Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session #2   3/14/2022

All right, thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone, and I call to order this March 14, 2022 3 o'clock p.m.

meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District, Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, and myself, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District.

And at this time, let's see, Mr. Bowman, I see that you're here.

All right, thank you.

Good afternoon to the board.

I am Andy Bowman.

I am the Chief of Budget in the Department of Finance and Budget.

I have just a few brief introductory comments while our team pulls up a presentation and then I turn it over to Chair Page and the public schools for their presentation.

I really want to thank the school board representatives for being here today, for their members who participated in the capital improvement plan process, and also to Dr. Haas and his team, especially Maia Kumazawa, the school's director of budget and planning, and Rosalind Schmidt, the school's chief operating officer, for their partnership in this entire budget process, and especially the capital improvement program.

Going to the next slide,

I just always start these meetings with what the agenda is for not only today, but the upcoming process.

No action is requested for today.

This is all for information and discussion.

On September 17th, sorry, March 17th is the next meeting that we'll get together where the board will propose a tax rate and budget for public hearing.

And at that time, there can also be continuation of any items left over from the first two work sessions.

Well, the next slide is just another reference that I provided last time.

These work sessions are intended to be interactive.

We'll certainly have presentations from school and county government staff today, but we want to allow as much time for more discussion as possible.

and staff will be listening closely for any general information and follow-ups, but also if there's anything for the list of budget adjustments that would come back to the board into future work sessions starting on Thursday.

And as before, we've been sending the Q&A back to the board by email.

We also post those on the website.

So before I turn it over to the school division, who we will start with, we've allotted about an hour for their presentation, which can be more or less depending on the board's time.

I think we can accommodate that.

We'll spend time talking through the capital improvement plan and the capital budget, and then we will end with the debt management section.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

Good afternoon, Chair Price, and thank you, Mr. Bowman.

And good afternoon to members of the board.

We appreciate the opportunity today to share with you the school division's funding request for next year.

As mentioned, I'm Graham Page, chair of the Albemarle County School Board, and our vice chair, Katrina Carlson, is also here today.

We'll be co-presenting this afternoon, and we also have staff on hand to answer questions following the presentation, and the staff includes Dr. Haas, Ms.

Schmidt, and Ms.

Kobazawa.

Before we get started, I think this is a prime opportunity to acknowledge each of you for your commitment to not only supporting public education in our county, but to strengthening it.

I also want to extend our gratitude to the taxpayers of Albemarle County, many of whom do not have children in our schools, for their partnership and support.

The theme of our funding request for the 2022-23 school year is Learning for All, which is also the title of our new strategic plan.

Learning Fall is a representation of our core purpose to provide each and every one of our students with an educational experience that prepares them to be successful and to become lifelong learners who make positive contributions to society both now and in the future.

Budget development is nearly a year-long process.

Beginning each fall and extending through the spring, we begin the process by connecting with our stakeholders about their desires and concerns.

We do this through a variety of ways, including school-based and division-wide focus groups, budget and climate surveys, meetings with our volunteer advisory committees, and public comment at our school board meetings.

We use the feedback we receive from those community engagement efforts to set our goals, prioritize our needs, and determine how best to allocate funding to support high quality teaching and learning for all.

Ultimately, this strategic cycle enables us to form needs-based budget that supports the priorities of our community.

You've seen our budget goals, which are shown here before.

We created them about four years ago, and we continue to pursue these goals throughout the budget development process.

Collectively, these goals represent our commitment to the vitality of our school division and by extension to the prosperity of our community as a whole.

I mentioned that we have a new strategic plan and that our funding request shares the same name, Learning Fall.

Because this is a new plan just adopted by the school board at the beginning of this school year, I'd like to take a moment to share our new vision and mission statements.

Our vision is that our learners are engaged in authentic, challenging, and relevant learning experiences, becoming lifelong contributors and leaders in our dynamic and diverse society.

Our mission states that we will work together as a team to end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities for our children's success through high quality teaching and learning for all.

It commits us to building relationships with families and communities to ensure that every student succeeds.

And further, our mission commits us to knowing every student.

Our new strategic plan includes four core values that guide our actions and decision making.

These include equity, excellence, family and community, and wellness.

Finally, our strategic plan has three primary goals, thriving students,

Affirming and Empowering Communities and Equitable Transformative Resources.

It is these goals that take center stage in our funding requests, which acts for investments in each of these areas.

And now we'll have our Vice Chair, Ms.

Yep, so I'm going to be talking about strategic plan goal number one, which is thriving students.

The first goal of our strategic plan aims to support the academic and social emotional development of every student, and it aims to eliminate opportunity access and achievement gaps that create barriers to their success.

As part of that, big focus is on learning recovery.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a myriad of challenges for school divisions nationwide over the last two years, and you may remember that learning recovery was a focus area in our funding request presentation last year.

As an update, we've made substantial investments in research-based strategies to address the academic recovery, social-emotional learning recovery, and mental and physical health needs for our students using one-time federal recovery funds.

We allocated two-thirds of a million dollars to increase intervention time and expand tutoring opportunities at all of our schools.

We spent $2.5 million to expand our summer programming.

We used another $2.5 million to reduce class sizes below pre-pandemic levels through additional staffing

and we invested $2.3 million to add at every school a full-time counseling position dedicated to coordinating mental health support and family engagement.

Moving into next year's school year, we plan to continue funding the additional counseling position at all 24 of our elementary, middle and high schools.

Another proposal of our budget is class size reduction.

Low class size has been a competitive strength of our school division and that continues to be the case.

In surveys of our teachers and families, average class size is consistently rated as a high priority.

Not only do lower class sizes enable more activities and more variation of activities in our classrooms, but lower class sizes also increase the capability of our teachers to connect with individual students and to engage with their families.

The value of that connectivity is heavily embedded in the mission of our new strategic plan.

to know every student and to work collaboratively to dissolve barriers to student success.

The chart on this slide illustrates our investment in reducing our student to teacher ratios.

If we look at fiscal year 2020 pre-pandemic, our average elementary class size in the blue is 19.6, whereas the class size standards set by Virginia Department of Education, which is indicated by the dotted pink and purple lines, is 24 or 25 students in elementary classes.

Likewise, in the same year, our average class sizes for middle and high schoolers in the green and yellow are below the state standards by two or three students.

You'll notice that our class sizes are even lower post-pandemic and that has to do with the lower the projected enrollment as well as investment of the recovery funds that I talked about on the last slide in order to further reduce class size.

The funding request before you today includes a proposal to maintain the low class sizes we've been experiencing.

The proposal adds 30

For secondary classes, grades 6-12 will drop to 23 students.

Another area is special education.

Our commitment to low class sizes has been accomplished through a mixture of standard and differentiated standing.

Special education is an area where differentiated staffing means the difference between a thriving student and a schooling one.

We've seen fairly static enrollment of students with disabilities over the course of the pandemic, but the needs of the students we serve continue to increase in severity.

What we know is that different students need different levels of support in order to succeed.

Our funding request adds about nine FTEs to bolster our specialty staffing models.

These models, which are explained briefly on this slide, involve specially trained teams of special educators and instructional assistants who use evidence-based practice to address the specific and complex needs of groups of students as well as individual students.

For students with disabilities, this means offering customized levels of support within the context of maximizing their access to the general education classroom and their

Our English as a Second or Other Language program, which we refer to as ESOL, has a similar staffing strategy, one based on the belief that students with different needs require different levels of support.

As of September 30th, we are serving approximately 1400 English learners in our schools.

Between September 30th and February 10th, the number of English learners we serve increased by 106 to just over 1500 students.

Based on Virginia staffing standards, which mandate that we must staff 20 teachers for every 1000 English learners, we should be funding about 30 FTEs.

Our fiscal year 2023 funding request includes 38 FTEs to support a differentiated staffing model that allows us the flexibility and responsiveness we need to support the individual needs of our English learners.

Another form of staffing which you might have heard about in the news and elsewhere that has been shown to be increasingly critical in our efforts to support student learning is substitute teaching.

Our substitute teachers have been extraordinary partners in serving our students and in spite of ever shifting circumstances they've been flexible, they've taken on the most media of challenges, they've mastered diverse situations and they've been tireless in ensuring that students are supported.

Historically we've filled our substitute teaching needs at a rate of 70% or higher

However, our current bill rates are struggling to reach 50%.

So simply stated, we need to strengthen this resource by increasing the number of highly qualified substitute teachers in several schools.

This funding request proposes to do that through multiple substitute program enhancements.

In order to help schools continue to provide in-person instruction when they're faced with teacher absences, we want to staff each school with one to four permanent substitute teachers depending on the size of the school.

And then we're hoping to improve same-day fill rates by increasing the daily compensation we offer.

And we're working to incentivize current school staff who are already familiar with the students and school routines.

We want to encourage them to substitute for teachers when they are absent.

And we intend to do these things while maintaining competitiveness in the current market.

Thank you, Katrina.

The second goal of our new strategic plan, affirming and empowering communities, seeks to empower our stakeholders to engage with our school community.

We intend to accomplish this by nurturing a culturally responsive environment that respects and champions the diversity of our students, their families, and our employees, and also supports their physical and mental health.

You may know that Albemarle County Public Schools now requires all teachers and licensed employees to complete training in culturally responsive teaching.

The training, which we offer in the form of a micro credential, as well as a certification, supports educators to learn about and implement

culturally responsive mindsets and practices in order to close achievement gaps.

Our funding request also stipends for culturally responsive teaching.

It also includes funds for professional learning stipends for classified employees to create alignment between the professional development payment practices for teachers and classified staff.

In the 2019-20 school year, we elevated the well-being of students at our five smallest elementary schools by increasing the part-time school counselor allocation at each school to a full-time counseling position, a move that grew our counseling program by 2.5 FTEs.

That same year, we also expanded our middle school counseling programs by adding one FTE between Jack Jouett and Lakeside Middle Schools.

In the current school year, despite decreasing enrollment, we used one-time federal recovery funds

to add one full-time counselor to support social-emotional learning at every school.

In total, this decision expanded our counseling program by 24 FTEs.

Our funding request proposes to maintain this level of service next school year, in addition to adding one FTE for a counselor at Center One in response to increased enrollment there.

Community empowerment is not an expense, it's an investment.

That's what we believe.

I mentioned some of our community engagement efforts earlier in relation to our budget cycle, but our overall efforts to affirm and empower our students, families, employees, and community members extend far beyond budget input.

In alignment with goal two of our strategic plan, the division began hosting student, family, and employee forums in the fall with the intention of sharing ways for participants to connect with us and to benefit from that engagement.

Our hope was that through this series of brief

focused engaging forums with small and diverse groups of stakeholders.

We would not only strengthen or increase engagement with participants, but we would also create a ripple effect of engagement among their social circles.

Also at the division level, our international ESOL program, in partnership with our Department of Technology, hosts regular technology support nights for multilingual families.

Each of these meetings features different technology topics and provides a great opportunity for multilingual families to get answers to their technology questions and to connect with each other.

In addition to holding school-based and division-level meetings with students and employees to solicit input on how we might improve school climate and working conditions through budget proposals, we hosted several information sessions

and other community engagement opportunities this year around topics such as COVID-19, mitigation strategies, culturally responsive teaching, anti-racism, equitable grading practices, school safety, high school redesign and more.

