloudy is uncertainty.

And I think that's really what we're seeing right now, particularly with the conversations at the federal level, is the uncertainty that that creates.

Yes, we are absolutely looking at what are contingency plans, what do we do if the economy was to turn differently, if our funding was to impact us differently.

So those are in place.

And as Mr. Bowman mentioned earlier, Dr. Bailey's in regular contact with us about the economy and about our forecasts.

And this is kind of where we're at right now.

reminds us that partly sunny, partly cloudy is that uncertainty.

For us locally, we have a strong housing market.

That's a positive sign for us from an economic standpoint.

Job growth has been solid.

So unemployment rate is still fairly low.

The housing market won especially here with the double hit of tariffs and immigration labor and labor shortages coming up.

That could have put a nice dent on our positive housing market.

I don't know if it will or not.

The cigarette tax board, did they suggest that their sales were going to decline some next year?

That was based on the action we received, if I recall correctly.

Yes.

I would add, jumping back, thank our revenue analyst, Robert Wilson.

We have 58 aircraft that are registered in the county in the last calendar year, and that is basically where they are hangered.

So I'll discuss that a little bit later, but just to kind of elaborate.

Yeah, but yeah, there will be a fiscal year impact in 25 to the calendar year rate impact, and that will be programmed.

Okay.

All right.

But that increase in there.

So on slide 17, you talked about the state reimbursement at 15 million.

And I just wanted you to clarify, that's not a portion coming to the county.

That's it.

Correct.

We've been talking a lot recently about manufactured homes, so prices between $70,000 and $90,000 were talked about last week, and they're taxed at $4.28 times $90,000.

Do I understand that correctly?

I was beginning to think that that was a panic vote on my part.

No, the manufactured homes are at the real estate rate, but they're in the personal property category.

Very good.

Thank you.

I apologize.

Well, I may have been the only one to who was confused.

And the last one, the M&T, there's been a lot of discussion over the last several years about how we were going to be obtaining the revenue that were promised to us by the solar projects.

So I know one solar project has a siting agreement based upon something, but the earlier ones do not.

So at some point in the future, not

learn about what that impact is on that particular sector.

I would say there's because it's a small category I'll give a few examples

Certainly over that time is when the county implemented the EMS cost recovery program.

As that program was created and as ambulances have been added throughout the county, it's a revenue now that generates more than $3 million that did not exist once upon a time.

I know that over that 20-year period, Department of Community Development has done fee studies and that's been updated.

There's been water resources revenues that have been updated related to that in terms of permits and those fees.

So those are just a couple of examples.

We can provide more of a breakdown.

But I think it's one of those areas where when we do have those changes, that we're being mindful of that.

Another notable category is our interest earnings and revenues.

We have restructured part of our finance and budget department to have an increased focus on how we are doing in those returns.

And so part of that is due to rates, but part of that is due to structure as well.

We are seeing a better return.

If that's sufficient, I can stop there, but we can provide more as follows.

And I think, for example, on the blue line, the property tax line, we have this dip in fiscal year 24.

It's very small, but I think it's probably just for the other group.

And because these are percentages, that's how that impacts that number, even though the real property tax is increased.

I mean, tax is totally collected.

Yeah, that's helpful.

Thank you.

We do have a process in place.

Ms.

I say this just knowing that we feel free to stand up if you're more comfortable here but I know that there are periodically we have had vehicles that have been added to our roles as they've done quality control around that yeah we use several different resources the main one is the Department of Motor Vehicles from the state and that governs where your garaging jurisdiction is that's a verification method

but we also have access to other tools if there's something that appears to be a discrepancy we also use Carfax reports and those Carfax reports show you where that vehicle's been registered if it's been sitting somewhere else and we also have the process in place for people to report untaxed items and we are on the Virginia criminal

Before we move on, I recognize, Board, that we do have time constraints.

I'm not sure we'll be back to slide number 24.

And I just wanted to point out that somewhere between fiscal year 18 and fiscal year 23, this board, and it was a different board than the board that's comprised today, really flagged for the first time for me our need to work on revenue diversification.

And it's where you saw the top line, which is property taxes, go from 64.7 to 66.

and you said we need to have a concerted effort to try to relieve some of the stress and burden that's on the property tax, real estate property tax owner in this county and over time we looked at cigarette tax, plastic bag tax, we looked at

prepared food and meal so we've done some things this board has worked hard on that but even with that you've seen the continued growth most of that's due to unusually high reassessment on the residential side and so unless I hear otherwise from this board we're going to continue to work really hard on looking for revenue diversification strategy

and you've heard me say and I'll continue to say that the one cent sales tax that the General Assembly has considered and will continue to consider that if allowed for this county to do a referendum on which means the voters decide would give us a $25 million a year dedicated tax

for local school infrastructure.

That is a game changer because you can see that with the things that this board has done, you work really hard on looking at these things that we could do, small but beneficial.

But with that, the trend line on the blue line continues to go up.

And so as Mr. Bowman showed with the list of all the different types of taxes, our options are pretty narrow right now.

So I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record.

I know we need to move on.

Right.

Right, which is a shared obligation from people who live here, live and work and buy stuff, but it's also capturing taxes from people who may come here that are just here to visit, here because of certain needs to shop, they're here for a variety of reasons, but they leave and pay property taxes somewhere else.

And so anytime you grow in daytime population,

that will in fact capture taxes and can help with infrastructure because when your daytime population goes up, all of the infrastructure sags.

It sags because there's more cars on the road, there are more people here, and there's more service demand.

That's an amazing point, and I'm really sensitive that I'm not taking up too much time, but when you break that apart and you look at residences, of that 68.4, residences are about 72%.

In the commercial industries, about 11.3.

Used to be around 15, and it's declined.

this board and staff to put some attention, some concerted effort toward what do we need to do to better position ourselves for private investment across the county.

A great example is Tom Thorpe, Afton Scientific, where last fall he invested $200 million in his company, 200 more jobs, that's all are now more count.

And so what that does is it has a tendency to put some of that weight that's embedded in that blue line more on industry

cost for service delivery where business industry and commercial is less to serve.

It costs less to serve than residences, if that makes sense.

And I think that's what you're getting at.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Mr. Chair, can I share the follow-up on that?

And I imagine it's a combination of the commercial decline

Lost Value or Lost Businesses?

I'm assuming it's a condo.

Do we have an understanding of, like Fashion Square Mall, which I would say is lost value, but if we have a company that leaves us,

I think it's a combination.

I think we absolutely see some decline in certain areas.

Action Square Mall, as you mentioned, is an area where there was decline.

But there are some businesses that come and go as they are successful and some others that aren't.

I would also say that it's also there's strong growth on the residential side too.

So that is because that outweighs the commercial so significantly that it is harder to change that balance just based on the sheer volume of the residential side.

together.

I think that would be something when the timing would be appropriate to understand further because that's something I think our chamber would be interested, should be interested in.

I need to dig in again to the COSS report, but with all those new houses come all those new services needed for all the different ages involved, school children for rescue or whatever.

there's still a big gap that everybody else is, the businesses as well.

I just want to ask about the split with the schools.

Is that something that exists?

I heard it's not set in cement, that that could be altered by the board.

I'm actually going to speak to that just a little bit later in the work session.

All right, a few more slides on revenues.

This is what is included in state revenues right now.

Again, making up 6% of our general fund revenues, which are actually slightly down compared to last year.

One of the things we always look for is what's going on in the state budget.

It's normal not to have a final state budget at this time.

We'll continue to watch and see how that plays out.

We have received both surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, when the state finalizes its numbers, so we'll continue to watch that closely.

For what makes up that $30 million and where our risk is, I'll share first.

Half of that revenue comes from the personal property tax relief that we've been discussing already.

That amount has been fixed for probably coming up close to 20 years now.

The other biggest category we look at is the reimbursement we have from the Department of Social Services programs.

This includes both funding that the county receives and pass-throughs to individuals, and it also includes the reimbursement for the staff who are working in social services.

We have seen, based on the trends of our reimbursement rates, those have not been as strong, and so we do have a decrease in revenues for that reason.

And beyond that, we have support for public safety departments that tends to be a little more steady, as well as telecommunications taxes collected by the state and remitted to localities, support for comp board, and then some other sources, mostly, which are a vehicle rental tax that we see related to kind of just the tourism industry in here as well.

So as of today, we don't have a strong indication any of those may change, but we continue to watch closely and get any insights we can to how that plays out at the state level.

Moving next to federal revenues, this is another one that we are watching very, very closely.

We do not have anything certain we can report on at this time.

So this slide is really to kind of share where the federal revenue is in the budget across all funds and where the biggest risk areas could be.

Right now in the general fund, there's a total of about $9 million, which is relatively flat compared to last year.

Almost all of that goes to the Department of Social Services.

That revenue comes from three places.

One is for the Medicaid unit that we received from reimbursement there.

Also to reimburse other staff in the Department of Social Services like the state revenue and also some direct assistance payments that flows to individuals.

