Board of Supervisors Adjourned Meeting (Budget Presentation)   2/19/2020

This is the local government's relationship with our state government regarding full-time staff and the retirement system contribution that we make.

And this is unusual in speaking with Andy Bowman.

He's not seen this in recent years.

But we have to make adjustments to be able to pay that debt to our state in order to be able to continue to participate in the retirement system for our staff.

The middle slide is the capital and debt service.

I'll remind the board that this is formula-based with our school system.

So with revenues coming in, there is a percentage that goes to schools, a percentage that goes to general government, and then a percentage that goes to capital and debt service.

This is probably when you go back and look 15 to 20 years at the swing back and forth between the city and the county.

There's a very complex formula every year that goes back 24 months and looks at tax base growth in the city, tax base growth in the county.

For this coming year, the obligation to the county will be an additional $100,000, which is a 2.7% increase.

And I'll remind the board that this comes off of last year a dramatic swing back in the other way, where we appreciated about a $1.5 million payment from the city coming in our direction.

It affected us in a dramatic way with our budget balancing strategies and what we were able to do.

I want to spend a moment on our capital program, which is a driver for this year's budget.

During these recommended budget presentations, I typically focus on the new capital projects being budgeted for the upcoming fiscal year and being planned into the following four years.

But it's important to remember that once ground is broken and ribbons are cut, we continue to pay for these projects up to 20 years.

And you can't look forward without also looking back to remind us of what our commitments are.

These are our current obligations.

Our capital program is carrying projects approved in prior years, including large projects like the fort renovation and expansion.

I've mentioned Woodbrook Elementary and others.

The board spent significant time over the course of many months exploring in partnership with our school board what our capacity and what our affordability for further capital commitments looks like.

And then you took on the difficult challenge of prioritizing our community's capital needs.

This budget funds our obligations to the prior year commitments to deliver high quality projects for this project.

Refreshed FY2022 Strategic Plan.

I believe this board dedicated time with staff in the fall of this past year.

And what we believe is that local government has an obligation

These nine strategic initiatives, they represent the biggest opportunities and the most critical issues over the next three to five years as identified by this board over a course of time.

The tenth strategic initiative is the underpinning.

This is the foundation, if you will, of these nine strategic initiatives, which is quality government operations.

What that does is it helps the staff to drive realistic change and also to help manage the expectations of our citizens.

Our budget is guided by the strategic plan, the initiatives which are shown here.

There is funding in this recommended budget to address each of the items that you see on this slide.

When we talk about our

It represents external services that are provided to our residents that we serve.

These are the services that we're talking about, our touch point with our residents.

It sometimes helps to remind our community about

For me, this is an impressive list of services that are provided to our citizens and at times our citizens forget these until they need them.

The recommended fiscal year 21 budget is balanced at a total of just over 451 million dollars, which is balanced.

at our current tax rate, 85.4 cents per 100 assessed value.

That is the same tax rate.

And that's why I'm recommending the same tax rate as the present year.

I'm going to focus my remarks at this point on the general fund, which is the primary funding for general government.

General government covers the function shown here.

This chart provides an overview of where our revenues are coming from.

And before we move on, this picture is one of the things that jumps out to me is this community's reliance on our general property taxes as a proportion of our revenues coming in the door.

I would also point out the amount of state and federal revenue, oftentimes at a local level, there's just a misperception

of how much state and federal money, which is critical to our budget, but in proportion to the total revenue coming in, I would bring the board's attention to that just as a reminder.

Same slide, except this is where our expenditures are going.

And you can see from the right half of the donut that there is a strong commitment to our public school system in Albemarle County, which reflects our community's vision

and has for some time.

All right, Lord, I'd like to talk about this year's theme.

It was budget for fiscal year 21.

Our theme is expanding opportunity, promoting our community's future, creating a positive community legacy, and striving for economic viability, equity and inclusion, and environmental sustainability.

These are ongoing vital functions for local government leaders.

I'll remind the board that in 2018, the board supported the creation of a project management office focused on project delivery, scheduling, resource alignment, stakeholder analysis, and business process optimization.

I'm proud to share that there is a new chapter in our budget book this year entitled, Efficiencies.

It highlights how we're working differently to achieve our goals.

Staff continues to demonstrate commitment to identifying our performance gaps, which helps to set a course for continued organizational improvement.

Why is this important?

This budget is about expanding opportunity, which we're able to do when we study our services, our business processes, our systems, to ensure that we're aligning the right resources with the right work.

