Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session   3/9/2026

Good afternoon, everyone.

I am going to call to order the Board of Supervisors for this March 9, 2026, 5 p.m. budget work session here in room 241.

All board members are present.

We also have Mr. Jeff Richardson with us today, our County Attorney Mr. Andy Herrick, our Board Clerk Ms. Claudette Borgeson.

We have a multitude of staff with us today.

I want to thank officers Dylan Shuplet and Enzo Irizarry for being with us this afternoon.

Thank you gentlemen for being here.

And I do want to recognize that we have our Commonwealth Attorney Mr. Hinchley with us.

as well as our circuit clerk, Mr. Zuck, as we're dealing with their portions today.

But yeah, we're ready to kick off our work session number one and see how it goes.

So Mr. Richardson, am I going to you or am I going right to Andy?

Right to Mr.

Good evening to the chair of the board.

My name is Andy Bowman, assistant chief financial officer.

I'll be kicking off the presentation today.

Others will be introducing themselves as they step up to the mic, as we'll be sharing a series of topics today.

I'd like to start every work session.

Where have we been?

Where are we going?

So to date, this is work session number one.

The county executive presented a budget on February 25th.

The board held a public hearing on that on March 4th.

No action is requested by the Board of Supervisors today.

And that's going to be true in the work session number two.

Well, hold on.

Do we need to speak directly into these, or does it pick up?

This isn't like your traditional mic, and I should have caught that at the beginning.

So we speak in here like we normally would, but just like when they were in there, I'm just going to say make sure you amplify and project and enunciate well.

And I'm going to call out Mr. Grant and tell him to give us a review, because this is a new sound system.

And I know if he's not listening live, then he will be paying attention later.

So please send your feedback in on how this new sound system is working.

But don't feel the need to pull it.

You don't have to do that.

Thank you.

No, thank you.

Thank you for the subtle hint as well.

So no action is going to be requested by the board today or work session number two or number three.

That will change work session number four where the board is going to be asked to take action to propose a tax rate and propose a budget for public hearing.

At that point, the budget becomes, it moves from becoming the county executive's recommended budget to the board of supervisors proposed budget that will then be adopted on April 22nd.

This date is very important because when the board advertises a tax rate, the board can only adopt a real estate tax rate at that amount or less.

And so if the board at that time is willing to entertain a higher tax rate, that 18th work session is going to be pretty key.

After that proposed budget is set, there will be a continued series of town halls.

There's a work session in April if it's needed.

And we'll conclude with public hearings and the adoption in April.

Before we dive into content today, I want to spend a moment on just the process of the work session in terms of what has worked well in the past.

Staff is going to present a level of detail in between what the county executive presented in his initial budget and the full 350-page document.

So I guess you could think of this as a mini-series adaptation of a 350-page novel.

So we'll do our best to give as much time as we can for discussion, presenting information in small chunks.

We'll be listening for the board very closely, of course, to answer your questions about the budget.

And if there's any question that we can't answer on the spot, we will post that online so that the public can see the transparency and how we're responding to things.

The other thing that staff is listening for is what I'll call the list, end quotes, for potential adjustments.

So as we walk through chapters of the book, the board may desire to see more or less or just a change in something in the budget.

What we have found has worked well in the past is to capture those things along the way and bring those back as a package with some options for the board's consideration in work session number four.

There's also not an expectation if the board wants to add something.

There's not an expectation on the spot they must identify something to reduce to funding.

Generally, if we can come up with a package and get a sense of where the majority of the board is, that will help us do the best work on work session number four.

Again, this is based on what's worked well in the past and will, of course, adapt to the newly seated board.

Today's agenda is going to walk through these chapters on the budget, a very high level, the total county budget.

We're going to spend our time on general fund revenues, general fund expenditures with a focus on compensation.

Our HR director, Jessica Rice, is here.

After that, it would be a good time to take a break if the board desires, and then we'll pick things back up with public safety, including our chiefs will be here, then judicial.

Again, I appreciate our constitutional officers being here at 5 o'clock for the last item on the agenda.

Thank you for being here in your partnership.

I guess I'll just say their requests are fully funded.

On the draft agenda, we did publish a non-departmental chapter based on the content preparing for today and preparing for Wednesday.

Staff thought it would be best to cover non-departmental on Wednesday just given the length of topics in depth today.

So the last thing I want to do before we dive into content is really just take a moment, though they don't like to be publicly recognized, I need to publicly recognize the team in the Office of Measurement and Budget.

They are the team who helps create these presentations, authors the book, responds to the Q&A, does all the work with our partners in the audience just around the year.

That's Caitlin Malcolm, our chief of budget, Ryan Davidson, our deputy chief of budget, senior budget analyst Larvin Zant, senior budget analyst Tia Mitchell,

budget analyst Thomas Unsworth, and of course our chief financial officer Jacob Sundner.

So with that I'm going to take my first pause before we talk about the total budget just in case the board has any questions about process.

All right so I'm going to start at about the 30,000 foot view with a few slides from the county executives presentation.

These are really just a summation of all the balancing considerations that go into putting in the fiscal year 27 recommended budget.

And I hope that the Board of Supervisors, as they think of whether you're seated on the board or whether you're observing as a candidate or a board member elect, you can see a lot of the board's discussions reflected in this budget.

Starting at the bottom left, we have the six strategic plan goals, and we'll spend a lot of time in the budget tying those to where the money goes.

We talked with the board at two meetings in the fall about the five-year financial plan, how we have a different plan and a different long-year outlook, but the short-term outlook is very cloudy and uncertain.

We talked about revenues and the economic outlook in October with Dr. Bailey.

Obligations have been a big part of this budget for both county government, public schools, and the capital and debt program.

We'll spend more time talking about those in the work sessions.

And finally, our financial management policies.

The Board of Supervisors updated these in November of 2019.

They've become really the backbone of a lot of our financial planning.

And I want to spend time today, because this is the first time we are proposing use of the budget stabilization reserve in this budget.

So I'll walk through the why of that.

Three budgeting strategies that will be a theme that the board hears through the next three work sessions as first of obligations, again whether it be from picking up FEMA SAFER grants for fire rescue, supporting community public safety partners, opening two new schools, funding debt obligations for the major capital projects in the coming years.

Multi-year planning as we think about how do we get to the more rosy revenue picture when economic development projects come online and the tax pay changes.

How do we begin to navigate that?

How do we plan for the situation for the school's very strong state revenue growth so that we can be better prepared should the LCI or local composite index be unfavorable for them in the future?

And again, strategic plan is going to be a guide.

You'll see in a lot of these presentations, numbers one through six in the upper right of the slides once we get to the expenditures, and that's going to tie to the strategic plan goals.

So, let's talk about the total county budget.

And this reflects every dollar that will be coming to the county, operating, capital, debt service, any special revenue or restricted funds that will be a part of the schools and county government in fiscal year 27.

I want to take a moment, not going into detail on the revenues, we'll do that with each major fund area.

We'll do the expenditures, take a closer dive at what the county executive presented about where does the county's tax dollars go.

The answer to the question is first, education.

52 cents of every dollar operating capital and debt in fiscal year 27 will be for that big orange piece on the left.

Next largest category is public safety in green at 14 cents.

The next largest category after that is community development.

That's not the department, that's the entire area of the functions of community development.

That area is larger in this year because that amount includes just under $41 million for the construction of holders road that would not be part of next year's budget.

I'll clarify that the 10 cents for county government operations, that includes both county administration and also the entire facilities environmental services.

That is a department that has a dual focus of supporting maintaining our facilities, but they also do a lot of proactive environmental services programs, water resources, public works functions as well.

Health and Welfare and Parks and Recreation are the remaining ones on the right.

So a question maybe on the board or the public's mind is the total budget is going up $86 million or 13.5%.

Why is that?

And despite all the numbers and figures, it's really three primary changes that explain that $86 million increase.

The first is that general fund local revenues, which are primarily tax revenues, are going to increase 7.6%.

Now in a few slides, I'm going to take a moment and I'll talk through that in more detail.

The second major change is there's almost $13 million in new state revenue support for the public schools.

That's about $11.7 million in their primary public school operating fund.

The remainder is in what's called a special revenue fund where there's some sort of state or federal restriction around how that money can be used.

And then third, I mentioned Boulder's Road before.

This is a $40.8 million capital project in fiscal year 27.

And the sources are really coming from all over.

The state is committed to provide $20 million to that project.

The developer, AstraZeneca, has committed to provide $12 million to that project.

The Economic Development Authority, they have contributed $500,000 to that.

And the remainder of that project is going to be covered by donated right away to the county because the county owns the land at the Rivanna Futures property.

There's money that the Board of Supervisors has previously appropriated into the Economic Development Fund.

That is being recommended to reallocate to fund the cash and the debt service for that project in the recommended CIP.

And so this is just a clarification.

I think I may have made it the first work session that there's a contemplation of another $4.15 million to the Economic Development Fund.

That is an entirely separate decision than Boulder's Road.

All other changes after those big three are essentially flat.

So the total budget, why that's going up, that is the reason.

We don't really spend a whole lot of time, though, in the work session talking about the total budget.

The general fund is really the primary focus, and that's for three reasons.

First, that's where all tax revenue comes in that is not restricted by the state.

Second, that's where the Board of Supervisors has the maximum amount of policy discretion.

And three, when it comes to the public school operating budget or the debt service fund or the CIP, the general fund is the primary funding source of those.

Any questions?

Yes?

OK, $20 million.

I guess just to confirm, the 48 for the revenue for Boulder's Road is included in that total for 48 and 52, yeah.

Yes.

So another way to think about it, if Boulder's Road was not part of this, the increase in the budget would be a little more than half of what it is on the screen.

And that's very common.

There are years where you'll see major changes just due to the timing of capital projects when they stop and start.

Next year you would see all else being equal if the plan moves forward.

All right, general fund revenues.

This is the longest chapter we're going to cover in the book today, and so I'm going to split it in two.

I'm going to talk about other local taxes first, and then we'll go through a round of questions with the board, and then we'll talk about the other non-local taxes.

I'm sorry, non-local tax revenues.

In the general fund, the budget is balanced on the current tax rates for real property, personal property, transit occupancy, and food and beverage.

I'll note food and beverage is at the cap.

This is the chart of the donut or the bagel, the wheel, however you would like to think about it, of general fund revenues that total $512 million in fiscal year 27.

For me, there are three takeaways when I look at this donut chart.

The first of which is that local government is primarily locally funded.

State and federal revenues only make up 8% combined of our budget.

A lot of that is directly related to the Department of Social Services, and we'll speak to that more in a moment.

Second is that of all those local revenues, general property taxes are the largest contributor at 69%.

The third takeaway is one that's actually not on this slide.

I went back last year and said, how did this donut chart compare to where we were a year ago?

And there's one change.

A year ago, other local taxes was 18%.

It's now down to 17%.

That 1% went to general property taxes, which was up to 68 and was now up to 69.

So I want to spend a few moments and talk about revenue diversification and really build on some of the comments the county executive shared in his presentation.

So we spent a lot of time, whether it be through the five-year plan, with Dr. Bailey, with the Rivanna Futures property, and the Economic Development Strategic Plan, all about why tax-based diversification matters.

And this chart really summarizes the cost of community services with our changing tax base.

We can see that from 2015 to 2025, the real estate tax base has become much more reliant on residential and multi-family.

It increased from about 65% to just under 74%.

Agricultural had a decrease from 19.7 down to 15, and commercial and industrial shrank from 15 to 11.3.

I'll share that we have not finalized the land book because the appeals process is still underway with our county assessor, but that we're seeing that trend continue in calendar year 26.

With that 11.3 in commercial, would be probably closer to about 11 percent even by the time that is done.

And we've seen residential and multifamily inch up more by a couple tenths of a percent.

The reason this is so important is not just the revenue that comes in, but what does it cost to deliver the services to these various classes of property.

And so for residential and multifamily, it costs more to serve those than it does to collect tax revenue.

The primary reason for that is public schools.

We have a well-funded public school system, to quote Dr. Haas if he's listening today, and it's one where because of that, just the cost per pupil and how that translates to the taxes is very different because

That is the tax base where children come from.

Agriculture and commercial and industrial are much lower.

Those are ones that are revenue positive when they come in.

So commercial revenue can help offset residential service cost.

So this is not to say that growth happens or economic development happens without regard.

