Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session #2 – School Board Funding Request and CIP, Monday, March 11, 2024

Date: Monday, March 11, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, Virginia
Length: 3h 10m (video)
Official meeting video (Granicus): https://albemarle.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=934
Official agenda: https://albemarle.granicus.com/AgendaViewer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=934

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-16. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] worth that good afternoon uh pleased to call to order this specialty in the alphamore office county board of supervisors on this 11th of march 3 p.m in room 241 of the back of our building i'd like to know supervisor present here uh mr mike through it from the scottsdale district the pico kirtland uh the revana district of the jack jack jewett district galloway mariah district is the whitehall district myself from the samuel miller district forum is present we're also joined by our county executive mr jeff richardson

[00:00:33] our county attorneys there mr steve rosenberg welcome um and our clerk uh mcborderson um i'd also like to welcome our upcoming police officers present i'm at your police officer garner riley and officer james morris uh thank you for being here thank you for what you do for our citizens every day in your service and at this time i'll turn it over to miss judy lee the chair of the opel county school board for her introductions thank you very much um chair andrews um thank

[00:01:08] you to anybody i'm i'm here judy lee uh chair of the school board vice chair kate acop is here also we have in the audience chuck pace and ram page joining us here today we also have staff superintendent Matt Haas, Rosalind Schmitt, Helen Dunn, Jennifer Butler, and Maya Kanzawa, and then Josiah Black.

[00:01:31] Okay, thank you. Welcome. And at this point, I will turn it over, I believe, to Mr. Andy Bowman, the Assistant Chief Financial Officer with Senator Sunders, also. Just to start it off very briefly, today is the second Budget Board session on the County Executive's Fiscal Year 25 Recommended Budget. Really, two items on the agenda today. First, to hear from the public schools and their operating requests and to allow the board time to engage with them. After that, we would recommend a break and then we will come back and continue in the general fund where we ended at the public safety chapter on Wednesday and then we'll continue from there. With that, I'll turn it back over to the chair.

[00:02:11] Okay. Well, I believe that back to our presentation on the school budget. Thank you. - Thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity today to make a brief presentation to you about where we currently stand with our funding request.

[00:02:28] After our presentation, we and all members of our school division staff will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. As always, this is a needs-based funding request that focuses on maintaining services for our students, as well as containing some clicker.

[00:03:10] - Thanks, Jeff. It's all about you. - Okay, thank you. - Thank you, Nicole.

[00:03:27] as we wrote in our recent letter to you the basis of any public service is to work together toward the betterment of our community we're very fortunate to partner with the board of supervisors that genuinely cares about the quality of our public schools not only the quality of the buildings themselves but also and most importantly the quality of the opportunities we provide to the students who attend them thriving communities are home to thriving students and we recognize and appreciate your commitment to supporting the vision, mission, values, and goals of the Alcamore County Public Schools. We do not want to miss this opportunity to thank you in person

[00:04:03] for your recent support of our appeal to amend our capital request and increase funding for our two critical projects, our new Southern Feeder Pattern Elementary School and High School Center too, as you can see in those slides. Your partnership with us will help us address capacity needs and support student success. In a county growing student enrollment and where our youngest schools are more than 20 years old, and our oldest schools are nearly naive. We know our capital improvement plan still faces challenges, but we also know that we have the support of our world security members, and for that we sincerely thank you. As I mentioned today, we're presenting

[00:04:40] a new needs-based funding request. That request currently includes a sizable funding gap of $13.3 million. We are presenting a shortfall today because our budget development process is not yet over, and this is where we are right now. Primarily, we're awaiting updated state revenue members, and our outlook is positive. We also have plans for how we would make expenditure reductions should they be needed. We'll also talk about why we have a gap, but the most important thing I want to communicate is that every budget decision thus far has been made in an effort to maintain current levels of service and sustain an upward trajectory for our learners and our employees. Every year, we include our strategic plan in our funding request, and we do so because

[00:05:19] our vision, mission, values, and goals provide the scaffolding for every decision that we make, budget is obviously no exception. We take care to align our budget decisions with strategic goals that focus on the well-being of students, supporting and strengthening our community, and distributing resources in a way that affects the positive change in outcomes.

[00:05:45] While our strategic plan guides our budget decisions, we also consider the valuable feedback and guidance from our recent instructional audit. One of the recommendations from the audit involves using a planning tool called a theory of change to identify to identify strategies actions and resources that can facilitate change and bring about desired outcomes this process includes reflecting on the various roles of the people in our school division and the influence of those roles on student success we're still creating our theory of change but we're focused on the idea that we each play an important part in transforming the words of our strategic plan

[00:06:22] into actions that positively affect student learning in our it is our collective ownership commitment, flexibility, and accountability that power our strategic plan and make it come to life. Our budget development process is an example of our strategic plan in action. We have five primary budget goals. To develop a budget that advances the school division's mission. To provide a plan that supports competitive benefits and salaries and reflects market adjustments. To develop a responsive and systematic approach to operations that reflects best practices and ensures long-term financial stability. Present budget proposals that align with school division's strategic plan

[00:07:01] and the school board's policies, and to incorporate metrics such as logic models and performance measures into our management and decision-making tools. Whether we are facing decisions large or small, these are the operating principles we look to for guidance.

[00:07:20] One of the most vital components of our budget development process is community engagement. I mentioned before that we each play an important role in transforming our strategic plans into positive impacts on student learning. That plays out in our budget development process, which includes a variety of ways for students, staff, families, and community members to participate and provide an aid. In turn, we use that feedback to determine priorities and develop strategies in building our aid.

[00:07:46] Before we jump into the numbers, I'd like to provide a quick update on the employees and students of ACPS. Our greatest resource is and will always be our dedicated staff. This year, ACPS employs 2,792 employees, half of whom are teachers. Administrators, including our principals, assistant principals, and central office leaders make up just 6% of our workforce.

[00:08:09] Classified staff, including all non-teacher and non-administrative positions, such as teaching assistants, bus drivers, custodians, and office associates, make up the remaining 43% of our employees. 69% of our teachers have at least a master's degree. 24% of our employees are people of color.

[00:08:26] The average age of our employees is 45, and employees have served our division for an average of eight years. 64% of our employees live in Albemarle County, 12% live in Charlottesville City, and the remaining 24% live in surrounding counties. This school year, our 2,792 employees are serving more than 13,800 diverse learners in preschool through 12th grade, 42% of whom are students of color.

[00:08:56] More than 1,800 students, or 13%, are eligible for special education services. Nearly 4,200 students, or 30.4%, are economically disadvantaged, meaning that their households meet the income eligibility criteria for free or reduced-price school meals.

[00:09:12] And more than 1,600 of our students, or 11.9%, are English learners, meaning that their first language is a language other than English, and they are participating in a special program for learning English. Our students are also internationally diverse, representing 100 counties of origin and speaking 76 home languages.

[00:09:32] And here we are, as promised, the why behind the funding gap. You might notice a big and unusual dip in state funding in fiscal year 25. While our funding request is growing by a modest 5% between this year and this, state revenues are decreasing by more than 11%.

[00:09:50] As you know, the state uses local composite entities, or LCI, to determine each school division's ability to pay education costs with local funds. lci is calculated using three indicators of a locality's ability to pay the true value of real property weighted 50 percent adjusted gross income weighted at 40 percent and taxable retail sales which is weighted at 10 when our composite index goes up the state estimates that our county can take on a greater share of education spending using local numbers and it provides less funding for the 2024 to 2026 biennium our lci has been calculated at a higher rate and the state will

[00:10:28] share less of the burden burden for education costs at alderman county to put that change into perspective if we applied our new higher lci to state funding for the current school year we would have received about 10 million dollars less from the state so our higher lci calculation is a primary reason for the drop in state funding we're expecting for fiscal year here's a snapshot of anticipated revenue from all sources we're budgeting for a 5.3 increase in local revenues and an 11.2 percent drop in state funding that's more than eight million dollars less from the

[00:11:03] state and our federal revenues are maintaining steady at just over 600 000 altogether that equals a 0.7 percent increase in recurring revenues or 1.85 million in the current fiscal year we applied 2.2 million dollars in one-time revenues we're not currently budgeting for use of one-time revenues in fiscal year 25 though it is still under consideration so right now we're facing a five five percent increase in expenses and a revenue stream that is approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars less than our current operating budget i will point out that state revenues are based on the governor's proposed budget from december however we are expecting a

[00:11:42] new really improved funding forecast from the state papers our five percent expenditure increase totals just under 13 million dollars and includes elimination of one-time expenditures from fiscal year 24 baseline adjustments in the form of mid-year compensation changes that were were applied in January, and some technical and non-discretionary changes, including a projected increase in healthcare costs for fiscal year 25, which we discussed, inflationary increases in operating costs, and a transfer to BrightStars to offset the decrease in state funding for the program, while also expanding the number of preschoolers we can serve. The biggest chunk

[00:12:21] of our expenditure increase is allocated to five proposals, totaling $10.4 million. These are not proposals that will move us closer to meeting goals of our strategic plan, rather they're necessary to help us maintain current levels of service. Speaking of maintaining services, I wanted to take a moment to point out just briefly that public schools today do more than ever to meet the social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of our community's children. Over time, the role of public schools has shifted to absorb more and more responsibilities that were once considered the function of families, society, and government. Health and physical education, school transportation,

[00:13:00] fine arts, school meals, preschool, after-school programs, family life. The list is long, but we embrace these responsibilities because we know they're necessary for students to learn and thrive, and we are uniquely suited and committed to providing every student with these levels of support. You will see that the proposals we've included in the funding request are not ambitious, but necessary, based on the learning expectations of schools and the services we're responsible for providing. Each year, our proposals, and there are five included in this request, represent the

[00:13:37] highest priorities for the division. As part of our budget development process, we collaborated with students, staff, families, and community members to assemble a list of priorities that reflect the most significant needs and desires of our school community and set us on a path toward accomplishing the goals of our strategic plan. Unfortunately, our funding restraints limit where we can realistically tackle and leave us unmet needs. In alignment with our commitment to produce a needs-based funding request, we're forwarding five proposals for fiscal year 25 that help us offer a competitive and equitable compensation program, meet the growing needs of our English learners and students with disabilities, ensure ongoing and equitable

[00:14:16] access to our social-emotional supports, and serve the academic needs of our most at-risk learners. And now I'll hand it over to Vice Chair Acuff to address those proposals. Thank you, Chair Lee. And good afternoon, Chair Andrews and members of the Board of Supervisors. I'll go into a little more detail now about the five proposals. The 3% compensation increase we're proposing at a cost of $5.7 million emphasizes the importance of sustainable wages, competitive pay, and standardized increases for all staff. First and foremost, our employees must

[00:14:54] be able to adequately support themselves and their family. More than three-quarters of our employees live in either Albemarle County or Charlottesville City, where the cost of living is among the most expensive in the state. Sustainable, however, is not enough. Not if we want to attract, hire, and keep exceptional employees. Our wages must also be competitive to maintain our position in the 60th percentile of our market. We've also committed ourselves to internal equity, and one way to accomplish that is to standardize increases that provide all

[00:15:28] employees with the same chance at income wages. Lots of cybers. Two of our proposals totaling just under $500,000 each include additional staffing to serve our growing English learner and special education population. Over the past 10 years, as you can see in the chart on the left, we have experienced a 48% increase in the number of English learners that we serve. And as a percentage of our total student population, English learners have grown from 8.3 to 11.9% of our total student

[00:16:06] body. We also see unpredictable increases in this population, as evidenced by the more than 100 additional English learners we've enrolled just since our September 30th count. Students with disabilities is another population where we've seen significant growth. Compared with 10 years ago, we are now serving 33% more students in our special education programs. In that same time, students with disabilities increase from 10.1% of our student population to 13%. Again, the growth

[00:16:40] doesn't just occur year to year. Between September 30th and December 1st, we gained an additional 120%. But these populations aren't just increasing in number, their needs are also shifting. In addition to increasing our ability to serve our growing English learner population, an additional five FTEs will help provide support to needed instruction that reflects the division's ongoing equity work. Many of these students, in addition to not having language skills, have had very spotty