It shores up our foundation.

It allows us to do more work with less effort, to reach deeper into the community, to ensure equitable services, to free our staff capacity up to work differently than we've worked in the past, which enables us to focus on how to best lift up our staff and to manage our resources to meet our community's capital needs.

The ability of a community to promote its future is linked directly to the existing and future quality and capacity of its infrastructure.

So I'm talking about roads, streets, parks, intersections, public transportation, water and sewer infrastructure, greenways and trails.

I'll talk about how this budget addresses community infrastructure.

Our community continues to grow.

School capacity.

St.

Louis College of Education's needs for additional

Second, I want to take a moment to talk about the school division's operating budget.

The school division is projecting growth of student population of more than 300 students.

That is larger than some of the division's elementary schools.

Thanks to additional support from the state and Dr. Haas's leadership in taking new and innovative ways in meeting the needs of our school-aged kids, the school division has put forward a balanced funding request, the first one, I believe, in 20 years.

Transportation leveraging, $22.75 million.

This budget process puts forward the two other capital priorities recommended by the CIP Advisory Committee.

I want to take a minute to talk about the CIP Advisory Committee comprised of the school board, for a supervisor's planning commission, and a resident member met throughout the month of October to create a recommendation for the capital improvement plan, fiscal years 21 through 25.

The first of the two transformational investments in our transportation program.

This budget process recommends beginning a five-year commitment to provide consistent flexible funding that can be used to compete

These funds create a pivotal moment for our community.

They set us to make long-term investments in transportation infrastructure at a level

of commitment that we've never seen in Albemarle County.

It positions us to stay ahead of statewide competition for funding over the next several years and to plan and execute projects in a more timely manner, to expand opportunity for everyone who moves through the community because when we make transportation improvements, we enhance safety, we reduce stress, we give people back their most precious resource, time.

Public-private partnerships.

The second of the two is to make $4 million

which positions us to make strategic investment in land acquisition for our economic development opportunities to create public good in alignment with our comprehensive plan.

I believe that localities that plan for land acquisition create a competitive advantage when working through public-private partnerships.

These types of projects expand opportunity because they tend to generate new jobs for our community and business activity that diversifies our tax base to yield tax revenues above what the county currently seats on a given property.

It reduces the strain that real estate tax carries for revenue generation.

Elections.

I want to transition and talk about an item in this budget that emerged with the change of the state law with respect to early voting.

Later this afternoon at your work session, Lance Stewart, our director of facilities and environmental services, will be with this board at your regular meeting to share more about a proposal to lease space to better serve the voting public.

This proposal is significant because it will bring activity into the Rio 29 area in alignment with our small area plan.

The space under consideration will only be needed for voting several times a year.

The remainder of the year we can use this space as an engagement hub for local government,

Initial investment uplift is $610,000, and we will need to also budget $225,000 for operations.

Finally, the budget also recommends an additional full-time staff member, an assistant elections manager, which will support the extended period of voting, and it will also better serve our community.

We can expect higher volumes.

We've looked at other states that are ahead of us with this initiative, and the data is compelling.

Equity.

Equity ensures fair access to opportunity, information, resources, and treatment.

Our organization has spent the past year listening and learning on how to better serve all of our employees and community members to expand our opportunity for everyone that this organization serves.

This budget reflects the board's ongoing commitment to the promotion of an equitable and inclusive community in three ways.

The first is employee compensation.

Employee compensation is an area that we've identified as an equity issue.

This budget seeks to address that by lifting our lowest wage earning employees because they lift us up every day in a number of areas that if we stop and just look for a moment, we see these people working behind the scenes in so many areas.

These are our police service specialists, our public safety dispatchers, our ground maintenance workers, our social services specialists.

This budget recommends establishing a new minimum wage of $15 an hour and a decompression strategy that will impact employees through pay grade 12.

This slide, and I know there's a lot of information on it, it reflects approximately the bottom one third of our pay plan.

And starting at the bottom, you see pay grade four.

That will be collapsed into pay grade five.

And then there is a decompression strategy that feathers some movement all the way up through salary grade 12.

The average pay increase, it's about 159 employees.

The average pay increase is approximately 7%.

No pay adjustments above salary grade 12.

In addition to this, there are 171 temporary positions in the organization.

Most of those would be recognized in the Parks and Recreation Department.

This also aligns our Parks and Recreation Department for temporary positions at $15 an hour.

All of this would be recommended to be in effect July 1st if this budget is passed.

I'm proud of work that has gone into study.