This is the plan and the economic development strategic plan to focus on particular sectors and where that comes from.

Another way to look at tax-based diversification

is this slide that I pulled out of the budget docket.

Sorry, this is not the easiest thing to read.

Hopefully it's a little better for people online.

This shows a very long history from fiscal year 4 all the way through fiscal year 27 about how general fund revenues have changed by category.

We can see in the top line in blue, so three takeaways on this slide as well.

Top line in blue has increased from property taxes being 56% up to that 69% in fiscal year 27.

That growth has really come at the expense of two categories.

First of which is state and federal.

The gray line there we can see in fiscal year four that number was at 16.7%.

It's been on a steady downward trend where we're at 7.9% in fiscal year 27 of the general fund funded by state and federal revenues.

So pretty significant change of almost a drop of more than half.

not as dramatic as percentage but also of interest as the orange line which is other local taxes.

That was 23% and overtime has decreased now to 17.3%.

I want to take a moment to dive into that a little bit more.

The reason that one has really been harder to grow because Albemarle County is restricted by the state of Virginia because we are known as a Dillon rule state.

So for those who are not familiar with the term, I say I'm talking to the people in line, not just the board.

I know you all know these very well.

The Dillon Rule is really where a governing body can only do those things granted by the state.

And so these are the tax rates for the other local taxes category, the amount they are projected to bring in in fiscal year 27, what that rate is and whether it's the maximum allowed by the state.

And for all categories, transit occupancy, which is not recommended to change in fiscal year 27, all of those are at the state cap.

So that is not an option that is available for the board to explore other than transit occupancy.

Although if they wish to explore that through long-term legislative programs, that could be something such as the 1% sales tax that would be for school construction, currently being debated in the General Assembly.

So let's get down to some details of the numbers of what makes up these revenues.

I'm going to focus first on real estate tax revenue.

Real estate tax revenue is assessed based on fair market value established by the Virginia Code.

In January, the county assessor, Peter Lynch, spoke in great detail about the assessment methodology, how the process works, the appeals, so I'm not going to recap that today.

I will take a moment, though, and put in a quick plug for the real estate tax relief and elderly and disabled program.

It's an expense that appears in the non-departmental chapter.

So if you are someone here listening online or you know someone who may qualify for this program based on the criteria in the presentation, please contact the Department of Finance budget.

We will assist you with the application process and the application review that takes from there.

It's a number that the board has worked to expand that authority, not expand the authority, expand the eligibility criteria and that's actually up to $2.8 million of tax relief the board is now providing for folks who qualify.

We'll talk about that more on Wednesday in our departmental chapter.

Real estate revenue is projected to increase $20.5 million or 7.6%.

That is primarily due to the 6.2% reassessment in calendar year 2015.

The reason that number is even greater is because we also have an impact of new construction, land divisions and other adjustments that will increase the tax base.

So in the actual rate for real estate, again, that is recommended to be at 89.4 cents.

But I want to take a moment and really define this term of lower tax rate in quotes.

This lower tax rate is defined by the Virginia Code and it is established as part of the ad on the tax rate.

And what this means is, what would the tax rate be if the board were to set a tax rate that would offset the increase in real estate assessments?

So the county would still receive increased revenue from new construction and land divisions, but that rate, which in this case would be a decrease to offset their assessments, and that is 84.2 cents per $100 of assessed value.

If the board were to desire a change in the tax rate, the value of a penny is $3.3 million.

I've put up here the board has an allocation of shared revenues that is used to guide what goes to capital and debt, public school operations, and county government operations.

Those amounts are if the board were to follow that split.

I will share that historically most of the time when the board has made changes in the tax rate, it has not gone through the split, the board has decided to dedicate that for one purpose or another.

So every tenth of that is worth about 0.3 million dollars.

So that information is available if the board desires to make that change.

I'll move to personal property next.

This one I'll have to admit is a little more complex than real estate because it has some different categories and some different relief programs.

So again, the rate is recommended to remain the same at $4.28.

The assessment method here is the Virginia Code authorizes a few different sources and assessment methods.

Now in Marl County, we are using the Clean Trade-In Value as published in January of J.D.

Powers' Used Car Guide.

And that's for vehicles and motorcycles.

Other classes of personal property will have other methods defined in the state code.

So this is a source that is increasing from fiscal year 26 to 27.

about a total of just under $7 million or 17%.

There are four factors that are driving this and a lot of this is based on activity that is actually taking place in fiscal year 26 that will more than what is changing in fiscal year 27.

So these four factors first are the collection rate.

The Revenue Administration team in the Department of Finance and Budget is always looking at the tools available in the state, our procedures, and we have seen, or people just happen to be paying more on time, we are seeing our collection rates uptick, and that is reflected in this projection.

The second thing is an increased number of vehicles.

We have seen just through our regular practices, whether it be businesses or vehicles, always doing audits to make sure things are garaged and located in the proper jurisdiction.

As it turns out, last year there were about 500 vehicles more than usual that were picked up and added to the county's rolls that were already here.

That plus businesses and others is why that number continues to grow.

The third reason is really the source data that we're getting from J.D.

Power.

If you were to go back prior to recently,

We would get data from J.D.

Power and it would really be about the make and the model of the vehicle.

What we're getting now is from the assessment tool is much more refined level connected to a VIN.

And so you can get data about what a trim level looks like.

And so rather than a make and model being assessed really the same regardless of trim level, we are seeing much more differentiation in that trim level.

So the higher your trim level is, the higher your tax bill would be.

And then the fourth thing is we are seeing changes in the vehicle market.

where the board or others listening may remember that about three to five years ago it was pretty tough to get a new car.

Supply chain issues, all of those issues were out there.

One of the prime used car markets are cars that are three to five years old.

So just as there weren't new cars three to five years ago, there's not as many used cars in that three to five time frame.

And so we're seeing definitely a

It shifted what the macroeconomic base of car makeup is in terms of used versus new in car prices.

So that is the explanation for the increase for vehicles and motorcycles and other personal property.

There is tax relief that is provided by the state.

and this is provided progressively.

So if you have a vehicle that has a value of $1,000 less, you do not receive a bill that is due to the county.

The state will provide full relief.

Next, if you have a value of $1,000 and above, for the first $20,000 of that, you'll get 39% relief from the state.

Any car values above $20,000 do not receive relief from the state.

taking a look at the other categories 84% are from personal vehicles but there's a few other small ones business tangible personal property which is really just vehicles owned by businesses they are assessed the same as personal property and the rate must be the the same as that tax rate they do not receive relief

Two other small categories are machinery and tools, boats, airplanes, and manufacturers.

If the board would like to set a different rate for those, they can only go downward from the personal property rate.

Right now, all of these rates are equal at $4.28 of assessed value per $100 assessed value.

If the board would like to change a penny on this tax rate, it would be $113,000 per penny.

Those will be announced by split.

Again, the board has their discretion to whether that is split or dedicated for particular purposes.

One more slide before we take a break.

Other local taxes?

I'll take a break before we turn it over to the board for questions.

This is a group of taxes that really, in the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, I had a lot of charts and graphs to talk about how sales tax was changing.

Food and Beverage, Consumer Business Licenses.

But this is one where this year it's really just modest growth and things are kind of saying slow and steady.

I would say modest, not slow.

There's a few taxes where we're seeing some weakening.

There's others that are just humming along.

But I would characterize these increases as relatively modest.

And in the other local taxes, these are the sources that make up 94% of that total.

I'll just go through everyone on this one.

Supervisor McKeister, currently, any questions?

No questions.

I guess I'll ask this now, and you can tell me to punt it till later.

As we talk about increasing, whether it's personal property,

Any of the taxes in general, what has been the trend?

Yeah, so going back on real estate taxes, for the last, I want to say 10 years, but I'm going to fact check myself, there's been two increases to the real estate rate.

the first of which was I believe in the fiscal year 20 budget process where there was a general obligation bond referendum and it was foreshadowing that referendum that there would be a tax increase to fund the capital and debt impacts of that.

So the board approved that, I believe it was 1.5 cents.

It was a year later than planned, but that was the first 1.5 cents that was approved.

And then last year there was an increase of 4 cents.

Thank you.

So personal property is one where we back and we researched this.

And from the 1990s, I think it changed the first year, except in 2020, I want to say two or three.

But there was a time where used car values were spiking probably upwards of 30% to 40% plus.

The board at that time dropped that rate $0.86 with the idea they needed to have some temporary relief from that.

Rather than collect it all and do the rebate,

or collect it all and just collect it all.

We can.

I can provide that through the follow-up of the board.

I will share, last time we looked at this, it's very common to see cities and counties who are adjacent to each other have the same rate.

So right now, the city of Charlottesville also has a 9% rate.

But we can provide that data for different metro areas, Northern Virginia, the beach, and show where those are historically.

That's it.

Thank you very much.

On page 19, I may have missed something.

You talked about the number of vehicles being registered in the counties, so there's more enforcement of people who come here for years and years and don't move their Florida tags to Virginia.

Jennifer Matheny, Chief of Revenue Administration, we, a big part of it is

DNV has changed their process and how they put in addresses so they have a new system on the back end that verifies locality or your garage jurisdiction more than it did before.

They did that last year.

That has cleaned up some of it.

So when you go to the dealership and you buy a car and you tell them you live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and they just put everybody in the city, and then later on we have to find them all because that's our most common scenario.

And then we also do have the ability, we have access to the state police website, VCEN, State Police System.

where we can go in and inquire.

And when we get notifications about untaxed vehicles, such as in Florida, we do follow up on those and try to do our due diligence to determine if that is something that is technically located in Albemarle County.

So it's an ongoing effort at a lot of different angles.

Thank you.

That was great.

I appreciate it.

There we go.

Supervisor Crow.

One question then one statement that comes to mind.

A portion of that is.

And so the state code, the county has a 9% tax.

Understanding money in a budget is fungible.

It can be moved from pot to pot.

I'm also curious, is the portion of

I would need to go back and see what else we may cover.

Really, right now, our goal is to assess what is covered by that 3%, because anything above the 3% is unrestricted for whatever may be used there.

What I'm thinking of is

If the board were to increase that rate further that would not be restricted to the state.

Just when the board moved from years ago it was five to eight.

The other kind of, just based on where we are on the PowerPoint, I think the normative statement I want to make is we every year have legislative priorities.

We've had the same set of legislative priorities almost exactly during my whole tenure on the board because everything we were asking was getting vetoed.

I think we're expecting to see a lot of the things we want.

we get in the coming cycle.

And I think we need to start thinking, oh, what are some more particularized things we want to ask for?

And a lot of our revenue powers I think could be more expansive or more nuanced.

from this presentation to that immediately pop off the top of my head is personal property machinery and tools are coupled.

I don't want them coupled.

I want to hire M&T than personal property.

I want to be able to provide tax relief to individual residents who have

cars that they own while making sure I'm getting as close to the Laffer curve as I can on the major industries that we have that we would like to have that diverse revenue supply from.

But I can't do that right now.

And the General Assembly could let me do that.

That's something I would like.

Currently, if I'm remembering correctly, if a car is owned by a business that is not a Virginia-based business, even if it's Virginia-based, but if it is incorporated in a separate state, that car does not have to be counted as garaged here, if I'm remembering correctly.

There's a lot of like Maine-based small business

or main license, every record in this town of Scottsville is licensed in Maine because they don't pay taxes on a home and they don't have to be because of how garageing works.

That is a loophole that exists to the benefit of business that could be closed and it would provide some marginal improved revenue that could also provide additional tax relief

toward the rest of our residents in the future.

All right, so we will move next to other local non-tax revenues.

This category of revenues is just under $20 million, growing at a little over 4%.

Just some examples of what primarily makes up this are on the slide.

There are two things I want to highlight for the board of supervisors that do not need you to finalize today, because we do have future work planned.

We've included in the budget $80,000, which would contemplate a charge for micro-cat services effective mid-year.

I would recommend to the board that we discuss this on March 11th in the context of the total transit expenditures.

I know we'll have some representatives from other transit agencies here at that time.

But it's also not that we would decide that on March 11th.

This would be one conversation that future ones would consider.

And also really targeting this for mid-year to allow ample time if the board wants to move forward with this to really shape what is the best way to balance that.

The next item is about community development fees.

So there was a study done on community development fees several years ago and recommended a regular updating of the benchmarking for the cost of service.