We don't have an indication that will change, but again, monitor it closely.

outside of the general fund there are some other significant buckets of federal funding in the county of special revenue funds special revenue fund is usually where there's some sort of legal or other requirement for that funding to be accounted for separately we have the federal housing assistance fund these are the housing vouchers that are provided out in the community almost six million dollars I'm sorry over five million dollars which is 90% of that federal funding in special revenue funds

and should anything happen to that, which again we have no indication, but that is where the biggest impact would be not only for the county's bottom line, but the amount of disruption that would cause into the community.

The schools will be here on the 17th to talk about these next two items.

There's about 400,000 they have in their school fund budget related to Medicaid and 11.5 million, which is primarily through three programs for free or reduced lunch, special education, and their Title I reading and math support.

They also do not have anything to report in terms of where that is, but they're, like us, continuing to monitor.

Viewing the funding in the next budget, we're also tracking our grants very closely.

We have about roughly $17 million in federal dollars we're managing right now that has been awarded.

We have no indication yet that any of that is in jeopardy, but we are staying in close contact with our grantors through our team in the Office of Grants and Agreements.

So final revenue I want to talk about is fund balance and this one is a little bit different because we're not alone really talking about what we think is going to happen in the future is what has happened in the past in our financial experience and how does that influence where we use this.

So in December the board received the county's audit and in that audit was our general fund fund balance that totaled just under 98 million dollars at the end of fiscal year 24.

By and large most of that money is already obligated or spoken for for different reasons.

In the board's financial management policies, we have a reserve of 10% for undassigned fund balance.

This is really to maintain cash flow and be there to avoid any emergency borrowing should the county experience a catastrophe.

On top of that, we have a budget stabilization reserve of just over $10 million.

That would be for more kind of acute shock that could be addressed.

there's a school fund balance reserve and also over 20 million dollars obligated in the current budget whether it was adopted in the current budget or appropriated from a prior year so that leaves 11.7 million dollars of one-time money that could be used for one-time uses but in addition to that county staff as we manage fiscal year 25 have identified two other one-time sources that can add to that amount to support the budget process

First of which is when we adopted the budget a year ago, there was an anticipation around the local funding that we needed for microcat to operate in the current year.

The good news is based on the extension of that grant and how that's played out, we don't need $1.3 million for that service.

It's now available to be reprogrammed.

Secondarily, interest rates last year in calendar year 24 did not fall as quickly as was forecast, which means that we have about an additional million dollars of interest money we can consider one-time revenue to program.

So that 11.7 plus those two changes make up the total amount of one-time funding we have in the next year's budget.

The uses are here, some in 25 and some in 26.

I will highlight that on Wednesday we discussed in length about the county's health fund and why a one-time transfer is needed into that fund.

So I'm not going to elaborate on that today.

But outside of that, the most notable contributions are to the CIP.

It's common for the board to send a couple million or plus into the capital to support equity, cash equity into projects.

We have a Children's Services Act fund for a mandated program in the Department of Social Services that would receive support.

Also, the Septic to Sewer program.

There was some funding from related to ARPA that in December, I'm sorry,

Back in September, the board said, we're okay repurposing this now, but we'd like that program to come back in the budget.

That is funded with one-time money again as it is now, and we'll speak to that on Wednesday.

Also, the reserve contingencies, there's one-time money to help the board should there be unexpected events or also during the year or as adjustments as part of finalizing the adopted budget.

That is one-time funding that's available.

I'll talk about the full reserve in just a couple slides in the next section.

For now, that's where we are on revenues.

I want to make sure that we're capturing, that I'm accurately capturing what we just went over on these last two slides.

That does not include them.

These are all the uses for funding above the county's financial policies that would be one-time uses.

I'm sorry, the total of fiscal year 25 and fiscal year 26 total the funding.

I'm not sure I have additional questions at this juncture.

I will say the thing I always say, which is I don't think the role of government is to be a bank.

It is not to prepare for tomorrow.

at this time, I do understand that.

Correct.

Yeah, these are all one-times.

Just a comment.

Thank you.

It's page 15, slide 30.

I remember seeing it, but now I'm not putting it in my hand.

So for something like the septic to sewer program, I mean, I agree that it should be here.

It's what we talked about previously.

But just as it occurred in the previous year where we got to a certain point where we knew the funds weren't going to be used.

I mean, that was, you know, we switched where the dollars went basically back then.

There's probably other

Is it something that happens a lot and don't necessarily think about it when I'm looking at the quarterly financial reports that you put in our packet?

Well, to do the example, okay, we're three quarters of the way through the next fiscal year, and there's still $200,000 in the septic sewer program, and it's not going to be used.

We know it's not going to be used based on applicants, et cetera, et cetera.

I think for those large items and two really good examples are on the previous slide where if we did nothing else with microcat we would not spend 1.3 million dollars this year.

So now in the context of the whole budget process, what would be the most, what would be a way to use that now to support the overall budget picture?

Same thing on the interest earnings, and I'll say interest servants is a small one, but we've done revenue updates too after the last three years in the middle of the year.

And the reserve, that 400 grand that's going to the reserve

What's in there now?

There's about 700,000, total about 300,000 ongoing, 400,000 one time.

I'll have that on the slide in just a few minutes.

Oh, we haven't got to that yet.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The DSS state reimbursement

money which comes into DSS for operations and caseworkers, et cetera.

But 9010 or something like that.

Billity Summit the other night about our RAISE grant.

And staff from another county said, well, remember, all of your contracts have that little small print at the bottom that says if the funding supporting this doesn't happen, then everything stops.

And that was sad, but also a relief, because if the feds took our RAISE grant, then I don't know where we would find the $2 million to keep it going.

So I just wanted to share that little bit of

Yeah, I certainly second that.

It's not actually a very big reserve in light of our year's budget.

It's a month or something like that.

I can't remember.

Back on slide 28, just a quick comment.

And I think we'll hear this with the schools, but I did ask the question when I talked to the school, that the pre-reduced lunch program is part of the US Department of Agriculture.

to part of the education may become significant.

So I'm going to move to the non-departmental chapters.

We move from the revenues to the expenditure side.

Some of this chapter I'm going to cover on Wednesday about how it ties together to Goal 6.

But I want to spend time on big transfers.

Because when we talk about the roughly $42 million revenue growth, the majority of that, I shouldn't say the majority, $20 million of that is to the schools and another $2 million to capital and the revenue sharing agreement as well.

So this is a picture of the donut chart for the general fund.

And non-departmental is really a lot of the left part of

To visualize how much this makes up the general fund, I've got this slide next where the general fund is on the left and non-departmental is a section in blue.

The other functional areas are in gray.

And on the right we can see that non-departmental is mainly the transfer to the schools, transfer to capital, and some other uses of funds in the revenue sharing that I'll walk through.

To begin with the revenue sharing agreement, that total amount will exceed $20 million in fiscal year 26.

That's an increase of $2.4 million or 14%.

That is a multi-part formula.

It's in full detail in the budget document that I won't go through today.

But the primary factor driving that is the growth in the 2023 tax base, not just the growth in the county, the growth relative to the city.

That's not just a percentage change, it's the actual dollar change.

So the county being much larger than the city, in order for the city to offset that dollar growth, they would have to grow a lot faster than the county would to make up just for that deficit and the two

historical comparisons this is the largest increase the county began annual reassessments and over the last two years we've seen a total of 4.5 million and how that is changing from where we've been on this previous slide we can see going back about the last 10 years or so it was certainly had its ups and downs through the years it was relatively stable but we can see in fiscal year 25 and 26 this is a different environment

Continuing on to the allocation of shared revenue.

This will speak to Supervisor Lupisto's question.

A lot of words on this slide, so I'll conceptually talk about what we do here in the board's financial policy.

It's really helpful to have a guideline for staff, both county government and public school staff, as we develop the budget.

The way that guideline works is to take our shared revenues, which are all local tax revenues,

and any state revenue that's not designated.

So the funding that we get for public safety, that's not shared with the schools.

In the same way public schools don't share their state revenue for education with county government.

But for some of those other revenues that aren't designated, they are here and kind of developed in step one of the calculation.

Step two is we make some deductions from that, many of which are directly related to tax revenue or the ability for the county to leverage that tax revenue for other services like revenue sharing.

of the tax relief program that we've discussed earlier with the board.

Any tax-related performance agreements for the short term, while those agreements are in effect, that revenue would not be split.

Once the agreement expires, it would be split.

And also a designated transfer of the water resources fund.

So after we run through that math, again, the full formula is in the budget, but that remainder of the change in revenues, not all revenues, just the change year to year is 54, 36 to 10.

So also the key part is this guideline may be reviewed annually with the Board of Supervisors.

And I've received the question, you know, why is the increased real estate taxes not changing by the split?

That's a fair question, but in help to answer that, I thought I would provide some historical perspective.

First, as we look at where these pennies go from the county executive's presentation,

Four cents of real property allocated 3.2 to public safety, 0.4 for schools, and 0.4 for housing.

These four cents are the exception.