And this is all in addition to community wide invitations to participate in multiple surveys, serve on advisory committees and speak at school board meetings during public comment.

The mission of our Department of Technology is to empower all members of our learning community by providing exceptional technology solutions and support that results from collaborative decision making and effective timely communication.

The Technology Replacement Program proposal included in our funding request prioritizes providing exceptional support of our digital learning environment, optimal functioning of complex machines and programs, and digital security.

Our ability to support these priorities hinges on reliable hardware capable of running up-to-date resources as well as adequate number of talented staff members who can provide individualized and timely support to our teachers, students, and staff.

In addition to enhancing the ability of our students, families, and staff to engage with our school division, our technology replacement program proposal

aims to make the right computer technology resources accessible to our educators and students, which is a key component of our third strategic goal, equitable transformative resources.

I'm going to talk about some things that tie to our last

Main strategic goal, which is equitable transformative resources.

Although I do want to note that many of our budget proposals actually support more than one of our strategic goals.

Our technology replacement program was an example of that.

So simply stated, our third strategic goal supports transformative teaching and learning, and it does this through the equitable allocation of resources.

And probably our most important resource are people, our 2,640 employees.

This school year Albemarle County employs 2,640 employees, including 1,378 teachers, 131 administrators, and 1,131 classified employees.

We are sincere when we state that our most valuable resource is our employees, and this funding request is a testament to that.

It dedicates 86% of our overall budget to compensation benefits.

This is a priority for us in light of the challenges we are currently facing around hiring and retention.

Well, more than a quarter of the teachers leaving our division cited pay as the top reason for their departure, as did nearly a third of the classified staff who left the division.

In fact, we've just observed the lowest retention rate for classified staff of the past five years.

And while our vacancies have increased, we experienced a 13% decrease in teacher applicants this year.

And as of late February, we have 18 classified job postings that have been posted for more than a month.

So

We are proposing a compensation increase.

In response to these challenges, the largest increase in our funding request is an investment in our employees.

This proposal represents 55% of our total expenditure increase and includes strategies for attracting, developing, and retaining high quality staff.

$16 million of the proposal funds the 4% compensation increase we recently implemented for all employees in February, plus a 6% increase proposed for the beginning of the new fiscal year this July.

The proposal also includes $880,000 for targeted pay increases for certain hard-to-fill positions and $350,000 to provide positive compensation adjustments for certain non-exempt employees due to changes in our payroll structure.

I'll also mention that these increases fulfill our promise to guarantee a $15 minimum wage.

In tandem with our compensation increase proposal, we are conducting a comprehensive compensation study this spring to review instructional and classified positions against various markers

and to garner recommendations for teacher and classified pay scales.

Another proposal in the budget is our HR redesign.

As you know, Albemarle County Public Schools and Albemarle County government are currently supported by one human resource department.

Collectively, we decided that separate human resources department more efficiently and effectively serve our localities growing and increasingly complex workforce needs.

Based on the recommendations of the HR redesign consultant, our funding request allocates around $840,000 to the creation of our own human resources department and increases our dedicated HR staffing to 26 FQEs.

Our restructure supports four focus areas, a center of expertise that focuses on primary HR functions such as compensation, benefits, wellness and safety,

a service center dedicated to meeting the needs of employees and answering their questions, business partners who will work with the school and department leaders and employees to support their needs, and a human resource information system dedicated to ACPS employees.

Another proposal is a department operations restoration.

In fiscal year 2021, we reduced departmental operating budgets in response to a projected decrease in revenues.

This funding request seeks to restore just over half a million dollars to our department operation budgets, which generally hold flat from year to year.

Departments request funds based on need.

We've included on this slide a list of example restorations, including such needs as repair and maintenance equipment for building services, staff development funds for professional learning, and office supplies for the Department of Instruction.

So now I'm going to move on.

Since we're presenting a needs-based budget, we did want to take this opportunity to bring attention to our unfunded capital needs.

Our fiscal year 2023 funding request includes a one-time transfer of $1.5 million to the Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, to address the school division's unfunded facility needs.

Listed on this slide are the highest priority capital projects as recommended by the Long Range Planning Advisory Committee, affirmed by the school board, and the CIP Advisory Committee.

These are considered our most critical capital needs over the next five years.

And without the underlying facilities infrastructure that would provide adequate capacity and learning environments, we are going to be severely hindered in our work.

Perhaps the most substantial barrier to continuous improvement facing our school divisions are teaching and learning spaces that currently average more than 50 years in age and are so limited, we are forced to use more than 80 mobile classrooms or trailers at over half of our schools.

Division-wide, 65% of our students attend a school that uses mobile classrooms and nearly 32% of students attend a school that is over capacity.

It's been 20 years since we've added a new school to our division and at that time our enrollment was 30% less than it is today.

The strategy of continuing to expand facilities built in the early years of the 20th century and supplementing facility space by adding more mobile classrooms is not sustainable.

It's not in the best educational interest of our students and their families, and it is not representative of a thriving and prosperous 20.

For the next slide, you get to get a break from me speaking.

We have a video to show you guys.

We'd like to take a few moments to share some of the progress we have made on capital projects.

Albemarle County Public Schools is proud of our facilities and this video will highlight some of our recent capital projects.

We'll focus on illustrating the impact of new and renovated spaces and also show some traditional spaces to compare them to.

We'll start at Albemarle High School.

Here you'll see a locker removal project that gives you more space than the hallway and also gives an interesting space for students to gather.

We're looking here at a traditional classroom at Albemarle High School.

You'll see traditional furniture, you'll see some more traditional spaces.

And here we're looking at a renovated space at Albemarle High School.

You'll see flexible furniture, some additional day lighting, and you'll see a lot of different ways the teacher can configure the room.

Here's a traditional space that was a science classroom.

We have storage issues in the space.

We can bring in some additional daylighting to give them some more light in the classroom and some spaces that aren't used as they originally were intended.

Here we're looking at a renovated science room at Albemarle High School.

You'll see a lot of different abilities for teachers to configure the room in different spaces and for students to have more choice in their seating.

You see lots of light and lots of space.

You'll see easy access to utilities such as gas and outlets.

We're at Jouett Middle School now to look at a few examples of renovated versus traditional spaces.

We'll start in a traditional classroom.

You'll see a traditional layout for desks, which is partially COVID inspired.

And in the new space, this is the tech lab that combines different classrooms into one common space.

Students are able to spread out in different configurations.

We have flexible furniture that can be moved into different places.

Here we're at Jouett's modernized tech lab.

You'll see lots of flexible configurations for the students to work with.

You'll see a lot of light.

There's a space where students can work in the shop area versus more of a clean space.

And we have lots of technology in the space such as 3D printers and laser cutters that students can experiment and learn with.

Now we'll focus on some of our larger modernization projects and give you some additional details.

At Red Hill, we designed to modernize a newly furnished 13 classrooms and the media center.

Work in the classrooms included updated finishes, casework, and lighting as needed from room to room.

Improved transparency and connection to adjacent spaces and the outdoors was very important in this project.

The furniture was updated to create a flexible and comfortable learning environment, including ergonomic seating choice, work surfaces that vary in height and size, but are all mobile and provide adequate storage.

At Woodbrook Elementary, we added about 40,000 square feet.

With that 40,000 square feet, we added 300 seats, bringing the school's capacity to 600 students.

The additions included 16 classrooms, two dedicated special ed classrooms, four smaller resource classrooms, a maker space, professional development training space, a conference room, two faculty work rooms and toilets, offices, storage, and various support spaces.

Smaller additions expanded the cafeteria and a new gym were constructed.

This learning space modernization budget touched on many different school spaces.

It added needed improvements to instructional spaces that included existing classrooms, libraries, and other elective and support areas that are consistent with the school board's goals and priorities.

Modifications included furniture and renewal work including updated finishes, casework, lighting, and connections to adjacent spaces.

Typical modifications included classroom furniture upgrades, classroom modernization, media center modernization, cafeteria modernization, specialty classroom modernization, and additional day lighting.

Western Albemarle High School's Environmental Studies Academy consisted of two phases.

The first phase included the Environmental Studies Academy standalone building, which includes the greenhouse.

And phase two was an academy addition and science lab modernization.

The addition is about 10,000 square feet and focused on expanded science facilities to accommodate the Environmental Science Academy programs.

This included three labs, offices, a shared prep room with storage, and project spaces for independent and collaborative teaming.

Spaces also accommodated hydro and aquatic activities and hydroponics.

Seven of the existing classrooms in the building were also modernized, which included replacing casework, updating finishes and lighting, improving day lighting, and adding additional power and replacing furniture.

The most recent work at Redhill Elementary was phase two of the project.

It included an addition, renovations, and site improvements.

The project added about 6,500 square feet to the building with a new gymnasium and support spaces such as physical education offices and storage.

Renovations to the existing building included repurposing the previous gym into the new media center.

The new media center is a creative learning space with new shelving finishes and collaboration spaces.

Renovations to the cafeteria, toilets, hallways and support spaces and kitchen and serving line were also part of this project.

Exterior renovations included painting and soffit repair.

Site work included additional parking, site improvements and outdoor learning areas.

Scottsville Elementary's addition and improvements added approximately 17,500 square feet to the building and added improvements to the existing building site.

The additions included four additional classrooms, two smaller resource rooms, two offices, bathrooms, and a full-size gym.

Improvements to the existing building included repurposing the current gym into instructional space, as well as other modernizations and renovations throughout the building to improve space for both staff and students.

Site improvements included outdoor learning areas and septic system enhancements.

At the completion of the project, all trailers and modular classrooms will also be removed.

The project adhered to LEED principles and practices.

As we've seen with the examples at Woodbrook, Western Albemarle, Red Hill, and Scottsville, significant renovations have occurred concurrently with building expansions and additions.

However, this naturally leads to somewhat unequal school facilities, and we recommend that dedicated renovation funding is needed at all levels.

The last time a significant renovation and modernization budget was approved was in fiscal year 18.

Since 2017, the Long-Range Planning Advisory Committee's highest priority recommendations have included school renovations at all levels.

In a community survey administered during the summer of 2021, respondents recommended that the following are important criteria to use in project prioritization.

Upgrading athletic facilities and outdoor play spaces to foster good physical health, making sites accessible for local and community-based events, adding natural light in classrooms and making it easier to access outdoor spaces, renovating spaces to foster good mental health habits, wellbeing, and collaboration, and improving access for students with disabilities.

The requested renovation project represents substantive investments in our school buildings, including the implementation of recommendations of the high school master plan study.

That video really showed to you some of the projects that we are quite proud of that we have accomplished over the last few years.

And in order for us to continue along that pathway, we need funding that will really take a collaborative effort between the two boards, between you supervisors and we as a school board.

We're asking for your partnership to develop a needs-based capital spending model that supports the future growth and prosperity of our county.

to create a designated funding stream for capital projects, to maintain a prioritized list of capital projects, and to launch an information campaign that will increase community awareness and involvement in our capital improvement efforts.

So far, we have spent our time today talking about many of our proposed expenditures and how those expenditures relate to the goals of our strategic plan.

None of it is possible without increased revenues, and we are currently anticipating a 14.6% increase in revenues next year.

Budget to budget, we are anticipating an increase of $30.8 million and a total revenue stream of $242 million in the 2022-23 school year.