It has been several years since that has taken place and so staff is recommending and has communicated to the developed community when the budget was released that effective January 1st they would look to do a benchmarking for the cost of those services.

So on the Board of Supervisors, March 18th, there will be a little more information about this.

We're requesting the authorization to hold a public hearing.

That public hearing would be held on April 15th, which is the same night as the tax rate and budget public hearings, because this is all part of the budget.

And we'll discuss that a little more in the coming.

Those are two things that I'm going to highlight for future discussion with the Board of Supervisors.

Next on state revenues, again, the 6% of the budget's about $30 million, and they are essentially flat for county government.

I should say county government and a portion of these are shared with the schools where they're not designated for particular county services.

So half of this comes from the personal property tax relief that I mentioned before.

The next largest category is reimbursements for expenses, both administration and direct service in the Department of Social Services.

We also received designated support for public safety departments, constitutional officers and the registrar.

And then we also received some taxes that are collected from the state and remitted back to localities for telecommunications and vehicle rental tax.

So the state budget is not done, and it's very rarely done, it seems, when the county's budget is adopted.

But looking at the draft budgets in the House and the Senate, we're not anticipating a major shift in our state revenues at this time.

Some of the big items they are consistent in, such as public safety support is level funded in both of those.

So the personal property tax relief would be a major statewide issue if that changed.

It's actually been the same amount for almost 20 years now.

and just some of those other items.

There will probably be some variants as there typically is, but we're not seeing a major change based on what we know as of today.

Move to federal revenues.

This is another one we're watching closely.

In the general fund, this is about $10 million, and 99% of that is funding that's in the Department of Social Services.

Again, reimbursing the cost of administration and also benefits that are going through the county, the department, and that's down.

These are actually going up 9%.

This is not really a change in the reimbursement methodology.

If we were to go back last year, I would say that we over-budgeted what we received from the state and under-budgeted what we received from the federal government.

So we're seeing a little bit of leveling out of that this year, because again, you can see the state government, the state money in total is flat.

and point two growth and we have a little bit more stronger growth in the federal.

So we're continuing to watch this very closely as there's questions about SNAP administration, which is supplemental nutritionist.

Thank you.

And we're watching that very closely and we'll continue to keep the board updated.

Beyond the general fund, just to take a highlight about where our federal revenues are and where the county's biggest vulnerabilities would be.

and special revenue funds for county government which again those funds from the state and federal government which have a lot more guardrails around them.

The Housing Choice Voucher Program is 89% of that amount which provides a lot of really critical assistance to folks in need in our community.

The Public Schools Operating Fund, we'll hear from the schools next week.

They have Medicaid reimbursements for special education programs.

And then they have a portion of a little over 12 million dollars in their special revenue funds for the programs that are listed.

And they can best speak to any risk areas in there when they're available to speak next week.

So finally, we're going to talk about general fund, fund balance.

So this is a visualization that is new this year.

Really, how do we clarify what makes up the county's general fund, fund balance?

First, to define what that is, there is $98.3 million, if you were to look at our budget or if you look at the end of fiscal year 25 in our county's audit, of $98.3 million.

That is the result of really every year in the past, all county revenues received in the general fund minus all county expenditures made out of the general fund.

So I've color-coded this really to kind of put the size, where are the dollars, and what is the board's flexibility in those and the financial management policies.

So first on left in the red is the unassigned fund balance policy of 10%.

This is set by the board's financial management policies.

This is sometimes informally referred to as the hurricane fund.

It would be recommended to never touch this unless you absolutely had to for cash flow purposes.

So imagine there's a hurricane that washes out a major highway, breaks a dam.

Imagine there's a wildfire that burns down a couple shopping centers.

Things are very, fortunately, low probability that they do happen around the United States.

That's why you have that reserve, those really dire emergency situations for cash flow.

The second is in orange because again having two reds the visibility was not great but those are things the board has already obligated in fiscal year 26 and so the board of supervisors will reappropriate funds from one year to the next to carry it forward.

The board of supervisors and their financial management policies a portion of that is

the 10% and the 2% grow year to year a portion of that is needed to be reserved and so that is I guess could theoretically be undone if the board were to revisit decision that made this year but really that's kind of the decision the board has already made in this sort of hands-on in this process next we have in yellow the 2% stabilization reserve under the board's financial management policies that's in yellow because it can be used but it needs to be used with some discernment and I'll talk more about what that is in a moment

Then we have in green, there's $10.7 million above the policy requirements of the Board of Supervisors.

So we talk about one-time money into the Affordable Housing Investment Fund, one-time money into Climate Action, the Economic Development Fund, and some other one-time costs.

That $10.7 million is the source for all of that.

There really is no restriction on that as long as the Board is using that for a one-time expense.

Some of that is also going into the CIP as well.

And finally, there is a school policy reserve of $4.2 million.

The school board is allowed to retain up to 2%, and that lives in a sub-fund of the general fund.

And that is available for one-time expenses.

The school boards will request that if they would like to address that for items in their budget or do something different.

I just want to say I love that slide.

That's my favorite way this has been presented since I've been on the board.

I can't guarantee we're going to turn all our nuts into those charts, but we'll see.

I'm saying that for the team in the back who makes all these slides.

All right, so the financial management policies.

This is the words right out of the board's policies.

I'm going to highlight the most important things.

This is using the budget stabilization reserve is appropriate in a difficult budget year.

Staff would advocate that we are in one because without use of this budget stabilization reserve, without an increase in any tax rate, there would be a notable reduction in services.

and that's where that cost to maintain the quality of services.

That is really what we're speaking to there.

It's also appropriate because we do have a forecast right now with the changing economic tax base where there is reason to assume that our revenues will grow differently.

If that was not on the horizon, staff would not be recommending using this budget stabilization reserve.

This is to find a way to bridge from where we are right now to the out years of the five-year plan without a major impact or disruption to services.

And finally, the clarification that if this balance is to be reused or used, it needs to be replenished as quickly as possible.

So the plan here, and also there's risk in using this, is the yellow light.

So I'm going to lay out how we were mitigating risk to give board the confidence in staff's approach.

is that first a portion of the reserve would be used and would be done over multiple years.

So the plan would be first in fiscal year 27.

Based on the fiscal year 27 recommended budget, the total amount of that reserve would be $12 million based on the 27 revenues.

$3 million, one quarter of that or 0.5 of the two would be recommended to be used in fiscal year 27.

An additional quarter, identical amount of $3 million would be planned to be used in fiscal year 28.

That remaining 1% would be recommended to be untouched because should there be a shock from the federal government, an unexpected turn in the economy and other things, that's still a resource that's available to the board to help navigate all this uncertainty.

Then when we get to fiscal year 29, the idea is we would be no longer using that budget stabilization reserve.

We would be back to full funding of ongoing revenues for ongoing expenses.

So second is staff is signaling the intention that that balance would be refilled as quickly as it could be.

And so right now as we think back on this slide of the $10.7 million, in the future before that $10.7 million could be applied to the CIP or other strategic priorities, you would first need to refill the budget stabilization reserve.

Then third, this is just a plan and the exercise of planning is important as the plan itself.

So as we would if the board approves this plan, we'll come back with a five-year plan, we'll come back every annual budget process and figure how do we need to adapt this with additional new information.

I did want to ask

on page slide 23, the MicroCat charge for services.

I know you'll be looking into that, but are we going to be comparing what other counties do, other places do regarding MicroCat, and do we have any idea how much we might be charging, because we've gone two years without charging.

It's been a big success.

Ryan Davidson, Deputy Chief of Budget.

Yes, we've been working with Bea, who is our micro-cat provider, and they have been doing benchmarking of the other localities across the United States that have a similar micro-cat and micro-transit product.

And so we're kind of benchmarking our

initial fee structure off of that, trying to keep it as simple as possible.

We'll go into some more detail on Wednesday.

But we're really looking at kind of an initial $2 charge with some potential discounts for certain things, such as multi-riders and other potential concessions that we could make.

We haven't fully, we're still doing research on this.

We have the general structure in place.

But we also wanted to be able to have a conversation with the board before we came out with a full structure of what that may look like.

And so we'll have a little bit deeper dive in.

We will have representatives from our microcab vendor here and from Charlottesville Area Transit who runs the service for us here on Wednesday.

And when does our funding run out for that?

Do we know?

So we are currently now fully paying for this with the county's dollars.

We have now used up all of the grant funds.

So all MicroCat services are now being 100% funded by the county, which has now allowed us to have greater flexibility in these services.

And one of the things we were not able to do while we were still drawing down grant funds was charge for the service, because under our grant application,

We had told them that this was going to be a fare-free service while we were still receiving those grant funds.

We are seeing...

We'll get into this a little bit more when we talk about the migrant head, but we've hit a plateau.

We see a lot of more demand and there's that level of the demand we can meet versus how much unmet demand is there versus the calls because we only have so many vehicle hours that they can put on the road with this service.

Okay.

And one other question.

I understand state revenues, we're getting some, we know some monies we'll be getting, but then we don't know the final bill until after we finish our budget.

Is that correct?

And, I mean, historically, based on what I know is on March 9th, we're not expecting a major change.

It's always possible something could.

That's also one of the reasons the board has reserves.

Supervisor Missel?

Thanks, on the Supervisor Pruitt's favorite slide, I have some questions on the red, yellow, and green, just real quickly.

One is, the 10% unassigned fund balance, how often is that modified?

So that policy has been the same.

I've been with the county almost 20 years, and I can remember at one point it was 8%.

It went to 10, but that was probably more than 15 years ago, but I can confirm that.

Okay.

I'm just curious how closely it's linked to increasing costs.

I think it was about two years ago we had our financial advisor prepare a summary that we can share that with the board.

Good to know.

And then related to the yellow and the green, I just didn't follow when you said you would use, I think what I heard is to

Add back to the Budget Stabilization Policy Reserve.

Correct, if it's there.

A way to think about it is pretend we used Budget Stabilization Reserve last year.

In the 27 recommended budget, we would need to reduce the one-time money from some source out there.

Sure.

So this was created sometime during the 2010s where the schools are not allowed themselves to carry a fund balance.

So what the board said is that we will allow you to all carry a fund balance and up to 2% of your budget can be retained in that amount.

And if that amount is above 2%, it will be sent to the school's CIP unless the school's request otherwise.

And what you'll see in the school's budget, I think it's a little under a million dollars right now in next year's budget.

We'll take that and use that for furniture replacement in schools or the desk, cafeteria tables, that sorts of things.

It would be up to the board of supervisors.

I should say the Board of Supervisors has full control.

That's all I have.

Thank you very much.

The red in the screen is what I, in my mind, call the Louisa earthquake plan because $40 million electric school got demolished in the 1980s.

And that's the sort of thing that I think has to be the level of chaos that that's used for.

In going forward,

I'm sure that you all have gone through a lot of worry about the chaos coming forward from state and federal.

I guess I would seek some reassurance at some point that we're saving enough because of what's going to happen.

I don't want the whole map.

some other day, but if there's a little map that you can share that will help us understand that we are well protected based on what we look at on the news every day, that would be wonderful.

and reliving the 2010 to 2014 when the school reserve was established.

During the recession they had nine million dollars that was not shared and we could have built, budgeted that for 90 million dollars of borrowing to build things.

Supervisor Pruitt.

I'm not sure I have any questions.

I'll just say, I know Seth has heard me say this.

I think most of the board has heard me say this.

I have a strong inclination to spend rather than save.

I think if we're going to ask for the public's money, we need to have something we're using.

And there's always urgent needs.

And so I've been consistent.

opponent of the yellow, the budget stabilization reserves.

Specifically, it's at 2% rather than 1%.

But I'm really delighted to see us using it.

This is, I think, the first time we've used it.

I know this is coming up, right?

And so I will just say that.

If I may add a comment to Supervisor Mallek on some of that reassurance.

Coming out of the pandemic, we realized we really did need to save more and we did move from 1%, say the board moved from 1% to 2% in 2022.

Supervisor Missel, you had another question?

Yeah, I just have one bounce back.

So the $54.9 million is sitting somewhere in the account?

That's correct.

We have a team who is managing our investments and our debt.

and the Virginia Code has pretty stringent requirements on how that can be done.

And the Board in its financial policies really prioritizes first, the security of that investment, the second, the liquidity of that, and then only third, after those first two are met, the rate of return that we would get.