The $15 minimum wage initiative has been truly a collaborative endeavor with our school division.

In our school division this will have a much more dramatic effect because of the types of jobs that are associated with running a school system.

I believe, as I've said, we have 159 staff.

I believe our schools are just under 900 staff who will be affected by this.

What we were able to do, Board, I will remind you in December, I'll take a second and remind you in December that we talked about that we may have to do a two-year implementation strategy, which would have been $13.50 this July 1st and then $15 the following July 1st.

We sat down with schools and we got within $400,000 of getting to $15 an hour, and so the schools

has agreed to absorb $400,000 of our first year cost in order for us to go in tandem July the 1st, and both organizations do $15 an hour.

And so I would publicly thank Matt and his team, their board, for helping us to get to $15 an hour on July 1st and not have to do the two-year implementation strategy.

As we hover around 2% unemployment,

On the local government side, I believe Lorna's room is in the room, but I won't think that it's around $11 an hour.

Ma'am?

We'll get that information.

$10.70.

I believe.

Oh, one thing I would say in addition to that, I knew there was one more thing I needed to expand upon, and that is we are also supporting a 2% salary increase for all of our county employees, which helps to maintain our position to competitively recruit and retain employees.

And so this recommended budget has a 2% salary increase for all county employees.

Equity and Inclusion.

This budget expands our organizational equity and inclusion initiatives.

Our community continues to grow in diversity and to ensure that we're able to serve our customers in a comfortable and welcoming way.

We know that language access is crucial.

In this current fiscal year alone, social services provided language translation on 3,475 separate occasions.

The funding that I have in this budget enables our organization to be more fully responsive across the organization to language assistance needs in our day-to-day customer service.

We know that to recruit a diverse workforce that reflects our community, we need to have a truly inclusive organizational culture.

We continue to work on the community remembrance project.

This board has been very supportive and active

with the activities that have gone on in this community over the last 18 months.

And to build the programming at the Yancy School Community Center, this year we welcome our new program coordinator funded through a grant.

This budget supports a request from the health district for a part-time health worker that will provide clinical services in the renovated space at the center.

Last year the board adopted an ambitious climate reduction goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% of the 2008 baseline by 2030 and to be net zero by 2050.

The draft climate action plan will be coming to the board later this year and while we don't know right now what the exact roadmap for achieving that goal long term looks like,

We do know that we need to be in a position as a county to make investments necessary to advance our climate objectives.

To that end, this budget process adds an additional $250,000 to our Climate Action Fund funding pool to support strategic partnership with AHIP that will increase the accessibility of transformational climate actions for our residents where the cost of housing, weatherization, rehabilitation, or preservation might serve as a barrier to participation.

These home investments allow for more efficient heating and cooling and preserves existing housing stock, which is good for the homeowner, good for our community, and good for our climate.

This brings the total climate action funding pool up to $750,000.

Our organization is working differently.

I've mentioned that several times.

And we're committing to applying the right resources to the right areas to get the best results for our community.

Over the past three years, on average,

Prior to this year, the last three budgets, we've supported 27 new positions each year.

This amount of headcount growth was driven by steady loss of FTEs during the recession six to eight years ago.

This organization was working to deliver the same levels of service in the face of a growing community with different needs.

The level of growth over the last three years, however, is not sustainable long term.

This budget includes 19 additional positions and I want to take a few minutes to talk about this because it's not exactly, it's not full funding for 19 positions.

Four of the positions were actually approved after the adoption of the FY20 budget.

Those people are already working here.

The remaining new positions will address a shift in the landscape in our fire rescue system, which I'll go into in greater detail in a minute or two, as well as to address timely staffing needs and environmental services, the county attorney's office, and I've mentioned earlier the voter registrar's office.

I share this to highlight that we've spent the past few years focused on how we can work differently to meet the needs and the wants of our community.

So if you can denote

The positions in blue are to highlight that many of the positions that are recommended for FY21, they come with additional revenue support.

And that could be revenue from the state, revenue from a grant, or revenue that we get through service delivery.

The ongoing net cost to Albemarle County for these 19 positions is about $628,000.

I want to spend a few minutes talking with the board about how we are working differently, and I want to center around three primary ways.

Our customer-focused service enhancements, redefining fieldwork, and aligning our resources.

This year, this picture shows that we added a front desk customer service ambassador to our organization.

We brought this role on to provide

visitors entrance while the building is open and also to monitor day-to-day operations inside the building and on our grounds.