70% of our revenues come from local sources, and this is where we again sincerely thank you, our Board of Supervisors, and our local taxpayers for valuing the public education of our community's children.

As you know, the Governor has introduced a budget that is being evaluated by both the House and the Senate committees.

Comparatively, the House supports a lower annual salary increase for teachers at 4%, with a 1% required bonus, whereas the Senate sticks with the 5% increase included in the Governor's budget.

The House version also eliminates $3.6 million in school construction funds that we have already included in the current CIP model to fund school projects.

We strongly support the Senate version of the budget.

Here we have a snapshot of our funding request by expenditure categories.

It's plain to see that the biggest chunk, nearly three quarters of our $240 million budget, supports instruction.

Instruction includes teaching, school counseling, library and media services, school social work, assessment, staff development, and school level administration and office support.

Our request includes a total increase of $30.8 million, $23 million of which is allocated to instruction, thereby increasing instructional funding to a total of $178 million.

The remaining $64 million of our funding request supports administration, attendance and health, technology, building services, transportation and transfers.

And here's a closer look at our $30.8 million increase.

Over half of our increase is a direct investment in our employees, and that's the $17.2 million compensation shown in blue on this slide.

We believe that this market-driven increase is absolutely essential to attracting and retaining high-quality staff.

The second largest contributor to our increase support supports our strategic proposals, many of which we have talked about today.

and all of which align with the goals of our newly adapted strategic plan.

At $7.2 million and nearly a quarter of our increase, these proposals will move us forward using strategies that are supported by metrics and those metrics are included in our budget book.

Notably, our increase also includes $4.5 million for one-time expenses.

including the $1.5 million transfer to the CIP and $3 million set aside to address the recommendations that will come from our compensation study this spring.

And as shown here, we are presenting to you today a balanced and needs-based funding request of $242 million to the 2022-23 school year.

Since the superintendent presented the draft funding request on February the 17th, the school board has held four budget work sessions as well as a public hearing on our budget.

We will use the month of April to adjust our budget as needed, pending more information on state revenues.

We plan to close out this budget cycle with the budget adoption on May 12th.

Chair Price and members of the board, we thank you again for your time and attention today, as well as your continued partnership and support.

Thank you, Chair Page and Vice Chair Kallsen.

Appreciate your presentations.

Board, we'll go through our order.

Thank you.

I had to fix my volume because I had turned it down.

All right.

I just have a couple of these jotted down in my sheets here.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

It's overwhelming, frankly.

But somewhere in here that the number of students I'm sure is in, I just lost it right now.

But anyway, let me go to the school substitutes who are

The permanent school-based, are those people going to be in the building every day or will they be, I mean for five years I was an on-call person which meant they could call me at eight o'clock and I would show up at ten after for the elementary school where my children went to school.

Those ones should be in the building all the time.

Okay, very good.

$1.5 million to capital.

Is that a one-time this year?

Because that would leverage $10 million, so that would be good.

I can't hear you right now, Chair Page.

Yeah, I'm going to ask Ms.

Kubazawa to answer Ms.

This is planned as a one-time expenditure in FY23.

All right, thank you.

Thank you very much for the presentation, Chair Page and Vice Chair Kallsen.

My question is also with the substitute teachers.

Okay, and if your need is for a substitute

Right, that probably would have to be worked out, but that probably would occur.

But I think in most of our schools, probably at least, you know, one or two people might be missing each day.

So those schools that would only have one substitute, more than likely that person would be used anyway.

Okay, and your desire to have between one and four, is that based on the data of how many

Yeah, I would say you know I just did a school tour and I would say that the majority of schools on any given day absolutely need at least one sub and I wanted to speak up because another thing that I was just talking to Principal Cassandra and she was telling me that having someone who is assigned to a school based in a school, I know Miss Malek you said that you used to substitute at your teacher school,

It allows them to form connections with the students and understand the structures and routines at that school in a much better way than randomly phone call.

And I would absolutely imagine that if there wasn't a need, if there happened to not be a need for a substitute that day, although I imagine it would almost always be filled and they could help out in other ways or go to an additional school because there will probably be at some point some flexibility.

And it also helps teachers out because they know right now teachers

Yes.

There's something else I was going to ask about.

Oh, yes.

Right.

Okay, what do you mean by fully certified?

Because they may not be certified in certain areas, like say for instance English.

Right.

They will be absolutely credentialed substitute teachers, which I do believe requires a college degree.

I think we do that to each other.

Now what I'm going to say is we're doing extra recruitment efforts to try to get retired teachers to come and serve as substitutes.

And Dr. Haas had something to add into what Ms.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and I want to thank Mr. Page and Ms.

Colston.

That was really well done presentation.

Maybe you could do mine next year to the board.

So anyway, yeah, there are a lot of moving parts in the budget, so it's hard to keep track of every piece of it.

These substitutes will have the same qualification as teaching assistants.

It would not be affordable for us to have licensed teachers as substitutes.

They will be the same qualifications as our teaching assistants.

Substitutes in Albemarle County right now need a high school diploma to be a substitute.

and that's the qualification that we have.

And so every school will have a permanent substitute.

We will still reach out to our on-call substitutes.

Just as an editorial note, when I left as an assistant principal, when I left Virginia Beach in 1998, I worked at a high school with 2,200 students and we had six permanent substitutes at the school.

And so it made my job as the person responsible

to have substitutes in the classrooms for missing teachers.

It facilitated that.

The substitutes that were there at the school built relationships with students.

They knew them.

We had continuity of instruction and greatly reduced discipline issues from having strangers come in to work with the kids.

So this will augment the work that we do.

Okay, well, I think you can see my concern regarding someone who has a high school diploma versus someone who has a college degree that is coming in as a substitute.

Because that does not give you the continuity of instruction.

It gives you the continuity of someone being there that they know, but not necessarily of instruction.

So thank you very much.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

So the conversation around the substitutes and the payment said it was one-time funds.

Where are those?

What bucket is that coming out of?

Can we ask Dr. Haas or Ms.

Kumisawa to give me a little bit of help with that one too, the exact part.

I heard at the tail end of the sub conversation, your answer was those are one-time monies?

Supervisor Mallek had asked a question.

So the three, I'll stay on the one time, the three million, the compensation study recommendations, and I suspect I know the answer will be similar to what's on the local government side, but just to confirm, I mean, is this the idea that if you need to do signing bonuses or any sort of type of things like that, you have it available to you to make the hires as they come up?

We did not want to tie up recurring operating funds for the recommendations of something we did not know what the cost would be.

And the compensation study for the school division, that's part of the local government compensation study as well?

Is that covering all county employees?

I believe they're separate studies.

So do you know the cost of yours?

Thank you.

Jumping around here.

The trailer information on the slide that had all the trailers and numbers and whatnot, does that reflect before Crozet edition or after Crozet edition?

Is that like the current state of affairs before the Crozet editions open and ready to go?

Or does that take into account what we're doing at Crozet?

And I'm so far removed from where the trailers are these days.

I don't know if Brownsville had trailers prior to.

Brownsville had trailers, but I'm not sure because Mountain View is one area that requires quite a few of the trailers, and I know quite a few of them are there.

But Ms.

Good afternoon.

Rosalind Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer.

Those numbers likely reflect current state.

I'd have to double check the numbers, but I would guess that that's current state.

Brownsville currently utilizes eight trailers, and those will eventually go away.

We want to make sure that we have a sense of the enrollment next year.

The numbers for the, you know, there's talk about, well, we need a couple new elementary schools and there's one placeholder for one, and then not really a big number placeholder, there's a placeholder out there.

Are the numbers for a new, brand new elementary school?

I mean, how close is that ballpark?

If we really built a brand new elementary school, is that theorizing a 300-seat school?

Is that, is there anything to,

40 million is approximately the cost of a new elementary school.

Sure.

So, but the idea is if into the point of we need money to go into CIP for schools, if you look out in your top three priorities, we've got a number for two of the three.

So the third one would be another $40 million on top of the already $40 and what is it, $32 for the high school center.

Right.

And I don't know if this is best asked to school folks or if this is best asked, Andy, to our team.

And it may be something we can talk about when we go through the whole CIP.

At our presentation on the 23rd, there was the comment that $3.6 million in CIP dollars that could be coming from the state wasn't firm yet.

That is correct.

I think in the Senate version of the state, I believe this is for all school staff to correct me if I'm wrong, because I always hesitate to speak for school staff on school matters.

$3.6 million is included in the Senate's budget.

It is not included in the House budget.

That is correct.

What's the backup plan if it's not?

Yeah, so I'll start with that question and others can chime in if they would like to.

I think we would certainly want to step back and look at the total CIP in the school's priorities.

I think we would look at the 1.5 million that was originally intended to be prepared for renovations and what the school board's thinking may be on that in terms of their priorities.

We could also look at our other assumptions should something have changed.

There's a little bit more of savings than we anticipated based on the impact of the bond refinancing last week.

where it was anticipated to be about a $1.9 million savings over the life of bonds.

It was about $2.6 million for the life of bonds.

Now that doesn't add up to $3.6 million by itself, but I would see us in partnership with the school division getting together over the coming month as we get together to determine how to best position a proposal to then take back to the Board of Supervisors to consider.

Ms.

Schmitz or Ms.

Right.

So I guess my only other question would be for the elementary schools, knowing full well that sites are not necessarily identified for all the projects, maybe some are being theorized, but what are the, if the school division had their way,

When are we plugging these, when would you plug these in?

I mean obviously other than, well right now, but you know if you could say well we've got the centers in for the fiscal year 23, you know we need a southern elementary school online by what school year and we need a northern elementary school online by what school year.

The Southside Elementary School, we would expect or would want that to be within five years or at the end of five years to be completed.

The Northside one, I guess as soon as possible, maybe probably not within that five years, but as soon as possible outside of that gate work of five years.

So they both really needed pretty much right now, but especially the Southside one.

And the renovations at Mountain View won't be able to really

accommodate all of the growth in that area.

And again, Ms.

Schmidt or Ms.

I would just add that because of the pandemic, it's been much harder to project enrollment, especially in the long term.

So every year as we get further out, I feel that our enrollment projections will become more and more accurate.

So by the time we see enrollment for this coming fall, we would have a better idea of exactly which school and when, but at this point it's hard to put years on it because every year we've seen something all the different.

I mean, my own opinion isn't something in the northern feeder pattern better is needed within five years, not outside of five.

But the expansion money is for Mountain View.

Does that take into account?

Okay, we're going to put a second elementary school in the southern feeder pattern.

That's obviously to help with the demand or the issues you're having at Mountain View.

But does that expansion study take that into account?

That school's seen what, two expansions recently?

but five, ten years.

So I'm trying to understand in my head if okay we're going to put money back to Mountain View again plus we're going to do a second elementary school.

I would say yes.

We had a conversation where we kind of went through different scenarios and decided that

Mountain View is in need of those updates regardless of what happens and we still anticipate being able to fill another school.

And I did just want to note that we are going to have a work session coming up about CIP and I believe Kate and Jono sent a letter and then we're going to propose having a joint work session so we can work through some of the finer details.

But even with that expansion at Mountain View, they're still going to be trailer classrooms.

And so yes,

Yes, we did.

Very good, thank you.

That's all my questions right now.

Okay, Ms.