[00:17:16] or absent education. Likewise, the increase in our special ed population is marked by a significant and unpredictable increase in the students with medically complex needs. The five FTEs we are requesting to boost special ed staffing will address the growth, the academic needs, and the increase in medical complexity of our special education students. The fourth area is social and emotional supports. Even before COVID, ACPS had recognized the importance of focusing on our

[00:17:53] students' social and emotional health, and it added a few staff positions. Then through one-time pandemic relief funding, we were able to staff each of our 24 schools with one social and emotional learning coach, or SEL coach, beginning in the 21-22 school year. These are specialized professionals who are committed to the equipment students with the essential skills for conflict resolution, academic focus, self-awareness, emotional regulation, and stress management. They also

[00:18:27] provide vital support in crisis situations with the lapse of the federal american rescue plan funding our fy 25 funding request proposes absorbing the cost of our opera in our operating budget to maintain our current social emotional supports and to upgrade a dip to a differentiated staffing model that would allow us to provide additional spel coaches at schools that demonstrate need. This proposal adds 2.7 million to the FY25. So why do we rank social and emotional supports

[00:19:06] on our priority list? In the aftermath of COVID-19, national studies show that many students are struggling with increased levels of stress, depressive thoughts, and anxiety. Unfortunately, Albemarle County is not immune to this. The results of the Virginia School Survey of Climate and working conditions demonstrate both the prevalence of mental health issues you can see in the two charts on the left but also the importance of effective and accessible mental health and social emotional supports in our schools and the bottom line is that students

[00:19:42] must have their social and emotional needs met to be open to learning our sel coaches operate as part of a tiered continuum of mental health and social emotional supports at the base of this continuum or pyramid is a Tier 1, which works to provide early intervention and prevention services and to integrate those services into instructional materials and school activities. Tier 1 is where you'll find our SEL coaches along with our student safety coaches and our school counselors. This tiered model calls for increasingly intensive and individualized levels of support in Tiers 2 and

[00:20:22] three where tier one services are supportive but continued but the needed services are continued by social workers the department of social services region 10 our special ed team our school psychologists and like licensed therapists to give you an idea of program usage last year we logged 24 000 interactions either in the form of providing direct services to students ranging from career counseling to crisis intervention or in the form of support of students such as helping families access basic needs in the community making referrals to outside

[00:21:00] agencies in support of our students or consulting with parents on how to help improve student attendance as of last week we've surpassed 20 000 interactions for the current year the last area that in our proposal is intervention services. Intervention services is another area unfortunately impacted by shifts in federal grant funding as well as inadequate financial assistance from state titles. Note that these shifts are euphemism for the loss of state and federal funding for

[00:21:40] these 10 positions. Our funding request includes as a result the increase of just under a million dollars to maintain our current level of direct intervention support provided to students by reading specialists and reading and math interventionists. Our proposal also involves taking this opportunity, I guess, of not being funded to restructure our current staffing formula to allocate intervention services according to school size and need. Our proposed model addresses

[00:22:11] a loss of six response to intervention FTEs, and the loss of Title I support for four reading specialists by funding 10 intervention FTEs through our operating budget. Again, just a little background of our level of need. This chart demonstrates the incident of student need for literacy intervention services across all grade levels. I'll bring your attention to the orange dotted line, which is our 20% line, and that's what the literature or the research tells us

[00:22:46] we should anticipate for the need for intervention, for literacy. The blue bars indicate the number of students at ACPS who scored in the high-risk band based on our own literacy screenings, which we conduct for grades K through 3, grade 6, and grade 9. And the green line shows the numbers of students who failed their reading SOLs in the previous year. We cannot afford to lose 10 FTEs due to a loss in grant funding. We need to absorb these costs locally to provide instructional

[00:23:25] support for our students in need. And I suspect, although I have not seen the data, that the interventionist for math is similarly configured. These five needs-based proposals totaling 10 point four million dollars account for 80 percent of our five percent expenditure increase community engagement is one of the most vital components of our annual budget development process this budget season we met with multiple advisory groups which reflected the community survey we

[00:23:59] hosted listening sessions with staff and we accepted public comments at our goal meetings one of the outcomes is this list of priorities reflecting the needs of our school community and the aspirations of our strategic plan. We can't fund all of these. We know that. And even though they're important and worthy, you can see that we have folded the five priorities that we included in our funding request. I want to reiterate that we are approaching this tough budget year by focusing our funding efforts on the priorities most critical to helping us maintain

[00:24:34] service. So now we come to a summary of our funding request for $272,900,085. We can look at our spending plan in multiple ways. For example, the chart on the left organizes our total expenditures by part wherein 71.7% of our expenses are school-based, meaning we can track them to the exact school location. This category includes our classroom teachers, classroom

[00:25:09] support staff, principal counselors, office staff, security assistants, school nurses, and custodians. Administration makes up 5.8 percent of this budget. That includes our executive services, human resources, professional development, community engagement, communication, strategic planning, fiscal services, and safety and security. The chart on the right shows the summary of our total spending by expense type to the point that our employees, our greatest resources chart shows that almost 86% of our expenditures goes toward people in the form of benefits, salaries, and

[00:25:49] other wages. Yet another way to look at the funding graph, it's a seesaw, where the funding gap of $13.3 million currently separates us from our ability to maintain our current levels of service. We are proposing a 5% increase in expenditures, but as you know, based on the governor's proposed budget, our funding stream is shrinking. And as you know, this preliminary funding gap we're presenting to you today is not our final budget, but a necessary part of the budget development process. That is not complete, and we look forward to receiving

[00:26:27] updated funding numbers from the state mid-month. We are anticipating they will help us. this gap. If the revenues don't improve, once they don't improve enough, we've identified multiple options for addressing the funding gap. We may apply monthly revenues, we may make reductions, we may reduce the timing or the magnitude of our proposals, or some combination thereof. Clearly, our approach to addressing any funding gap will involve a plan for both revenues and expenditures. With regard to revenues, we now expect to

[00:27:05] the updated state budget numbers later this week um the early uh the early numbers from the house amendments and the uh senate amendments had a range of 1.7 to 6 million dollars more we're hoping for in the four to five million dollar range we'll know more this week um and again we may consider revenues we may also consider applying some one-time revenues um with respect to closing the the funding gap on the expenditure side, five options for finding trimming expenses on this

[00:27:42] site are under consideration. Although in the exact magnitude and pattern of trimming will be a function of the revenue gap in April when the school board will be a function of the revenue gap in April when the school board will balance the budget. Although we're always looking ways, looking for efficiencies, we would revisit our efforts and look at some other areas in our work.

[00:28:08] First, we would reduce our operating expenses, perhaps by deferring the placement cycles, furniture, technology, equipment, and areas that don't directly impact these structures. Secondly, it's working with the department to adjust the budget to account for areas where we've underspent or miscalculated what we needed to spend.

[00:28:29] Third, we would re-audit organizational structures and programs which show us efficiency and effectiveness. business, then it becomes even more difficult. We would reduce the number of budgeted positions. This typically doesn't need layoffs.

[00:28:44] It means hiring freezes. In doing this, we would want any central offers or department-based reductions to match or exceed any kind of school-based reductions. That said, such reductions would necessitate an increase in class sizes, which we know is not favorable for our students or supported by the school community.

[00:29:06] resort we could modify our proposals to decrease for example we might adjust the timing or the amount of our compensation increase or reduce but not eliminate the number of fd2 proposed so let's talk takeaways i hope this presentation has impressed upon you that number one this needs-based funding request focuses on main community service in alignment with our strategic two our expenditures are growing by a five percent uh rate while our revenue stream is shrinking

[00:29:45] primarily because of decreases in state funding the 13 million point three mil funding gap we presented is preliminary a budget development process we are waiting updated revenues numbers from the state that we expect to be an improvement over our current projections although the magnitude of that and we have plans and options for addressing and we will have these those critical

[00:30:18] conversations before we adopt a budget on the 20th and with that time essentially consideration and as miss lee said at the beginning of the presentation we value your partnership and we appreciate the complete support and that of the taxpayers and now we will only Any questions you may have.

[00:30:41] Thank you. We're going to go through our order. We've got to reach meeting, and so the department of supervisors approved. Sure. I wrote down quite a few when you were speaking, so I hope you don't mind if I just go through slide.

[00:30:57] Thank you. On slide A, could you help us understand that new hire seems like it's had a lot of different meanings. I recognize that you identified several FTEs that you're specifically hiring, but I'm also is how much churn versus how much billing long gapped positions versus, again, new FDs actually captured employees and new hire we need to throw out.

[00:31:25] Which slide were you on? This was on slide. Okay. It's taking a bit to get back. There were 52 new hires. Right. So like 252 new hires for that size of the workforce seems really striking to me.

[00:31:41] So I guess I'm just trying to make sure I'm putting that this proper context. We routinely hire about 200 to 150 teachers per year. And that's just speaking mostly to that 12% retention, right?

[00:31:58] Or non-retention, right? There's an element of churn in there. And then also growth in student population and in special populations. On slide 12. So it's up there.

[00:32:14] So we don't think you're struggling to figure out how to answer my question. No, it's on the screen. This is probably mostly speaking to my ignorance. And I recognize that the—and this may be more a question for Candy—I see that the local bump is larger than our bump in, say, assessment growths.

[00:32:40] Is that coming from mostly other revenue sources that we're delivering? So I'm comparing that 5.3 boost in local revenues to our, say, increase in assessments of the year. because that's capturing for additional tax revenue streams that we're increasing.

[00:33:01] There are a couple factors to that. I'll start, but I'm going to ask Maya Kumazawa, Director of Budget Planning, to fill in. For that local category, that includes both the local transfer from the general fund and then all other local sources. But the second reason that is impactful for that is last year in the budget process, the Board of Supervisors approved directing some funding one time to capital last year that would be available for ongoing operations in fiscal year 25.

[00:33:30] Based on that strategy, that's one of the primary reasons, if not the primary reason, that that growth is larger than that 4.1% assessment because some of that ongoing growth was invested in capital 24 and is now ongoing in operations. Please, Ms. Kumazawa, if you have any more details on the details on the school fund, please chime in.

[00:33:49] The transfer does make up for both of it, and that transfer alone is actually a 5.6% increase. We have other local school revenues that are about $2 million, and so any changes on that would also be reflected in that standpoint.

[00:34:07] Thank you. On slide 18, and just speaking to the broader discussion that we have about the S&L coaches, and I feel like it's probably what we do get to this, because I expect this is maybe one more prominent elements of the budget change, and I want to make sure we have much to use.