But more than anything, our two staff members, Josh and Jamie, they provide customer service.

They say hello when people come through the front door.

We've gotten emails from our citizens to thank us for that level of service.

They help people find where it is in the building that they're trying to go for services.

They hold the door open when your arms are full.

And these young men kneel down on one knee and teach a young boy how to tie his neck tie when he's on his way to the superintendent's office for a critical meeting.

That really happened.

This is optimization, redefining our fieldwork.

We're leveraging technology in our day-to-day work to make field time more productive and to create

A temporary employee in environmental services, pictured here, has developed a GIS-based tool for stormwater inspectors to use in the field, improving efficiency and accuracy by eliminating duplicative data entry.

The system has since been expanded to now include community development inspectors.

This budget recommends making this temporary position permanent to support further systems development initiatives like this.

which enables our entire team to operate more effectively.

This budget recommends a legal services over hire position.

This will temporarily augment the county attorney's office to support the digitization of legal documents that long term enable our county attorney's office to operate more efficiently.

These actions may seem small, but they're putting systems in place and improving the way we work to enable us to build capacity, to leverage technology, and to allow our staff to perform higher level work, and to deliver better customer service to our community.

This budget continues to provide training dollars, an increase of $35,000 to our training pool to continue to allow us to invest in how we work so that we can continue to deliver efficient and high-quality services focusing on leadership development as well as technical training on our key business systems which has been an area of the

creating a culture oriented to working differently also enables us to approach emerging issues as opportunities to re-engineer our systems.

The budget addresses an issue facing not just our community but communities across the United States.

There is a persistent challenge to recruit and retain volunteer firefighters and paramedics.

to this board a few weeks ago, two changes in their system, one on the fire side, one on the rescue side.

Albemarle County Fire Rescue received notice from Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad that it will not be able to reliably send advanced life support or ALS units into Albemarle County on nights and weekends in the near future.

To address Albemarle County's emergency medical needs, this budget supports 12 new positions

that would enable staffing on an ALS ambulance from the Ivy Station and at the Pan-Top Station 24 hours, seven days a week.

The proposal provides consistent, reliable county-wide ALS ambulance service and it improves EMS response times to most areas of the county.

There is a net cost to hiring these positions due to offsetting revenues.

The revenues are cost recovery,

these are patient transport insurance payments that would come back to the county that now is collected elsewhere and it's about 60% of the total cost.

So the net cost of hiring these 12 physicians is about $332,000 a year.

And I would emphasize that these are patient transport insurance payment costs.

This is what the citizens, through their insurance

The other area is a request from our pro se volunteer fire department for daytime weekday staffing at their department.

To address Albemarle County's fire protection needs, this budget supports a proposal that this board has seen recently in a work session to reposition existing resources from within the ACFR system by aligning our personnel with call demand in lieu of hiring five additional firefighters otherwise required to meet the need that's been identified.

The proposal reallocates staff from Stony Point to Crozet and from East Rivanna to Pentox.

And the end result is it improves urban and rural response times across the country.

This slide is representing funding for our agencies, arts and community partners, 33 agencies.

We're identified with our budget review team.

I believe that the partnership, the community collaboration that we have is a significant part of our ability to provide services to our community.

I think that collaboration brings out the best in others.

Our community is fortunate to have a strong history of regionalism, partnerships with agencies and other nonprofits, as well as community arts and cultural groups that work to enhance the daily lives of so many.

This budget continues to support the many partners that directly deliver services to the residents.

For fiscal year 21, $1.7 million is recommended for programs and services provided by the 33 agency budget review team organizations.

and arts and cultural partners.

I'd like to talk about public transit for a minute.

Public transit is a critically important area of our community and this budget supports a continued commitment to looking at how to deliver services effectively.

Afton Express, a new commuter service originating from Stanton across Afton Mountain to provide support for those coming into Charlottesville and Albemarle County for work each day.

This budget supports the regional transit partnerships interest for a local match to create a transit vision plan that will chart the future course of transit using a regional manage.

This budget supports our transit providers, CAT and John, both of which have requested increases in revenues over fiscal year 20.

We will delve more deeply into these requests during a dedicated work session that I have proposed with the staff support in March, where we will dedicate one work session just on public transit.

to be able to spend some dedicated time looking at our agency partners and the challenges and the opportunities that we have.

Again, I think this is how your dollar is spent in Albemarle County.

This illustrates what a dollar of tax revenue supports.

in the fiscal year 21 recommended budget, the critical services that we stretch all through the county.