Carlson mentioned

The letter from Mr. Alcaro and Dr. Acuff, because we do want to, once we have met, we'll probably ask again to meet with you, with the supervisors, to see what things we can work out in regards to funding all of the things that we need.

So thanks, Ms.

Supervisor Andrews?

Yes, thank you for an excellent presentation.

It's fascinating and I look forward to this discussion continuing on how to deal with the long-term plans with the CIP.

It's very unfortunate this year to have to deal with more uncertainty

at the General Assembly about budget, I think, than anticipated.

Supervisor Galloway asked about the capital improvements and the 3.6 million in the Senate version, not in the House version.

As I recall, there also were references to an amount for raises specified in the Senate version, not in the House version.

Okay, yeah that would be unfortunate.

I'm trying to, I'm going to just ask a couple questions to try to just probe my understanding of school needs and forgive me this is just for my education, it's my chance here.

There are building pressures and then there are also desires to take and have smaller class sizes.

And I'm wondering if there's a strong sense that there's one driver over the other in terms of expansion of space, whether just the sheer numbers of students in these elementaries

Is there more pressure to try to reduce the class sizes and that is what's driving a lot of the space needs.

It would just help me to sort of get a feel for that a little bit better.

Also would help me to understand when you say that there's uncertainty in the enrollment whether this is uncertainty that's caused by how

The parents are looking at where their children are going to schools or whether there is real uncertainty over the demographics of the school-aged children in the county.

I would think that that would be a number that would be fairly well known, although we're a fluctuating population.

Okay, the problem I think with estimating or forecasting what the enrollment might be is that during the pandemic, quite a few students like left the county schools for various reasons.

And so it's hard for us to predict.

We know that some have already returned and we expect some more to be returning next fall, but exactly how many returned

would be pretty hard to forecast.

So that would be the main thing with the kids coming back into the system.

And then the other thing that would make it hard is just the growth in the county, especially around the urban areas.

There are quite a few subdivisions that have opened in the area near Mountain View.

And the first part of my question is really just trying to understand the pressures on school size as far as classroom numbers or driving down the number of students per classroom.

Right.

I think the main thing, though, would be the increased growth in the county.

We do want to maintain low state standards for the number of kids in our classrooms, but between those two factors,

Thank you.

I'm going to ask just a little question about employee numbers too.

I know you mentioned the 2,640 employees and a breakdown of teachers, administrators, and classified.

I just wondered if almost all of these are full-time or whether there's a different number for full-time equivalents.

Okay, either Ms.

Schmidt or Dr. Haas or Ms.

Kubisaba or Ms.

Carlson.

The data that was presented on the number of employees, that's HR data, so I would assume that that's the number of people that are employed by us.

When we look at budget, we do look at FTE, so in our budget book,

It's a combination of full-time and part-time employees, but we do as a practice strive to hire as many full-time employees as possible, knowing that the benefits and the

Well, and I also noticed, you know, of course you're planning your own HR department, so the number of employees definitely drives a lot of the needs on that.

Human resources, redesign, and I didn't even, I'm ignorant here, are you moving out of the building?

Are you staying in the same spot?

That's it.

Thank you, Ms.

No, I actually, I am curious.

Right.

Okay.

So basically the same space.

Okay.

Well, that's it for me for now.

Again, thank you for an excellent presentation.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for the great presentation.

Just looking at my notes that I was making as you all were presenting, I really do appreciate the focus on learning recovery, intervention, coming out of the pandemic now, and class size.

And I am sorry, but understand that you were struggling just like everybody else right now with recruitment and retention.

It's a huge problem for all of us.

I really also applaud the focus on counselors.

That's something we've been struggling for in Albemarle for years, and I'm glad to see we're actually moving forward on the numbers of counselors that we have available for our students.

I do think, oh, and just to go to the substitute teacher piece, I thought that was a great discussion.

I can remember back in the day principals making 20 and 30 calls in the mornings trying to get someone to be a substitute teacher in a classroom that wasn't going to have a teacher that day and that's just not sustainable.

I guess this is more a comment, but I think the idea of putting permanent subs in the building is great.

I guess if there's nothing in that building they could be assigned to another school on that day where the need would be greater.

Yeah, that would make sense.

I do want to go back, though, to the 5% salary.

From my understanding, just from my memory of the state providing 5% salary increases for employees, that used to filter through our composite index.

And that meant that Albemarle County wasn't going to get 5%, necessarily.

I mean, for the public to understand, and maybe it's worthy of just a little discussion

I'm going to refer to Ms.

We always used to say to the public, we feel the same that the state is paying 5% for Albemarle

Right, right.

I know the composite index did have a big part to do with it previously, but Ms.

Kamuzawa, do you have any insight on Ms.

Has that changed?

Yes, it is the same.

The state pays just a portion of our cost of the five percent salary increase, essentially an incentive

For us to pull down funding, to get the maximum amount of funding, we provide a 5% raise and then we get just a portion of that funded which funds certain SOQ positions.

So that's a community's ability to pay.

And because we have a high ability to pay in Albemarle County, I'm just saying for the public to understand, I think we just need to be clear with the public that the state's not just going to give you all 5%.

For a good salary for all of your teachers.

and I thought maybe something had changed since I was on the board.

Your compensation study, I applaud and of course we're doing the same thing.

Does that compensation study include all employees?

So it's really primarily going to be focused on those positions that are the hardest to fill so that we're comparing apples to apples.

For example, in just comparing classified staff from one school system to another, it's not deep enough.

If you have a master electrician,

that you're trying to hire.

We really need to do a study to see who we're really competing with for the master electrician.

We're competing with UVA, we're competing with private companies, so we need to identify that market and then we need to

So it'll be the ones that we're showing the greatest churn and highest turnover, hardest to fill.

Those will be the ones that we'll be looking at first.

School nurses is another example.

If you just compare flat classified to classified, it doesn't get there.

But school nurses, we're really competing with UVA, Martha Jefferson, the local clinics.

Thank you.

That helps.

I appreciate that answer.

And I do agree with Ned that

A new elementary school is critical, especially in the north and in the south.

The issue is, in my understanding, of course, in the north you have proffered land.

At least one, we have two areas that are proffered.

One that is more buildable right now, I would assume, with the Brookhill piece.

So I'm hoping that those, and I understand you're looking for land in the south for the Mountain View, but I'm really hoping we can move those schools forward.

And I guess just to wrap up, I have one more question around school size.

We have traditionally had small schools, medium-sized schools, large schools, especially in the, and I'm speaking in the elementary school size.

very small elementary schools.

We have discussed that.

And at this point in time, we haven't come up with a figure

We are aware of, and you know, thinking about whether or not there would be an optimum size that would be good.

But right now we don't have that as a figure.

We don't have a figure of what the maximum size would be.

But as a board, we have talked about it.

So as you're putting lots of money into renovations of small schools that have 200 students or 230, I'm not sure what your sizes are right now.

It's an interesting question.

as to what is appropriate, what gives you the best.

And it's more about education for the students in those schools.

True.

Because not about money, but about the small size and the educational outcomes and what's best for the students in those schools.

I would hope that you all are talking about the educational outcomes and the benefits

would not be able to increase those schools to say a Brownsville or a Mountain View size.

Okay, that's all of them.

I thank you for the great presentation and all the good work.

So outside of the CIP issues, you're not requesting additional money for your, for the proposed budget as of right now with Matt's budget.

Just so everybody is clear.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And also, as with the other supervisors, really do appreciate the thoroughness of the presentation.

The information was very easy to follow and understand.

As with the other supervisors, I concur that adding the additional counselor and a permanent substitute at each school is really a great way to start.

Recognizing that apportionment, given the different sizes of the schools, means that some schools will get a little more of a benefit than others by having that, but every school will at least get some benefit by having

that permanent substitute assigned.

Also really do appreciate y'all explaining a bit of the differences between the House of Delegates and Senate budgets and how they impact

pretty substantially the differences between what is proposed in the budget for both construction and compensation and the impact that has on us as a county is in terms of our revenues and expenditures that we would then have to make up for if we don't get some of that state money.

I would love on the CIP to be able to join you as a meet on a needs-based budget but also recognize that you appreciate we have to do a balanced budget and simply will not be able to afford

all of the construction that is requested.

But speaking as the supervisor for the Scottsville Magisterial District, very, very thankful for what you all have done over the last couple of years with Scottsville Elementary School and the attention that's being given to Mountain View Elementary School with all the construction that's been taking place in that part of both Samuel Miller and the Scottsville Magisterial District.

So I have no further questions for y'all.

Yeah, Chair Price.

As Ms.

Carlson mentioned, once we've had some board discussions, we'll probably come back to you to sort of address what you've just said to see, you know, what we can do as two boards to agree on what we can do for funding.

All right, thank you.

And I see a lot of hands have been raised recently, so I'll just go in the order in which I've seen them.

Thank you.

Questions from citizens often focus on where there may be empty seats.

So have you thoroughly looked at all the spaces in your many, many schools and figured out

if there are places in current buildings where there is space in this analysis for new classrooms.

So I know what to tell people.

Okay, I know that there is not, you mean through redistricting?

The chances of that happening would be probably pretty slim because I think that would be fairly difficult.

to do.

But I'll refer that question to to Dr. Haas.

Well, when you look at our enrollment right now, we're about, I'd say about 400 students down from where we were prior to the pandemic, which is about 3%.

And that's spread out all across the schools.

So numbers in our schools are not dramatically down in each individual school.

Ironically, the one area where we have excess seats might be Walton Middle School.

Our middle schools are not overcrowded.

They're at capacity, but they're not overcrowded, and I'm not sure how we would almost have to do a big counterclockwise shift across the county to get students to enroll there.

Our high schools are either approaching capacity, at capacity, or above capacity, and that goes the same for the majority of our elementary schools.

It would be great and amazing if somehow we could gather up the seats and move them around.

And I appreciate the question.

I think we're making the most use out of every facility that we have at this point, feasibly.

Thank you Ms.

Thank you.

Yeah, so the finish up to Supervisor McKeel's question about

aside from the $3.6 million CIP can rely on the state monies.

The compensation money that's included, you are including state funding for the raises that's not been finalized yet.

So what's the potential, what's the potential switch?

Just like we know $3.6 for the CIP, we don't know I guess yet depending on which version it goes.

The amount for FY23 would not actually swing out widely because there's a four percent salary and a one percent bonus budgeted.

The financial impact of it would be in the future years there's a negative impact to us of the lower raise amount that would be provided in FY23

And then there will be impacts to VRS contributions, for example, because those are based on base salaries.

When you say future years, how long does that impact you guys?

Well, any salary increase at a base salary increase kind of carries forward into future years.

So I guess you could calculate the negative impact of that from here on out by losing that 1% in funding.

Because it sort of sets a new level of supplement to pay a certain type of position.

Yes, thank you very much.

Superintendent Haas, I understand that Baker Butler is currently overcrowded.

but yet according to the letter that came out, the principal there said that he could maintain for several years or X number of years.

I'm going to let Ms.

Schmidt address that.

I'll have to pull up the latest numbers, but that school is okay right now because it is utilizing mobile classrooms.

We have concerns over the long term with that.

That's not a long term solution.

So that's why that's the school right now that's driving the need for that northern feeder pattern.

So to answer Mr. Gallaway's question, I would say both schools are needed in the next five years.

and it's going to be a hard conversation with which one to prioritize.