And the return on that doesn't go back into adding to the investment fund balance.

Yeah, it appears in the general fund, but it's really just for reporting.

It's never been taken out of that and used for any other purpose other than public schools or to the public school.

Sorry, their operations at the request or the CIP.

And again, there's a process where if they were ever to use that, they request the board, the board appropriates that.

Thank you.

So, a quick follow up on the use of the yellow.

I have it printed in my brain two finance directors ago.

constituent, 95 years old, but some White Hall brother lived.

He called me to his kitchen after I was elected and gave me the riot act about never ever ever get in a situation again in Albemarle County where you have to borrow money to meet payroll because of the disaster that that causes and the chaos and the extra expenses.

So that's part of my savings fleet going forward because I think it's really important.

And I'll stop there.

I've got a couple.

I realize I didn't do my email set of questions.

So page 89, and this can be followed up, but under public service tax, which is the real estate and tangible personal property owned by railroads, utilities, et cetera.

It looks like I understand the explanation there, but it seems to be on the tangible personal property side.

I'm looking for the reminder of how that real estate is assessed, just like we assess residential and commercial can be assessed differently.

Does that make sense?

We can take that as a follow-up.

In terms of determining the value, the property value.

Like, this is a Peter Lynch question.

They might say we do it like homes, do we do it like commercial?

I guess I've just never thought to ask that question before.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wasn't expecting that one today.

A lot of these are great for follow-up.

93, page 93, 94.

And this just surfaced in Supervisor Missel's question, because there's your revenue for the use of money and property that you guys were just talking about, unless I'm thinking of a different category.

My question here was, in follow-up, if I could see the breakout, the percentage

You know, what's the percentage of use of money?

What's the percentage of property?

Just to clarify, for that category like between rent and interest and the other subsets?

Yes.

Okay, yes.

I think somewhere in a recent consent agenda item I remember seeing the use of money

The quarterly financial reports do include an investment report as part of that.

But we can give, I think your question's a little different in terms of what are the types of uses of interest, property, and the other revenues.

That's just a breakout.

When I saw the numbers, I was like, oh, where are we at?

I'm remembering like a ballpark 3 million or 4 million.

That might have been the added when we changed how we were investing some money or we started using an additional tool at some point.

So I'm just looking for more commentary on that.

and then page 96 which is payment and honestly I've never really dug in to understand this more because the state revenues are just there's not a whole lot but that payment in lieu of taxes when it says services charge service charges incurred and it's not if they're small amounts I mean and I don't want to get into the bigger

political conversation of that that sometimes the city likes to get into with the university.

But I am trying to understand, when we say service charges incurred, I want a little more color commentary on that as well.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

And then

I'm good, thank you.

All right, so I know Supervisor Missel, as we get into some of these, sometimes your questions can generate off of other people's questions.

So just give me the heads up if you have a follow up.

If everybody's wanting to follow up, then I'll just swing back through for organization.

I just thank you.

I just have one quick question back.

And I think I heard you say that the money that is, let's say it's $55 million that's invested,

The income off that investment annually goes towards operating budgets in some other areas.

I think I heard you say that.

Yes, correct.

No, we would allocate the income from where it's sourced to whatever balance in the CIP would get its interest.

Okay.

I would say what we've seen, not in terms of I'll say an endowment, but knowing that interest can be volatile and especially where we've been in recent years.

We have really taken an approach to treat sometimes interest as one-time income.

And so a good example is in this year where I didn't discuss the revenues, but right now in fiscal year 26,

based on the stronger than reassessment, the stronger personal property values.

And because the Federal Reserve has decreased its rates later than was anticipated in the budget, we are having more interest in it coming.

Got it.

OK. Got it.

There's a term called arbitrage which is basically you can't borrow to make money and so there's lots of rules and restrictions and actually some exemptions where you can use that is that really comes to compliance that we have as part of what our investments team does and

to make sure that we are not, we're following IRS guidelines.

I'll say that's what we're doing.

I'm going to walk you through the expenditures that are in the general fund for the recommended budget this year.

For the rest of today's work session and our work session on Wednesday, we'll be covering the chapters that are in the expenditure section of the budget.

And of course, those are balanced to the revenues that Andy just covered in the previous chapter.

So as you can see on this donut chart, the largest expenditure in our general fund is the transfer to the school's operating budget.

The next largest after that is for public safety and followed by the transfer to the capital and debt program.

We're going to go chapter by chapter through the recommended budget document.

Tonight, I'm first going to start with an overview of compensation very quickly, and then hand things over to our director of human resources, Ms. Jessica Rice, to talk you through the details behind that more.

And then we'll take a break if the board desires.

After the break, we're going to come back and cover the public safety chapter and the judicial chapter.

And you'll hear from the chiefs, as Andy indicated earlier, about what's going on in public safety, as well as our chief operating officer, who's going to give you an update on

So first, going back to what Andy said previously, we used the strategic plan as a guide when

working on and recommending the budget to the board for consideration.

As you know, there are many more things and priorities in the strategic plan than we have money for.

And so the goal here is really to balance among the different priorities and make progress in all six goal areas in any given budget year.

You'll see in the middle of the workforce and customer service goal is in the middle.

And we're going to cover that first tonight with an overview of the recommendations for compensation that are in the budget.

It's really important that we support our workforce over time and the board has been very supportive of that effort in recent years and so that's why we're starting off there tonight since it affects many of the chapters in the budget and then we'll take a deeper dive as the work sessions continue.

So in the budget, in the recommended budget, we have $2.9 million that's going to provide a market-based compensation

Market-based compensation adjustment for classified staff.

Ms. Rice is going to go into more details about that, so I won't get too in the weeds there, but essentially every two years we review certain positions within the classified staff of the county.

That plus the cost of living increase that we're suggesting in the recommended budget of 2% plus a one-time bonus are the dollar amounts that make up that $2.9 million.

and that's for classified staff only.

We'll also get into more details tonight about the recommendations for our public safety staff.

Within this recommended budget we also have a total training budget of 1.4 million dollars that's flat from FY26 and that supports all training and development efforts, helps with employee retention and recruitment and again we're maintaining what we're doing in FY26 in that proposal.

And then finally, there's an increase of 8% to the employee self-funded healthcare fund.

I believe Mr. Gallaway asked in a prior session how much does that 8% amount to.

It amounts to a change of 2.1%.

We just received a rate update and the rate actually decreased by 1.33 percentage points, which got us a savings of $1 million and that's incorporated into this budget as well.

So now I'll turn things over to Ms. Rice to walk you through the compensation recommendations.

Great.

Thank you, Caitlin.

Jessica Rice, the Director of Human Resources.

I wanted to start tonight with sort of a review of the board's adopted pay philosophy.

So there are three of you on the board right now that were not here in 2022 when we actually went through a comp and class study and adopted our current pay philosophy.

So in 2022, we hired a consultant to come in and do a full review of our pay practices, where we sat in the market, our pay scales, were we competitive, were we not.

And the results of that actually ended up being a recommendation of two different things.

The first one was restructuring our pay scales themselves.

We were way off base with the market and as a result we had a vacancy rate of almost 20% at that time.

It was very, very significant.

The second recommendation from that consultant was to adopt

a market that we compare ourselves to and we're looking at how they're paying and you can see them up on the screen.

There are 23 different, I want to call them agencies because what you'll see is our public school system is up there as is the University of Virginia.

And this grouping of localities were selected and recommended because of a few different factors.

First, their proximity to us.

Secondly, it's about the services they present they provide and their size and cost of living and all of that stuff was factored in there.

And so since 2022, everything that we have done related to compensation was through the lens of looking at where do we sit with this group here.

So back then, the board took an action to approve this market.

And then the second item that the board took an action to approve was where do we want to be in relation to the agencies on here?

Do we want to pay a lot more than them?

Do we want to pay average of them?

Do you want to be just a little bit under?

And so what the board approved was that we would be the average market average for these localities.

And the reason for that, there was two reasons.

The first one was that it was just offset against some of those other folks on there that maybe have a higher cost of living.

Northern Virginia is pretty heavy on that list.

And then also we had affordability considerations as well.

On the bottom of the slide you can see some data and this is from FY23, 24 and 25 and this is the impact or the results of adopting that philosophy over the past three years.

Like I said, we started with a vacancy rate of about 20%

At the end of FY22 and then by the end of FY23, our vacancy rate was down to 8.1%.

The goal is to be between eight, actually the goal on the vacancy rate is to be between three and five percent.

and then the turnover rate goal is to be between 8 and 12 percent.

And so as you can see over the course of the three years there, we've made significant progress in where we are in retaining our staff and actually being able to recruit for key positions that are required in the county.

Go ahead, Kaitlin.

Okay.

These numbers on the screen are actually what is proposed in your budget.

I believe this is one of the budget documents in the book.

And so what I wanted to ground everyone in, so for the board, for our folks in the room, and for the public that are listening, is that we actually have two different pay plans.

We have a classified pay plan, and we also have a public safety pay plan.

It is really important to recognize that they are different.

They're structured different.

They are maintained different.

they're benchmarked a little bit differently and overall they're treated differently for various reasons and I'll walk through what that is here in a second.

The classified pay plan essentially is a scale that consists of pay grades with a minimum and a maximum in them.

And then our staff are placed on that scale based on what current market data says.

As Caitlin alluded to earlier, we've maintained benchmarking with this market-based philosophy so that at least half of our positions are benchmarked every year.

and so what's recommended in the budget, the first bullet on there is the 0.6 million and that is for that market benchmarking that we do every year.

So this was year two.

This is the second year of the actual benchmarking.

We completed the first half last year and we adjusted pay for those folks that needed it last year after the benchmarking and this year this is the second half of the group.

that was benchmarked and so we went in and put in that recommended movement on that classified pay plan.

The second bullet under classified reflects a cost of living adjustment.

And so what happens with the cost of living adjustment is that the entire scale moves.

And it is based on the economy and the economics and the competition in our area.

So it's not individual positions.

It's the whole scale moving based on exactly what it sounds like, the cost of living.

and then the third bullet on the classified pay plan is for a bonus for a one-time bonus so it would be a one-time payment not ongoing costs and this is in response to the state has it in their recommended budget right now the same thing it's a one-time bonus and as a result almost all of the other localities on our competitive market

I have proposed the same thing in their budget proposal and so this is in response to that.

Now, to switch over to public safety, again, this is a different pay plan.

It's completely separate from the classified pay plan.

In public safety, we have three different scales that we're maintaining because we have three different agencies that fall under the umbrella of the county, and that is our fire rescue department, our police department, and our sheriff's office.

And so on the first bullet up there you can see that is the recommended budget amount to move the police department pay scale as a result of benchmarking that we do for public safety every year.

It is a little bit different because they have a step scale very similar to what teachers see and other paramilitary organizations see.

And so these numbers reflect moving the entire scale rather than just moving one position.

What that equates to is an 11% increase in the pay scale.

I think that was a question that came out before.

And again, that's a result of our benchmarking that we have completed during the fall.

For fire rescue, that second bullet is $1 million in there, and that is to move the fire rescue pay scale to be comparable to market, and that is a 5% increase for them.

They have different operations, they are different departments, different functions, and honestly their markets are different and are calling for different actions right now.

And then finally, the third bullet on this slide, the 0.7 million, that is for a programmed 2% step increase by virtue of them being on a public safety pay scale.

It is a step scale in which when personnel are qualified, they move one step up in the scale.

It reflects a full 12 months of

Gains skill and experience and also based on proper performance as well.

That $0.7 million includes for the step movement for fire rescue for ACPD and the Sheriff's Office.

OK, so this is just to kind of let you know what we're seeing in the market right now.

So for FY26 that we're in to finish out the fiscal year and what we can expect in FY27, I will say our current data in that box on the right-hand side, our vacancy rate, which is as of March 6th, this past Friday, is 4.9%.

And our turnover rate is 8%.

And so what you can see in that box, if you were to compare it to the FY25 closeout numbers, is that our vacancy rate has increased.

and our turnover rate has decreased and you're probably wondering how does this happen, right?

Well, we did have some public safety new positions at the beginning of the fiscal year that y'all granted for the county and we have not been able to fill those yet.

We are having some challenges in particular in police.

in being able to recruit our police officers.

And some of that is resulting from the competitive market.

We do have a handful of folks that have collective bargaining right now, which is playing a factor.