In summary, I meant to wrap up, and I do appreciate the board's attention, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with staff today to deliver this budget.

In summary, the fiscal year 21 budget totals a bit more than $451 million, and it's balanced on a tax rate of 85.4 cents per 100 assessed value.

It's the same tax rate as the present calendar year.

The CIP Advisory Committee recommended

$55 million in additional CIP projects over the next five years.

And I have visited with board members, and staff has done significant analysis to suggest that this will take raising our tax rate at some time in the near future to help pay for both in pay-as-you-go and in debt these additional $55 million in projects.

because our local economy continues to be strong.

And we see strong economic vibrancy, as we talked about earlier.

I did not recommend a tax rate increase for our capital fund because of the timing of our debt, as well as our current financial position.

So we will be revisiting this after the budget is adopted.

And we will monitor closely our economic conditions.

And then we'll be back to the board about this probably

It continues to invest in key equity programs.

It also raises the organization's minimum wage to $15 an hour.

More than the numbers, I want to share that I'm proud of the work that the organization is doing to address equity, inclusion, and diversity both within the community and inside our organization.

I'm proud of the work that the organization is doing to work differently, to evaluate business processes and systems,

All with a focus on delivering better customer service and better work products for everyone in our community.

I'm proud of how our capital planning process prioritized capital projects that meet community infrastructure needs in a transformative way, delivering consistent but flexible funding to ensure the right projects get built to address our needs in education, transportation, economic development, and voting.

are organizations demonstrating its appetite for measuring performance and identifying how we can improve business processes and how we serve our customers.

Albemarle County is expanding opportunity in ways that are measurable, meaningful, and improve the daily lives of the staff and the community we serve.

I want to thank again the dedicated and hardworking county staff for assisting me in developing the budget recommendation, which will advance the organization and our community

in our strategic areas.

So this is our budget document that we're going to be working through in the next several work sessions together.

If you open it up and look in this left side, you'll see a yellow paper.

And this is very similar to the budget calendar that we shared just recently that had a lot of information on it and it's been updated.

And one thing that we updated was to tell you where the pages are from each of the pages.

Some people refer to this as your homework.

So to share with you some homework pages that you can review as we go into each of the work sessions.

So if you don't mind, I'll take you through a couple of these so you'll see what I'm talking about with this.

So you can see our very next time that we get together on the budget is February 25th.

And it's a five to eight work session.

So it'll be later in the afternoon.

And you can see we have identified in kind of a blueprint

The budget summary, we usually start with some summary data, it's in page 27, the starting

I'm kind of taking you to the starting page of each of the chapters for you to look at.

We'll go over revenues and expenditures kind of in a broad way.

We also have a chapter called non-departmental that's kind of towards the back, page 165, a good one for you to look at before the first meeting.

You'll also have time with the school division.

They'll be showing up at the first work session to share their school budget with you.

So you'll be, we have a chapter

called Education Chapter.

And it's a tab in your book behind 195.

The numbers are a little different in their chapter because it

to see the education tab behind page 195 for that.

And then we will also touch on the Capital Improvement Plan at the first meeting, and that starts at page 219.

So you can find your way.

That's kind of a way to work into your notebook as we hit the first meeting.

And I also wanted to mention Mr. Jefferson.

He mentioned the efficiencies, and it's on page 35.

So it's part of the budget summary area.

So we'll call your attention to that.

We won't go into a lot of details on that in the first meeting, but something you could look at.

So then you can see our next work session is in March.

March is going to go pretty fast for us, because we're going to have the third, fourth, and fifth in a row touching on things around the budget.

So your first week of March will be pretty intense on budget.

The third, we're going to talk about all the general government departments.

So we just placed page 75 through 164.

So it's almost the whole center of your book.

We'll be going through categories of public safety and the different categories from the budget.

On the fourth is our public hearing on the recommended budget.

We'll have another work session on the fifth.

This is a real important work session for you

In recent years, we've been adding another revenue update because we want to look at the most recent date on revenue.

So we're putting an adjustment in revenues that occur on the 5th.

And at that point, you finalize your tax rate for advertisement, and you'll improve your proposed budget.

So we'll go from the county executive's recommended budget to your proposed budget.

The 11th is the transit work session.

It's from 3 to 6 in the evening.

And then we have a holding place for another work session on the 17th if there's a desire by the board to continue your conversation on something that we didn't cover in the detail that you'd like.

And then you can see moving into April, there's another public hearing on your proposed budget.