The remaining kind of 54-36-10 split applies to all the other revenues, the increase in personal property, the increase in assessments, all of those are factored in.

So the slide for kind of historical reference is here.

What has happened the last five times the real estate tax rate has been changed?

Every board and past boards have made different decisions, but it's interesting that in all of those rate changes, this is the first rate change since fiscal year 20 when the board raised the rate 1.5 cents and dedicated that to public school, operation, and capital.

The situation is different every year, but all five of those changes going back to fiscal year 14 have been a dedication in one form or the other.

Even in one year where there's a 1.7 cents in fiscal year 15, that last line, 1.7 cents was allocated by the funding formula but they still had separate additional breakouts for public schools

and operations.

So I share this not to lean in and revisit the history of every budget because the circumstances were different in all of them, but more of kind of leaning backwards at a 30,000 foot view and say that when the real estate tax rate changes, it is pretty common for that not to happen through the usual split because the board is looking at what are those circumstances in this particular year and those unique things that may be driving, that may be different than other years and how that's applied.

So just a slide for perspective.

So moving on to the transfers to public schools and capital, public schools will increase $14.3 million, 7.3 cents for the recommended ongoing transfer.

That amount does include the .4 cents dedication that would supplement the normal 4-way allocation.

Schools will be here on Monday to talk through there.

They're still working with the school board.

They had about a $5 million gap they publicized at their last meeting on Thursday, and they're still continuing to work through that, intending to adopt a school board funding request on Thursday.

In addition, the county is recommending a transfer of $6.2 million in one-time funding from fund balance.

fund the school share of a health fund transfer.

Again, I'll discuss that more Wednesday, but that is the source of the county government to provide that to the schools.

Finally, we have the transfer to capital and debt service by the formula.

That increases $2.4 million.

We'll hear next Monday also what that provides in terms of projects.

Now to Supervisor Malek's question, what about fiscal year 25 when the rate changes?

So because the board adopts tax rates on the calendar year, there will be an impact in fiscal year 25 and fiscal year 26.

So when the board adopts a rate in May, the tax bills that will be collected in June will be impacted by that rate.

So with the impact of personal property increasing, the four cents on real estate, and we also included in this the impact of the stronger than anticipated reassessment, that would generate $11.1 million of one-time money in fiscal year 25.

Staff would recommend the board allocate that as part of the budget process as follows.

This one-time money staff is recommending to use through traditional 54-10-36 split.

So this provides $6 million to the public school operations staff would recommend because that money is not available to June to direct that one time into the CIP.

This helps support the school CIP projects part of the recommended county executive budget.

Capital's 10% share does the same thing.

It supports the recommended CIP.

For county government, that 36% of one-time money, staff would recommend allocating that $3 million to the Affordable Housing Investment Fund, and just under $1 million, it rounds up to $1 million to the Economic Development Fund.

On Wednesday, we'll discuss really the history of those funds, their available balances, how they've been used, so the board can have that information.

But this is really for what those transfers look like.

After the board adopts the budget, we would bring back this as an action for the board to amend 25 for this revenue.

This is also important because if the board considers different rates, whether they be more or less, this also could impact these items in fiscal year 25 as well.

So other uses of funds for tax relief.

We've talked about this a couple times for the presentation.

This is the amount based upon what the board approved in January to continue to increase the relief limits every year.

That will grow at 11%.

The reserve contingencies to Galloway's question, the total $736,000, $322,000 ongoing, one time $413,000.

If the board is desiring amendments to the budget, that can be a funding source.

Finally, other uses of funds includes a few categories that I'm going to discuss on Wednesday as part of our overall workforce and customer service discussions.

The reengineering savings, changes in positions, salary benefits reserved, and of course the health fund.

Thank you.

Yes, I want to just drill down and make sure I'm understanding your slide on the history.

That's 38.

So when we talk

since I've paid attention to county government, which has been after all these tax increases, the 5436 aphorism has become ubiquitous.

And I'm wondering, is that figure, a 5436 split, is that captured post-fee or pre-fee?

If these are dedicated funding streams,

Yeah, that is.

Well, if I follow you, that's a good question, because that's a good distinction, where really when these rate changes are happening, it's really just adjusting the base amount, and then next year things continue to grow $54.36.

With one exception, historically, and that's the Water Resources Fund, which is .7 cents that was created during fiscal year 17,

where that .7, wherever the value of a penny changes for .7, that remains with water resources.

Second exception is actually what is recommended in this budget where the affordable housing .4 cents, that would recommend for that .4 to remain with the housing fund and not be split in the future.

Correct.

Right.

And the four cents for affordable housing, that's not going for the split.

Why?

And not that I wanted to, but

The reason that I recommended that 0.4 cents, 4 tenths of a penny to affordable housing, not go through the split, was that we were looking to try to make a meaningful impact.

And with 4 tenths of a penny, that's 1.2 million of ongoing money that would go directly into affordable housing on an ongoing basis if the board supported that, along with the three

$3 million of one-time funding that if the board accepts that, it'll be ready July the 1st.

And so that .4 is $1.2 million.

And I felt like that was all that we could afford to do and balance, given the other obligations that we had.

Question.

No, no, no.

I said, well, I didn't explain it correctly.

Well, the way that this dedicated tax rate increase was designed, it was designed, first of all, to take care of the public safety obligations that we're taking on as the FEMA safer money, the federal grant, goes away.

And so 3.2 of the 4 cents was focused 100% on local government not going through the split.

just to the federal funding going away.

I believe it's about $10 million.

And that left us with eight-tenths of a penny.

And we were able to look at, number one, devoting half of that to schools.

I don't understand your question.

I apologize.

I'm just wondering.

I can understand public safety.

What makes it not part of the split is the fact that it's ongoing.

So if we were to switch out, not that I'm saying that at all, but something else, let's say besides schools, we put in something else.

If it's ongoing, that's not part of the split.

The board has full flexibility on what, if anything, whether it would like to split pennies or whether it would like to dedicate them.

We're not dedicating them.

and so this is one and looking at all the six strategic goals and how we move forward on them the county executive felt to make a investment in housing which is not received or going funding before that required something different that cannot be accommodated in the current revenue growth in the split given everything else has gone on in the budget okay so to be in the split not to

Thank you.

because it has taken, and I recognize flexibility is excellent, but it has taken the

the inconsistency away and made the dollars more stable for us and the schools and I can tell you before we had that agreed upon split we could fill the balcony and the auditorium in the county office building with people upset about school funding and what happened was our community was pitted against each other on school funding and government so this in principle

This split has been wonderful for our community and the getting along in this community and not driving fights every year about how much is going to go to schools and how much is going to go to county government.

Having said that, this chart has been very helpful.

I really appreciate it.

And I think it is important for everybody to understand that the board of supervisors, at the end of the day, make a decision.

And that decision can be around who gets won and what share is.

It can change.

Well, and it just takes the angst that we just were in horrible.

Pitying the schools against county government is not helpful to anybody.

And this has taken that angst away.

Yes, one comment and then a question on your other use of funds, page 235 and 236.

I guess I never realized in past years that lapse factor was inside the Department of Legends and not as one item.

So the comment is I am wholeheartedly endorsed the way that you're going to be able to do this to look at it as an organization here.

I've never really taught that before.

My question is,

I can't remember now if this was a school board memory or this board memory, but the 175 being used to calculate, I think it's 175 for the labs.

We look at our experience and try and target about two-thirds of that because we don't want to budget lapse so aggressively that we are all going to hold positions to make that.

But it's also, and again, it's two-thirds of our experience, and I'll call it as maybe a normal work environment.

Certainly the pandemic was a very different experience.

Now that we've implemented a common class study, we've had some different results.

But two-thirds of the experience is where 1.75 comes from.

credit, and it can be a budgeting trick.

If you made it one and a half, you just got rid of some credit.

If you make it two, then you just added some credit.

So I know it can be.

Yeah, and more recently, I would say this is kind of a comfortable risk tolerance we have because there's a risk to going higher or lower as well as we manage that.

A question to leave is looking at the revenue sharing formula, excruciating page, 239.

And I feel like I'm going around and around in circles.

It's in the book, not in here.

It showed a lower city assessment ratio, significantly lower.

So my question to leave for a future day.

is does this significantly lower the value of the property in the city, which is a major component of the sharing formula?

If they are not doing a satisfactory job as the county is to have their assessment ratios within that state thing, 95 to 100 to 105, they're at 89, which looks like a pretty big

And on 38, this chart is excellent.

But what would also be very instructive is what a penny would work.

Because back in 14, it was $1.5 million.

And the dollars are very, very different now in what they can buy as well as the amount.

So it's not just 0.2 or whatever.

It's $2 million or $10.

I'm not misunderstanding.

So the fine print.

Yes.

This is the $3 million.

So it's the fiscal year 25 that's coming up.

And same with the economic development fund.

These are coming up right out of that fiscal year 25.

This is a construct.

Staff has followed the split in this case.

but the board has full freedom to shift among these categories.

I understand.