And I believe our police chief may be addressing this a little bit.

I don't want to steal his thunder.

So that's partly why we're seeing less turnover, but our vacancy rate is a little bit higher.

One of the things that you'll see in the market itself is our classified pay plan, like our positions, are starting to stabilize.

We're not seeing these wild salary swings that we were seeing for the past three years and the proposed budgets that have been put forward from our competitive market

all include between two to four percent of a cost of living adjustment and as I stated earlier they also are including a one-time bonus to reflect sort of what the state has put forward already.

On the public safety side, fire rescue is thankfully a lot less volatile than it has been in previous years.

I know that we've been really successful in our recruiting efforts, and the key to that is to ensure that we remain competitive with all of those localities.

and then on the law enforcement side it is becoming more volatile and this is where we're putting a lot of intentional effort and focus because we are having some difficulty recruiting and their pay is still fluctuating.

There's the impact coming from collective bargaining and also we have sort of a new competitor around us that we did not have before and that's the federal agencies.

We've lost a couple

We are still losing a couple to the state and we're doing our due diligence to hedge that off as best that we can.

Great, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, Supervisor Missel.

Is this questions for both of you?

Great.

Yes.

Okay, so one is, I'm just curious, the staff training and development, that $1.4 million allocation, is that fully utilized on a given year?

Is there a remainder?

That's a great question.

I would need to go back in time.

I know there's been a emphasis with forest treatment planning.

OK, great.

Thanks.

And then in terms of total compensation, so other than just the percentage increases in pay,

Yeah, so one of the things, that's partly why they have that number up there for training.

That is one of the things that we consistently get feedback on as people want to feel that they're being invested in, that we're training them, that they have a career here and can stay here.

We are also revamping our reward and recognition program as we speak.

The vacancy rates, is that normalized for any reductions or increases in FTEs?

Oh no, vacancy rate is actually the number of employees, the number of vacancies that you have, and it's divided by the board's approved number of FTEs.

And then the last question, so cost of living was 2.8% this year.

Part of that was the 2% was to help with the budget, but also to provide additional numbers.

We don't.

While it is a factor, we're mostly looking at what other localities are doing and really comparing ourselves to where they sit.

Because even though the cost of living may have gone up 2.8%,

That's a great question.

So classified employees, are there any permanent employee that is not in the public safety pay plan?

They are benchmarked and they're slotted into our pay scales.

They fall under our county policies.

So that's what a classified tech means.

I can answer part of that and the other one we're going to have to get back to you.

So our total classified employees are about 850 something.

Non classified, those would be your temps and seasonal workers and interns and things like that.

Ideally, we try to include them in cost of living adjustments, but it's policy driven.

Thank you very much.

Let's see, on slide 31, I remember a number of years ago,

When applicants come in with extra skills, multilingual or something like that, that affects where they enter the pay scale and we're able to give them due credit right at the very beginning.

Second, for turnover,

Does turnover include retirements?

Or is it just people who leave or something?

Yep, so turnover includes everything.

It would include retirement if we have an employee that passes away, resignations, terminations.

It includes everything.

And so there was, I think between FY24 and 25, there was a little bit of a spike and that was a year where we happened to have more retirements.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Supervisor Pruitt?

No, there aren't.

The board implemented the first part of it the year that we got the results.

I believe that was in 23, May of 2023.

And then the board implemented the, approved to implement the rest of it

that same calendar year right in December as it was turning 2024.

And again, it was really to help us be able to fill the vacancies that we had.

At the time, you know, I shared the 20% vacancy rate.

And I think to kind of put that more in context, you know, we're a staff of 850 or whatever that is.

We had about 130 vacancies.

A lot of them being public safety as well.

From the new public safety study that we just received at the end of last year, are there unemployment developments that tend to salary additionally?

Yes, so the comp and class study that was a couple years ago and that was fully implemented within a year to a year and a half and I think Christy is going to go over the public safety staffing studies in a little bit.

I do not believe any of the recommendations talk about compensation.

This is very basic, and I realize it makes sense.

But I just want to make sure I'm stating something that is correct, because I just haven't thought about it until a stray comment made me think of it.

We fully control through our HR and our pay scales all constitutional offices.

Is that accurate?

As in, we are the people who decides what a sheriff's deputy makes.

Yeah, so we do if they have an agreement with the county to provide that service.

I think in my mind I realize I haven't thought about it that deeply.

I do think it's just worth kind of putting a pin in.

This is certainly something I talk about in a lot of public messaging.

The federal impact has come up twice now for us.

How it has affected our vacancy rates due to immigration enforcement.

Sniping our qualified personnel and how it's affected the administration of certain programs and services, namely SNAP, and then we have a whole new FTE whose whole job is administering, maybe a partial FTE, whose whole job is administering new compliance regulations that make it more onerous to administer.

And we are a very wealthy place that is also deeply desirable for people to live here.

If Albemarle County is facing these kinds of obstacles, if we are struggling to retain police talent and afford retaining police talent, this might be paying quite well in being a highly desirable place to live.

If we are having to have new personnel to administer these public services,

I worry about thinking what are other regional peers who do not have these benefits we do, how they are struggling with these kinds of problems.

The town of Scottsville bought quite a long time to hire a new deputy, because they are not able to offer the same kinds of competitive pay that we are.

And knowing that that deputy could weave tomorrow to make it twice as much, more than twice as much.

in immigration enforcement with the same level of experience makes it really freaking hard to maintain a debt fee.

That was my stop.

Sorry.

We were kind of one of the first out of the gate for the compensation study.

Other counties have since followed suit, as have a lot of our partner agencies.

So I think it's time to ask, I know what the counties have done, the other counties have done, at least some reported from the EDC.

EDC's a good example of this.

But since all of those agencies have now done their compensation studies, working on their individual budgets, I know they've opted to compensation to get caught up to the market as well.

It's fine because we share those expenses, but that's been an increase for us too.

I don't know if there's a way to get at that and tease that number out to understand what it has done to us.

More so as probably a high-five that, oh, we spent too much money on this.

Because we have found that some of those agencies, like the EDs, were woefully underpaid.

relative to their peers around the state.

But I think it would be good to understand in our own budget what that's meant to us.

The PDC, we share it with five other jurisdictions, but per capita, we're the largest contributor to that.

So in their budget requests, how those agencies have managed it ultimately hits our bottom line.

Just curious about that.

Have you well done on the vacancy rate?

It's time to kind of champion it because it's there.

You answered that question, so I'll just leave that as a comment.

So this is proposed in the state budget.

And what it is is that it's any position that is funded by the state.

So what happens is our partner agencies and the schools and any of the state agencies will be receiving this 2% increase.

And then if the county wants to participate,

The state would contribute 2% for the positions that they support us in in their payment and then the county would be responsible for sort of making a department whole.

I'm going to give you an example.

Yes and no, right?

I'll give you an example.

So our state may fund 75% of one of our offices here and they would give the 2% of the pay increase to the county to cover the increase for the 75% and then the county would be on the hook to either

come up with the money to give the other 25% the pay increase, or only give it to the 75%, which creates its own problems, I'm sure you can imagine.

So the intent behind it, though, was really to be, because a lot of our competitive market

following what the state is doing for some of that reason exactly is to mirror it and take away the ambiguity, the inequity, and all of the other things that go on with it.

Thank you.

Just a question back on the bonus.

So on the Workforce Stabilization of Personnel budgeting slide, which is about $33, I think.

Oh yeah.

So that is everyone that is in our classified pay plan.

So it's not public safety, but it is everyone in our classified pay plan.

And what's happening there too is that bonus would be there for the classified pay plan and then the step increase down below is for the public safety folks.

So they sort of mirror each other.

But I believe that the answer is all staff.

It's all staff.

Great.

Thank you.

Yes, I just wanted to mention that actually it was mentioned by Supervisor Duncan that I think we should be very proud of the fact

that our police officers are not all rushing to join ICE.

They feel very comfortable here, very well respected here, in spite of the fact that they have a $50,000 bonus for ICE.

So I'm very proud of the fact that we do a good job of retention for our police officers.

Anything else?

All right.

Yeah, we'll take a quick five minute break.

Do I have a break?

Do I have a break?

Do I have a break?

Just be mindful.

Thank you.

So we're going to start going through the chapters in the expenditure section of the book tonight.

The first one that we're going to cover is public safety.

So I want to take a minute and explain the two donut charts that you see here for the benefit of the board and the public, because we're going to use these donut charts in the same approach for all the chapters in the budget.

So on the left, what you're seeing is a gray and blue chart that shows the entire expenditures in the general fund.

And you see a blue carve out for public safety, which represents 17%.

of that general fund expenditure budget.

And then on the right in the multicolored donut chart, you see what's contained within that 17% of the general fund for public safety.

And so as you see on this slide, 41% of that donut is represented by the police department, 42% is represented by fire rescue, and the remaining

The remaining percentage, 17%, is our partner agencies within the public safety chapter of the budget.

So you may remember when Mr. Richardson gave his presentation to you a few weeks ago, there was a really busy slide with a lot of different partner agencies named.

Some of those partner agencies were our public safety partner agencies.

They represent about 17% of the public safety budget overall.

Tonight, you're going to have three different

Four different speakers?

Four different speakers in this section of the agenda.

So I'm going to walk you through at a high level the overview for the departments and the public safety partner agencies.

And then interspersed with that, we're going to hear from our chief operating officer, Ms. Christy Shifflett.

She's going to update you on the public safety staffing studies implementation.

And then you'll have an opportunity to hear from both the chief of police and the chief of fire rescue about some of the data that are driving the recommendations in this budget for their departments.

Good evening.

So I wanted to connect us real quickly back to the compensation discussion that we just had and follow up with kind of a comment about this, the Board of Supervisors approved the implementation of that comp and class study.

over nine months.

And so that did cross over two different fiscal years.

But what I'm going to go into in a minute about the studies is really not about compensation because we had just done tremendous work on that.

And so the study reviewed industry standards and best practices and made recommendations for infrastructure deployment and staffing that will address the changing risk profile of the county

as it continues to grow and change year to year.

The company that we hired to do the study was named Emergency Services Consulting International and we like to call them ESCI.

So if you hear that referred to today, that is what we're speaking of.

We actually had two separate studies that the board heard about in October of 2025.

They focused primarily on fire and police, but they had two separate teams.

with separate different groups of expertise that met with our police and fire departments.

And so we brought the study recommendations to the board in the fall of 2025.

And this also gave a lot of expertise to benchmarking.

I can't today even name all of the benchmarking within the study because I think it covered about two to three pages.

and each of the studies.

But we looked at a lot of federal and state benchmarking as well as different localities in our area and definitely localities that provide the same level of service as Albemarle County needs to do.

and so they compared us to those jurisdictions in Virginia.

The consultants perform data analysis by using data from our Emergency Communications Center and the different data points from our departments as well and all of the information that they track.

The board of supervisors and the public received these studies in October of 2025.

We reviewed the recommendations with you and we asked the board at the time to give us a minute to digest and review those studies.

They're very expansive and long and also to create an implementation plan.

So today that's what I want to start sharing with you all is what we have done since those studies have been put in place.

So we're going to highlight really the work that's been done to date and what has been prioritized for FY 27.

I've gathered the prioritized tiers here today that are listed across the board there on the slide.

And I want to talk to you about while the police and fire department had a little bit of variance on the tiers, we are focusing on these top four, especially in the current state that we're in in FY26 and 27.

So tier one, as you can see, the highest priority for both departments is to add and maintain staffing.

to respond to the growing demands.

The FY 27 budget includes small investments and additional staffing for the police department with three new officers and fire rescue is requesting a plan to pursue an additional FEMA funding for six firefighters.

The priority on compensation that you've already seen today is to focus us on retention, given our financial outlook.

We'll take time to fill the study's recommendation.

It has 39 police officers and 35 for fire rescue.

over this period of time in the studies.

So that is substantial and we recognize that.

And that is why we instead decided to focus in on, let's look at our compensation, let's make sure that we're staying competitive, and let's maintain the officers and the firefighters that we have.

And so for that core stability tier, we can't really talk about adding

20 to 30 more police and fire until we are able to fill the vacancies that we have.

And both of our chiefs of the departments are going to speak to this in a minute.

And then so you'll see we have small increases in staffing and then we have the market adjustments that we've already talked about today.