[00:34:26] So it sounds like we have some basic information from, like, what I would feel is fairly to describe as a program evaluation of a pilot space we know the uh in excess of 20 000 interactions is there any additional uh program evaluation data or insights that we can gather with the sal coaches is uh that information on interaction frequency about what we have to work on this at this meeting at this level i don't have more granular information but i think that's a

[00:35:04] good way to sum it up is just the numbers of interactions we have some additional we have a director of mental health and wellness and i know that miles nelson is collecting data i've seen data in terms of a tier two two tier three services how many tier two and tier three services as well on how many how many and what the breakdown in terms of uh diagnostics or informal diagnostics are i know he's continuing that data a couple years old um and um we have a lot of feedback from actually the counselors and principals of the schools we don't have as far as i know a formal

[00:35:44] evaluation of it we have utilization and how many tier one how many tier two how many three and what the materials out looks like i think slide 19 really speaks more to that i've heard about it and then slide back to the conversation because you've you know and what we have found is anytime that we offer more uh counseling to the students it immediately gets soaked up with student use and it i feel that i don't feel i know based on the data that we look at that we we are the number

[00:36:22] one place where students will will interact with a counselor we even do tele-counseling now we we allow students to on school time we provide a private space for them to meet with their own counselor in terms of the community you can see it's it's just a tiny splinter of what's available and any conversations we've ever had over the years with families where we'll say contact region 10 or

[00:36:54] contact agency a b or c it's hard very hard to get services through any of those whereas at school a student can see a counselor they can see an scl coach they can talk with them they know they're going to be there the next day it's very reliable very very dependable so that comes down to when miss lee was talking about we're uniquely situated to serve these kinds of needs for students and we don't and then they also don't have to interrupt their school day really to access it on that note

[00:37:28] i i am maybe a little perhaps confused by the use of the word referral here on this on this graphic i i look at that my immediate assumptions that means like a referral to a csb which seems unlikely just because of the scale but is that actually representing individual referrals to csv service or or therapists just last yeah i mean we have a range of places where they're referred sometimes they refer to social services for more some more support i mean just a total an anecdote if you indulge me um last week well diantha knows but i'm also the executive

[00:38:07] director of a organization called partner for mental health and we're partners with the county on your heart program which is a corresponding model and the other day a teenager was locked in the bathroom not wanting to go to school threatening suicide they called 911 the police responded first the heart team came but then our social emotional coach and the school safety coach arrived and because they had relationships with their student the student would talk with them and the student eventually had to be hospitalized in a residential facility for a time but these

[00:38:45] needs are real and they predate certainly um covet but um one of the with the with these sel coaches and our school counselors we're the biggest mental health provider of mental health services for children um we can i know there is more data and i can certainly at least see what we have what um i appreciate that i just you know again complete my own ignorance here it feels like i'm sure there is some kind of kpis that are typical in this field something that we would

[00:39:21] put in the output section of a theory of change chart but i just don't know what that is and i'm not really seeing that data so um it makes it challenging for me to think about how well what we found was um so if you if you look in section a of our budget all the proposals have um logic models with them that talk about their outputs we throughout the year we have meetings with owners of the proposals and they go through a process of review and we assign you know whether they're healthy or they'll be green or if they're struggling they're yellow and if they're

[00:39:58] something that we're going to perhaps discontinue or it hasn't been successful it's red this um the sel coaches in many respects are green in terms of the access that we talked about and what Dr. Acuff talked about. We scored them yellow though, because in their initial logic model, the metrics that were assigned to it weren't very, they were fuzzy, they weren't very strong.

[00:40:25] As a result, we did go back and take a look at how we were assigning them. You might notice from last, when we started them during the pandemic, we had the federal funding. So we just went ahead and said one for every school, regardless of the school size.

[00:40:40] regardless of the school need. And one of the things we learned through our ongoing review of kind of the fuzzy results, we pinned down more specific results based on things like our baseline social-emotional learning data that we do with all the elementary school students.

[00:40:58] It's called the DESA Strengths Assessment. We looked at student referrals, we looked at attendance, looked at an array of measurements to then determine a differentiated model for assigning these so that some of it's based on school size.

[00:41:16] So now larger schools will have more coaches assigned. Smaller schools will have a baseline of one. And then we also looked at that other data like attendance, chronic absenteeism, student discipline referrals, and also the DESA scores for the school and their panorama survey results for climate and use those as differentiating factors for assigning the SEL coaches to the schools.

[00:41:43] So there wasn't an outcome of looking at, well, we've got them assigned at the schools. In terms of taking on the funding and putting it into our base, we needed to be more specific to address the current outcomes at the schools.

[00:41:59] When you look at the logic model going into this coming budget cycle, you'll see the data is a lot tighter. measurements are stronger the interim outcomes are we have higher expectations for those and we're using existing surveys like the panorama so that we can measure the success of the program so what i like well whether i like it or not it was a great thing that you said earlier that since it was federal money and it was one-time money we we did we do consider it a pilot and so this would be the opportunity if it wasn't being effective and weren't seeing the access from the

[00:42:34] students we would probably discontinue it we did anticipate having consistent levels of funding from the state we weren't anticipating that our adjusted gross income locally would skyrocket two years ago that's now tanked us for the next two years but since it has we we're trying hard and we'll we'll move a lot of things around this in our budget to prioritize it thank you so much i appreciate it all really deep diving me with this because i'm sure it's uh much heavy on a lot

[00:43:06] of my peers hard too so i um i appreciate that um on slide 20 you touched on the drop in time one funding that's being used amongst other institutions i was actually just curious did that like shift in federal policy did a school stop being classified what what is motivated it's change in the school category it was the funding stays flat typically from year to year and as our costs increase complications and benefits but funding for it doesn't go up and so our costs continue to increase we've been holding steady the last few years we did carry over in our ways

[00:43:45] but next year will be the first year where that's just just showing the true cost of yeah oh thank you um um i'm actually going to jump out of the slides real quick because i remember something that i made note on in e-work funding request on and this is very simple i think got an answer but on page a23 where you have the master kind of chart of budgetary changes uh year to year um by the carpenter category um it's very obvious that there's no increase in administration

[00:44:20] um it's an almost 20 increase mostly due to uh staffing you know benefits and specifics i'm guessing that's because a lot of the positions we're talking about are coded in this administration i actually don't remember great observation um that category includes not just admin but also attendance of health positions this proposal that we're talking about with mental health that all those ftes 27 of them would fall in that that was my suspicion but i didn't know that's like so this is like you're at cl which is our class under um and they're not uh they're not

[00:45:00] departments either state functions i appreciate it a lot of this is also first term i'm forward trying to make sure i uh taking through things correctly um you mentioned in your mitigation plan uh talking about shifting one-time revenues um i i guess i would like to understand a bit more by what you need about what schools are you potentially identifying as places to This is on slide 26, and I might be misquoting.

[00:45:32] I apologize, Steve. One time could be projected use of fund balance from our operating budget. So in savings, you might have to save this year. We could also look to our special revenue funds, see if there's any fund balances there that we might be able to find in ourselves.

[00:45:54] And I think I just want-- oh, yeah, this is a big one we have talked about. so this is probably the best illustrated by the next slide you have a lot of different strategies for potentially mitigating and offsetting um any shortfalls that persists after you know both a review by the general assembly and review by board supervisors try and build that gap it would be helpful but maybe either you don't have or you're not willing to get a sense

[00:46:29] of how much you estimate could be saved these different strategies do you have those estimates we do we don't have the community okay historically we've had the data like every quarter of us we've been playing out several scenarios um you know it's it's like a it's like a a dire a moderate and a successful you know ranging with the um the current state

[00:47:06] the house version and the senate version and so among those things we we do we look at um when you look at the uh non-personnel reductions it's things like um not over the past five years we have each year identified uh you know started with kindergarten of uh furniture replacement cycle so that we can um replace dilapidated furniture and put in furniture and casework and things like that in classrooms

[00:47:43] that's more appropriate for students. So that would be an example of like a one-time thing, or maybe we are also looking at our technology budget and not skipping, but prolonging the replacement cycle for some machines that normally would be teeing up to replace at this time.

[00:48:03] And then you can also apply across the board percentage reductions in budgets. And so everybody just goes back to their departmental budget, and they scrub it again to get to a different percentage of savings. Number two is where you're just looking for low-hanging fruit in areas.

[00:48:22] But it's a mixed bag because when you're scrubbing, you also find things like Maya was talking about earlier that with the federal government, and you notice they contribute a whopping $600,000 to our budget, about 1%, with a lot of demands that are good for kids.

[00:48:40] but still, it's a lot of mandates that we have to cover. So you will find things that you've been underspending that you need to beef up, but you also find areas for cost savings for maybe a position or half a position that has gone unfilled for quite some time, so you don't fill it. And if you find those pieces here and there, it starts to add up to savings. Organizational structures and program effectiveness. Within the departments, we are doing a lot of work right now. Since we We're not going to, the central office and departments has really not grown at the rate as the school staffing has over the last five years.

[00:49:20] During the pandemic onset and after that, we really put a lot of staffing out to the schools. That's why our class sizes are really low right now. So rather than putting a lot into the departments, we put that out to the schools. But having said that, since we're not going to add, we're not planning on adding anything,

[00:49:40] We're looking at how do we solve the same issues with the staff that we have, for example, looking at some of the positions in one department that could function in another, like community engagement, perhaps one of the specialists that we have in that department could go into the instructional department to be a math coach or a math lead coach so that we can work on those issues.

[00:50:05] so you do you try to accomplish the same goal without adding and then we will um we're developing we're actually starting now a pool of frozen positions to accomplish a particular savings that might range from you know a million dollars give or take throughout the year that we're looking to save through central office positions or departmental positions and that typically would be positions that are not directly facing students or supporting students at the school level. And the goal is not to maintain all the same positions frozen throughout the year, but

[00:50:45] as positions come open throughout the year, you compare the pool of frozen positions to the newly opened positions, reprioritize so that you can make sure you're not crippling the organization in terms of the work that we need to do to support the schools reducing the number of budgeted positions that that would be budgeted positions that we're looking at going based on new revenue we could we could reduce that or um the last part of course is we could we could take a look at those proposals the big the big things you toggle are are tend to be compensation and class size

[00:51:24] things that go into people because that's the 86 part of the budget so much those were all the question. I appreciate it with the patience. Supervisor LaPita. Yes, thank you very much, and thank you for talking about 0.5, their class size reduction, which I think is it.

[00:51:44] What currently is the ratio right now, teachers? Off the top of my head, I think for elementary schools, it's under 20, 21. I think it's 18, 20, and 22. It's very low. So that the elementary school and then and then it's slightly higher and uh going into the secondary grades yeah and if you know what that is going into the secondary did you say well i think it used to be 22. i think it's like 18 in elementary i mean of course it may range sure you know 10 in japanese

[00:52:24] and 30 and it's like a bit class right it's on the last time do you have that there on page 814. 814. so for elementary it's 18 to one middle it's 20 to one high school is 20.4 20.4 wow that's very impressive frankly that's it and that's very low it's just really valued by our community you know every year we survey for several years we didn't put it on the survey because it always was the first thing right i'm trying to find do you want anything else yeah

[00:52:59] everybody asks that i understand that um i do believe uh i i do like the fact that you're addressing english learners and students with disability and that wasn't so x number of years ago we're now we're not doing that so that's something at least together 25 percent of our student profits right right and i can see school and class five and in those situations but and i

[00:53:34] really like the idea that you're supporting the school SELs with coaches rather than going to the outside rather than going to region 10 and other agencies i think most impact for children is whatever they can have at the school side now where they feel safe that's who they trust and I do a lot of prevention work, embedding it into that school curriculum.

[00:54:06] And what you're doing when you're helping children have a healthy, happy life learning, then that translates to adults. And actually, in the long run, you have fewer problems with adults. So I really like it happening at the school side, in the school setting, rather than on the outside.

[00:54:28] just i'm saying that um your ftes on page 18 so those are all with your fcls those are all included as administration is that correct okay yep so those are all these are administrative positions because i've you know i've never stopped if you go back to page eight you have you have 11 requires for administrators is that your central office administrators or for those or to be FTEs or emotional support teacher?

[00:55:06] That would be in the current year. It's not, that's in the current year, right? The age of new hires for the administration, that's like our snapshot. We haven't hired these yet because they're still in technically in a grant fund, the FDLs, they're not hired.

[00:55:24] But the ones you're talking about here in the administration, the 11 new hires, those are... They're not new positions, they're just new hires. Okay, same position, that was not, I was thinking of hiring 11 new administrators, and I'm going, okay, and what is your ratio for administrators regarding schools?