Yeah, and that's part of the reason why I was troubled because the $6 million in public schools doesn't really fit with because there's other contributions to that side.

Yes, sir.

Let me just reiterate that.

Sorry, one quick I forgot.

So every time there's a transfer to school ongoing, that becomes automatically part of the base.

And I keep harping on the base because that's grown so dramatically in the few years that I've been on the board.

One additional clarifying question.

Just the continual conversation about what is and is not ongoing and how ongoing dedicated differs from just dedicated, right?

So my understanding is that the 3.2 cents for public safety is dedicated for this calendar year.

And then moving forward, that will not be an ongoing dedicated element, unlike the housing element, which is ongoing as dedicated, which means it will go that that remaining

I'll try to maybe explain this.

So of those 4 cents, next year, pretend the board adopts its recommendation.

Next year, 3.6 of the top two lines are going to change in value.

However, that 3.6 changes in value, staff would recommend splitting that 54, 36, 10 as a point for the board's consideration.

That is consistent with what I understood.

Maybe I articulated it poorly.

But the thing that I want to draw attention and make sure I'm understanding is that would mean as a percentage, the additional tax rate that we're levying this year.

that we're proposing to let me this year, as a percentage, a smaller portion of that next year would be going to public safety, right?

Because, and I guess I'm asking, I would trust that we are, because that's all, those are all going to ongoing funding.

that's dedicated to public safety.

I think really when staff has this, it's really trading off the simplicity and communication with financial planning.

because I know the schools appreciate that we have this formula in one page and the board was so supportive two or three years ago to simplify the formula to have it be the seven-step calculation versus what it was before.

So there would be an impact, but it would be one impact among all the factors that we would consider in the budget.

As an example, next year the PRS rate will change in the state.

If county government were to change and schools were to not, that could be an even more impactful change than this potential allocation.

Got it.

So if next year we're going with the four sets, next year the board decides to reduce that.

How would that change this?

I kind of think from a year from now, that board would have the full flexibility to apply that in the way they felt.

I guess I'm just wondering why

be ongoing with the four sets.

And what you're saying is that won't be ongoing for public safety.

Just to clarify, I may have not said this, because it goes back to the allocation of shared revenue.

It goes back to that first sentence.

It's really the increase or decrease in shared revenues.

So it's not the full pennies that would be split.

It's just that smaller differential that would year to year.

of every year is not taking the whole budget and kind of re-carving it up.

It just is that fractional difference.

Now, the board's questions can still remain, but just if it helps.

So if I understand it correctly, that 3.2 would go into the base for public safety, and then because it's in the base, then that is attributable to the real

the split.

Well, that's part of their split, but that's in the base.

No.

There is nothing.

I'll try an example.

So let's just take public safety.

I'll round it up to $10 million.

If that $10 million grows 4% next year, that would be $400,000.

Instead of that $400,000 being dedicated to public safety, it would be split $54,3610 in the same way the school's dedication would be split in that same way.

The housing would remain with housing.

for dedicated housing.

Correct.

I may have been the only one to misunderstand from the very beginning.

I thought that 3.2 was going to be dedicated.

And that was the way it was being presented to our citizens that way.

That was not the way I understood it.

And so this is a really important conversation today because it changes everything as far as the outreach is concerned.

I remember back when the water resources was put on, and everybody said, that's great.

It's solving a particular problem.

I don't have any problem with that.

But feeding the base is different.

So I will just now have to put that out.

I just had thought it was going to be dedicated in the same way that the affordable housing one is going forward.

What rate do you propose?

Welcome back, everybody.

Let's start it again.

All right, so we'll resume now walking through the functional area chapters of the budget document.

Again, going to add an order today with Public Safety, which is the largest county-governed functional area.

Primarily, we can see it's at 16% of the general fund, and it's mostly made up of the fire, rescue, and police department.

Also, with our community agencies, such as the Regional Jail, Emergency Communication Center, Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center, and Charles Schwab, our SPCA being key partners, and part of the overall story of our obligations and our increases that we have.

Hello.

I wanted to touch on one thing that the board has already heard about in a previous session, and that is that

we were going to do a public safety staffing study.

And so I just want to spend a moment because this is something that both Chief Eggleston and Chief Reeves have brought.

in asking.

We'd really like to take a moment to bring in some outside expertise to look at best practices, to look at calls for service, and also how we schedule and support our community.

And so because they both wanted to look at this, we decided to merge this together in one contract.

And I just wanted to let you know a little bit about that before they go into what you're going to hear today from them.

is that they have different challenges and different needs.

But this study is going to review the department's current and potential staffing levels.

They're going to look at industry standards and best practices.

They're going to also look at the evaluation of the current conditions.

That includes staffing levels, scheduling, operational and administrative staffing, and also their response delivery capacity.

and then they're going to look at future service demand forecast as well and so this is as much about where we're headed and how we need to continue to focus and serve our community as it is about current day and so that study is going on right now they have come on site and they're taking a look at our community and our stations and different things and meeting with staff from both departments

and then we expect this to be final in the fall of this year.

So I just wanted to share that with you before we go into listening about the different departments perspective.

Thank you, Christy.

Before we begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Richardson and the County Executive's Office for this opportunity to be before you today to talk about the police department's request for six additional law enforcement officers.

So to begin, I want to start with where we're at now as a police department and provide this board an overview

of our current staffing levels and how we're deploying, how we're utilizing the officers that we have within our range.

So currently we have 165 sworn positions.

and 158 of those are filled.

The five vacancies that you do not see up there are already counted for.

One of them is the deputy chief of police position.

We have two for the hearts position that we are currently advertising internally and externally and then one in patrol and one CID.

So those positions are already dedicated.

We have several certified officers in background check plus several slated go to July's academy.

So when you look at the current number of 158, it's important to note that 15 of those positions are either in field training or in the academy with four on like duty So the significance of that 15 number is the fact that it usually takes about one year for a brand new officer once they get hired to go through pre-academy, the training academy, post-academy field training before they're released on their own

So we're in this constant flux of constantly advertising for vacant positions.

We're fortunate to have a very talented training recruitment unit within the police department that keeps our staffing levels so high within the police department.

Along with our 663 sworn positions, we have 28 professional staff.

That's our support staff.

They include our service division staff, our analyst, and our victim witness staff as well, and with currently one vacancy in that position.

and how the breakdown is and how, if you wouldn't mind going back, sorry.

For patrol operations, 62% of our sworn staffing goes to patrol.

And then you can see the continued breakdown of numbers below that on how we allocate the 163 sworn positions.

That does include myself as well as command staff and supervisor staff in those numbers.

Next, please.

I just want to provide the board with a timeline of we are appreciative of the resources that we have been given over the past several years.

Starting in 2022, we received five sworn officers with the bulk of those positions going into patrol with one going to our training officer position.

The problem order to policing officer or the pop officers you see down below was a grant funded position that the county graciously took up funding for so it was cost neutral.

and then in the years follow you can see how many police officers that have been committed to including last year where we were awarded three sworn full-time employees with two of those positions being committed to the HART team and one of those to the TDO transport to assist with those calls.

Next slide please.

So the Elmore County Police Department, we practice a geographic policing model, meaning that we are currently broken up into two different districts.

The Jefferson District you see are in the orange colors, and then the Blue Ridge District you see in the blue colors.

Our officers work 10 hour shifts,

Again, we're broken up into two different sectors or two different districts with eight sectors altogether and 21 beats that you don't see within these sectors.

So that's how we deploy our resources.

You can see under daylight, evening, and midnight shift how many officers are allocated and dedicated to each shift.

And then I want to draw attention to the minimum staffing numbers.

That's the minimum amount of officers that we'll have on the street in order to effectively do our job.

There are several occasions where we're at our minimum staffing levels right now based on our rotating schedules and how we are deploying our resources.

Going back to the study Christy referenced earlier on,

That is one of the things that we are considering is how we are deploying our resources and are we utilizing our resources in the most effective manner.

I want to spend some time talking about our workload and performance measures.

How we track our performance is with our calls for service.

And that's one of the easiest benchmarks to look at is just overall calls for service.

And calls for service are broken up into two general categories.

Public generated calls for service, that means that somebody has emergency or somebody needs police assistance, they'll pick up the phone and call 911 and we will dispatch an officer or more than one officer out there.

and then proactive or officer initiated.

Those are your warrant services.

Those are your traffic stop or several administrative services type calls for service.

And then there's the proactive service activity that we want to see our officers do.

We want them to be engaged with the community.

We want them building relationships with the community.

We want them to be doing proactive patrols in areas within

and other geographic districts.

We want them to be visible in both urban and rural communities.

And we want them to be able to do proactive policing and identify those hotspots that are in our community.

What an ideal metric for our police officers should be, 60% of their available time should be in reactive mode.

That means that 60% of their day or their shift should be going to those calls for service with 40% of their day doing what you see under there as a proactive service activity.

training, report writing, go to court, things like that.

That's how they should be spending their time.

In 2023, we did an internal review of officers' workload analysis, and that number is 90% of officers' time is in pure reactive mode, leaving only 10% of time to do these extra activities.