For Tier 2, we are focusing on leadership depth and so both departments talked about coverage and the supervision and leadership components of their departments.

Police has created coverage already for one shift since the study came out and we'll be able to do so in the future with all shifts as we have additional staffing.

We're also moving the Office of Emergency Management out of Fire Rescue as an independent office to support both

In tier three, we had a required focus work effort on how administration within the departments of fire and police

and within other functions in local government work together.

And so the studies, as you'll read them, talk about internal support.

And so we want those that are sworn, as we spoke about earlier, focusing on the services that sworn police and fire need to do.

And so we've been reviewing how we have dedicated resources on administration.

So what we've already put into place is a dedicated HR manager

and this is someone that lives within our HR department, but she only serves fire and police at this time and she is learning through the intricacies of their functions and making sure that they're getting the support that they need.

We have also hired an outside consultant to look at this workload analysis.

It takes a lot of effort to dig into the details and

and do some process improvement work.

And so we have done that by looking at specifically our HR, our IT and our finance functions that serve the police and fire department.

And so we're looking there at is there the right balance of what's within the department versus what's in the other internal services groups.

Is there ways that we can improve efficiencies?

And is there a way that we can shift work around in order to support them differently?

So again, this is within that lens of what can we control without adding anything else?

And so that's the work that performance and strategic planning often focuses on, is how can we be our best selves before we talk about new resources?

And so that's the work that we've done here today.

and then additionally we've looked at with both of the chiefs a real commitment to understanding our sworn versus civilian staffing in those departments and making sure that we're being efficient with those decisions as well and so we want to make sure as you can as you already know

Sworn positions require a lot of certifications, a lot of special training, and so we want to be thoughtful about who's doing what type of work.

And so that's the work that we've done as well.

And we have identified opportunities to target and remove some inefficiencies.

We've learned about ourselves a little bit.

We want to also make sure that we're being compliant and that we're moving risk and also removing increased stress for the staff.

So we'll complete these improvements by the end of this fiscal year in June.

And then the last tier that we have there, it calls out that many of the recommendations take time and long range planning.

So the intent from the consultants was not anything that would be done overnight.

It is going to take us a significant commitment to move some of these things forward.

in both departments as our community grows and changes.

But in our five year planning process in November, staff built the cost of those additional personnel that I mentioned, the 39 and the 35, into our five year plan.

And so for this board to understand, those positions are baked in, but they are phased in as an increase in staffing levels to address these operational needs.

The additional positions are one of the factors driving that gap, that 3% gap that you'll see in years three, four, and five of the five-year plan.

So that is really all that I wanted to share about the ESCI study.

It is something that will be our roadmap for many years as we work with the different departments.

But they're going to add a lot more complexity to this in their sections for today.

Supervisor Missel?

No, thank you Supervisor Duncan?

No Mallek?

For ACFR, does the cost in the pie chart include apparatus?

The apparatus needs capital Okay, thank you Supervisor Pruitt?

No.

No, I think the core stability is that those positions over a long range, I think it was seven years in our study, and then the leadership and training

is I think like the leadership I spoke of is something we could do pretty quickly and we can probably do it next year with additional staff but some of the training components to be able to do different things like multiple recruit schools for example is going to take a real intentionality and commitment that we it's probably going to be in three to four years

Yes.

So when the study came out and it had the 39 and 35 positions, which is significant change, what I was saying was that our budget team took those positions and built them into the five-year plan so that we could prepare, just like we do CIP.

We put them in the out years so that we have time to facilitate that.

Not sure you can answer this now.

I'm going to pose it here.

It may come up later.

We're adding three positions in the staffing study

We understand what the current level of service is that we're trying to meet or what we're dealing with, what the reality is.

Each position should do something to that reality.

And that's what I'm curious about.

Because as we move forward over, because it's not, I think we all recognize we're not going to fix this in one budget or two, but this is going to be a long-term budget piece, I get that.

But

when we dedicate a tax rate specifically for it and then we do something about it.

Last year we added positions, this year we're adding another.

Part of that story has to be, okay, we've added these positions that should equate

I mean it's so damn complex because I mean the calls what you're dealing with could change so your calls of service might not change just because you got it I get that but in theory the theoretical is if all things remained equal one position should be able to hit that metric

What I will share is 100% and our intention is that we are tracking that as a county for all of our studies, you know, that we have done where they suggest things and then we say what do we do with that.

So I'm going to give a high-level overview of the new resources for the police department and then I'm going to turn things over to Colonel Reeves to give you an update on operations and again that data that are kind of driving the recommendations in the budget and then we'll pause for questions for me or Colonel Reeves and then we'll move to fire rescue.

So as you know from the recommended budget, we have three new police officers recommended.

We are going to continue to implement the recommendations in the public safety staffing study that Ms. Shiflett spoke to.

And then we are also increasing their pay to the recommendations that Ms. Rice spoke to earlier.

A few things that are not on the slide that I want to call to your attention, and they're mentioned in the budget book.

There are a few other minor things driving an increase in the police department's budget this year.

One is an increase for the costs associated with health and medical, for required physicals for staff, as well as increased costs for mental health services for the police department.

In FY27, there's also a planned replacement of two K-9 units.

for police, and so this budget includes the cost associated with that and the related supplies.

And they also have a small increase in their operating budget for things such as bulletproof vests and tasers.

Thank you.

Next slide please.

So before I begin, I want to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Richardson and his staff at the County Executive's Office, as well as the team in Finance, HR, Christy and Jacob, who are here today, for really leaning in on this challenge that our police department, your police department, is facing right now.

So what this first slide shows you is the current state of the police department as of today.

That first number is the total authorized positions by the Board of Supervisors.

You have 171 sworn positions.

That does not factor in the civilian support staff.

This is purely for sworn officers and detectives who deploy out in the street.

Out of that 171, we currently have 149 of those positions filled.

Out of those 149 positions, 11 of those are either in police training academy, field training, or on light duty capacity.

So after you filter out those middle two numbers, right now we have 138 officers that are deployable 24-7 across three shifts.

So that is the current state.

Chair Galloway earlier on asked about, he referenced the ESCI report and when it was authored.

I would like to remind the board that the study was done last February.

So the data that they use, as Ms. Shifflett alluded to also, is actually a year old.

We were a different department back then.

We have a new deputy chief of police in place.

We also have additional bodies in place.

But unlike last year, moving into July 1, we were fully staffed.

And then after July 1, we started seeing some retirements.

We did lose a handful of officers to the federal government.

And we've seen officers going back to the retirement

This is a national trend of law enforcement professionals retiring at the earliest available opportunity.

Typically, that's at the age of 50 with 20, 25 years in.

And there's a variety of reasons for that.

There's different National Institute of Justice, as well as the Police Officers Association, International Chiefs of Police.

There's data out there about the complexities with our profession and why more and more people are not applying to be police officers anymore, quite frankly.

And we are not exempt from that as your police department.

We are seeing lower turnout for recruitment days.

We are seeing a shallow applicant pool.

And quite frankly, we're seeing people that should not be police officers applying for police officers.

We just had a test the other weekend where somebody had a felony sex conviction on their record that applied for law enforcement.

We had another applicant admit to doing acid the night before he came out for testing.

Yes.

So that is the caliber of talent that's out there.

Unlike other jurisdictions, one of the other challenges that our police department faces is in our selection and background process.

We are a risk-adverse police department, meaning we go above and beyond the minimal standard that the Department of Criminal Justice Services had for background investigations.

We do polygraph examinations, which eliminates a lot of people

to include certified officers that we would have missed and hired from other agencies for committing crimes had we not had that polygraph examination.

We have physical fitness standards.

We have an oral interview panel, things like that that separate us.

So yes, it does extend the hiring process, but it's also ensuring we're getting a higher caliber of officer coming through that door.

And in order for us to be competitive, and this is where HR's team has come in,

to look to see if we are being competitive against other agencies.

And right now, we are not competitive in our starting salary.

So all things equal, it's harder for people to get in the door.

We have higher standards to get in our police department.

But what this budget proposal does is help close that gap to make us more competitive in the marketplace.

So that is where we're at with our current staffing level.

And go on to the next slide, please.

So, Chair Galloway, again, to your point is what are you getting for these resources?

I remain fortunate and ever so grateful for the outstanding work that the men and women of the Albemarle County Police Department do for this community.

Even with our vacancies, last year they did a tremendous job of being proactive while they're out on the street.

and solving crimes, working with the Commonwealth's attorneys, prosecute crimes, and really taking a data-driven approach towards selective enforcement and throwing a broad net out there.

We're being laser-focused with data on where crimes are occurring, how we're deploying our resources, the limited number of resources we have to make the most impact on our community.

So what you're seeing is last year we had almost 93,000 calls for service, which is a

A dramatic increase from the year before, that's a 23% increase, and overall in one of Mr. Richardson's previous presentations he referenced the 19% increase over the past three years.

So what you're seeing is these calls for service continue to climb year to year over the three years.

And that's where the ESCI report comes into play, that as the population increases, as businesses increase, as we bring more people into our jurisdiction, the calls for both PD and Fire Rescue and other resources, quite frankly, through the county are going to continue to increase.

So it's going to put a strain on our resources.

I am so proud of the work that our officers do.

Those part one crimes that are down for the second straight year is tremendous.

Gun violence, ever since I was sworn in as Chief of Police four years ago, gun violence and gang violence has been the number one topic when I go out to community meetings in our community.

At 2023 to 2024, we saw a 9% decrease.

This past year, we saw a 30% decrease in gun violence because our officers are putting in the work.

They're getting guns off the street.

They're getting drugs off the street.

And they're putting those responsible for most violent crimes in our community away.

So again, this is the great work that our people are doing with the limited resources that we have.

Next slide, please.

Previously, I spoke about response times.

If those of you that were on the board last year recall that we use this as a measurement of how quickly our officers can respond to those priority one calls.

Priority one calls are those types of calls for service that have injury, bodily harm, and those life or death situations.

They range from a motor vehicle crash with entrapment or injury to a domestic physical assault, stabbing, homicide.

Those types of calls are your priority one calls for service.

In Albemarle County what you're seeing is within the urban ring or that center of the county, that's what typically draws in the majority of our cultural surface.

It pulls resources in from the the rural areas of the county.

Something that we've touched on before but did not go into depth today is as a county how are we breaking up our geography in our response.

We've talked about urban but potentially looking at urban, suburban, rural, and remote jurisdictions for

not just public safety but all across the county so that work has yet to be done but that's something that we're actually going to look at and that's going to change some of the response times in the rural parts of the county because as you see in the rural parts of the county even though we want to hit a 10-minute response time meaning one officer somebody picks up the phone says my house is getting broken into and it's two o'clock in the morning that that midnight officer can run lights and sirens safely all the way up to White Hall

in the middle of the night in under 10 minutes from wherever they are in the county and get there safely.

And I see Supervisor Malek's reaction, yes.

But again, that is the reality.

So when you start talking about these resources in the ESCI report is putting them in individual

Beach within these sectors of the county to enhance those response times and increase that service throughout the entire county.

So that way our west side officer isn't up on the north side by Fashion Square Mall and a priority one call comes in because most of your typical violent calls for service or priority one calls require at a minimum two officers to respond and not just one.

Next slide please.

And this is my last slide.

What is it that the Albemarle County Police Department is focusing on this year?

This year, priority one is our recruitment and retention.

We have to have people, we have to have men and women out on the street providing public safety, public service.

We cannot continue to operate at diminished capacity.

We have to do something different.

So we're assessing the way that we're recruiting.

and we're looking at ways again thanks to Mr. Richardson and his team and the HR looking ways how we're retaining employees.

Employee health and wellness that is subject that's near dear to my heart.

Over the past four years we've made tremendous investment and not just employee physical health by contracting out with Aquila to work with our officers.

It's a third-party company.

that's a fitness instructor and dietitian to work with our officers as well as the new clinics that have opened up to give our officers those resources.

We have two police psychiatrists on hand, completely anonymous, no charge to staff, combined with the work of the clinic too.

Yes, we have seen increases in usage, but that's a good thing.

That means that officers and staff are using these resources and it's all confidential and they feel safe that they have somebody to talk to.

And then finally, that training and emergency preparedness.

That is something that both Chief Puckin and I continue to focus in on with Rescue Task Force training that's currently on.

that cross training with staff plus working on a variety of threats and challenges that we are facing as a society in this day and age.