[00:55:48] So, one thing I would point out that's really handy is the staffing standards that are in the back of the notebook, it's G5. you all do you have in her book but uh when you when you go online one of the things i'm really proud of is that when i started out as superintendent my goal was to have a staffing standard for every single position in the school system uh that wasn't the case and so um when you go through here you can find the identified ratios for all of our positions including administrative position teaching positions specials like p.e. and so forth so if i if i'm going to answer that i

[00:56:28] would have to also look at them to determine that okay okay and i'm just interested frankly yeah i do think there are some schools that have uh principal which i think school means principal but also i have an assistant principal with a very low enroll right we so uh annually we review our staffing standards and when we did the review two years ago we looked at dr keiser's two years ago uh one of the one a lot of the feedback we got was a lot of the needs that the school have

[00:57:03] and again this kind of goes back to that expanding responsibilities of schools um missley didn't include sol testing or all the other types of testing that were required to do what we found was in the smaller schools we would we would assign like a part of an fte like a you know a 0.4 or 0.3 and say, that's for your testing. Okay. But what that really means then is that the school counselor is going to take it on. So they're doing part-time counseling, part-time testing, or the principal takes it on, or lots of times they'll give it to a staff member and it reduces their interactions with students. So that was just one example. And that was a request that

[00:57:42] was made by the smaller schools was to have an assistant principal. And we have found that highly effective like our schools like red hill and scottsville um have a full-time assistant principal that's done a couple of things one is it has reduced the administrative burden on teachers so the teachers are not doing all the administrative tasks that the principal has to farm out for example if they have to be out uh if we can't get a substitute for them then the teacher might do it and the other thing it's done is it really has increased the supervision of instruction one of

[00:58:17] of the things we really put a lot of stock in is walkthrough observations, you know, like five minute observations, and we tally those on an ongoing basis. And we have watched those take off astronomically, because there's more supervisors in the school to really help with that. I think it's also enhanced the safety at schools. So it's been a, it's been a positive project to do that.

[00:58:41] But it has met administrative growth. But again, we put the growth in the schools, we didn't add administrators to central staff. Okay, so there has been no central staff increase. So over the last five years, central staff, I mean, it's different numbers that are being kicked around, but this is a report that I had from a couple months ago that shows from 2019, we had 2,396 total staff. 2013 of those were school-based, which was 84% of the staff. Now in 2024, we have

[00:59:21] 2,289 school-based staff, and that's 85.1% of all of our staff. So that's grown by 1.1%. Central office in 2019 was 112, and it has grown to 126, but it is still only 4.7% of our total staff.

[00:59:45] So it's grown just like the other positions have in the county. The only thing that has shrunk a bit is the operational staff, and I would say it's because we have done some right-sizing in our transportation department, Whereas if we haven't been able to hire bus drivers, we haven't kept having a giant pool of staff for that so we could use it in other areas.

[01:00:08] But as a percentage of our total school system employees, our central office staff has not grown. It has grown in numbers, but it's still just as small as it was. Okay. So really, any of the positions that you had mentioned, the FTEs that you would like to see increase, those are directly school-based?

[01:00:32] Yeah, there are no, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no central office, anything. And I think that answer is... Thank you.

[01:00:49] Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Supervisor McKib. Sure. Um, sticking to the same theme about our employees' snapshot, I really am pleased to see 13% people of color and 24% people of color and 36% people of color.

[01:01:08] That is a real improvement. It used to be we'd go a percent and then we'd lose two and we'd go another 2% and we'd lose three. I'm just saying that this really shows progress in diversification across the system. I'm really pleased with that.

[01:01:25] Diane, I appreciate you saying that because we're really proud of it. Last year, we had a 2% bump, and as you know and I know for decades, it sat at about 11%. And I really want to take a nod to our human resources department and the efforts they made, and also our principals for really reaching out and supporting paraprofessionals to go through the new teacher certification programs that the state has adopted. It is really, I think that's added a lot of diversity to our staff and a lot of local community members that grew up in our

[01:02:02] schools and have been working in the schools. They have college degrees and they want to be teachers. So they've entered the field. So I think there was a lot of creative work, but the goal was to fully staff. And we started the year with less than 2% vacancy rate, which was much was lower than we were pre-pandemic, our starting vacancy rate, and we had zero vacancies in special education this year. That's impressive. I'm very impressed historically that we would have never heard that historically. Well, I was just really pleased with that. And keeping on that same

[01:02:39] theme, I guess, and maybe because I used to be a substitute, I'm wondering what your all situation is, the substitute teachers and how you're handling that. And I don't know what the budget No, I'm glad you asked. You don't see things in here as much now about the substitutes.

[01:02:57] As you remember, last year, we talked about a lot of things we were trying to do to settle that down. One was significantly increasing pay for substitutes, so enhanced pay was important. The other thing we did was we started out a few years ago with school-based substitutes that are there every day, and those were assigned to schools initially by the size of the school.

[01:03:20] And we have a staffing standard for those in the staffing standard section. But moving forward with that, Dr. Kaiser and the HR department looked at specific data at the schools, like the fill rates at the schools, so that schools that have lower fill rates, they assign another permanent sub to the school.

[01:03:39] So there are still issues around substitutes. I'm not going to say that it's magically solved, but our community has really stepped up. we have a lot of parents a lot of community members that are coming into the schools that they do it one day a week or some of them are there every day and having those permanent subs i think has really been able to lower the stress level of our of our teaching staff because they know they've got someone on board and those substitutes become well known to the school so that had you know i i'm sure you all get emailed about that just like anything else so i'm hoping it has simmered down the i know on our end it has we haven't heard anything you know and

[01:04:17] of course i remember the days when the principals would come in in the morning and make 20 phone calls and you couldn't find anybody so this is wonderful the last thing i'll say about that is we centralized the substitute budget uh what we found when we when we scrubbed it was schools were annually planning their uh substitute budget and then overrunning it and spending out of other categories which they can because it's zero base but what we did is we just took it all and um didn't take it out of their budget so they had they have the budget they still have that money but we took it centrally and that was a budget initiative we did last year okay so now

[01:04:54] it all runs through central office it doesn't come out of school funds that's great thank you that's excellent um going back one more time to and i think we're we're i'm looking at the 181 administrators six percent i think we're focusing on this because this is the number one question we get from the community. We constantly hear from the community, you're bloated. We need to go after the administrative staff. I'm just saying, that's what we hear.

[01:05:22] Several staff. Well, and yeah, the administrative staff. Would you go through for me, just on the record, who is included one more time in that administration? Because it's people that, again, and we alluded to it earlier, but it's folks that people don't normally expect.

[01:05:40] So I think that I'm going to let Ms. Kumazawa tackle that one because I think she has spent the most time looking at those categories. And I certainly understand everyone's concern about central office and departmental staff because when we think about schools, we don't think about the staff doing that work.

[01:06:00] And for me to just say, well, the staff that we have doing that is really important is not enough because they're not front facing and they're not going to be noticed behind the scenes. and that's our goal. But I do think we should always be accountable to the community for positions that are outside the school. And I've already had, you all are just presenting your budget and I've already had two comments from the community. So that's why we're, I mean, on the slide, I guess it's not, the administration makes up 5.8% of the total budget and includes executive services, human resources, which as you know, we skip back to more, professional

[01:06:37] development community engagement communication strategic planning fiscal services safety and security schools and safety and security would be our school safety coaches and now this past year we've had one um full safety and it also includes your school nurses they're used to anyway um The school nurses, I think, are now in the school budget, aren't they?

[01:07:07] You moved those. Okay, right. Let's go for major nine. So the 181 includes principals, assistant principals, central office directors, and assistant directors. Okay. We have 63 principals and assistant principals, and they're included as part of the 181.

[01:07:25] Great. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Let me just see here. I asked about subs. Sorry, I'm looking at my notes here. um just curious as we talked a lot about the state and not knowing exactly where you are and and we all get that because we don't know where we are in some things either um are you all are there any dramatic new mandates that you all are facing that you're

[01:08:01] not sure about i haven't heard new mandates mentioned and i was just curious as to sometimes they're in terms of funding i have i don't i don't think there's anything that's got uh on well any almost any mandates that come from the state are unfunded i was just saying that um but nothing that i have that's where we've had where we've talked to the board about it hasn't raised anything to happen some years you have something one of the additional costs is about three hundred thousand dollars for pre-k and they stopped funding it the the way they have, but they've also opened up more positions, more slots for us.

[01:08:41] It's about a $300,000 range at hand. And that's for the pre-K. Good to know. I really appreciated Mike talking about the SELs, because I think we were all trying to figure that out.

[01:09:00] And so what my takeaway is that one-time funding from the pandemic, so to speak, from the fence, was used in a pilot format to see how it would help so you'd figure out how to go forward with improving the social and emotional well-being of the kids. And that makes sense, because I have to admit, I was thinking at first, one-time funding is always concerning, but this makes more sense. I really appreciate that explanation. And you're working your way through how to organize that within the schools now to get your biggest bang for the buck.

[01:09:38] I'm saying it for you, but I think that's my takeaway anyway. Exactly. Okay. I will just add, but the CSBs, and just so the community knows, those are community service boards. And for us, those are community service boards across the state, because a lot of people don't know this, I think.

[01:09:56] And for us, that's Region 10, where a lot of our, I can't remember when I was on the Discipline Committee, we sent lots of families to Region 10, sometimes waited long, long times to get help. I would just point out that the JLARC study that came out not this year, but last year about the Community Service Board was very informative.

[01:10:20] And I would think it would behoove us at some point to think about our legislative packets that we share next year to really go after the JLARC recommendations. Because I think for the community, it would help everybody.

[01:10:37] Certainly help me with regional jail, help you all with the schools, help everybody. So just to put it on our tickler list is, I think, when I'm saying that. Let me see. I may be pretty close. And I do appreciate that you all bring to us a needs-based budget, which is, this is your first whack at telling us what you need, right?

[01:11:09] And it's a needs-based budget. and you have some strategies, these best requests, but yeah, and you have some strategies. I'm curious, or maybe not curious, I think it would behoo the public for, and I think this is probably an Andy question. So Andy, can you just describe for the public what the funding would be, what the split looks like and what the funding would be when we're talking about $12,977,000,

[01:11:45] just to go into that briefly. Sure. So there is a formula set by the board's financial management policies that allocates funding to school operations, county government operations, and then our shared debt and capital improvements program. So the short version is that every kind of new net dollar shared revenues which is primarily tax revenue 54 of that really the first 10 would go to capital and debt the remaining amount is 60 40 which happens to be 54 for school operations 36 for county government operations um did you have a follow-up question yeah well help

[01:12:23] us with so 12 million would look so to fund the thanks i'm tracking now so uh just running some numbers now this is based on the initial school gap of 13.3 million which obviously will change but just kind of for some your perspective if we if that were to be funded only with increases from the real estate tax rate following that split that would be an additional 8.6 pennies on the tax rate to do so you know another option if that were to be you know pennies 100 dedicated

[01:12:59] to school operations which the board could choose to do different from 25 that would require an additional 4.6 dedicated pinnings and obviously the the actual determine the state and everything else that's sort of the for the order of magnitude to give the board some perspective and that's why it's just perspective and it's good for the community here as well um and i think all my questions from right now are comments um great presentation and i appreciate it thank you supervisor gallard um thank you everyone what is the um can you just speak a little bit i'm sure

[01:13:37] sure you've done some direct advocacy to the general assembly specific to your the funding gas and the laws can you guys review what you've done and what that's been and what the results or feedback has been from that yeah one of the most um sort of hopefully meaningful additions to the budget um was amy lawfer added a full of harmless to the budget um as a just a member request um that would amount to approximately 14 million over the biennium, which would be amazing.

[01:14:10] Obviously, we're sort of waiting to hear what gets signed. The forecast is that there will be a little bit more work getting done before it gets signed. But, you know, fingers crossed. I think that is one of the things we've pushed hardest for that she added.

[01:14:26] It's hold harmless directly for Albemarle County based on the LCI. So it's really just related to that. So that's something she added just to benefit us. And so most directly, I would say that, to answer your question. Obviously, you know, we have done advocacy relative just to the budgets that have been proposed.

[01:14:49] And so right now we'll make some calls and just advocating for the budget that is currently going to Governor Youngkin, hopefully for a signature. So that's another thing we'll kind of work toward and some big picture stuff. So the decisions they made this past Thursday, are we just still waiting to see how it irons out with the governor?

[01:15:08] And we just don't know enough to start? Ned, when we asked for our, when we met with our legislators, we asked for the whole harmless provision, but we also asked at the very minimum to be notified sooner in the budgetary process when the LCI comes out, because we didn't get notice of that until we were already in budget development.