So you can see the strain that it's putting on our officers just to be purely reactive and go to call-to-call.

Next slide, please.

So I want to take a moment to talk about

how our police department comes up with numbers.

I'm oftentimes asked, Chief, how many officers do you need to do your job?

There was an older metric where police departments looked at population.

I see Ms.

McKeel as as well.

And so you would agree that maybe over the past two-plus decades, it was 1.4 per thousand, and that was a formula that was utilized.

There are new ways that law enforcement agencies are looking at how they're deploying resources, and that is a service model.

What is the community's expectations of their police department?

How do you want our resources deployed?

So by comparison, just side-by-side comparison, if we were to take the Elmar County Police Department and we're looking at our next-door neighbor in the city of Charlottesville, you can see how we compare on population, how we compare on geographic areas with Elmar County having both urban and rural areas in our geographic location.

But our officer population ratio is 1.4 officers per thousand.

So, you know, 20 years ago, that's a great number, right?

But in today's

Right now, if we look at what the FBI says and the Bureau of Justice Statistics say, on average, law enforcement agencies within our state have about 2.4 officers per thousand.

So the next question is, okay, Chief, if we were to meet that number, how many officers would we need?

And that number is 115.

That is not what I'm asking this board for.

That's not what I'm asking the county executive for.

That just shows you that we need to reframe and relook at the way that we're deploying our resources and not just look at sole population.

Well, that is a factor.

That is not the factor.

It is, is our staff doing what needs to be done in order to provide the service our community expects of them?

So I just wanted to call that out, that number out, because it does get asked quite a bit about the 1.4 per officer ratio.

Next slide, please.

So how do we stand as of last year?

As of 2024, at the end of 2024, officers responded to over 75,403 calls for service.

Comparing that number to 2021, we saw about a 17% increase.

If we were to look at 2024 and 2021, over a three-year average from 21 to 23, what we're seeing is about a 2.2% increase due to the epsom flows of calls for service.

What I want to spend a moment talking about is our priority one calls for service.

Our priority one calls for service are dispatched through our ECC system through an alert tone.

Some of you may have heard a buzzing noise going on in the background a couple times.

That was the priority one alert tone that was going off.

those are the most serious calls for service our officers can go to those are the ones where there's a threat of bodily harm those are your in progress calls like a breaking interest entering call for service or it could be a motor vehicle with entrapment and injury we're assisting the fire department with a call and those typically take anywhere from two officers and above depending on the search and circumstance

So when you see those numbers and that increase of Priority One calls, those are singular events.

And what we're seeing over the past several years, especially in our urban areas, is an increase, an overall increase in those Priority One calls for service.

Compared to 2021, we saw an 88% increase in Priority One calls.

If you compare it to the three-year average, it's still a 34% increase in urban areas with 50 and 17 respectively in the rural areas of the county.

So our calls are becoming more and more complicated and more and more risky than we're going to.

because there is a real-world risk when our officers are running lights and sirens to a call.

It puts our officers at risk and it puts the community at risk when they're operating their vehicles.

So training is essential.

But this indicator says that by this stats that our community is going through using that 911 system, we're getting more and more priority one calls for our staff.

and the final thing I'll draw your attention to is when I referenced the beats earlier on.

If you look at red, the red areas, there are six police beats that are responsible for over 50% of all calls for service.

And then in the burnt orange, if we add those two burnt orange areas in the Crows area and the area around 5th Street and around the Urban Ring, adding those to it, you would have eight sectors that comprise

is in that geographic region that you see indicated up there.

Next slide, please.

So earlier on when I talked about metrics, I talked about workload balance.

This is another key area that we're paying attention to is our response times.

When somebody picks up that phone and calls 911 in the urban sector and the rural sector, and it is a priority one calls for service, how quickly our officers can get there on scene.

So in 2024, we met that in the urban rinks, let me take a step back.

So in the urban rinks and the urban areas of the county,

We have a sub-five-minute response time.

That means if our office, if you pick up the phone, there's an emergency, at least one police officer will be on scene in under five minutes, 85 to 100% of the time.

That's what our goal is.

In the rural areas, it's 10 minutes, just because of geography and the way our roads are structured.

We want officers driving license items very safely on the back roads, 85 to 100% of the time.

As you can see by the response times in 2024, we only hit that metric in the urban area 73% of the time, and then in the rural areas we still have not been able to break that 50% threshold.

So getting two emergency calls for service, priority one, running lights and sirens, still remains problematic

of our time and our officers resources are being spent in the urban areas.

So it's going to have an extended response time.

Next slide, please.

I apologize.

There was an additional slide with this slide.

Thank you.

So why the six officers now and what do we

Those six officers that are going to be specifically identified for patrol, not the specialty divisions, not special operations,

not investigations or any other function.

It is purely for patrol.

And as you can see by those black dots, what that indicates is where our officers are spending the majority of their time on the shift based on call needs and service needs.

What those green dots indicate is our intent to place those officers within those two sectors, specifically the west side and the south side, in order to free them up, to provide additional services, backup, and additional coverage in the more rural area parts of the county.

and because we are a 24-7 service with three different shifts, that is why it's the sixth officer asked.

Yes, very briefly, Colonel Reeves has spoke at length about the staffing, the performance, and all the data they've tracked.

I also wanted to acknowledge in the budget are some other notable operational increases related to vehicle replacement and equipment costs.

We've tried to schedule when those are due, and we have the substantial volume that would be recommended for next year's budget.

Also included is the ongoing education and training.

Colonel Reeves spoke to that, and also the

immense amount of training as we onboard new staff and having them ready to perform in the field.

And finally, a lot of the physical and mental health services we are providing in the police department will have a similar component of fire rescue.

As those costs increase contractually, that is factored into the budget as well.

So these are not the headline of the story with six officers and Colonel Bruce's presentation.

We do want to acknowledge them as we look at the other departments, notable drivers.

So with that,

I want to begin by saying thank you so much.

I was one of the few members of the board who had asked, I'm not even sure I would say pushed back, but had asked for a little bit more of the data story to justify this because we've seen that in the past from other departments.

I have a few questions just because this isn't data that has come before me since I've been on the board, since I've been here.

And I'm just hoping to understand a few things in greater depth.

Can you help me?

So at the beginning you, and I'm missing the slide for it.

I'm sorry.

I believe this was 47.

You talk about your daily minimum shift staffing.

Thank you for that question.

If you look back at the map, you'll see the way our sectors are set up, 1 through 8.

What those minimum officer numbers do is ensure that there's at least one officer in every sector with an additional officer that could serve as a backup officer.

It does.

That is the exact answer I was looking for.

I think you, I wrote this down very early on, but I think you actually answered it in the rest of it.

But I feel like I sometimes think of my role

and vice versa.

And something I've found myself, a narrative that I've found myself resonating with is that the world, even if it's not becoming more violent, is becoming more attuned to violence.

And with that, I would assume that we see, even if our crime rates aren't shifting dramatically, we see these calls for service significantly increasing.

Am I off base with that, I guess is kind of where I would ask?

It does, but I think it's also important to realize that we also live in a relatively safe community as well, especially when you compare it to other comparable jurisdictions.

We do have low

We're seeing technology touch more of our crimes.

We are leveraging relationships within the region with the city and university and our state and federal partners, too, as a force multiplier.

And as the board's aware, we're also examining ways that we can utilize technology as a force multiplier

Speed cameras, drones, but at the end of the day, you still need humans, you still need people deployed out in the field to do this job.

And I think it bears worth repeating that when I talk about those priority one calls for service, when somebody picks up the phone and calls 911, and those metrics of sub five minutes, sub 10 minutes, that means that one officer is on that scene within sub five minutes, sub 10 minutes, and their backup could be further away.

So what I'm trying to do with

On a similar just kind of line of tap-checking the kind of political narratives that we craft against the actual factual experience of what it looks like to staff this department, a talking point I've used before that people have politely pushed back and said, I'm not sure how accurate that is, is that expanded authority for

staffing demands could reduce the growth of staffing demands in the patrol sector.

But it's been pointed out to me, well, if we're driven primarily by calls for service, that might not actually be correct.

That would certainly be a follow-up conversation because it is very complicated.

Right now there's no law that allows us to do

and what those speed cameras do is it catches speeders and that would be the function.

It has no bearing on the overall calls for service.

question that I've been wanting to ask.

On the timeline, I had, and this is a really minor question, and it's probably my own misunderstanding.

This is slide 46.

I remember when we voted on this last year, or when the board

at that time.

No, you're not, and with this

shows the board what we did with that officer based on the fact that we were awarded one TDO and oftentimes it takes two officers to do a TDO.

I made the decision, the conscious decision to take that officer position because it's still a sworn position and allocated to the HARTs team to help offset that demand with mental health.

Okay.

That directly answered my question.

Thank you.

And helps me understand, it squares it with my own experience and memory at the end.

I had another note on here, and I don't remember what I meant by it.

So I might try and puzzle out what I meant when I wrote this note.