The world is unfortunately not getting any safer.

It's becoming more and more unpredictable.

It's incumbent upon us, the public safety to really scan that landscape and be as prepared as possible for whatever threats may emerge.

So with that, that is my last slide and I can take whatever questions that you all have of anything that I just covered.

Do you want us to pause here for police and then we'll do it?

I know it well.

So thank you very much for the presentation.

It's interesting to know why those extra officers are needed if we want to have response times increase and everything.

Supervisor Missel?

Thank you.

Thanks, Colonel Reeves.

It's really helpful.

I just have a few questions.

One is

If you're balancing increasing calls for service with challenging resources, are there other ways that you've looked at

I guess that's the word I'm looking for.

Sort of managing that resource shortage by adding to IT or adding to educational programs for the community.

I'm just curious, because you can't just add another X number of officers.

Yeah, those are some of the... One that comes to my head is the work that this workforce workload analysis work that Ms. Schiffert alluded to right now is we have officers that are sworn.

They're doing functions that non-sworn civilian people can do.

And through attrition, moving those FTE positions into sworn positions.

That's step one.

Step two is something that, again, I've advocated for the past four years is looking at the realm of technology and how we can use that as a force multiplier.

For example, drones.

Back in the day, many, many years ago, I was on the SWAT team, and things that we did, humans did, that were high risk, very dangerous, now we have robotics that we can utilize.

Speed cameras is the third example, and the school zones is the third example I have.

Instead of having an officer situated on Rockfish Gap and situated in front of the Lambs Lane campus running radar looking for speeders, we have technology that can do that.

That's really helpful.

So when you're considering resources and it's not just officers or personnel, you're thinking of those other aspects as well.

Do you feel comfortable with the amount of financial

Yes, sir, I do.

This current executive's office, and I'm not just saying that because they're here, I share it with my staff.

I do share it with my staff.

They have done an outstanding job supporting my mission to make sure that all officers are well trained, and I'll speak on that very, very briefly.

You know, as the chief,

Prior to me taking over as chief we strayed away from fundamental training for a long time.

Some of that was driven by the pandemic and some of that was driven just because of staffing and we use that as an excuse to not train and that's just quite frankly unacceptable.

So I want to make sure that our officers are trained on driver's training

those tactical skill sets they need to survive that keeps them alive but also constitutional law training, de-escalation training and so there's a balance to that and driver's training as well.

Driver's probably the most dangerous thing our officers can do out here on a daily basis.

Chief Reeves, just to provide a little more context, I think around the question which is optimizing existing resources too.

Chief, you talked about it on slide 41 in the calls for service, but could you just drill a little bit into that calls for service total

includes both community initiated and officer initiated.

And what I've seen in my couple of years of working and supporting PD is really an intensive focus around data, hot spot, kind of predictive analysis, and I think even

Even with some of the shortfalls in the current staffing, there has been improvements in the focus on where officers are proactively spending their time, the officer-initiated calls.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, what I pointed to that almost 93,000 calls for service,

that came in, 38% of those, approximately, were public generated.

I mean, somebody's picking up the phone and calling 911.

The rest of the calls for service are officer-initiated calls for service.

That's all our officers out here being proactive, doing extra patrols, making community contacts, doing traffic stops.

So that's what it is that the officers are doing in between calls for service.

They're out here doing whether it is a request for speeders that the community called in and complained that they're having speeding issues.

or suspicious circumstances that our officers are out here on midnight shift driving around.

They see a suspicious person.

That's officer initiated, making sure that that's going on, checking our businesses after hours, going to community events.

All those type of things are baked in to those proactive calls for service.

Officer initiated is 62% calls for service and 38% are public generated.

and the officer initiated, I'm proud to say, is up 32% from the previous year as well.

That's really interesting.

That's really helpful.

Thank you.

I have some sort of data questions.

I read through the staffing report and I didn't take notes so if all these answers are in there you can just tell me to go look at the staffing report again.

So you have the numbers for the priority one calls.

There are lower priority calls that fall outside the scope of priority one calls.

That could be like a disabled vehicle or a random miscellaneous pass call or a noise complaint.

This feels like, you know, roughly it's an average of like three a day, just priority one, plus you have all the other priorities.

It varies day to day.

It depends on overlap days.

There's a wide variety of factors if there's training going on.

So sometimes if you look at this map, like on daylight shift, and I'll look to the officers behind me to either nod their head or shake their head if their chief is getting it wrong.

But there can be a midnight shift sometimes.

Seven, eight officers plus the supervisors working the streets sometimes on an overlap day.

There's more.

There's 12.

work in the street and it varies shift by shift.

Daylight is anomaly shift because you have traffic unit, you have detectives that are primary out that can backfill.

Do you have

like an average time that's spent on the call.

It's going to vary.

If there's a specific call, I can follow up with you offline.

For example, if it's a mental health call for service, that could take anywhere from one hour, and depending if they have to transport the person to Williamsburg, it could be an entire shift.

If it's a DUI call, depending on how backed up the mattress officer in jail is, it could take a couple hours to include the paperwork.

If it's a shoplifter call, the officer, and they can release them on summons, they can be in and out.

Patrol, that entire S3 yellow area up top gets tied up on a shoplifting case.

He or she is going to be tied up for at least an hour.

They have to have to take them into custody maybe two hours and drive into the complex.

So that means you don't have an officer up in Sector 3.

Rush hour, there's a motor vehicle crash.

Now you're pulling the closest sector from their sector to go handle the crash in somebody else's sector.

So it has this cascading effect.

And then you get domestic out.

Every time I hear one of these presentations it brings back memories of

How important it is that you don't have the need for domestic in the middle of the night to send a signal officer?

Because that's been set up on Apple many years ago.

You can't get things like that out of your head.

I remember Steve Sellers talking about an applicant pool of a hundred and three wouldn't be able to go to stage two.

So Steve Sellers, for those of you unaware, he was a former chief of police back in 2011 to about 2015.

Different era, different applicant pool.

We get about 10 applicants and maybe one or two out of those 10 will pass the entire background.

This past testing day we had one.

I'm especially grateful of all the extra diligence you are doing because all those qualities that you are fostering are really important from the public's point of view.

Are you allowed to use drones for investigation yet?

and I'm also especially glad to hear about the fundamental training that you're doing because that's really what we're proud of.

I remember when we had the officer plus up a year ago, I had

said something to the effect of, I want to see your homework on this, and was really pleased with the response I got.

I'm similarly pleased with the self-justifying work that's going on here.

I do want to just clarify, with the previous one, it was very clear what the officers we were hiring were for and who they were.

Not necessarily straight out of the Academy, sir.

It's a combination of both.

All of those FTEs are dedicated purely for patrol.

That doesn't factor in, and Ms. Shifflett can correct me if I'm wrong, that doesn't factor in any detectives, any other specialty units.

That is strictly for response to patrol calls for service.

So the 39 bodies, the three this year, and the 39 were identified, are all going to the street on all three shifts.

to provide service to our community.

And that would include certified officers.

There's fluctuation and that's what's attractive about the Public Safety Pay Scale and that's the benefit of it is we can attract certified officers and we have attracted

Many, many certified officers that have passed our background to become, to backfill and that is ideal in this current state we are, but we want balance.

It depends on the time of year because they can look at the website, HR's website, and let's say I'm a certified officer from Texas.

I can look at Albemarle County, factor in my years of service, and get an estimate of where I'd come into the Public Safety Pay Scale.

If you're a brand new officer with no experience, you could factor in where you come in immediately.

They know where they're coming in at.

you mentioned force multipliers and you mentioned briefly photo suite and of course that's something this board has been pushing for for a while and part of my rationale for it is that I see it as a potential cost saver further down the line just on

force demands.

Not at this time.

There's nothing that's jumping out.

There are other technology components that we're working with, RIT, and doing internal research on that we're going to be moving forward to present at the appropriate time.

I didn't think to ask this until you were answering Supervisor Duncan's question, but we're now, I think we've spent more than a year after your department absorbed TDO transports.

It hadn't occurred to me until I think this moment that it would be the officer on patrol in that sector who it didn't be, oh well I guess I'm driving to wherever this app tells me I have to take them to the nearest hospital vacancy.

Yeah, so our staff has absorbed that.

We also have a callback list for officers who want to volunteer to work overtime assignment that can help that.

Thank you.

That's all I have.

All right.

Just in the interest of time, if this can come back as a follow-up, I always like to know what the base entry-level police position costs for the FTE, and then the one-time costs associated, and the same for fire.

Just as a reminder, because I'm sure the one-time costs probably sneaks up every year, so I'm curious about that.

But outside of that, I'm going to pull

I'm going to give a brief overview of the resources for fire rescue that are recommended in the budget.

Then Chief Puckett is going to walk you through operational things on the side of fire rescue.

Then I'll come back in and talk about the Office of Emergency Management and the public safety external agencies.

So as you know in recent years the county has invested significantly in fire rescue primarily by pursuing a number a number of FEMA safer grants to hire firefighters and last year was the first budget where we started seeing those grants expire we started picking up the cost of funding those firefighters locally

Since 2021, we've had four grants totaling $12.7 million, and that's been awarded for 57 firefighter positions.

In this budget, we're picking up local funding for 30 positions for one half of the year, and that amounts to the $1.7 million that you see on the slide here.

We also have an intention in this budget to pursue a fifth FEMA grant, which will fund an additional six firefighters to address some of the staffing issues that Ms. Shifflet spoke to earlier.

Also included in the budget, as Ms. Rice covered earlier, we have $1.3 million to maintain competitive salaries for recruitment and retention.

And we have a few operational costs increasing in the fire rescue budget this year.

First is replacement of some durable Toughbook laptop computers that need to be updated due to a software change.

Similar to what you saw in the police department, we have some increases related to providing a mental health clinician in fire rescue.

and an increase in cost for annual physicals for staff.

The budget also includes a $25,000 increase in funding to support the volunteer reimbursement program for fire rescue, as well as contributions to the fire rescue volunteer groups for their operational support.

And we have the details of all that listed in the recommended budget document if there's a specific fire rescue volunteer agency that you're curious about.

And then finally, their budget includes reallocating two FTEs to the Office of Emergency Management.

That's in line with the ESCI study recommendations, and I'll cover that in a future slide.

Thank you, Ms. Malcolm.

Good afternoon, Board.

David Puckett, Chief of Fire Rescue.

Before I comment on the fiscal year 27 proposed budget, I'd like to take a minute to remind the board of fiscal year 25 budget process.

During one of those work sessions, I shared with the board two ongoing service challenges.

The need to add an additional ambulance to the Seminole area and request North Garden Volunteer Fire Company for 24-7 career staffing.

Thanks to the board, we were able to address both those needs that year with a combination of local funds and our federal grant.

We shared with the board previously how long it takes to hire, train, and deploy firefighters.

The firefighters the board funded as part of that 25 process went into service this January.

The new services have only been in operation for six months, and we should be careful about drawing conclusions until additional data is available.

But I'm excited to share some promising indications that those units are having a positive impact on our service delivery.

This slide shows the impact of the second ambulance added to the Seminole, or the Route 29, Rio area.

You might recall that the Seminole area is our busiest demand zone, receiving over 4,500 requests a year for an ambulance.

The sole ambulance that was assigned there responded over 3,000 of those calls, but they were unavailable for the remaining 1,500.

The remaining calls were answered by ambulances from other areas, other parts of the county, resulting in increased response times and decreased ambulance availability for adjacent communities like Hollymead, Ivy, and Pantops.

Since adding the second ambulance, the reliability in that area has increased to 80%.

Because ambulances aren't responding from other areas of the county as frequently, we've also seen a decrease in response times of almost a minute.

And finally, I share with the board the negative impact the excessive call volume is having on our personnel.

And I'm happy to report that the workload of that original ambulance has dropped to a more sustainable level and that several firefighters have reported a noticeable difference in how they feel after working a shift at that station.

The North Garden Volunteer Fire Company requested to expand their existing daytime career staffing to 24-7 during that budget process.

The additional career staffing would provide an additional ambulance to an area on nights and weekends and provide relief to an aging volunteer workforce.

Since previously there was no ambulance available nights and weekends, the areas experienced a dramatic increase in ambulance availability, up 84%.