Right, no and I understand that and I hear that from the people who live around there also, you know, about being overcrowded and I guess the temporary solution is portables, the mobile home, the portables, yes.

I wondered, I know your

It's 19.55 I think for your ratio students per classroom.

And I'm wondering if there's been a study done that if you go to being a former, I think I'm the only one that's been a former classroom teacher.

Elementary School T-shirt, besides Ann Mallek and then, excuse me, Supervisor Mallek and then Supervisor McKeel was the nurse.

Oh, and Supervisor Andrews and then, here we go, Superintendent Hawes.

Okay, sorry, everybody.

But the difference between 19.55 or 21

or even 22.

Sometimes when you're a classroom teacher that number varies and it can vary actually from month to month depending on who moves away or who stays.

I'm wondering if you've done a study if that would help if you don't get the funding that you need and if the students in the fall don't

attend or if you don't have this huge influx we're down 400 students what happens if those students don't come

I guess I'm looking for alternative funding to be able to make sure that you get what you want, but then maybe increasing class size by one student or two might also assist you.

So what I would say is, and thank you, that's a good summary analysis of the interplay between class sizes and building capacity.

As you all surmised, when class sizes go up, you get more capacity out of a building, and the reverse is true too.

So as the enrollment in a school building increases, the class sizes start to increase,

Over the years, we've been careful to monitor that and adjust what we are staffing at each school so that we can keep pace with the size of the classes and the overall enrollment in the school and try to match them up.

So when you look at some of our larger elementary schools, you'll notice in terms of numbers, the class sizes do drive up with the exception of, say, a Title I school where you're trying to push the class sizes down.

That's where you have to bring on extra capacity.

So there is an interplay there, and we try to thread the needle of making sure that our class sizes are manageable for teachers, that students get the individual attention they need, and also not just artificially drive up the capacity issues at a school.

So I think we've done a good job of monitoring that.

In terms of enrollment, we already are seeing our enrollment uptick

Based on our projections this year, our enrollment has increased by 160 students since the beginning of the school year.

So the phenomenon of

Public schools losing enrollment is, as you all probably would surmise, is a national phenomenon.

It's a Virginia phenomenon, and we're a part of that.

And so what we're going to see, what I'm anticipating, is that our enrollment is going to come back.

We keep getting a little closer.

I think to where we're going to anticipate that we would be, but this year we've already seen a 160 student increase from where we started at the beginning of the year.

No further questions.

Thank you.

Alright, I don't see any other questions, so again I want to thank all of you for your information and presentations today and

We look forward to continuing the conversation with you.

Board, we're about halfway through our time.

We do have an optional opportunity for a brief recess if the board would like.

I would just look to see a show of hands if anyone would like a recess.

Yep, we do see a couple of people.

So let's take as quick a recess as we can.

We'll shoot for five minutes and be back just a little after 4.30.

All right, thank you.

Hi, everyone.

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Morris.

Yes, thank you.

I also saw Mr. Richardson raise his hand.

Yes, Chair Price, thank you very much.

Before Mr. Bowman jumps back into the presentation, I did want to make one clarification of a question that was asked in the first part of today's work session.

Supervisor Andrews had asked about the actual physical location of human resources, and I just wanted to add

to the discussion real quick that, as the board knows, this has been a transition year for local government to pull away from the shared service model of the school's HR function, also embedding the local government team inside of that function, which has operated downstairs on the first floor of the county office building.

Local government is relocating the human resources function to the county office building at Fifth Street and in fact that office is currently open.

Our new Human Resources Director, Mia Coltrane, officially opened that office, I believe, one month ago today.

And she is in the process of hiring staff and bringing staff on for the local government human resources function.

She also is planning soon to have an open house.

We're waiting until we had a little more

of a reliance on the COVID numbers before we do anything to officially open the office.

But the office is open.

Ms.

Coltrane is operating out of that office.

And to my knowledge, the school staff from the human resources function is currently on the first floor and in the immediate future will remain at that location.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Thank you.

So we'll be shifting gears from talking about the public schools budget related operating budget to our joint county government and public schools capital improvement plan and fiscal year 23 capital budget.

Now there are two phrases on this introductory slide and just to take a moment about to explain the difference and what that means with the board and Kim if you could hop back on one previous slide just so we have that as a reference.

Thanks.

The Capital Improvement Plan, or CIP, is the five-year period of the program from fiscal year 23 to 27.

At the end of this budget process, the board will be asked to approve it.

In addition to that approval, the board is going to be asked to appropriate funding for only the first year of the plan, fiscal year 23.

So, fiscal year 2 through 5 are considered approved.

They are not appropriated until subsequent budget processes.

So in the coming year, years 2 through 5 in the CIP, they'll continue to be refined in the next budget process and every budget process afterwards, as the board considers what the fiscal year 24 to 28 CIP looks like.

I want to note, just while the details of that process have not been determined, staff does intend to prepare and recommend a more formal community agency capital request process.

The details of which are going to be forthcoming on that, that's just one thing we wanted to signal as part of our intent in the 24 budget process.

I don't want to get ahead of myself because we're here to talk about the 23 to 27 CIP, about fiscal year 24.

So now we can go ahead to the next slide.

And this slide is just as an introduction.

And I like it because it helps me, and someone who spends a lot of time with these charts and graphs and details in a 300-page document, just kind of step back and reflect what the CIP does.

Just to summarize and echo the county executive's presentation from February 23rd, when we look at both this five-year CIP and the annual capital budget, it is transformational.

The budget recommendation over five years advances three new school projects we heard about earlier from Chair Page and the school team to address capacity needs within the school system to elementary schools and the second high school center.

The budget recommendation supports the second phase of Biscuit Rim Park that includes trail connections and into the park and athletic fields.

This is a 1,200 acre natural park within the county's development area that provides a park experience unlike any other park.

It combines the natural features of our rural areas with the athletic amenities you'd expect in an urban park.

The budget includes to continue funding the court's expansion and renovation projects to deliver safe and effective facilities to house our judicial function.

and it also continues to support the school renovations and the indoor air quality improvements.

We've heard about it as well.

We also have transportation leveraging program, which provides local funding to draw down state funding for road improvements and bike pedestrian improvements, I should say.

And so before we kind of step back to the high level picture and talk about that recommendation, I would like to tell the story about how we got here.

It really begins this time, really this week, two years ago, at the onset of the pandemic.

and also to lead up what led from there to the work of the CIP Advisory Committee process this fall and how the CIP, the recommended CIP, responds to that committee's recommendations.

So after that I'll share some revenue highlights and a couple slides on debt management and then of course we'll allow some board comments and questions which would allow as much time for and knowing that we are a little behind schedule if we need to continue this on Thursday morning we can certainly do so.

I will say while my presentation was in much smaller chunks last week on Wednesday, it's going to be a longer block of time before I turn it over to the board for discussion.

So moving on to the next slide.

Again, while that recommendation is important, we also need to spend some time on the process of how we got here.

This fiscal year 23 to 27 CIP is the first CIP the board will be asked to approve since the 1-7 pandemic.

The story really begins two years ago, again about this week, where the fiscal year 21 capital budget was really revised and adopted in May 2020 during the early stages of the pandemic.

The county bought several capital projects and programs due to anticipated decline in revenues, an uncertain economic situation, and also a very uncertain bond market at that time.

So given all that uncertainty, a five-year CIP was not adopted, only a one-year capital budget.

and an approach was developed to assess that capital budget as soon as the middle of fiscal year 21 using what we call the 3-6-6 timeframe that refers to the last three months of fiscal year 20, the first six months of fiscal year 21, and the last six months of fiscal year 21.

So for that fiscal year 22 budget development, which was really kind of a mid-year fiscal year 21 and a fiscal year 22 development,

The Board and School Board agreed at a joint meeting in October 2020 to a simplified process where the CIP Advisory Committee was charged to develop a proposal from remainder 21 and then at the start of fiscal year 22.

Given the uncertainty at the time, there was no five-year proposal that was put together.

The CIP Advisory Committee that consists of two Board members, two Board of Supervisors members, two School Board members,

One planning commission member and one community representative met in the fall of 2020.

They recommended projects move forward both in January of 2021, or fiscal year 2021, and then projects at the start of fiscal year 22.

Those recommendations were all approved by the Board of Supervisors.

So that 18 months or so leads us from the last two years to this process.

Well, this next slide is one from the County Executives presentation.

and it compares the fiscal year 23 capital budget to prior capital budgets.

As one can see, the first year of this plan, all the way on the right, is notably larger than any prior capital budget.

For this comparison, I'm using a one-year capital budget instead of a five-year CIP because we did not have a CIP in fiscal year 21 and 22 and so it just would have been an unusual looking chart.

So this is just the capital budget, we tell the same story, or a similar story I should say, where we think back all the way in fiscal year 2006,

There was a capital budget around $23 million, and that has now grown in fiscal year 23 to be a total of $93 million.

I'll note, kind of to call attention what the board may see on the slide in 2010 and 2011.

Those years were impacted by the Great Recession, and we also see the impact of that pause in 2021 that was put on at the onset of the pandemic.

This slide only speaks to dollars.

It doesn't really speak to project complexity or other factors that can shape the capital budget.

It's just one reference point in terms of where we are now to where the county has been historically.

So moving on to the next slide, I want to acknowledge while we're going to talk about the future, the present is also very important because while fiscal year 21 and 22 have had smaller capital budgets in prior years, I want to highlight there's no shortage of active capital projects that are currently appropriated and underway.

They totaled over $146 million and some examples of those projects are listed on the slide.

In the interest of time, I'm not going to run through those.

Some of those began in fiscal year 22 and some of those are continuing from prior years.

As it's for the public's awareness, it's common that you would appropriate all of the capital funding for a project to get under contract and then that work through design and construction would take place over the subsequent years.

So one of the things in this bottom slide is really this theme that's come out through the budget about how we need to work differently.

And this also ties to our theme of making transformative capital investments, really connecting the operating budget and the capital budget and just our own internal structures and how we do business.

The staff considered how we improve our organizational execution on both a $146 million CIP of active projects and the upcoming $292 million CIP.

All in the face of supply chain and raw material challenges, it's demanded that we consider how we work to align our resources internally to deliver on the community's expectations.

So this budget continues through resources and legal and finance operations and project management to continue the evolution that's been taking in recent years to both in county government and public schools.

to make recommended investments that will improve our throughput in getting the work done and also to bring projects more quickly online.

So to look beyond on the next slide, that working differently is not just about adding staff or changing internal structures.

We need to consider the results of when it's taking place.

What we can see is in the last two years, our investments in financial management to date have allowed us to be smarter in how we're funding projects and being stronger fiscal stewards.

to elaborate on what that means and how that positions the board in the CIP.

Prior to the pandemic, there was a fiscal year 21-25 CIP that was never adopted.

It totaled $211 million, and it included a dedicated tax rate increase in several out years of that plan.

As a comparison, this CIP two years later totals $292 million, about $80 million more.

It does not have dedicated changes to the real estate tax rate.

So the question that may be on the board in the public's mind is, how is that possible to put that together of a much larger CIP without that?

And there's really not so much one thing that was done.

It's a combination of lots of small things together combined to position the board to make some transformative capital investments.

So much of the answer is on this slide.

To hit the highlights, first with the bond issuances and refinancing.