And Mr. Chair, if you want to check back in with me and see if I figured it out by hand.

Yes.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

I really appreciate that.

Wanted to know, how many two-person cars do you have?

We have no two-person car.

In situations that you see two-person cars is usually when it's a trainee and their field training officer.

So right now we have a number of those that you see that are operating two-person car, but the role of field trainer is to step back and evaluate and grade and watch and coach and mentor that young officer.

Not necessarily interfere unless absolutely necessary.

Where we do adjust from that, that two-person car is on implement weather days.

When there's a blizzard, then we'll pair them up for safety reasons in case there is a priority call and we can make sure the officers get their safety.

There could be benefits to that, but again, because the county is so large, that'd be something, that'd be a long-term strategy, not a short-term strategy, because all you're doing is potentially tying up resources.

Okay.

Yes.

Also, overtime.

I would have to get back to you with the actual numbers, but I can say and I can check with our finance department.

Every quarter we submit a balanced budget on our overtime.

So the budget that we place, we operate within our overtime budget.

And we're conscious about that.

OK.

With that, that's factored in to our request with callbacks and holdovers in those special circumstances.

So that's factored in our budget.

So right now we're fortunate that we are not over a budget, but as Jake and I have discussed before, all it takes are one or two critical incidents.

And those long incidents and the fire chief's nodding his head, that can really impact our overtime budget.

Okay.

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, for FY25 revised budget and what we're proposing for FY26 is just under $1.6 million and it's a slight increase from the prior year to adjust for increases in salaries and benefits as we move forward.

So then if they do any overtime

That's their discretion on overtime, yes.

And I understand that the school zone

And then, I mean, a huge amount of tickets.

Yes, that is correct.

A member of our traffic unit actually reviews the company, reviews the violation, and then it's sent over to the police department for a second review.

Which is additional time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ms.

McKin.

I wasn't going to ask this until I was right in her question.

Are you finding a lot of people are going to court over these fines?

The sits on receipt for a traffic unit.

That's good.

It's a time issue.

So just a couple of really easy things for you.

Yes.

Oh, I agree 100%.

I apologize if I didn't say that earlier.

I'm sorry.

Problem-oriented policing officer.

One of the questions that I get or receive a lot from the public, probably because of the area that I represent, is are the officers that are directing traffic at Almar High School or at some of the other private schools

because people see officers, they see a uniform, they're not sure what the uniform is.

Those are, yeah, that's a good question.

Those are contractual overtime assignments that are funded through school, so it's not, it is not uncommon to see somebody from the Sheriff's Department directing traffic or the

wants an officer out there directing traffic.

So that's separate from your budget?

Yeah, okay.

I said these were the easy ones.

I'm just going through my notes here.

I really...

found that, well, first of all, I'm really thrilled that you all are doing this study.

And I'm thrilled that you're doing it together, even though you'll get separate recommendations.

I mean, I get that.

But that is really, really needed.

And to just follow up with that, I really found over the years, using the formula per population was really easy for the community to understand.

I'm not saying it's the right thing to do.

and I'm happy to move away from it.

It does.

I agree.

Unfortunately, law enforcement does not have a set formula because every jurisdiction is going to be different.

And how we explain it sometimes if we get it down to it.

So when we get the study back, we'll see what they're recommending.

And my only other question

is getting that quality of life issues and probably because a lot of my high density neighborhoods, apartment complexes, but neighborhoods especially, I have a lot of calls to me around quality of life issues.

Why is this?

I have a school bus right now parked in a neighborhood and people are wanting to know why I'm that school bus.

is there.

Or I've had dump trucks and construction trucks parked in neighborhoods.

Those quality of life or abandoned cars just on trailers.

And so trying to figure out, Sean, because I know I was told two police chiefs back that that was coming as we urbanized and that there was going to be a need for the police to figure out how to cover those calls.

because they were going to just gain momentum.

Under current deployment strategies, we prioritize

lower tier parking violations.

That is a task, I'm getting a little ahead of the county executive's office, but a long term strategy would be to look at a potential function of our traffic unit to support a traffic program like you see that enforces parking violations and things like that.

We're not even concept phase, it's a discussion

speaking with things, and we are prioritizing those types of quality of life.

Short term, we get to those.

And I get that, and you have to absolutely do that.

Having said that, looking to the future, and I wondered if that is part of what

We can certainly- It would be interesting to know.

I've met with them today.

They're doing their rounds.

That's something that we have asked them to look at is not just quality of life, but all functions of the police department.

And do we have the capacity to provide all these services?

And if not, what does it take to provide those services?

Because I understand you don't now, but it's only going to grow.

as we are urbanizing and building out.

And like I said, at some point, I think there's going to be a need.

But you certainly have to prioritize.

I'm just putting it on the table.

The consultants receive data from both departments about their calls for service.

You know, future planning or strategic planning, and I would use, I think the schools is the easiest way for me to think about this.

We get more students, we need more teachers.

And if we're currently operating at a one-four per thousand, what's the AC

Yeah.

20 when?

30 more.

So that's 40 based at our current level.

That would be another 40 to 45 officers over the next 15 years.

And then that's just to keep pace at a staffing level that we think is not sufficient.

Correct.

Or at least in my opinion would be sufficient.

Now the study, I guess, will help us understand that.

So I know we all kind of laughed and you were like, well, I'm not here to ask for 115 more officers.

But if there were 115 more officers out there,

I think about 16,000 calls for service in the Rio District and how those calls for service might change if there was enough staffing out there to deal with that.

And I don't necessarily guess I think of the first call for service.

It's the second, the third, the fourth.

On top of that, when I see 90% of the time is in that reactive mode, and it's supposed to be 60-40 and we're 90-10.

not just the strain it puts on, but the work that's not being done in a timely manner, how does that impact operations?

But to get ahead of that,

I mean, it's almost as if you've got a, you know, what's our expected population growth each year?

So it changes.

But I mean, if you average it out of the trend, if we're not adding at least the one for per 1,000 every year or whatever based on the population growth, much in the same way you think of teacher allocation, then we just, you're going to be back here.

You get your one or your two, and then every fourth or fifth year you get five or six.

And it's from a long-term planning standpoint, that's not on you all.

That's on us.

That's not a good planning approach.

So maybe the study would help inform, like the question that I wrote down was how many

I think we could figure out what we would need to keep pace with Grove and then have to commit to that.

That would be a board discussion.

You're putting all six of these current positions into traffic, but since you're only getting six, what's the need next year?

Earlier we were talking about, well, it's not going to be dedicated.

It goes to the base, blah, blah, blah.

But if it were dedicated to public safety and more specifically to police,

Is it six more traffic folks next year?

Or is the Criminal Investigation Department or Special Ops?

Like what thinking in a five-year plan kind of approach, you know, how, what would you say the needs are?

Yeah, I'll address some of those.

So just for clarification, and forgive me if I wasn't clear, the six officers I'm asking for today are for patrol.

They're going to go to patrol stations.

B&E call, those are your first responders.

So that's what I'm asking for today.

As for the future years, what we're hoping for is to look at this study this fall once it's completed and then have that assist us in looking at how we're deploying resources and our future resource needs and then have those discussions internally on what a long-term strategy is to meet those goals, what it is

that we need in the next five years.

And then I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the domino effect.

While we're specifically talking about the police department now, as we grow our police department, there are internal resources that we need.

We need support from IT.

We need support for human resources.

I guess I'd look to the county executive and just say, you know, we do so well in five-year planning in a lot of different areas, you know, that the staffing for something like this that really can be population-based, the only way to get ahead of and creep up on getting more coverage out there is we have to get ahead of the year-over-year growth by a position or two.

And I guess the math might be informed by the study, but

but speeding is a good to me how it represents in a citizen's eyes on the street like speeding I just had this meeting with an HOA Friday and speeding everybody gets unhappy about speeding but they don't see us out there really doing it but it's and a lot of times you know and I have to be careful with how I

We can't get to the speeding enforcement because there's too many other calls for service happening.

But when this cycle, I guess with it being on there, we'll have a chance to talk to folks about it in public to help tell that story so they understand.

But I think this is one where

If I may, I just want to respond to.

So one of the things that the consultants are looking at are also the scheduling models and also the way the sectors have been built out.

And so they're going to look at are there any efficiencies we can find in what we're doing today?

And also the special units that we have, should they be deployed differently or the same?

And so we're going to look at how we're working

looking today.

And then there's also going to be the future planning for the workload needs that we expect are coming.

And then they're going to lay out for us some options.

And adding the 6 doesn't change the 1.4.

Does it change it to 1.5 or something?

It's going to depend on population growth.

And back further, if I remember, I guess maybe you were lower 10 years ago at 1.2 or 1.3?

That's part of my story.

I hope that you're taking your consultants on a drive-along to the mountains and places where your staff has to go all the time because they really need to see what it's like out there for everybody driving.

Thank you.

Okay.

So back in 2008, 2009, and 2010, the chief at the time came to the board asking for four each time.

So that's 12 behind right there.

And

I was very grateful to finally be able to get a second at some point after that to try to build this.