[01:15:35] And we can't get access unless we have some legislative action. Right. And that would be certainly a longer term concern that we'll continue to address over the years. Lots of different approaches to that. Every one of our legislators has sort of a different idea about what would be best.

[01:15:53] Three years rather than binial, using a completely different calculation or formula, you know. Cutting off outliers. Right. Yeah. So, you know. yeah um but you always have a few legislators who say um we're not going to touch the lci and i know you've heard that over the years as well um it's it's anyone's guess what might actually happen but jlark did suggest that it was a good calculation but that it does need some um addressing of just

[01:16:28] these in these major you know fluctuations the major fluctuations as well as it takes no account for the specific needs of the jurisdiction like if you have 25 or uh you know people in english language reverse or you know special ed um it doesn't make any adjustment to that and

[01:16:53] and timing yeah thank you um so on slide 27 i guess that's just the next you can listen again at some point i don't remember if it was a budget presentation or was that one another school board work session that i set in on the comment was made that department budgets are basically you take the previous year's budget and then build your budget for that the next year so if i got 10 million one year i immediately use 10 million as my starting point to build a budget for the

[01:17:33] department buttons now if i misunderstood that explanation then that should probably be cleared up but my question here is wouldn't number two just be an annual exercise yeah for building a department budget it's a myth that we take last year last year's budget and just you know take it out of the binder and set it over here and put it in a new binder and start from there we actually start from scratch from the beginning um you use you're always going to use what what a department spent the year before as a sort of a meter as to you know what their needs are but

[01:18:08] that's part of that scrubbing process because within a budget they're going to within a department budget they're going to have different categories even though it's baseline and you can see what they underspent what they overspent and then you you make an adjustment on the budget for every department based on what happened the year before and the year before that so it's not we don't just roll things from one year to the next and i appreciate you asking that because that's like i said i just think that's a myth that we'll hear things like zero-based budgeting we do a zero-based

[01:18:41] budget annually with the understanding that for the video we encumbers almost all of the spending that we do and then so there's a there's a slim margin of that that we have to work with that's local dollars on that are that the ones that aren't making up for what we don't get from the state and so we're very um diligent in making sure that we have right sizing of our department budgets i just heard that it was the expenditures that maybe it was built on previous year exactly i had

[01:19:20] asked the budget team for uh the 10-year trend line for public schools and baseline department budgets and that was provided they said over time steadily increased three to seven percent per year do you track what that would have been or might have been if this exercise is happening i think my i think us i remember you and i even having conversations many years ago when i was on the school board about we don't tell the story about where the efficiencies have been found and realized right so if we're saying the department budgets have increased three to seven percent per year and have that information maybe they would have grown four to eight percent or six something like

[01:19:56] that um if they had matched inflation they would have grown much more than that so the but the actual realized savings that are in those do you track that and be able to tell that story not to my knowledge um look i get that you want to hold your hold your uh cards to yourself but what does one side like one class size increase not like one student ad at your levels what does

[01:20:27] that cost you're saving what's the expenditure my 3.3 million that's just total one if you did a one over the whole of the building not based on your remembering oh we'll do 0.5 at elementary we'll do one at the high school and then you start maneuvering it typically we do maneuver we do try to keep the class sizes smaller k through four if we can but one across the board and you

[01:20:57] said 3.3 mile all right those are all my questions right now thank you thank you mr gallant thank you thank you and very very helpful all of the questions that others have asked on the presentation as well so i many of mine have been asked already and answering that specific um the

[01:21:27] um was more organized before um so i guess are there my sort of a general question i wrote at the very beginning but based on what i have heard come to me on the telephone in the grocery store etc are there budget takeaways regarding improving the reading skills of the children that it's in here somewhere that i just don't understand where to look or is there something you can't tell us about i assume that it's restra instructional but i would love some more help about that question

[01:22:04] so the um around the reading the new reading curriculum that's all adopted within this year's budget within the current departmental budget so we um based on the virginia literacy act we needed to select a new reading curriculum for elementary schools through and uh so we went through that process, community process. Schools had all kits. We leaned heavily on our teachers to help us decide what we were going to pick for that. And we chose HMH McGraw-Hill. And so all the funding

[01:22:41] for that, though, is covered within this year's departmental budget for instruction. So it's not going to show up in the budget as an initiative because that's what you budget for instructional resources within that department. I would say that in terms of reading, the other piece that we did going into the current year's budget was we adjusted our staffing standards to allow for reading specialists at all the secondary schools, and we beefed up our reading specialists and

[01:23:14] interventionists at the elementary schools as well, partially by putting a fence around differentiated staffing, and you've been around a long time, so you know, we differentiate staffing at schools based on demographics, and so what that would typically mean was each school principal would dig into that pool that was an enhancement to their staffing. They could use it in a variety of ways. One of the concerns that some of our board members raised was, are they using that for intervention? Are they using that for reading? Are they using that for math? And And frankly, we weren't really being very transparent about it in our budget because

[01:23:54] it just showed like a blob of differentiated staffing, intervention staffing. So when you when you have time to go through the support section, it changed last year. But I think you'll notice a difference from what you've seen in the past where it really delineates.

[01:24:10] And you can see the reading specialists down in the column for elementary school that weren't delineated before from the differentiated staffing. it was a combination of two things. One, really increasing our reading specialists, and then also adopting the new curriculum. And the glue that really works to bring that all together is all the professional development funding. Again, that's encumbered within our current budget for professional development. So it's all within our current resources to do that. So for the next

[01:24:48] budget year there may be more investment in people in the buildings to help individual children in terms of professional development right not just beyond the home room teacher right having to have someone who can actually that's right answer that get the widget you know yeah we're seeing you know he's missing we're we are looking at the classroom level right now across the schools and seeing how they're using the reading specialist some of the schools depending on their size will, like Albemarle High School, for example, has four reading specialists,

[01:25:24] which, you know, at the secondary level, that's a big investment. But they're not necessarily going to meet with individual students because of the size of the staff and student population there. They'll hold trainings for staff. They will work with teachers to work better with the students that the staff is working with. And then for the kids that are all the way up in tier three, they will probably be working with them more directly. Now, an elementary school, like a like Murray Elementary School, that they'll have a reading specialist, that person can work individually with the children because it's a smaller school and smaller staff. And we're

[01:26:02] watching them. And what we see is that you see a variety of successful strategies, but where the reading specialist is pushing into the classroom while the teacher's teaching and being part of the overall instructional team is where we're seeing the best results from that. And hopefully the more success you have at the lower levels.

[01:26:21] Yes, you worked yourself out the job. But all of us have the scars we got from elementary level of being in the language classroom. I didn't understand what the hell was going on. And it's something I've never forgotten. And so I understand how, and I guess my follow-up question to that is, do you perceive a connection between success in reading, particularly, and the sort of anxiety level, the social emotional stress that we're hearing about.

[01:26:53] Because I think if kids are feeling on the spot and not able to perform as they're across the classroom, peers are, then of course, their anxiety level is going to come. So I would love to hear more about that in the future. Okay, I'll stop talking about that.

[01:27:09] I'm very glad they joined the school subs because I was a school sub for 10 years. Knowing the children because you're there all the time is such a great benefit for the sub person. cuts that anxiety a little bit. So that, and the kids as well.

[01:27:24] All right. State budget, we'll just keep our fingers crossed. And I guess within the next, well, we don't know when the governor's going to get around to be doing things, so. - And yes, I do remember, and I understand your challenge on this class size thing, because back in 2010 with the recession, There was a, oh, let's just take out one or whatever.

[01:27:52] And the one ended up putting English, sort of basic English at the high schools at like 40 kids because of the way everything happened. It's not, I wish it were simpler for people like me to understand, but it's not clearly. And so I do understand that challenge.

[01:28:10] All right, going along. So we answered all those. That was good. I'm very grateful for the sweeping of the budgets and extra accountability and raising the standards.

[01:28:35] So if the budget is signed, there will be that 3% increase from the state, but we would have to match that in order to get it. And I understood from something that came from David Bluth or someone else recently that if there's a lower amount locally, then they would prorate the state as opposed to zeroing it out, which is a huge improvement over past years.

[01:28:56] So I guess that's an option we didn't have in the past. but I will later on ask Mr. Richardson to remind me of what he was proposing for . I will stop there, thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Mann. - Thank you.

[01:29:11] And a lot of my questions have been answered, and let's just hit on a couple of things that we're already at but I didn't quite understand, I'm sorry. But if we go back to slide eight, and this sort of all fits together with this, well, staffing and this combination of staffing needs, new positions for the different level of service, but also student-teacher ratios and all that discussion.

[01:29:36] I just put it all together. So here we have-- and I'm just going to play with the numbers for a moment-- 252 new hires with 88% retention rate, 88% out of 1,407 teachers, 10% of 840, and 128%.

[01:29:53] You still have about 90 new hires. But those aren't the teachers that would change the student-teacher ratio. Those are these other, I don't know, I'm not sure where that comes in as far as teachers go.

[01:30:09] - So those are new people in the same roles, though. So this is not talking about new positions. - Okay, but 88% retention rate suggests a smaller number. - Right. - And that's where I'm confused. - That's where you factor in growth.

[01:30:26] We, and that's part of what we're looking at doing this year. We had to adjust our growth from last year because we didn't meet our growth projection. So there'll be a reduction overall in the teachers that we have in the county. But last year when we budgeted, we also budgeted for growth.

[01:30:43] And then you're also budgeting for growth in special areas like the special education services, the EL services and other positions that are unique to schools that are considered instructional positions. So it's more than just addressing the turnover.

[01:31:05] So it's just, it's growth as well. - And would that also apply then to classified staff? Because again, we have 30 or 20% approximately non-retained, but the number higher is 375, 20% would be 240.

[01:31:21] So there's a big gap there again. - Yeah, I think we need to, honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable addressing that without the numbers in front of me. So I think we need to dig and give you something more specific, because you're the second or third board member we're just talking about. So I think we need to break that out for you.

[01:31:38] Okay. Thank you. I'll just play with the numbers on it. So similarly, when we looked at the additional English learner growth, 5Ds, special ed, 5, social emotional supports, 27, intervention specialists, 10, those, how do they fit into this categorization?

[01:31:58] So they don't fit in here for this year. would they would go ahead with a snapshot the um the el and special education go into the teachers category okay uh apparently what i'm learning is that the scl would go into the administrator category or administrative staff oh no on this slide okay but they go in there for the state category okay so they'd be in the teacher category as well about the interventionists And the interventionist will be in the teachers' category.

[01:32:26] OK. Well, yeah, that's good. That's good. Any questions? I guess I will also, if I'm picking on numbers and looking at the 24,000 school-based referrals, which we've now called, I guess, interactions, 20K interactions so far this year.

[01:32:48] There are interactions within the building. It's not referrals out. OK. Those are like tier two or tier three level. I think we had two years ago about five to six hundred students referred out in tier three services. This is more. It's a big it's a big number.

[01:33:05] It's a concerning number. And I'm trying to understand how to just sort of look at it in terms of you've got 20 some schools. Yeah, 24 schools with the 20K interactions this year, 100 plus school days.

[01:33:24] We're still looking at 10 interactions a day or something like that. So that's okay. That's why I'll make sure that I'm hearing this right. Okay. Thank you for an excellent presentation.

[01:33:40] Thank you. I'm sorry, because we're probably running out of time. But one of the things that we all, I know everybody keeps hearing about is school absenteeism and truancy. It used to be the name that we used to call it.

[01:33:58] Could you just help me a little bit? And I know we're probably going to choose one time, but how you all are thinking through truancy and trying to get kids back into school after the pandemic? So the way I would sum it up right now is that we're having a lot of success with it.