In the summer of 2021, the county issued bonds for the first time in several years at record low interest rates.

Part of this was really looking at the new structure in finance and budget, not just with the budget, but the treasury management function being set aside definitely to focus on more strategic treasury work.

That has been followed up in March of 2022 with the refinancing that was anticipated to save $2.6 million over the median life of the loan.

As part of both of these processes, the county's AAA bond readings have been reconfirmed.

There have also been staff's due diligence to revisit all the assumptions in the plan.

For example, we have worked with our financial advisors to update our borrowing assumptions for projects where in the past we had a ratio to fund projects that were eligible 7% cash and 93% from borrowing.

We've updated that to now be

5% cash and 95% borrowing.

Again, in consultation with our financial advisors to confirm we were doing anything that would be too aggressive aligned with our financial policies.

During that time, we have also updated our revenue projections based on the activity we've seen since the fourth quarter of 2021 that's continued into fiscal year 2022.

Those have also created additional headroom for projects.

At the same time, it's not all good news as we've been working with our facilities, environment, and services department since November.

and again late in January to make sure we have the best handle we can around raw materials and project costs knowing that we're just in a time of uncertainty with supply chain and just seeing changes in cost that we typically don't see in a year-to-year environment.

So part of the additional flexibility and revenue has gone to address those project cost updates that are included in the fiscal year 23 to 27 CIP.

Many of those examples are administrative in nature, but I also need to point out there have been significant policy decisions

made by both the board of supervisors and the school board to invest one-time money and leverage state and federal revenues that are moving this capital program forward.

Without the actions of both boards to invest one-time funding into the CIP, the budget would be smaller than it is today.

I'm sorry, the fiscal year, five-year CIP would be smaller than it is today.

Just to hit the highlights, there's $11 million in local funding that has been dedicated from county governments.

And there's also an additional $8.2 million in counting for public schools to pay.

I say accounting because of that $1.5 million that was included in the school board's proposal adopted Thursday, just with the way our processes lined up in terms of the police recommended budget.

Knew that was coming, but certainly did not want to get ahead of the school board's approval.

And of course, there's also the $3.6 million in state funding that the schools are hoping to leverage, again, pending the outcome of the journalism.

So all of that background leads to the work of the CIP advisory committee, which took place in November and December of this year.

So going ahead to the next slide is transition.

I should note that really this work began in October with another joint board of supervisors and school board meeting.

And the board's agreed at that time to some guidance to develop and draft CIP for the advisory committee's recommendation.

that would really be built as follows shown on the slide.

First, staff would prioritize and not ask the committee to revisit any of the previously approved projects appropriated in fiscal year 22 and prior.

That's that top category of 146 million that the board saw on the slide before.

Next, the intent was to prioritize maintenance replacement programs and other obligations which total $144 million in projects.

That is the county's long-standing practice over the years.

It has been to prioritize funding for maintenance and replacement projects.

That is more than a practice.

It is informed by the board's financial policies to note that our intent is to protect the county's capital investment and minimize future maintenance and replacement costs.

Finally, the remaining projects will be prioritized initially for the community consideration using the criteria that were shown on the slide.

So before we move to those projects in the third category, I do need to give a moment to maintenance, replacement, and obligations on the next slide.

Examples of these projects are listed on the slide.

I'm not going to go through them in detail, but I'll note that the top half of the slide are projects that the board would typically see in most years of the CIP.

Obviously, our county governing public schools maintenance programs and other large, ongoing programs like our fire rescue apparatus replacement for engines, ambulances, and so on.

There are two projects though I want to list as of note on the slide.

One is an obligation and one is a maintenance replacement.

They're not typical what you would see in maybe last year's CIP or the last CIP that was approved by the board.

So first, the fiscal year 23 budget includes the final appropriation phase of the course project.

This phase is $18.5 million and is based on the agreement with the City of Charlottesville.

The timing of this appropriation has been accelerated to fiscal year 23, which was earlier than previously planned, in order to lock in pricing by awarding a contract with the General District Court and the circuit court construction as we head into this final phase.

On the court systems modernization project, I spoke to this last week at the summary level in the general funds.

But to elaborate on this further, I do want to turn this over to Kristi Shifflett, our director of performance and strategic planning, to speak to this a little further over the next slides.

Because while there were impacts on the operating budget, there are impacts on the capital budget as well.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for letting me speak with you today.

As Andy said, I'm the director of performance and strategic planning.

You may recall it used to be the PMO.

We've rebranded and a lot of that rebranding connects to what I wanted to share with you today.

It's about really looking at our strategies for large organizational and performance improvement across the organization.

So the core systems modernization is really our five-year strategy to execute on large organizational change to provide those who come in contact with us

and improved experience.

Currently our financial, operational, personnel and customer data is spread out in isolated and redundant locations with no consolidated source of truth or clear systems of record, unfortunately.

The interfaces that are in place between these systems are in some cases manual, can be error prone and difficult to support.

So these systems are quickly becoming unsupportable due to their age and complexity.

So we have come together to put together a five-year plan where we are looking at the first human resources information system that we've had here at the county to replace the community development system

Replace the financial system that we have today, also the tax billing, and hopefully launch a customer relationship management system in our future.

And that's on the five-year look.

So if we move forward, I just really want to, that is all with an eye of being mobile friendly, easy to use and facilitate interaction with county departments and ensure accuracy in real time information and provide a contemporary technology portfolio that's sustainable, supportable, and which presents industry best practices.

We want to provide the respective business processes and technology architecture and information security.

So this is a lot of organizational change because it's going to require streamlining and bringing efficiency and efficacy to the work.

So the strategy before you includes many connecting things.

So policy and process reengineering is taking something today that we might do that takes

you know 10 steps and really trying to make it five as an example.

It's dedicating full-time resources to this work so that we can focus and execute in a timely manner and not drag out projects for long periods of time

It's hard for our organization and staff sometimes where everyone has day-to-day priorities and responsibilities to focus in on projects like this, and so this is asking for dedicated resources to do that.

At the same time, we don't have the functional expertise necessarily without that staff.

So, for example, with the community development replacement, it's going to require the expertise of our planners

and our building inspectors as an example to work on these projects.

But what we will do is support them and bringing in technical expertise who've done implementations before, who understand the technology challenges to support them and help redefine some of these business processes.

Lastly, it includes change management and training.

One of the things we want to be very sure of is that we don't launch anything that, one, we don't realize benefits on.

We want to realize those benefits.

We want to make sure our staff understands how to change, what they need to do moving forward, and also to make sure we provide really great communication and training across the organization.

so that our customers and our residents that they feel a seamless approach.

So my new team in performance and strategic planning have been selected to fill gaps and resources across the organization to merge these strengths and focus areas to successfully implement large organizational change.

This is complemented with functional expertise in the departments and we partner to provide the full scope of services.

The request provides a great opportunity to reduce risk and offer improvement and to move away from our disparate systems that do not connect to seamlessly sharing data across functions.

This will not only improve services but allows us to shift from performing so many steps of a task to now analyzing the data and offering our staff competencies.

that they are often trained to perform.

We believe that as we bring in our new educated highly skilled different staff across the organization they're expecting some of these modern systems that we yet do not have and so we believe it'll also help us with retention.

The last bullet you see here is about the ADP payroll and Camino application submittal that you've already heard a lot about.

These are just first steps to reframe this work and decrease the manual interventions and provide

All right, thanks Kristi.

Kind of covers the highlights we want to hit on the maintenance or replacement category.

On the next slide, or the remainder of the presentation, I wanted to talk through kind of where the CIP Advisory Committee focuses their attention.

These are projects that were included in a draft CIP, which was supported by the CIP Advisory Committee.

There are also additional projects that are recommended to be added, depending upon the financial picture, ending up where it has to go.

So I'm going to talk through these one by one and I'll start with the Biscuit Run Park.

I'll say these are not in any particular order.

I'll say on Biscuit Run Park, it is a project to build out additional phases for a portion of the overall master plan of the park.

Because it has been a while since the overall park was discussed with the board, I'm going to ask Bob Krickenberger, our Director of Parks and Recreation, to provide some history of the park plan.

I'll ask you, as we get to the end of this presentation, if we can say for those questions that are specific to athletic fields, if we could hold those until March 23rd, we'll be discussing those in the context of all the issues around, all the questions around that issue.

But today, if there are questions around the other aspects of the park, we can address those a little bit later in the presentation.

So I will ask Bob if you could speak to the next slides.

Great.

Thank you, Andy and members of the board.

Good afternoon.

I appreciate the opportunity.

With staff felt that it would be helpful to share with you just a very high level overview of Biscuit Run, the planning, development strategy, and the approval process.

However, for the sake of time, I apologize for having to move rather quickly.

There's a lot of information.

So I will be more than happy to send out this presentation to each and every one of you afterwards.

I wanted to just quickly go to a little bit of the background.

Biscuit Park Run is approximately 1,190 acres.

Albemarle County and Department of Conservation and Recreation, DCR, agreed to a 99-year property lease back in around 2018.

Some of the terms with the lease is 80% of the property to remain forested, which is 960 acres, 5% maximum impervious surface, which is 60 acres.

There are just really two major restrictions, recreation restrictions from DCR.

Is that no golf course or no permanent stadium seating.

And additional requirements are the

the Natural Heritage Preservation, the Repairing Buffer Protection and Invasive Plant Species Remove and Management.

Okay?

Thank you.

Now this next slide, and I'm going to go again very quickly, but I wanted to share with the overall park design and approval process.

You can see from the top again, we entered into an agreement with DCR.

And during that general time, it was great timing because our 2018 community recreation needs study pretty much came to a close.

So that information also helped assist us in making some good decisions in terms of the park needs and the park amenities.

As part of that design process, we met several times with the community.

It was at least 60 plus attendees, if not more, at each one of those events.

We had an online survey which provided the community the opportunity to voice their concerns and their recreation desires if they were not able to attend those public engagements.

And staff also met with all our interested groups.

Special Interest Group and stakeholders and such.

A steering committee was developed to even help guide the process.

The master plan was presented to the 5th and Avon CAC.

During the board's December 2018 public hearing, the master plan was presented and after receiving public comment.

The master plan was approved.

From that point, staff seeked approval from DCR, which was also a condition of the lease agreement.

And that master plan was approved by DCR in February, excuse me, May of 2018.

Okay, please.

This slide is some of the findings that came from the rec need study as well as all of the public engagements that we had.

These, what you see here, are the high priorities from each one of those events, the need study and the public engagement.

So we used this kind of as a springboard to help us make those decisions in terms of the park amenities and the biscuit run.

Next slide, please.

Now, the site contacts, let's see.

Biscuit Run is a unique facility, not only inside location and landform, but it straddles the southern urban neighborhood boundary.

With 800 acres of the park in the urban area, the remaining 400 acres in the rural area.

You can see it in this slide and the red dotted line that goes across.

That is the urban neighborhood boundary line.

And I'll go into a little bit more detail in the next slide, but you'll see various access points.

One from Olensburg Road, Hickory Street, and Route 20.

and there is a private, which is a little odd, there's a private 38-acre in holding parcel and you will see that kind of to the left of the property.

We all have always kind of called that the hole in the donut but that has been there since day one.

Next slide please.