But I agree that it's impossible to cover to what the citizens want, which is when they see somebody passing them at 80 on the country road, they want somebody to stop them right away and make them be accountable for it.

And then that's not possible.

But I'm excited about your study.

I had written down when you were talking about

Page 47.

And my question at that time was, are the beats close enough together for any backup?

Because I've never gotten over the young officer who went out to Afton at 12 o'clock at night all by himself.

And that was very scary.

But 53 is a great solution, if I'm understanding it correctly.

And I don't know how that works for the three shifts, either.

I so appreciate being able to see the officers' cars out in their yards.

That's a great deterrent right there.

So I really hope that we continue to have them living in our neighborhoods for sure.

I was shocked by the proposal even that 10 minutes response time in the rural area is on the table because 25 is the best I've ever had.

So that's just time has changed, I guess.

So good luck with trying for that.

54, you

I know you were trying very hard to set up more training locally.

And then you have a whole extra year almost.

Yes.

After they get here.

Great.

So anyway, I really, I guess, don't have any extra questions other than support of all the other questions which were asked.

And several things I hope you can respond to me.

A person leading a church funeral jumped out in front of me on Earlaceville Road by the church by the basement.

And it scared me because it was like from here to the far wall.

And I screeched to a halt.

And then they brought out the people leaving the funeral.

was a madhouse.

So is there a rule about that?

That I could then at least, when someone calls me about that, in the future, I will know what to say.

Yeah, that would be the preference, is that somebody in uniform, some of these funeral homes do reach out or attorney will reach out for officer support.

Sometimes that does come from officer ownership as available.

Sure.

supposed to be doing that.

Thank you.

I look forward to the study.

I think there's a lot of great justification here, also interesting information.

I'd like to know more eventually about rural and urban as well.

Right now, I believe we have anywhere from four to six motorcycle officers.

The traffic units.

Right.

Exactly.

Because that's the one complaint I hear about most of all is speeders.

With that, I'll turn it over to Chief Eggleston to talk about the fire rescue services for public safety.

Well, good afternoon, board, and thank you.

I, too, like Colonel Reese, want to thank the county executive's office and the finance and budget group because they brought us in fairly early on this process, and you all know this is a tough budget.

And I would say it's a very big team effort.

We worked through a lot of things, and I just really appreciate

I mean I think we started meeting before the FY25 budget ink was dry but it was really beneficial to get in early and also appreciate Colonel Reeves being here listening to his presentation because there's a lot of parallels of what the police department's experiencing and what fire rescue is experiencing as well

So I'm just going to go over some overview of some things, talk about some of our demands and trends, and then talk about our FEMA grants and what's required to keep those going.

So if we go to the next slide, just briefly, I know a lot of you know this already, but our system is made up of 14 fire stations, fire rescue stations.

Six of them are fully staffed with career staff and there's a legend there to show you which ones are.

Six of them are a mix of career and volunteer staff and then two of them are fully staffed by volunteer staff.

So they're strategically located throughout the county.

We also break the county into different planning districts.

We have 11 different districts that we look at performance of those districts.

But in aggregate, those districts' performance really affect the overall performance of the county because we're a networked system, meaning that oftentimes on large scale events and even events like a motor vehicle accident with entrapment, it takes multiple units from different stations on that type of call.

So it's really important that those networks

working together.

And as you all know, we're a combination system, meaning both career and volunteer members work side by side to provide service.

And we're the only county department, too, that relies heavily on unpaid professionals to provide a very important service.

So as you all know, when there's decline in our volunteer service, we have to invest and make up those services through career staff just to maintain our level of service out there in the

Let's go to the next slide.

One of our central planning documents that's an industry standard and a best practice is our standards of cover.

This is a fundamental document that you all approved back in 2019 called our standards of cover.

and it's centrally focused on the risk assessment of our community so it's designed we had a group that came in to help us with this and it's based upon the risk in our community it's about six years old we're in the process of updating it now but it includes looking at our fixed and mobile resources it recommends response time suggestions

and then we have a process to continuously evaluate our performance against those objectives.

So right now our response time objectives are 8 minutes 90% of the time in the development areas and then 21 minutes 90% of the time in the rural areas.

I'm not too happy about the 21 minute time just because that's a long time but we have such a vast area in the rural area to cover it would be really difficult to cover anything more than that but I thought we'd just briefly go over that and we'll talk about some of the performance at the end of the presentation relative to these response time standards.

So we can go to the next slide.

This is really talking about our service demand trends.

As we say, we constantly evaluate our performance all the time.

And like PD, we're seeing a dramatic increase in calls for service, 21% since 2019.

We think that this is related, looking at the calls for urbanization driving their growth, especially in the development areas.

And what's unusual

types are increasing across the board, including fires, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Some communities of fires are declining, but we're seeing an increase across the board.

And I think I'm ready to note, and I was over here nodding a lot when Colonel Reeves was talking about it, but we too are experiencing complexity of the kind of calls that we have.

Major Motor Vehicle Crashes on the Interstate that are very complex situations to mitigate.

So it's changing.

I will say too that

We're the canary in the coal mine when it comes to social issues.

When there's a social shift out in the community, we're the first person to see it.

If we have an issue related to overdoses, related to domestic violence, we see it, we experience it.

And I've been in the fire service for a long time, and I never remember a time where we're involved in so much of that.

I think it's an important service, but I just

you know one other thing too and I know I'm preaching to the choir here but we're seeing a lot more calls related to weather events than we ever have seen before you all know that last year about this time with wildfires this past winter a lot of snow we've had flooding I think personally you know this is effect of what we're seeing in terms of climate change I've even had a chance to testify before Congress explaining the same thing and I think we're now seeing it so I just bring that

to deal with.

One other thing, too, is just like Colonel Reese had pointed out, we try to dedicate enough resources to try to go upstream to solve some of these problems before we experience them, because providing a response model that takes care of some of these

for example, we're trying to get out of the community to do some mobile integrated healthcare that visits our higher utilizers to see it there, make sure that they're cared for so they don't rely on 9-1-1, but it's only through our discretionary time, which is very little.

But we try to really work on that as much as we can because, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth the pound of cure, right?

That's, you know, Benjamin Franklin, which is the father of the fire service.

So, anyway.

Some of our service demands, this is a heat map you probably used to see in some of these, but this is all relative to because obviously we do have calls in Whitehall area, but it doesn't necessarily show up.

But this is probably not a surprise for you all.

We're seeing most of the calls activity in the development area, some really hot spots along 29 North there in the Rio District.

A lot of that has to do with that's a large population of our elderly care facilities there, which generates a lot of calls, just like Pantops.

Pantops is one area that has the highest concentration of people over the age of 65, which are more likely to get injured and sick, two and a half times more likely to get injured.

So it's really important that we look at this.

But even you can see along the roadways, motor vehicle crashes are a big part of our activity.

I'm just amazed at how fast people go here I think sometimes it's like a raceway but but this is not unusual

and the activity.

So it gives us an idea as we look at this of how, you know, what to expect, again, how to pivot and make sure that we are paying attention to the things that are happening around us.

And also, what do we do to reduce the risk in some of these areas is really important.

So if we go to the next slide.

So this is where I just want to give you a moment and just give some history of our

Point and Seminole Trail, all about the same time asked the county for daytime help because they were seeing a strain on their services.

And so the county stepped up.

This is before I came to the county in 2002.

And then if you go to the next slide, so between 2000 and 2018, we only had two requests.

That's an 18-year period that seems like not a lot.

Now, at the same time, we were building some county stations along the way, too, so I don't want you to think there was no activity.

But between 2000 and 2018, we had former Scottsville Rescue ask for daytime people, as well as East Ravanna.

a dramatic increase so we had in two stations both Crozet and North Garden asked for daytime assistance and then now we're starting to see where 24-hour assistance was being requested so before they ceased to exist Scottsville Rescue asked for 24-hour staffing last year North Garden

Crozet volunteer for our park for 24-hour standing.

So that, I don't know if that trend is going to continue, but I think it tells a story of how stressed our volunteer system is and what we need to do, again, to invest in these places so that we can at least maintain a level of services as the volunteers age out in some cases or are unable to meet the community demands.

If you go to the next slide,

I just want to step through some of our strategic investments to just again to give you an idea back and I'm not going to go over all these but but the ones highlighted in the green are ones that were funded through a federal safer grant which are really important and a big driver in this 26 budget if you go to the next one 2022 that's when we added a heart member

and then we added some staff a while back through a safer grant to ensure that we, you all remember back in 2022, we were shutting down rural stations because we didn't have enough staff.

And I know Ann remembers this because I used to get a lot of emails from you about it.

We were lucky that at the time the federal government allowed us a grant that we could stop that process because we didn't think it was a good long-term strategy.

If we continue on, 23, we added emergency management.

That's when we decided to invest in emergency management within the county and add those positions.

And then 24 was a big one.

This is the Monticello ladder truck and the Scottsville fire engine down at the former Scottsville rescue station.