[01:34:14] I think that's the most important thing to say is that what we talk about now, it's a newer term for this generation. They call it chronic absenteeism, which is when a student misses 10% of the school year. So that for a student that to be considered chronically absent, I think it's 17 absences. And so the state tracks that and that's one of the indicators they use for our accreditation, one of the final things for that. But most importantly, you know, far beyond that is what we when children are in school there's so many positive outcomes that come from that a lot

[01:34:49] of research out there too that when you're in school dr andrews does better so it's not just your attendance affecting you it's affecting all the other kids that are in your class too when you're there um we have used a lot of strategies this year and and last year but most of them are functions of the scl coaches so they do a lot of that work they've built the relationships because the students that tend to miss school are also students that have trauma or they've got other social emotional issues to where they're not coping with coming to school day in and day out or

[01:35:27] another way to put it is they're not coping with not being at their house and so the scl coaches form relationships i don't want to shortchange the school counselors i know there could be some listening they are the bread they're the bedrock they're the bedrock of the work that goes on that this hasn't changed their role um at the elementary school in particular there's a lot of overlap of those roles high school i think you see more of an academic focus among the counselors but they still work a lot with these kids what we what we know from research is that the number one way to get a student to come to school is when a teacher particularly a teacher could be another

[01:36:07] adult want uh asks for that student to come to school and and lets them know that they're missed when they're not there and so that's the practice that we've been doing and it seems it's not it's not phone calls per se it's not it's all it's not always emailing it's texting and um we have messaging services that translate when they arrive at families to the language that they speak or the one that they receive so that i think has been our number one return on investment is the one-on-one interaction with families building relationships principals getting out and visiting homes and

[01:36:43] then this year our office of community engagement engaged a new practice that uh as a mandate for all of our schools that they host four family nights at their schools and they're they they do three academic nights and then one is of their choice so it could be a cultural celebration or art celebration or something like that but the areas we were mostly concerned about with our school performance are around reading math science so they've been doing those family nights around helping parents understand the competencies that students are learning helping

[01:37:20] them understand when when you get a a quiz that comes home or another assessment that comes home what does it mean what does it mean next several of them use that opportunity to introduce families to the new reading curriculum that we were comparing for them. But I've had a lot of positive feedback.

[01:37:38] You'll go to Brownsville for their community nights, and they'll have 400 families engaging with the staff, read-alouds, things like that. And it's the same all across the school system. So doing those things and having a positive relationship with families rather than the punitive way we used to address it, which there is, at some point, you do reach that because it is the family's responsibility for the child to be at school.

[01:38:07] But having that positive relationship has really helped us. And you're going to see, when you're looking at the numbers from last year and then you look at them shift this year, it's been very positive. Our schools are doing a great job with it. Thank you. That was very helpful. And the only other thing I would ask is, can we have copies of your budget or your notebook?

[01:38:27] All we have is one. we had today so that would be great i think we can sprint that oh yeah it might go off all of us need printed version electronics you might want to ask who wants a printed one and who doesn't because i don't i don't i can go to g5 online i'll do that I want to make sure that we go through the poll order real quickly just to make sure all questions are answered, understanding that this is not a one-time thing, but this

[01:39:07] is a best chance to get our questions answered. Obviously, if mails would be appropriate to have to make comments, though I know that there's miles to go before we sleep on this and a lot of things unanswered, so I don't think comments are anything there, but just where we stand right at the moment, so surprise I don't know that I have another question at this time, and I'm also appreciative of the fact that I took quite a long time with my first round of questions.

[01:39:35] So thank you. Thank you. I just had one question. We have, you had mentioned 20,000 interactions, and that's over, what, 181 school days? Is that correct? And would that also be referrals to the principal, like, especially in elementary school?

[01:39:56] I still think that includes something more substantive. We'll track that down, but I don't think that includes that. Well, they're all for support, I guess, but I don't think they're for discipline issues. Okay.

[01:40:12] That answers all my questions. I really appreciate the time you all took, and I'm looking forward to your full budget adding to our 317 pages that we already have. Thank you. That was a lot of good information.

[01:40:30] Thank you. I commend you. I'm good. I just want to point, I mean, in the spirit of what we're all working on, both school side and local government side, this year we asked the county executive, and I believe it just came out Friday.

[01:40:45] You know, the school division brings forward a needs-based budget, which we all know that's going to occur. However, the county executive doesn't bring forward a needs-based budget. budget he brings forward a balanced budget and given the reality of the situation since he's balancing it that means that there are initiatives or things that aren't going to be funded that either maybe were programmed in previous years or decisions had to be made by the county executive before he comes to the supervisors andy would have to fact check me but i think without the cola it was between just my quick glance at it was about between five and six million dollars worth

[01:41:25] of things on that list and then a cola one percent cola increase is about 916 thousand dollars if i remember that right from a previous work session so basically a million bucks so before we even get to doing anything with our staff positions which predominantly supervisor mikhiel's pretty more expert on this just because i know she was talking to me about it fire positions police positions things like that so it's just a matter of i made a comment on a show friday that it is going to require a discipline from all of us this year in this particular budget but the fact that we've also you know if you if the state had fully funded you you were still looking at about five six

[01:42:04] million dollars worth of some initiatives interesting that that number is similar to what the county is looking at if we say well what would our gap be if we wanted to bring forward those items and that's before a pay increase um so i'm just putting that out in the spirit of transparency on both sides of the uh both the school division and local government side of what we're contending with this budget being mindful that all while property values have continued to increase in the county even though the overall county-wide percentage was four percent this year in a lot of neighborhoods and districts it was well above 13 15 percent so revenues are still climbing and

[01:42:40] increasing at a rate that does not normalize thank you and then i would just add you can find that document that jeff presented for us the six pages of unfunded it's on the website but we could certainly provide you a link or something to it because it is really very effective thank you yes sorry thank you um i gave lots of comments during my question so i don't want to add any more of those but just to to add to what supervisor galloway said in addition to all the positions

[01:43:15] there will be things that were postponed that some of us may want to accelerate to meet community needs that have been around for a long time so it is definitely going to be a big discussion going forward and lots of lots of pain for sure thanks well thank you very much for the presentation excellent presentation i really appreciate your opening us to questions i'm sure there will be more uh i make sure that's one for us as well as we get forward and go forward in this process this point uh ms gillman we suggested a recess this is just a break yes okay

[01:44:00] good board ready to award you know let's see if we come back to five

[01:44:28] I'm not sure who has the hard job.

[01:44:59] Okay, welcome back.

[01:54:15] We have a different makeup at the table. I'll turn to Mr. Bowman to reintroduce us and start. Good afternoon to the Chair and the Board. Again, I'm Andy Bowman, Assistant Chief Financial Officer. We'll have some other staff who will introduce themselves along the way.

[01:54:32] We're going to continue this work session working through the general fund expenditures where we left off from Wednesday. We have about a little over an hour scheduled, so if there's anything we're not able to cover today, we can roll that into Wednesday's work session to pick up because we don't want to rush any more discussion depending on where the board's energy may be on these topics i do want to take a moment and provide some proposed modifications to our budget calendar based on the topics identified by the board last week and again also trying to figure out how to best support the board in their timeline after today's work session we'll come back on wednesday march 13th in this room

[01:55:10] we're going to pick up some discussions started last week this year we'll be here to discuss her funding request we'll also have our fire rescue staff to discuss some of their service proposals that are not included in the budget and any other questions the board may have after that we will continue into the cip or anything else in the general fund if we need to and then any to be determined or continued items can be picked up on monday the 25th we have studied the uh the calendar and our advertising date so we can actually push back the advertising for the proposed tax rates and budget from the 25th to the 27th so staff will

[01:55:47] recommend that to give the board with more deliberation time to work through that so that's just really the same content with a slightly different order of operations over the next few days all about really trying to support the board and the issues of interest to them and also for the timeline and tax rates at the end of today just as i did at the end of wednesday i kind of asked the board for their direction in terms of areas we wanted to explore in more detail like the sheriff and fire rescue so again before we break today we'll make sure we do that same exercise so we are prepared in addition to the usual q a that has come in from stan so with that

[01:56:23] update uh just a reminder in terms of our process we're going to present information at a summary level more detail than the county executive's presentation but less though in the budget document we'll pause many times after every chapter to list for any items the board may would do to change in the budget or those that just may be more general information requests and as the board mentioned earlier for anyone in public listening in the q a not addressed this meeting is posted to the website the first couple batches which are already posted and have been provided so with that i will turn it over to deputy chief ryan davidson who will continue to walk us through general fund expenditures thank you andy um good afternoon board um ryan davidson

[01:57:02] deputy chief of the budget um we're now going to continue discussing the general fund expenditures picking up where we left off with the health and welfare section that begins on page 137 for those falling along at home of the FY25 recommended budget document. And it's budgeted at approximately $30.1 million for the upcoming fiscal year. And as a refresher with these charts that we're going to be seeing at each section, the chart on the left illustrated what percentage of the total general fund budget for each larger functional area represents, 7% in this case. And with the chart on the right shows what makes up that percentage and how much of the total functional

[01:57:39] area each piece makes up you know and for health and welfare um health and human services portion of the budget makes up about 85 percent with some contributions to our regional and our non-profit community partners looking at health and welfare um in the area of central services there was an increase in the total um excuse me local governments transferred to the csa of about four hundred thousand just shy of four hundred thousand dollars which is based on recent trend the service levels and the complexity of the cases we are seeing in the csa um there's also one fte that was added to the budget for a csa coordinator positions in f125 that will be offset

[01:58:17] by approximately 33 revenue by the state and further offset by future reductions to the local transfer from for improved compliance and to help us better get our costs in line and help with the compliance and the children's services act and make sure we're spending our dollars more efficiently emergency assistance funding that's another area with that we was funding was brought in house in fy24 to replace the united way pathways program with similar assistance it's meant to address urgent one-time financial assistance needs the fy25 budget recommended budget continues that

[01:58:51] program at level funding from what we have in that occurring broadband office of broadband affordability and accessibility we'll achieve universal broadband in 2025 and this is one of those areas where there's not more or additional funding being added to the budget but it's again about completing what we've started and so uh of the 38 000 roughly total passings required to fully service out tomorrow there was only about 6100 remaining and we do expect those to be completed in f225 uh obviously uh opposite equity inclusion again not about new funding but about

[01:59:29] using existing resources more effectively and efficiently in fy25 a part-time temporary position and inclusion and health equity program manager was converted to a regular part-time position in a cost-neutral management manner in alignment with previously identified goals and looking at the strategic plan goals and objectives around housing there are a couple items i wanted to point out here first is a housing position housing program coordinator that was previously funded on a two-year basis from the housing fund is now being moved into

[02:00:05] the general fund this is providing a more permanent funding stream for this position to continue that programming and that work. Second, $2 million of otherwise unobligated FY24 fund balance is recommended to be transferred to the housing fund at the end of FY24 to support housing initiatives that are more one-time in nature and will support the county's strategic and housing goals. Any remaining balances in the housing fund at the end of the fiscal year will be reappropriated into FY25 for expected programming. Currently, that's projected to be at approximately $4.7 million remaining in the housing fund reserve going from 24 into 25 um finally the county partners with

[02:00:45] various regional and non-profit community agencies to provide health and human service programming throughout our community and the fy25 budget that contains approximately four and a half million dollars in contributions to our non-profit partners could continue that programming and you'll hear more about these programs on the next few slides thank you mr davidson i'm going to step back in a moment to talk about the abrt process this is a process of the agency budget review team that's not an obvious acronym this is a team of volunteer community members and staff who review human services non-profit agencies replaced that group has a set of criteria that they review all

[02:01:24] of the programs by for those agencies and they will determine evaluations from those programs from exemplary to a poor range we have with the board's blessing done something a little different in this year in this process, I want to talk through how this works. And this really begins in June of 2023, where county staff led by Chief Human Services Officer Kaki Demick presented a outlaw human services needs assessment. It was a data that looked at a lot of information around our community and emerging needs area. And there were four emerging need kind of priority areas that were identified. Family homelessness, adolescent mental health, community safety,

[02:02:02] and navigation for seniors. So in light of that report, the board came back the following month and proposed or approved some process changes in July of 2023. The concept here was that interview funding for human services agencies really would be prioritized for those programs that closely align with those four emerging needs areas identified in the human services needs assessment.