Now this is the overall

uh master plan again at a very high level a big picture uh with lots of detail that need to be worked out as we move forward um you can see there the park entrance off of route 20 which is to your right on the map uh another park entrance off of old Lynchburg road which is to the west and a proposed uh street parking off of hickory street

on the northern part of the map.

And Hitcher Street, that would serve that community.

And that location is directly across from Covenant School.

It was, I will say that having more than one park entrance access was a great community interest.

People that led, let's look for an example on Olinsburg Road.

I felt it would be a real inconvenience to drive all the way to Route 20 to get into the park.

So that's why the design team worked to identify these other park access points.

Let's see, the urban neighborhood activity, which is kind of the top, that of the northern portion of the park is programmed to have

of lawns and meadows and small pavilions, picnic areas and play structures.

This again was taken into consideration of those that live or don't have easy access to the park from Route 20.

It kind of provides them more of some recreational activities closer to their actual neighborhood.

On the western portion of the park, excuse me,

Where the Route 20 entrance is, this is where the athletic field will be.

This area was pretty much designed and designated for more active recreation.

and the lower part where you need the 400 acre woods and the southern portion, that is for more passive recreation, less development and it has a lot of natural resources in that particular area and working closely with DCR we felt it was the best to not have much activity, maybe just hiking and mountain biking.

Next slide please.

I'm not going to go through each one of these, but these were the development costs and summary phases from the actual 2018 study, master plan.

Again, as we move forward and there will be some changes within this development scheme due to market funding, site conditions, and demand.

So there's just a lot of work that needs to be done with all of these phases.

And you can see that the estimated cost, total build-out for phase one, two, and three was estimated to be the $34 million.

Next slide, please.

So this is an updated development policy summary for the phase.

Phase 1A, which the funding has been approved, a park entrance off Route 20, 75 spaces, restrooms, trailhead and kiosks, open breeze spaces, and five miles of multi-use trails that are being developed with our staff as well as volunteers.

Phase 1B, which is being currently requested, excuse me, 4 Natural Turf Athletic Field Irrigation, a maintenance facility and equipment yard, the Biscuit Run Connector Trail, which is approximately 2.3 miles from the Fifth Street hub to the main loop in Biscuit Run Park.

Additional parking in the 50 spaces of on-street parking at Hickory Street.

And again, a lot of trails and bridges and boardwalks and such.

Next slide, please.

This slide shows you the timeline for both phases.

Phase 1A is based on the consultant's estimate.

Construction to begin in March 2023 with substantial completion in early fall of 2020.

23.

Phase 1B is approved, designed to begin in FY 23 and construction in FY 24.

Next slide, please.

These two next two will probably be the most interesting of them all.

This is a conceptual of Phase 1A.

Again, you see the entrance off of Route 20, the park entrance with the

the 75 parking spaces that will have again restrooms and a trailhead and the little fingers off to the right and left of the parking or proposed trails.

That little the round area which is to your right that will just be a temporary storage area for the soil and excavating from phase 1a that will be used in other phases.

Next slide please.

and this is Phase 1B.

The lower part you will see would be at that point the existing parking area.

The rest showed additional parkings that are to park the maintenance facility and looking at the athletic field,

Right now, we're proposing four in phase B, but the end result of the total number of fields will depend on the site conditions analysis, site analysis, and actual funding.

Next phase, please.

I'm not going to go through each one of these for the sake of time, but these are just some of the park amenities that is for future park development.

and I just want to note that the future park development total is to be determined.

And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you.

Thanks Bob for that overview.

We'll go ahead on the next slide to the other projects we'll include in that draft CIP and we're not going to go through all of these in as much detail and that was more of a unique situation even in the history of it.

Let's move on to the other projects.

This draft CIP includes a northern convenience center in fiscal year 24.

That would follow the one that is currently underway planned in the southern part of the county.

The image on the slide is a rendering of the southern convenience center that is currently under development.

Funding also is included for a street sweeper fiscal year 23 to increase the frequency of street sweeping in urban areas.

It keeps our bike lanes clear of debris.

It's good for keeping contaminants out of stream, and it helps keep Albemarle beautiful.

Moving on to the next slide, we have additional support for the transportation leveraging program, which can also be used to leverage state funding.

The final item here I do want to spend a little bit more time to talk through is that the CIP includes a placeholder to provide flexibility in the out years to address items that are going to come up from either end of the county's comprehensive plan update and the county's strategic plan update.

This placeholder's use is really recommended to be determined in the next CIP process.

This placeholder is because the county is entering a time of transition where during 23 to 27

The county will have an updated comp plan, which is already underway, as well as an updated strategic plan.

I should acknowledge as we talk about this being a joint CIP, the school board is in a different place as they have adopted their strategic plan this past summer.

So this transition year period impacted staff's thinking around this five year CIP in a couple of ways.

The first of which would be not to develop a CIP with the county's financial and operational capacities fully committed

Prior to updating strategic directions, they'll be set in the next few years.

This approach also recognizes that there are other community conversations that are ongoing, which may impact for capital planning.

This approach doesn't seek to get ahead of those community partners or the county's regional partners.

It just intends to provide that flexibility as those needs are being better defined.

And again, this place will only be revisited as part of fiscal year 24 to 28 process.

Finally, on the next slide is the largest portion of the CIP, which are the investments for the public schools.

My comments are brief as the school board representatives hit on them earlier.

The draft CIP included the high school capacity project.

This is the project that was paused.

Anyone said the pandemic was previously considered and design funding was approved.

This would be the next phase of that project.

The elementary school was included in the draft CIP that was seen by the advisory committee as well as an indoor air quality program that would have some federal funding that would go with that.

There would be some local funding to provide that management.

The majority of that is federal funding.

So when the CIP advisory committee looked at this list of projects, their recommendations were to prioritize three additional projects on the next line.

Should funding be available to fund the cash and debt related to these projects?

And because the county's financial picture was evolving rather quickly in November, December, the committee's focus was really on priorities rather than the dollars and kind of the how for these projects.

So staff indicated, based on those priorities, as the financial picture became clear, we would respond to those.

And on the next slide, we have shown how we responded.

First, with school capacity number three, design funding is included in fiscal year 27 for a second elementary school.

Now, there is no fiscal year 28 in the current CIP, so this essentially is the intent that as we update fiscal year 24 and 28, that year 5 will include the construction funding for that school.

This also increased transportation leveraging program by $1.9 billion and adjusted the timing across the five years to be aligned with the current VDOT schedules.

And this budget also includes $9.4 billion in renovations over five years, which is just a portion of

the school's overall request.

I think in the school board's request, they broke this out among high, middle, and elementary school renovations.

In this recommendation, it really is a lump sum for the school board to prioritize.

So with the draft CIP plus those three projects, on the next slide, we have the donut chart about what this looks like.

We can see in the donut chart, the largest portion on the left side is the public school portion.

And then on the right-hand side is the county government portion broken down by the functional areas that we looked at last week in the general fund.

So the next slide is a snapshot that I like because it puts these major projects by the review by the CIP advisory committee, our maintenance and replacement projects, as well as kind of those two of note projects, the courts and our core systems modernization, all in one slide with the timing of when the appropriation begins.

And please note, this is not when work is going to be completed for those projects, as they may be the good example for the school funding.

The funding will be appropriated one year, but the work to construct the school will be over more than one fiscal year.

So this is just that initial phase of appropriations.

And we can come back to the slide as a reference as there are questions.

But I do want to highlight really again as I started that difference in the five-year CIP and the difference in the capital budget.

On the next slide is a more focused look on what are those projects in the CIP.

So all fiscal year 23 and a shorter list of projects, these are the ones that the board would be asked to appropriate as part of the fiscal year 23 budget later this spring.

So I have just a couple more slides to talk through the revenues and then I'll open it up for more discussion.

This is the donut chart to show where the five-year CIP revenues come from.

As shown on the slide, the largest section is borrowed proceeds from future bond issuances.

The next largest category is cash equity, both ongoing and one-time.

I have one slide to talk through this in a little more detail.

I find it's helpful if you go to the next slide.

When I think about CIP revenues, it's helpful for me, at least, to think about these revenues in terms of what are those that are unrestricted and shuffled among projects as priorities change versus those that may be restricted, where there's a limitation, whether that be in the borrowing requirements for particular projects or whether there be guidance from the state or federal government in terms of how those funds can be used.

So I'm going to start with the top half of the slide, which is the unrestricted portion.

The CIP receives cash from the formula transfer from the general fund.

as well as one-time cash investments from the board and school board that I highlighted earlier in the presentation.

So as part of the mid-year update that both the board of supervisors and school board provided, that has provided the one-time funding in this cash award to help fund projects in fiscal year 23 to 27.

I do have a note on the slide of the $1.5 million we discussed earlier today as part of the school board's request.

That is not yet included in the recommended CIP, but that would be worked through in April as we wait to hear information from the state in terms of how that revenue picture changes.

It will, of course, continue to partner with the other schools on how that shapes and then report back to the Board of Supervisors.

So in the bottom half of the slide, we have restricted sources.

Primarily, these are borrowing proceeds.

We have a total of $187 million approximately in planned borrowing proceeds.

We are planning to do bond issuances for lease revenue bonds in fiscal year 23, 25, and 27.

This is part of really our new approach to get back to regular drumbeat of issuances, which was not the case prior to the end of fiscal year 21.

And the actual borrowings will be based upon the spending and execution of projects at that time.

So in addition to our proceeds, as was noted in the school's presentation, there is state funding that funds our capital request, as well as some federal funding for the school air quality project.

So finally, we're going to move to debt management, which is our last chapter, and there's just two points I want to make here before I open the board discussion.

The next slide is one that we typically show the board every year to show our projected bond activity from where we are today to where we anticipate to be in the fiscal year 27.

So we started this calculation to say, what is our existing debt, which is a total of $199 million approximately.

And we would then project to issue bonds in 23, 25, and 27, as I mentioned on the earlier slide, these would be loose revenue bonds, which would be an additional $249 million.

Over that five-year period, we'd be retiring debt of about $115 million.

So that leads us to a total projected debt at the end of fiscal year 27 at $332 million.

This is just a snapshot in time that we'll revisit throughout the year and every year.

And so one of the big questions we want to look at on the next slide is how does this CIP compare to our financial policies?

And we have the chart on the left is our outstanding debt as a percentage of assessed value to taxable property.

And we can see that the orange line and kind of yellowish line is our policy.

The blue line is where the plan is, and there is headroom in that policy.

The same is true in the chart on the right, which looks at our debt service as a percentage of general fund revenues.

The question we got from the advisory committee process was saying, why did the staff not go further in their recommendation to utilize some of that headroom that is not included in the draft, really the recommended CIP at this point?

The answer is, while that debt capacity exists, there is the cash that is needed to pay the debt service once that debt is issued, as well as the cash that is needed for the initial part of the project that would not be borrowed, essentially the 5% national that I referred to earlier.

So the cash that is available, both ongoing and one time, has been programmed in the CIP.

And so if there was additional cash available, additional borrowing could be done.

But until that cash is identified,

There's not any additional capacity at this time to fund that future debt issuance.

So I want to recognize that I probably ran through these last few slides a little quicker than I would like to, but hopefully I've made up some time to allow as much time for more discussion as possible.

I'll ask Kim if you could leave the presentation up and recognize that we may need to jump throughout the presentation.