You'll set the tax rate and adopt the budget on April 20th.

And after that, the school board adopts their budget.

And then you'll appropriate in May.

So that's basically how it's going to go from here.

Thank you so much for the efficiencies, the sectional efficiencies.

Our community has been asking for that for years.

And thank you, thank you.

Having the efficiencies assembled is really great to be able to bring people's attention more easily to what's been going on because all of you have made so many improvements already over the last several years.

Well, echo the comments of everyone for the great work that y'all have done.

Once again, I'm just so impressed with the staff here at the county and the dedication that y'all bring to everything you do.

I have a couple

to get some information.

I believe the comment was made that that was an unusual increase.

Sure.

I'd say that every two years the state reassesses what all of the local shares should be.

Every locality has going to be a separate pool and the school division has a separate pool from local government.

and I think the state does kind of an actuarial study.

They look at their future rate of return and through all those factors they kind of put together a long-term projection.

The result of that was about a 2% increase scored from about 12% of a salary to 14.

And that is something that every two years we revisit.

This is something we were not anticipating based on the long history we have seen in the past.

So we certainly have a mandate to respond to lower share of the state.

We certainly had some follow-up questions to the state when we received this news to understand that and I think the state cannot guarantee anything in the future either.

Thank you.

Young man rides bikes up on the trails.

That is the dedication that we've come to really appreciate here in the county.

to see a recommendation of no tax increase, yet still balancing everything out.

We can do anything in Albemarle County.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

I'll try to be brief.

First of all, this is my seventh time, I believe, as amazing as that seems.

And it gets better every time.

And I really appreciate that.

And it's especially very impressive, I would say,

Thank you very, very much.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn't point out one thing that's missing.

Oh, first of all, I want to say I'm very happy with the $15 now.

That is great for our lower-paid employees, and it's going to be a lot easier for us to hire people.

But when you were talking about your infrastructure and our infrastructure needs, you did mention water and sewer, which, of course, is paid through rates, water and sewer,

However, we did not mention solid waste, which does come out of our tax dollars.

And while I really, really appreciate all the support that the board has given in the last couple of years for the IBM UC in bringing us up to compliance with the DEQ and putting in the new transfer station, I do recognize that we're still very behind.

So I have to remind everybody that we have people in this county where they live.

They can't even get anybody to come to their house because they are too far out.

And we have a lot of people who can't afford to hire somebody.

I support that.

I'm very impressed with the staff here at Albemarle County, with the executive directors.

Your budget is very thoughtful, which I really appreciate because it really does go to servicing the needs of all of our constituents and the people in the community.

I really appreciate that.

I'm going to be following closely the whole issue with

Fire and Rescue and ALS services.

I think that's extremely important, not only for the urban areas, but in the rural areas.

And that's something I will be following.

I'm very happy to hear that the school board is presenting a balanced budget.

I'm sure people will be happy with your recommendation.

We'll see what happens, but regarding no tax increase,

providing more convenient centers because I think our job is to make sure that our community that they're well served and that they feel that we're doing our job and I love your efficiencies.

Can I add one thing regarding the extra money for BRS?

Some of you will probably remember that in 2010, Governor McDonald borrowed $600 million from BRS to balance, supposedly, the state budget.

And at the end of the year, it was, and I wrote this

At the end of that year things were not as bad as he thought they were going to be and instead of putting it back in VRS he sent the bill to local government and he gave the $600 million away as bonuses to state employees.

So it was really really punishing and something for which I'm still very unhappy.

I've covered it, but part of the issue here is that VRS has been underfunded for years.

And I've been reading editorials in the Richmond Times who've covered the General Assembly and been writing editorials about the underfunding of the VRS data for years.

It goes way back.

So they're trying to shore it up, which is a good thing.

Thank you.

I'll just remark that I

I would too like to acknowledge the school division bringing forward a balanced funding request and obviously that it was a large part of the state finally picking up their slack after years if not.

That's going to have a big impact on what we're able to do not just in the school division side but on our local government side as well.

Obviously, we're going to have plenty of time to discuss everything that we're remarking on.

And I know that we'll have plenty of questions.

Just to remind of our guidelines, it is best through budget season to copy the county executive and the rest of the board on questions because it's a question we might not have thought of and one that we would appreciate hearing asked and answered even if it's done electronically so when we walk in we can all be informed and not take meeting time to have to backtrack and get caught up.

Now on this specific hour, we're at our 1 o'clock where we need to get adjourned and get into the auditorium for our next meeting.