[02:02:27] The idea would be that with that higher funding, we would look to also have potential performance agreements and contracts with them to have increased accountability. The second bullet, the board approved removing what had been a precedent of capping new programs at 50% of the request.

[02:02:43] That is no longer the case, and so we would be looking to bring in new programs at greater amounts than had happened in recent history. And the third is that this was not about eliminating the APRT program. This was about augmenting that, so that we would first look to invest the funding into the areas that would move forward, the board's strategic goal on human services.

[02:03:05] What were those areas that would make the biggest difference? After that, continuing to support the remaining existing APRT agencies based on their program evaluation. So looking to the next slide, how this plays out in terms of recommended funding this year. First, the human services priority here is, sorry, slide for the process.

[02:03:27] Now to the actual funding, these slides show the $100,000 that is for a community safety concern. That is being held really to address topics like gun violence in the community, it is to be really intended to be done in partnership with uva and the city of charlottesville who are also looking at similar funding those discussions are underway as the city's budget was just released last week and that dialogue is continuing so staff intends to bring back a recommendation to the board of supervisors about how specifically that 100 000 would be recommended to be applied there were several applications made for use of that funding that's

[02:04:04] one knowing that this is a really under development staff would identify the funding know there'd be a future step staff did receive applications for the other three areas but they are not included in this this actually shows up on the unfunded list that supervisor galloway spoke about a few minutes ago and then that really is a really speaks to where we are in the human services priority areas of remaining agency budget review team because the funding was intended to go there secondarily the exemplary and solid rated programs receive level funding if you are fair rated agency funding they also receive level funding but before we release any funding during

[02:04:42] each quarter we're going to require quarterly reports to make sure any issues in the application are on track and i must admit there's a typo in the budget book where we did not identify who those agencies were those are the programs for the central virginia community justice on our own and the sexual assault resource agency also known as sarah so those are still level funded but we've done this before with agencies where they'll submit quarterly reports to us to make sure being responsive to findings in the review and then we would release funding assuming that everything looks okay and then no new programs are recommended in abrt again with

[02:05:17] that intent to put funding in the human services priority area first so with that that wraps up staff comments on the health and welfare chapter and i'll turn it over to jr for any questions or comments from the military thank you we're up to our order um first i do want to just get a little bit more clarity for myself, right, about the piece you were just talking about, about the specifically the community safety element that was programmed at the $100,000 level.

[02:05:44] Is that because we got quite a lot of specific applications, and it seems like we've already had a rough decision about how to use that. Is that because the opportunity emerged after we'd already made the decision to allocate that set of funds, and therefore we already had things coming in for the solicitation or were we just legally required to submit this public uh i'm blanking on the acronym that really requests for funding uh requests it was it so i guess i'm just asking like a sequencing thing did we already have this opportunity to develop and then we just had to

[02:06:22] advertise it or did this emerge suddenly i would say there's not so much of a illegal requirement to have this uh the dialogue with uh uva in the city has been going on for some time this was really to signal our intent to our partners that we are seeking to bring funding to leverage that as well i'll ask i'm sitting if would you add anything to that summary i i think the timing of the community safety working group wasn't quite what we had hoped when we advertised for this community safety priority area we had hoped that we'd have the recommendations for immediate implementation from that group to then inform our assessment of the activity that work is ongoing

[02:07:00] so the contingency allows us to come back to that and use the recommendations to assess the applications we got or ask for different applications. The intention being that all efforts to support community safety I think would be well worth it, but the opportunity is rare to join forces with the city and EVA to fund something at a substantial level that you actually might be able to expand capacity or develop some new intervention. And so I think we wanted to hold onto this money until that work was done so that we could maximize our impact is it fair to them

[02:07:36] understand like this set aside doesn't specifically mean this is a hundred thousand dollars that are going to be spent on some specific partnership with the it could still include the partners who absolutely their interventions or a proposal that they made made fit perfectly with the recommendations and they all fit um they certainly will find themselves in the original recommendations from that community safety working group, how the implementation group sort of teases out what to do first or what to do next is yet to be determined. So I think it's possible that one of those

[02:08:12] applications, in fact, makes the shelf available for the larger pool of money. They all certainly find themselves, they're suitable interventions for Q&A. And I do just want to say, in general, the increased emphasis on strategic planning and how we deploy our ABRT resources is something a place so i'm glad to see this going back to this this budget something i've talked constituents about it really weeps off the page when you uh read the budget that historically does not feel like we're necessarily exercising full strategic control of how these very important services

[02:08:50] work for it and i like i like this much more concentrated approach it's given me a lot of so i just want to thank staffer for the work they've done in this in this person um i did have a question just in to the zone page 140 that i'm looking at this might be something i'll say if they're cold um under uh dss we list the total budget of direct assistance uh current actuals being um i am not clear if that is is that happening primarily like programmed federal funds

[02:09:24] or is that entirely local programs for for direct assistance i think that includes state money um through particularly through csa it's money that we spend we pay for so there's lots of direct assistance that we join somebody who needs it with the funding source and we watch that happen that doesn't come through our finance office this is money that actually comes through our finance office and then the purchase of service happens through us thank you um i would see because i just recognized that uh human services is a department where we have a lot of federal programs that use

[02:10:00] in as of past somewhere in this document in this specific table i would be able to find if i was looking for a little bit of a better eye for this the federal funds because i just recognize they're captured in our revenues and our expenses on like the big items they are in the in the big way i in the annual report from the dss advisory board that's a showcase number because it's big it's like 168 million dollars of money that is leveraged through dss for this community through those

[02:10:31] kinds of benefits like uh medicaid um and i do unsurprisingly i i was very intrigued uh when the lajc community organizer came to talk to us about the eviction reduction fund and i recognize this is something that we get a probably disproportionately large impact per dollar spent but i don't know that i've seen any actual data on what that scale of impact is do we have the ability to identify

[02:11:05] truly just how many individual disbursements there have been because i i feel it's not ungenerous or inaccurate to say that each individual disbursement is a family that is not evicted so that would just be a very compelling number that i might appreciate if we're looking at potentially seeing how that fund could grow or change.

[02:11:28] - Sure, we keep data about the number of callers, the number of individual clients over the call period, household size and composition, and then how much money they got, and whether it was for a shutoff notice or an eviction notice. And so those are the sort of two priority criteria for eligibility.

[02:11:46] And then we prioritize based on whether there's children in the house under five, whether there's somebody who's medically fragile in the house, those kinds of things. We can give you all that. And kind of further, maybe a little bit of a more complex data request. I recognize that in eviction prevention, there is also a cost saving that is realized for the public.

[02:12:07] But I also recognize there's a wrong pockets problem, right? Like not everything is, not every cost saving is realized by the locality. So the cost savings are realized by public, other public services, other bodies. Do we have a simply what the cost saving for an eviction prevention for the locality is?

[02:12:26] I realize that the complex data has. Not for real. We would be able to extrapolate based on data that's used at the national level, but we don't have that for ourselves. And we don't, honestly, we don't know that we know we've avoided your eviction in September, but you can't come back to our source.

[02:12:50] And so I don't know what happens for you in October. And so we may be able to realize, even sort of we, the global we across the community, realize some savings in September, but unless we have an ongoing source for family, that may not be a long-term solution.

[02:13:05] I will say, and please correct me if I'm wrong, and this has got to be my last question. Sorry for holding the mic for so long. My understanding is that currently we do disperse eviction prevention funds, primarily to families that are able to keep current but have an existing debt.

[02:13:25] Is that incorrect, Karen? As in, like, I had a catastrophe, and I'm now $2,000 behind, which is a month and a half of my rent. I can make my rent payments, but I can't pay down this debt, so I will be living. That is my problem. That is certainly the preference, right?

[02:13:40] That this is meant to be an emergency assistance program, not a poverty solution program. That's a hard distinction to make. It doesn't feel great, but it is the distinction that this is meant to help you through a short-term problem and not necessarily be the long-term solution.

[02:13:58] Again, for the September-October example, we use it for the short term in fact. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Supervisor Lupita? Thank you. Regarding slide 7, we said that complete remaining passings, so you know, there are 6,100 homes to be completed in 2025.

[02:14:24] Does that mean that all the others will be completed prior to that? Yeah, there are sort of rolling deadlines for the existing grant that are out there. The anticipation is by the end of 25 will be very few folks in probably pretty remote categories.

[02:14:47] You may have heard also the description around this sort of donut problem where early broadband was sort of created, but there'd be three houses in the middle that didn't get connected. So there'll be quite a bit of work in the last six months of that to go and identify all of those folks. and so the economy of scale around some of the work is missing there because we have to do some strategic work to get them in there and i think we'll firefly and bright speed have some of those houses in there listed folks to get to that because i know we've heard different numbers

[02:15:23] uh that may not be able to have service but but what i'm hearing now is everyone will have service i mean we're pretty dedicated to universal service i think we're also dedicated to problem solving whatever those donut holes are and we've certainly had that problem with with past years where we said to for example a provider uh who's agreed to provide broadband to 100 households and they get 98 them right and so it's our job to keep track of all of those missing twos and fours and sixes and make sure that our final year we solved as well okay so

[02:15:57] the 6100 could be part of the donut they certainly are i find myself in the middle of a donut and yes i i my my address is in that list wait where's mike kaufling believe me you know okay but really because before i thought the 6100 that referred to the people who were up on top of the mountain with a three mile long driveway it's a little bit of everybody there's some actual clusters for example you know the keen uh as well has largely been sort of addressed in former grants

[02:16:36] but king in the north garden so there's villages sort of in that we will not just the one offs thank you and um regarding the housing fund uh so we're looking at possibly giving two million for the housing fund for next fiscal year but you you're saying that right now we have 4.7 million remaining that will be then transferred that number that projected number at the end of the year does include this two million dollars as well so it's going to be transferred in during the current fiscal year and so that 4.7 expected or projected that's going to roll over

[02:17:15] to the next three year includes includes this two million yes ma'am yes ma'am and we have 3.6 million dollars in applications that are in the pipeline for that four million yes good glad to hear it and you said that the um on slide 11 uh the human services price you mentioned gun safety so i think i was writing down when you mentioned something about gun safety it's part of community safety contingency okay so there's part of that for gun safety and um i just have a question

[02:17:48] regarding is probably intro to navigation for seniors is examples of those programs instead of your own role would you like to speak to that in the human services needs assessment there were sort of two two areas two pieces of data that we looked at. We looked at the number of calls that come to our Adult Protective Services Unit that actually are not protective service issues, but seniors or friends of seniors or

[02:18:24] family of seniors who need somebody to talk to about what the senior service landscape looks like. They don't know that they might be able to go to Java to get some of that answered, but they don't know where to start. And so our staff at DSS spend an awful lot of time through coaching and supporting folks who are not our traditional clients and we also have a staff that is overworked and has a lot of traditional clients and so there's a need to sort of push that work back into the community and not at aps and then we also heard a tremendous number of seniors who were or again friends or

[02:19:02] family of seniors who didn't know where to start and so we got lots of data from people saying we we didn't know where there we could call we didn't we didn't have anybody that would help us and we We made huge both financial and emotional mistakes in our process in terms of negotiating the complicated service system for seniors.

[02:19:21] And so we identified that as one of our emerging needs for the grant process was navigation for seniors. Could that also include the center, which may be the challenge? It could. The center did not apply for those funds.

[02:19:36] No. I have to check up on it. All right. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you, Supervisor McKeith. So let me just stick to that point because we're just trying to make sure I understand because last summer when we approved the, you know, we talked about the priorities and we had homelessness, adolescent mental health, community safety, and navigation for seniors.

[02:20:05] And I've heard, with Mike's discussion and some of his discussion, we've heard talking about community safety. And I didn't know if that was being discussed in a general topic or as a specific under this.

[02:20:21] I'm not sure if it makes sense. But I'm just trying to figure out, you were talking about how the $100,000 could be utilized later. You're looking at how to best use it.