Certainly Bob and Christy and other department heads are here if we need to go back to anywhere.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

We will go ahead and go through our order then.

Thank you.

My brain is exploding, as usually happens during budget season, so I will try to be coherent as I go through my pages.

The transportation leveraging 1.9 million in a fairly recent slide, is that going to be annual addition?

It was one of these things that was suggested to be added on as a priority.

Yes, 1.9 million reference the increase to what the CIP advisory committee saw.

So the total amount of transportation revenue

and you know there is funding in every year of the plan ranging from $2.1 million up to $7.5 million and the out years is more than $3.4 million.

Okay, very good.

Thank you.

That's really exciting for me because that's going to double us coming back and anytime we can get extra money from the state, I'm happy.

For the list, which I know you'll work on because they're not things we're going to talk about today.

Could we please consider and talk about later for the ACE program in the out years?

I understand we're studying it this year, but if we can have something in the out years to make sure that we are able to draw down the state money, which the smallest I think it's ever been is over $100,000, and in some years it's as high as $500,000, but that depends on the state.

The state is having a much higher funding

I think agreed in the budget already for the conservation programs.

So that would be a reason from my perspective to have something in the out years to start with as we do those budgets.

I know that on the non, I just got several emails today from folks about Western Park so I will have to find out.

I do not think there's anything in this budget even in the additional years for funding that, but I will follow up on another time with that question.

That is correct.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

Yes, following up on Supervisor Malek's statement regarding the ACE program, I understand that we put that on pause for, I don't know, up to a year maybe to study it, but if there are funds that are coming from the state, are we going to miss out on that by putting the program on pause or is there some way we can access those state

Monies.

Can someone answer that?

I'll speak to this in two parts.

The first of which ACE program is currently going up and going into assessment and community development.

The current schedule for that to come back to the board is in June, at least tentatively that has been scheduled.

Okay, and I didn't hear when, when did you say that we're listening?

Okay.

Thank you very much.

No other questions.

Good presentation.

No, thank you.

I mean, I think a lot of questions that I probably have can come as we continue through work sessions.

I'm going to hold off on some of the Biscuit Park or responding to some of the Biscuit Park because I think that'll be tied into the conversations we have on the 23rd when Darden Tow is discussed.

But I will say today that you know some of my past views or thoughts about Biscuit Run was when I thought that we had approved funding for the other project and if that changes then that could change how I think about the Biscuit Park stuff so I might as well flag that now for further conversation when we get there on the

on the 23rd.

You know this last slide that we were on and we had the

understood the point you made Andy but we also in the CIP we've been working off over pre-pandemic was based on a joint local government school board meeting and that's when the transportation leveraging was seen as number one and a lot of priorities were set by both boards so we're still seeing that and now since we're coming out of the pandemic time and have to get going.

It gets a little confounding to me to think about this elementary school when I don't know yet where or when.

You know, but that can be worked out.

We have to have the placeholder for the money, I understand, but at some point there has to be some decisions made about here's the location, here's the size, here's the actual cost.

You know, whether we find that out this budget cycle or have to wait until the next CIP swing for that, then I guess we'll wait and see.

That's all I have right now.

Thank you.

Supervisor Andrews.

Yes, thank you.

This is a lot to digest.

It's interesting stuff though.

And obviously the trepidation, look at the assumptions about interest rates in the future and borrowing costs.

and I did note that it says the 322 refinancing savings, I just wonder whether recent effects in the market have changed that at all or if you anticipate that because I couldn't tell whether that was the future tense or past tense for the March 22.

We can start there.

The issuance was based on something that took place last week.

Oh, excellent.

That's great news.

So I'm just worried about what's going on here.

March is going by fast.

Okay, I just want to follow up, there's a slide that talks about the different number of, which years different projects are, the diamonds, if you could jump to that.

Okay, so I'm looking at the last one, Core Systems Modernization, and I'm just trying to understand what aspects of this

how they carry forward in future years.

How much of this is, I know there's a lot of, you know, there's Camino I assume is part of this, although that actually was fiscal year 22.

Are there things like that that are expected?

I'll ask, I'll ask Ms.

Absolutely.

Thanks for the question.

So the community project isn't implemented in this.

It was just the first step as the intake application process that launched before.

This is really, each year we are looking to implement a system but also launch the organizational work I talked about where we prepare the RFP

We do a lot of business process review and we'll look at the redesign.

So for FY23, we are focused on the HRIS and the County View replacement.

For FY24, we're looking at the financial system replacement.

For FY25, it would be the tax billing.

So, and then, you know, the last would be the CRM.

It does sound like a lot of these are based on new software systems.

Yes.

You're correct.

There is, it is a blend, so the request blends operating and capital once some of it's one time and ongoing.

So sometimes there's a one time where you would procure and buy

that a piece of equipment but others are ongoing services that we would continue to pay for.

So that's built in and then this also includes full-time positions in order to look at the maintenance and sustainability of those systems.

Often we have procured and implemented a system without the full-time employee to focus on keeping that up to date and current and improving the needs.

Thank you.

This is very helpful.

I recognize that, you know, starting even from the point of view of software, that talking about capital improvements in this context gets a little fuzzy.

And that was actually clear to me, so I understand it a lot better now.

Thank you.

My only other minor question, Biscuit Run, I know we're going to talk about fields later.

I know that there was mention of the entrances off of Old Lynchburg Road and 20.

There are, you know, obviously different aspects to the park in different places.

Now, sir, at this point in the design phase, the roads will not connect with one another.

We feel from a safety standpoint and management standpoint, having these proposed

Okay, I think I agree with that.

Exactly right, which activity, and that's why we've tried to play very, very close attention

Nice.

Excellent.

I'm really looking forward to spending time with you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

All right.

Yes, thank you.

Jim, thanks for the good questions.

I really think it's wonderful that we finally are addressing this core systems modernization, trying to bring us into at least the 21st century.

And I appreciate your questions about all that.

It's very, very important work for our organization.

I have a question on page 23.

I'm going back to the Biscuit Run presentation on 23.

And my question really, I could have just probably written it down, but my question was, it looks like to me we are basing our costs on 2018.

which concerns me greatly since we all know how much our costs have changed since 2018.

Great question, Supervisor McKeel and working with park staff.

We wanted to note that these were 2018 costs.

This is what was last presented to the board when we went through the master planning process.

The information that Bob shared a few subsequent slides later reflects current day cost.

So it goes without saying that phases one through three today would be more than what's listed on the slide.

We just haven't gone through that effort and updated all the cost projections on the future phase work.

This really is just kind of an order of magnitude of what the costs were predicted back in 2018.

OK, that's helpful.

Thank you.

So I need to go back and I looked at this and saw that in red.

I need to go back and look at the updated projections that you have that have are more current.

Yes, ma'am.

And of course, they're all a moving target at this point.

I will say that I agree with Ned.

I agree for my supportive Biscuit run was based on specific projects and plans we had for Darden Powell Park.

So that discussion is going to be happening, but I made my decision about Biscuit based on other plans that we had for Darden Powell, just to let that stand.

I guess the other thing that I wanted to mention was the planned review of ACE.

And because we have not reviewed ACE since 2002, which is 20 years, I am just wanting to make sure that

We are able to have a full review of the ACE program.

For example, I have specific things that I would like to have looked at in that review.

Are we not going to have a chance to have input into those reviews like ranking criteria and some of those?

I'm just trying to figure out.

We're talking about it coming up in June and we had a review a few months ago by an employee

I'm just questioning what the June review will be, and will you be asking for input from us about that review ahead of time?

Thank you Chair Price, members of the board, Doug Walker, Deputy County Executive.

We do at this point anticipate that the review of the ACE program is going to be in a number of phases.

The first of which

will be reviewed with the board in June.

That would include an assessment of the process, a review of the program history, its effectiveness, its review of funding and remaining funding that currently exists for the program, known constraints and opportunities, and then they get all wrapped into an overall program assessment.

That is what staff is preparing to present to the board at a work session in June.

There is additional work and significant work that we anticipate needs to occur as part of the comprehensive planning process to understand the overall conservation program goals that then would inform future policy considerations by the board.

At any point, we would anticipate that the board could advance funding to support acquisition of conservation easements if that's what they choose.

But we do see that this is both a near term and a longer term evaluation and understanding of what the board and community's goals are.

for the overall conservation programs as it relates to the AIDS program specifically.

Right.

Mr. Bowman, on behalf of everyone who assisted you in your presentations today, the complexity and sophistication of the operating and capital budget for our county is both astounding and all of your collective works are outstanding.

If you would go back to slide 41, just very briefly, please, I want to just comment on that.

Again, when we look at the complexity, the sophistication, the dollars, the fact that we can still see that our outstanding debt as a percentage of assessed value and as a percentage of general fund and school fund revenues is still below those caps is so critical to provide the flexibility and the cushion that we need.

I think we all may be wondering whether the financial climate will be as unpredictable

and the future as our weather climate has become over the last few years.

And so for this budget to be prepared with that flexibility allows us the capacity to deal with interest changes and inflation.

So Mr. Richardson, your entire staff, yourself and your entire staff, really deserve great credit to be able to do this and to do it without having recommended an increase in the tax rate this year.

I have no questions right now.

simply appreciation for the work that you have done.

Thank you.

I was just going to appreciate more looking at the headroom slide because this is one that I always have in my brain knowing how quickly that cushion can evaporate if the real estate values happen to fall.

which has happened now and then over the last time and so we're really being cautious and I appreciate that caution very much because that way we can all sleep at night.

My final slide, which we don't need to pull back up, was just to conclude that we'll be back on March 17th.

While these work sessions are typically from three to six, due to scheduling conflict, this one actually will begin at 8 a.m.

The board will be requested to take action to propose a tax rate for advertisements and a budget for advertisements, and I'll run through the details of that on Thursday.

We can certainly, as we are, continue to respond to the board on questions, and we can bring it back into topics better as a discussion on Thursday as well.

But really that concludes my comments and thank the board for their attention and participation.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

If I could, I'd say take the rest of the day off, but that's Mr. Richardson's priority, so I'll have to leave it with him.

I was just thinking back to Bea LaPisto-Kirtley getting a roll call of raising of hands of all the teachers that have taught and on that note I would ask the teachers to let the staff go out and play for the rest of the day because it is quite nice outside so maybe we can do that if that's okay but I do appreciate staff and board you've always got good questions as was the case today.

And Andy, great job.

We'll come back on Thursday if there's questions that originate out of today.

Andy collects those and he pushes it back out to the board.

We have been requested to provide a letter of support from the board for a restorative justice diversion grant application.

And so I believe everyone has had a chance to see the letter.

It's comparable to what we did last year.

We have a motion and a second.

Any further discussion?

Seeing none, the clerk will call the roll.

Mr. Bissell-Kirtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Rowley.

Yes.

Mr. Keel.

Yes.

Ms.

Pardes.

Aye.

Mr. Andrews.

Yes.

Mr. Gallaway.

Yes.

All right board, we'll see if there are any other items from any members of the board out on the agenda.

No items, just it's time for recess.

Supervisor Galloway?

Nothing for me, thank you.

Thank you.

Supervisor Andrews?

Nothing from me, thanks.

Thank you.

Nothing from me.

So at this time, Board, we will adjourn.

We will reconvene on March 16th at one o'clock

Thank you everyone.

Good afternoon and we will see you in a couple of days.