Simultaneously, the area has seen a decrease of approximately two minutes in ambulance and fire engine response times during nights and weekends.

Finally, North Garden volunteer chief shared that the career staff has relieved the pressure to respond to every low-acuity call.

Focusing their efforts on higher acuity and second calls has allowed members to spend more time with their families.

I should also emphasize that this is the first volunteer station with 24-7 career staff.

Both volunteer and career responders have reported a positive experience.

Career personnel expressed a welcoming and supportive environment, while volunteers continue to be engaged and serve the community in a meaningful way.

I want to thank the board for its ongoing support and allow me a minute to share the impact your investments are having in the community.

Despite the substantial investments the board has made over the last several years, we continue to experience challenges in meeting our daily staffing obligations.

85% or 182 FTEs, including our eight overhires, are assigned to operations, providing frontline service to the community.

However, many of those positions are not available for staffing on a daily basis.

As you can see from the chart, 140 or 77% of operational FTEs are actively working in the field.

We have 24 FTEs assigned to training as students.

This includes 18 in our recruit school, six in paramedic school.

An additional four FTEs are assigned to training as instructors.

Our training division has limited capacity, so instructors from operations are necessary to achieve the student to instructor ratio required for our recruiting school.

The ESCI study acknowledged this practice and recommended adequately staffing the training division in the future to avoid drawing down operational resources.

Six FTEs are currently on modified duty or long-term leave, such as military leave, family medical leave, or parental leave.

And finally, despite starting a recruit school in January, we currently have eight vacancies.

Since we only hire once a year, these vacancies won't be filled, trained, and providing service until September of 2027.

Although this picture is constantly changing, our current status is not unusual, especially during the first half of the year while recruit school is in session.

In 2025, Fire Rescue experienced an unusually high attrition rate of 11.5%.

This was driven largely by a larger than normal recruit school and retirements.

When recruits and retirees are excluded, the department's attrition drops to 3.7%.

While it's important to understand why employees leave the department, all attrition, regardless of the reason, has the same impact on daily staffing.

One way these staffing challenges show up in the community is through service reductions.

When sufficient personnel are not available, some role stations are reduced from three firefighters to two.

During the impacted timeframes, the fire engine is removed from service and the remaining two firefighters respond in an ambulance or a tanker truck, depending on the nature of the emergency.

In 2018, ACFR implemented the use of service reductions or dynamic staffing after we began to experience an increase in forced overtime.

Forced overtime is typically 12 hours of mandatory overtime at the end of a firefighter's 24-hour shift.

The increase in forced overtime was having a significant impact on our employees' personal lives and job satisfaction and was an unsustainable staffing solution.

So we made the difficult decision to implement targeted service reductions when adequate personnel were not available.

In 2025, we reduced service a total of 218 times.

That's not to say that there was 218 days with a single reduction.

Staffing shortages are often inconsistent.

So in many cases, multiple stations were reduced on the same day.

On a positive note, service reductions peaked in 2023 and have been decreasing since that time frame.

That decrease is a result of five firefighters who were funded as part of a FEMA SAFER grant.

That grant was specifically designed to bolster our existing staffing as opposed to adding or expanding service.

The ESCI study evaluated our existing staffing capacity and recommended adding six additional firefighters.

Based on the impact of the first five firefighters, we believe six additional firefighters will enable us to completely phase out service reductions.

The FEMA SAFER grant included in Mr. Richardson's recommended budget provides the six firefighters recommended in the ESCI study and allows us to continue decreasing the number of service reductions.

We also continue to work with our volunteer agencies to look for efficiencies in our volunteer onboarding process, improve our volunteer membership data, and the proposed budget includes an increase in the volunteer reimbursement program.

Although not an area of funding in the proposed budget, FireRescue is currently evaluating its organizational structure to ensure alignment with the ESCI study and the recent workload analysis.

And then finally, during fiscal year 27, we plan to fully evaluate and prioritize the recommendations in the ESI study to inform the county's five-year planning process.

So quickly, I'm going to cover the Office of Emergency Management.

You've heard about this before, but in the ESCI study, it was recommended that we establish a separate Office of Emergency Management, and that's what we're being responsive to here.

This is a budget-neutral reorganization, so we're pulling two FTEs out of Fire Rescue into the Office of Emergency Management.

and they have an operating budget again coming out of fire rescue for $118,000 to support their needs.

That office is going to be a standalone office that I'll be reporting to the county executive's office as part of the proposed budget.

And lastly, I want to cover the regional public safety agencies.

Supervisor Galloway alluded to this earlier, but we have several partner agencies that we have agreements with and in many cases there are formulas that drive their budgets from year to year.

So on this slide you see a selection of the ones in the public safety chapter and the increases that they're going to be projecting for next year.

One thing I do want to highlight that we haven't covered yet is there are always staff adjustments that happen.

between the time that we finalized the county executive's recommended budget and the time that we adopt the budget.

So for example, one of these is the Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail.

They had a proposed budget from their board when we went to print.

With our budget, we have since learned of a downward adjustment where they need less funding from the county to sustain their operations.

So that will come back as part of many staff adjustments that we'll suggest later in the process.

That's kind of typical when these

Timelines of the individual boards are out of sync with this board's budget process.

I think that's everything that I wanted to cover on this slide.

That's a great question.

I think we're trying to get our arms around that.

When I discussed trying to get better volunteer membership data, I think that's where we're trying to figure out exactly how that's trending and which way it's going.

Based off the growth we've had in the last several years where volunteer stations have requested career staff, I think they are seeing some decline, but it's not equal.

Real quick, just thank you on behalf of the North Garden Metropolis.

I heard several people say how happy they are to have that.

I'm just curious, you mentioned the attrition rate is unusually high.

What's an average news?

Yeah, I would love to see it pretty low.

Ideally, maybe around 5% or so.

I think HR would probably have the official answer as an organization we're striving for.

I think what we will see over the next five years or so is retirements increase.

No questions.

Thank you.

Supervisor Pruitt?

Slightly unfair question, because I'm going to be asking if you know what someone other than your organization does in response to your organization.

But something that I bring up frequently is the relationship between insurers and fire.

Basically, it's a budget justification.

Not typically.

ISO is the organization that typically rates fire departments for insurance purposes, and they do that every couple years, so there's sort of a snapshot in time.

And very quick, I feel like I've gotten the answer to this before, but I'm forgetting.

For EMS transports, the county bills insurance-only billing, as long as they are an Albemarle County resident.

Anybody outside of Albemarle County, then they will also follow up with a bill for the copay.

But it is soft billing, if you will.

Thank you.

On 44 and I think it was the following slide, you showed the impacts of the stations, your data, and you alluded, I just want to be clear, that's specific to the ambulance where it's serving, the localized area?

Correct.

So I would be curious to see, you alluded to how it impacts the other places?

Yes.

Yeah.

And I didn't say this before.

I should just point it out.

This performance is January 10th to February 28th compared to last year, the same time frame.

So it is a relatively small data set.

So I just want to point that out.

I believe in Seminole's case, in that time frame, there was 120 less responses from ambulances outside of the area.

And I mention it because during this year's budget we have to remember to be able to share what happened from last year, previous budgets, and the impacts that they have.

This was one that came up that we had that we specifically kind of focused on to get done.

And then, I think I was at 10 hours.

Yep, that's all I have.

Thank you both so much for being here.

Oh, the OEM, it's just the two FTEs pulled out of fire, or are there other FTEs?

It's just the two FTEs.

And are they the fire marshal and somebody else?

That would be the emergency manager and the assistant emergency manager.

OK.

So those positions exist currently into fire rescue.

So the last chapter that we're going to cover tonight is the judicial section.

So as I spoke to previously, 2% of the overall general fund budget is the judicial chapter.

Within that, you see the highest amount for the Albemarle County Sheriff.

That's 53% of the $10.2 million that's represented in the judicial chapter.

This budget includes a recommendation for three new sheriff's deputy positions within the judicial chapter That's really being driven by the opening of the new courts facilities that we've recently renovated and are continuing to come online The positions are being added to assist with day-to-day operations of the office including courthouse and courtroom security as well as inmate transportation and civil processing the sheriff's budget also includes some modest increases for the replacement of durable laptop computers and

Similar to what you saw in Fire Rescue and the replacement of some existing vehicles that are at the end of their life cycle.

Within the other offices in the judicial chapter, the Commonwealth's Attorney, the Clerk of the Circuit Court, and the Public Defender, all of those requests are funded at their request level with very modest increases primarily for cost of living adjustments for existing staff that they have within those offices.

All right.

We'll go for order.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

No questions.

Supervisor Missel?

No, sir.

When the sort of plan for the court renovations and expansion stuff was done, was it planned then that they would need new positions?

Yes.

Yes.

Supervisor Mallek?

No question, thank you Supervisor Pruitt?

I don't think I have him.

We've made Mr. Zug and Mr. Hensley wait for this.

We were grateful they were not being grilled.

I should expect, by the way, next year for the court's request to remain kind of steady, that we're not going to ask for an increase.

I owe a debt to Mr. Davidson for dealing with me because I was difficult this year, even though I wasn't asking for an increase.

I just want to also announce to the board, I've told staff this, I will be retiring next year around the first day.

I am working on vetting a candidate.

I believe this position has been served by having a lawyer in it.

I am asking to try to get recruiting another lawyer who I believe would work well.

I'm actually looking to steal from Jim to fill that position.

Of course, it is an elected position.

But anyway, thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Mr. Hensley, any comments?

In the interest of time, I'll try to be brief.

I just appreciate the partnership that the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office and the Constitutional Officer has with the Board of Supervisors and the County Executive and the budget client staff.

We work very well together and we very much appreciate the County's support for our operations.

Thank you.

And just to follow up with John's retirement announcement, I also am retiring.

I will be retiring at the end of my term, so it won't be soon.

All right, so for future reference, the clerk in the column will turn you around and see

Thank you both for the update and for that input.

Thank you.

All right, back to where are we at?

I'm going to recap this with next steps.

So as Andy started out this morning, or just a few short hours ago, daylight savings time, first work session.

There's a lot going on.

We have our next work session on Wednesday afternoon at 5 o'clock again in this room.

These are the chapters that we're going to cover in that work session.

These were sent to the board previously.

And as Andy noted earlier, the one change is that we moved non-departmental, that chapter, to work session number two.

So we'll be starting there when we regroup on Wednesday.

Otherwise, your agenda remains the same as it was previously.

Any additional questions?

I do regarding the general fund expenditures.

Placement of monies and everything.

When will we have an opportunity to have an input as to a specialized health and welfare program?

The Outside Agencies, is that what you're thinking of?

Yes, that's on Wednesday.

That's on Wednesday, perfect.

Any other, Sally?

Yeah, I have one just because it comes up kind of in like every department of just what it means.

I looked it up, so I think I know, but the VRS kind of like decreased to like less money in, just sort of what that means.

So every two years the state will do a study.

We're as part of the state pool for the Virginia retirement system.

Based on our workforce, the VRS will be investing those funds, getting returns.

They'll do their actuarial study and those just those rates up or down.

So the Board of Supervisors will contribute a percentage of employee salaries and employees contribute a portion of their salaries into the VRS pool that gets revised every two years.

It's not a decrease in people's retirement.

OK. Can I add one?

Right, yeah.

I figured that.

I was just kind of wondering.

The money going into it is coming from somewhere.

But it's the system, the retirement system.

Most cities and counties in the entire Commonwealth go into that one system.

And so when they start doing actuarial every two years on who owes what, you can theoretically go up or down.

And that's across the Commonwealth.

And so it's not just a single retirement system like the city of Charlottesville has.

I also want to say one more thing about it because that $1.1 million, right?

About a million dollar savings.

A million dollars of savings, which is an expense decrease for us.

For county schools, that was $3 million.

And so while that is not new revenue, that is a $3 million decrease that is just like a new revenue, just like for us.

It was just like getting an additional $1 million.

and that factored in and we're going to talk about schools next week but that factored in and I wanted to mention it now because we've really not honed in on it that factored into what I looked at when I looked at how much more state money that was going to be coming to schools when you combine LCI with the reduction in the ERS because it's enough money to talk about when you start talking about three million dollars.

All right, and then from the county executive, any... No, sir, not unless the budget team, finance team has anything or to my right.

All right, well, great.

With that and without objection, we will adjourn to March 11th, 2026, 5 p.m. here in room 241.