They're highlighted in yellow, meaning that they're not out yet.

They haven't graduated out yet, but those two services will start this July.

So it's right around the corner.

But I just want to let you know, because it takes about 18 months for us to hire and train those people, so there's a lag.

And if we go to the last one, we also, last year, thank you all for approving.

Garden, FEMA Grant, and then of course the big one is the Berkmaar Ambulance, because when we talk about activity, that Berkmaar Ambulance runs about 3,400 calls a year.

We can't get another call out of them.

They're so busy, it's starting to affect other areas in the county, and I think you all recognize that and helped us fund that.

That's going to be in place next July after the folks get out of this recruit school.

They're in the recruit school today, so it just takes them a while

in order to start service.

But if you go to the one more, so all this adds up to 97 people since 2021.

Big numbers, I realize that.

One more handy, please.

40 of those were funded through general fund revenue.

57 of them were funded through safer grants.

Now, what we're experiencing now, if we go to the next slide, is that those safer grants were awesome.

I mean, this is a

I think it's a great program.

We just got through work in Capitol Hill to ensure that our federal legislators know how important these are to our locality because that paid for people to go to training for three years and then to be deployed.

We did $12.7 million in federal work to jumpstart these folks.

But what's happening now with those grants starting to age out, so we have to pick up

budget.

So I think it's important to frame all that.

So if we go to the next slide, this is just a history, just a rundown, but it gives you an idea at the bottom of the dollar figure required to pick up these positions in the budget.

So there's 57 positions, and you can see it marched out over the years.

We still believe that this is fundamental in terms of being able to help us provide adequate services to our community.

So although we're not required to continue these beyond the grant periods, we have four of them work.

I mean, I can't imagine what our county would look like if we did not pick this up.

So I think this is a vital part of our service.

So if we go on one more, we talk a little about return on strategic investments.

There's some good news in all of this.

We've had 2.6% reduction

When we get that Burkmaar Ambulance in place, I think we'll see that drop even more or increase even more in terms of response time reduction.

But also the added feature is that now we can guarantee through our partnership with Western Elmore Rescue and the county staff, a paramedical in every critical call, which is so important because it's such a life-saving venture.

If we go to the next, we saw some even better performance on our first due

to decrease response time for that second and third arriving apparatus, which is so important when you have a structure fire where people need to arrive on scene for suppression and search and rescue and removing victims.

It's so important to have a full complement.

So we would like to see those numbers.

One thing that I'm really proud of, and I know Ann remembers all this, but because we've invested in resources, we've been able to transition

contract we had with the city, which we were paying close to a million dollars a year to now to a mutual aid agreement at no cost reciprocal agreement.

So that allows us to use that as a force multiplier for ourselves as well as we can provide the same thing for the city.

And I would say that's working out very well, probably better than what we anticipated.

in terms of really focusing on the county needs, but also be regionally connected.

I would say today we're much more connected with the university in the city in terms of priorities and communications, but we've made some great strides in terms of putting policies and procedures and responding to our large-scale emergencies, including working with Christy and her group to

to ensure that we can have continuity of government should we ourselves have a catastrophe that we have to deal with.

So we've had a lot of great return on investment from that.

I know I probably went through that really quickly, but I wanted to make sure that we spent your time.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I know you went.

I'll just acknowledge the deal, and just as I did for Colonel Reeves' presentation, there are some similarities in the cost we are including for the

Medical and Public Safety Supplies as we continue to run additional ambulances.

We are responding to the change in regulations for the fire rescue pharmacy located at the Public Safety Operations Center to be compliant with the new way of providing that.

Again, continuing to support the volunteer fire rescue stations as part of their operating request.

We have funding included in there.

Yes, I'll say the last part of public safety, just to acknowledge, we have our partner entities.

These are the ones included in that.

I'll highlight the regional jail.

Currently, we have an increase for debt service for the facility that is over 50 years old and has not undergone a major renovation.

Also, the new contract for the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA doesn't include an increase that is based on the board approved lab.

The other partners are regional entities that are just funded based on the county share and our share of those costs.

We'll go through our order for questions.

Help me make sure I'm not tell and tell us out of school here, Chief.

But my understanding is that there are no new non-obligate costs from fire in this budget.

But am I mistaken on that?

I think we kind of gestured toward this last year.

But last year, kind of the big story in Fire Rescue was the, again, to use the phrase, data story that the North Garden Department shared, basically saying, strictly speaking, we're good, but this big shoe is about to fall.

And I'm curious, and maybe this is projected out too far, but

I found something that we have benefited from in the past is being able to plan out and forecast all of it in the future.

Yes, we did receive a letter from Crozet Volunteer Fire Department this year expressing the same concern.

And the challenge we have, quite frankly, is it takes us so long to hire and deploy people.

We don't have the ability to pivot right away.

It's been my experience working with with volunteer departments is they they work so hard when they finally do raise their hand and say, I need help.

They need help like right there.

So we we are challenged to react quickly to that kind of request without taking people from other areas of the county to do that.

You touched on this in your presentation and I know a conversation we've had before is about falling volunteerism generally and

at different sectors in our demographics.

I mention this because something that I've, and this may be frankly getting into a future chapter, there are so few levers we have

The amenities of stations themselves help generate higher rates of volunteerism, and that it is therefore something that could or should be a capital priority.

I agree with you.

I think, you know, having a good station is part of that.

And I think we used the model that's been a couple years ago when North Garden came to the county and asked for help with their building renovation and construction.

And Jacob and I worked in putting together a really great framework that was mostly in Jacob's boat.

to how do we do that when we don't own that building and it was a combination of a grant and a loan and some oversight that I think if you were to ask North Garden they think it was a real success and they've got a beautiful station.

Thank you very much for an excellent presentation.

Actually, both of you, I really enjoyed that.

And I think also a key aspect regarding the volunteer stations is to have a good volunteer chief.

I've seen that Stoney Point that's changed the entire volunteer fire department around their Stoney Point.

So that's made a big difference.

And I just wanted to point out, too, that

We have some stations that are doing a wonderful job.

I don't want you to think that everybody is doing poorly.

We've got some very strong stations that are doing this phenomenal work.

And you're right, the leadership, and particularly in Stony Point, are doing very well compared to what we saw years ago.

Supervisor Gallo?

Thank you, Chief.

I guess I'd make a couple of comments and then tie this into a question and can punt it to the study because it sounds like the study is going to get at it.

And this is probably for both of you if you have comments or two of you have comments.

I feel like you guys max out at your capacity more frequently than we're all willing to admit to.

I think of the day where there was an incident over near Belvedere with the homeless individual.

Now, it happened to be resolved just in time when a call comes in where then you have to go to Planet Fitness for a bogus bomb threat.

And everybody on site, I mean, there was movement.

So, like, it was clear something was going on somewhere else.

And the fact that that was already kind of resolved, but it hadn't been resolved, what would that have done to y'all?

And we've had, what, just in the last month, I think there's been, what, three or four tractor trailers that have overturned on the interstate?

And that's not a, you're not just sending one or two people out there for that.

So we oftentimes think that it takes, and not to mention the significant things that we've seen in the last two months.

We've had a plane crash, we've had shooting.

So, and those types of incidents require even more people to attend to that call than the tractor trailer or some of these other type of instances.

the board and perhaps community members get it into our head that it takes major events to stress out the system.

Well, I don't consider, and I'm not meaning to devalue or say it's not significant that a tractor trailer overturns.

But I think that if you went around and asked people to name significant event, they wouldn't say a tractor trailer overturn.

And this gets to the 1.4 staffing on your side and the staffing issues and the whole mix with volunteerism.

But as a board member, I'm starting to wonder, all right, we can't put neither the folks that are on your teams nor the community members in the situation where the system is being maxed out every single month for three days or five days or whatever the number is.

It's just not the right way to do this.

So I'm hoping, it sounds like the study will probably help us understand what that max capacity is and how often we're hitting it so that we all just have the truth in front of us.

But I think I'm starting to become a little bit more interested in looking to the team, the finance team, and saying what if some of that 3-2 was dedicated moving forward, how you all would react to that.

I think that's a list question maybe.

It comes back to us and says, because I don't know how else

For similar rationale for why I think it's important to have dedicated ongoing funding for affordable housing, it's the same rationale here.

This is not something that's going to go away.

We know we're going to have population growth.

And the types of things that are happening, we have to get ahead of that it doesn't take two events in a given day to stress our system out.

How the hell do we get in front of that?

And funding is going to be a big part of it.

So I don't know how you all react.

hadn't really thought about that coming in today, but I don't know if it's the 3-2, I don't know if it's half the 3-2, but I think

I think there should be some discussion about that.

We have a follow-up because it's one of making sure that we can just have clarity in what we're doing for everyone, the public, the board, the partners, certainly the schools are impacted.

I'm there.

Well, I appreciate the question.

Erotomy, you know, I was before you a year ago, December, talking about what we thought five years was going to look like.

And I know that at the time it was like a shock because they were big numbers.

But I would say if you go back and look, we were hitting those things.