[02:20:37] And it might come back to some of these, one of these four, some of these four. Help me, Gary, I'm trying to get a better understanding. Sure. So we solicited during the ABRT process applications to solve or address community safety. And we got a number of applications in there.

[02:20:53] When you say community safety, that's one of the, we have homelessness, mental health, community safety, and navigation for seniors. Right. So you're talking specifically community safety. We solicited applications for all four. Okay, that's what I'm trying to do.

[02:21:09] Along the issue for community safety, there happened to be this parallel process with the joint UVA city county community safety working group that would emerge with a set of recommendations for implementation. And how amazing would it be that we had $100,000 in our process that would be potentially able to join forces with funds from the city and UVA to make a bigger impact on community safety.

[02:21:34] So we hoped that all of those things would be able to influence each other in time to come to this body and say, to the budget process and say, we know exactly where we think this money should go. That's not the way it happened. And so that $100,000 is being proposed in the budget to hide in a contingency until that community safety working group has finished its recommendations.

[02:21:58] Okay. With the hope that it maximizes, it gets amplified with money from these other places. that helps me a lot because i was getting hung up on the term community safety and what i was seeing with homelessness adolescent mental health navigation for seniors and community safety so i think i understand it better now thank you so we'll be hearing for more about that in in the future i hope so yeah do you have a and maybe you said it but do you have a sense of when I haven't had many senses of when. I've been wrong in 2028.

[02:22:37] I'm optimistic. This year? I hope so. All right. I guess that was really what I was trying to figure out in my head. I really do, to turn to staff and thank you, I really do like the new look that we're using and how you're tightening this down I like the idea of some of the partners with quarterly reports for more information and I just really like the way you all have parsed this out and doing things differently this year and I really appreciate that thank you so with that I think that's all right now thank

[02:23:16] you uh supervisor um the first question is one that we've been it's not high priority but it's easy to get back to me I didn't it's it's a question I should have asked last year but and looking at the different uh abrt categories there's there's basically four for oal it looks like two of those came online this week or 22 and trying to track the monies i was just struggling to track it but then i was like oh wait when should we break out these other three lines and

[02:23:54] are they all the same if there's any info that you can provide just on the history of when and why those stuff broke out i didn't catch it sure so i can i can speak to that um previously if um those that are showing with the zeros and fy 23 were considered part of the overall abrt contribution we looked at the services that they were providing and then we felt that they felt more contractual in nature and so those were moved from the abrt process into this staff review process and so it really is a data issue for to not compute the issue of saying but wait i thought we contributed

[02:24:32] x amount to oar back in 2023 we started pulling those out separately and showing those separately here so that we could track that data more consistently across and it wasn't a but wait we had 231 back there why is it only showing 211 and so that's really the reason for for breaking those out in that way they've always i could go back and look at exactly how long they've been funded but i mean i've been doing this for a long time and yeah probably the math behind mr davidson's comment which is spot on if you were looking at in the abrt the oar line for fiscal year 2324 dropped from 205 000 down to 178. that was not a decrease in funding for those programs recognizing

[02:25:11] that some of those were more appropriate to be broken out every year with our staff we'll go through and do a review to make sure that uh agencies really are in the right process in terms of avrt versus others that i guess that's where i struggled i didn't math it so we can take a follow-up to show how that look yeah if you would um because clearly it is i just i'm not looking at it properly um i know in the list of unfunded items there were two dss positions a human service navigator and a senior human service worker that was specific for hearts in the description there

[02:25:51] it does state that the position was received a 33 percent reimbursement from the state the cost that's included on the list of unfunded items it already include that reimbursement so that's just pure county cost in our list or is that before the reimbursement thank you before all right so a senior humanry is hearts it has in there is 107 599 as the total cost that's the the ongoing of the one time, you're saying 33% of that would come back and back up fund.

[02:26:23] Well, 33 is maybe the 105, the one-time cost. I've got that right. That's correct. Yes, sir. I think those are all my questions. Madam Mayor. Thank you very much. I apologize that I have left my four pages of message home, so I will email things to you that I don't remember properly enough right to turn it um following along with the on the unfunded list just i guess my question

[02:27:03] about the emergency assistance program is we're contemplating putting public dollars in because the federal dollars are done and where will the capacity come from to deliver the money without the person who is not whose position is not uh last year you graciously funded a human services navigator position as part of the human services priority and that person is screening the calls and distributing the funding so that position will continue but one in the do not i mean the unfunded list is different than what you just described exactly so okay i had to imagine them

[02:27:40] doing differently okay all right there's that's good news very good thank you um and all right um jumping to the avrt list procedurally is there a number of years when one or several are having not so great analysis and yet still carried along when does that end because there are considerable chunks of money 25 000 here and there that are going to things where the application was fair

[02:28:15] when there was no data delivered at all and so um there are so many that didn't get any funding that we know are delivering food I mean Lowe's and Vicious jumps to mind because their application was exemplary and they're monstrous numbers of families who are helped and um so anyway that's just how how that's sorted out is something I would love to learn more about when you can the um and an element that I brought up every year for the last 10 is the focus on I always look very

[02:28:50] carefully on the um charts and thank you for all this detail because it really helps me understand uh the county residents who are served versus the overall to me it's very important that we focus county taxpayer dollars on services that are primarily for county residents rather than a very small amount you know 15 14 13 percent of the people served being county residents does not meet the standard i hope we would have so i will just pass that thought along

[02:29:22] because it's sort of colored the way i've looked at the the chart um in your application process somewhere are questions asked about the capability of the agency's staff to do the job and that is what are the numbers of the turnover rate for the people on staff now i've heard only anecdotally about various agencies in the social service realm who have huge turnovers of people i mean talk about churn it's just like and they're they get half trained and then they're out the

[02:29:57] the door. So is that part of your information gathering and analysis? And if not now, then perhaps next year would be a really good thing to add. So again, we're making sure that we are funding agencies who are capable and willing. I know that it's really hard to be on a non-profit board, and we need a lot of people on those boards who are over to actually get the work done.

[02:30:24] So having an analysis of how they carry that out would be, and I'm not on it, except that we can work, and I should disclose someday, but when we talk about LEAF, then I'll read the statement. So anyway, that's just a wish for more information, and I'll stop there.

[02:30:44] Thank you. I can speak to a couple of those in response. We do not have a specific question on turnover rate, but we do have, I'll call a few questions, I'll just call it around organizational health to make sure they are of sound operations. But that's one every year we look at the application and we can factor that into, you know, other ways we may look at that just in the changing environment we have in the labor market.

[02:31:07] On the first question around what happens or what point is funding withdrawn? No one scored there, but there is a four rating. And typically when anyone scores four, that is when there are significant consequences in our recommendation for funding. I think it's been a couple of years since we've done that.

[02:31:24] But at that point, really look at a defunding or a reduction of funding with a lot of contingencies around that. Certainly for fair agencies, it's really more where agencies are more put on notice. And typically what we find is they may improve over time.

[02:31:39] But it's really when the rating drops below fair, we tend to have more consequences in our recommendations. And for the jurisdiction of origin for the clients, how does that factor into the rating? Yes, that will be a piece of data that the AVRT team looks at.

[02:31:58] I'm not sure in the rubric exactly how they score that, but there is consideration to ensure that there is that representation and that they really are serving county folks. Yeah, we have a beneficiaries list where they're required to look at their past year beneficiaries by zip code, and we're specifically giving them that.

[02:32:17] So it's zip code and map overlay to verify that they're city or county beneficiaries or other beneficiaries. then they have to report at the end of the year how close they came to that estimate and so for many of these organizations we have six or seven you know years worth of data at least if not more well i understand the challenge of the zip code since you know one goes all the way out to the white hole and so that really trips you up right away i'm glad for the map overlay so how does one determine organizational health if you're not asking questions like staff so we uh they're required to provide an audit i believe there are some questions around their board and

[02:32:57] their executive structure. I don't have the full list of questions. Do you recall, Nell? There's audit on top of that around some of the financial health things. There is diversity of funding, making sure it's not a sole source of that. There's a diversity of funding sources.

[02:33:14] There's operational reserves, capital reserves that are looked at along that. I believe there is feedback surveys feedback into their performance and operations and a 990 i would assume yes okay yes because that's been a real sticky point for many they haven't done it for four or five years and so that's like oops all right well um and at some point i will hope that you might go with the current state of disaster that the postal service is in going to electronic checks for the especially

[02:33:50] these agencies who weren't forced to be in a quarterly thing for some reason i don't i don't understand that for the formerly municipal band charlesville band has been funded for i don't know 30 years used to be 16 000 and when the recession came along they were released 8 000 but they've been here they're doing it and i it seems like a lot of effort on staff parts has said four two thousand dollar checks and one that has that disappears in the mail so please consider all those kinds of wear and tear things when you go forward so that um we make it easier on staff as well as on yes having hand delivered one of those checks and was lost in the LA it's not just them

[02:34:30] i'm sure it is other agencies as well but i think it's screaming for their money that's a good example as we head into the financial management system but what are those processes where our best practice and how we can do that differently we're not there yet but we would anticipation with that system online that's a really good opportunity to take a look at that is that a 2020 that's for Thank you very much.

[02:34:49] I'll stop. A lot of my questions have answered. I would say that it's making you confused by the presentation method sometimes in the books when it has a list of expenditures, a whole group of essentially zero requests of organizations that then appear elsewhere.

[02:35:10] And then there are some, I guess, that were the practical services when we look at the next page and use the job again, even though it's -- I just wish there was some way to sort of mark those that got funding in other ways or something so we didn't look and just see oh there's a zero there they didn't get anything but they did get something because they got it through a different process so i just find that sometimes people look at this and they'll tell me why didn't you do this and i'm like well we did but it was over here and it just wasn't good so yeah otherwise it is a really painfulness of this year's budget

[02:35:49] that's just getting flat is frustrating and recognizing that we have these four priority areas and I hope that this is just a re-solicitation that comes about next year and we can start to focus on them the way I thought we'd intended for this last year. So thank you. I think we're ready to move here. I'll just say because we've covered health and welfare because I know our director of job of Vardakin is here. I don't expect we'll have more questions or if anything at this point but you're of course welcome to stay so i just want to recognize her in the audience

[02:36:26] thank you thank you for being here thank you for what you do i appreciate it all right okay all right um so moving along um next we have the parks for recreation and cultural area of our budget roughly 11.9 million um 30 of the general funds um 43 of that uh being parks and recreation department with the um excuse me yeah with the remaining 57 going to our community partners okay within our parks and recreation department we have approximately 90 000 worth of increases

[02:37:02] that are related to operational costs related to improving our athletic field maintenance including contract costs for additional field maintenance services um springing repairs improvements to irrigation services additional costs for supplies and equipments grass seeds fertilizers all those kind of things um and as we continue um well i'll mention that in the next one also um there's a big focus on implementing our cip and there's an emphasis on this budget to move forward with the approved cip projects including fields of dart and tau which again as those come online we will continue to to uh incorporate and add on those additional operating costs as those new fields

[02:37:40] come on and we continue to maintain those at a higher level identifying another one of the cip products we've been talking with the board about is identifying the location and beginning the design and construction um of the urban pocket uh we'll talk more we're going to talk we're going to get into a little more detail with that at the cip work session and so we can get into more detailed questions with that but i just wanted to mention that a lot of the staff time and capacity and and resources not only in parks and rec but in our facilities department other areas uh i know our county attorneys involved when we're looking at land parcels and all of those things are going

[02:38:17] towards this project and finally biscuit run leading phase one improvements to open biscuit run for opening the park so um so those are those are a few that the highlights with our parks and recreation operating department um looking at some of our uh notable changes to the our parks record cultural uh regional partners the library um there are no services are changing we're just paying the county's share of existing services however this does include some increases in compensation

[02:38:54] health insurance and the final year the minimum wage phase in similar to what we're facing what our other regional partners are facing as well with the convention and visitors bureau this contribution is increasing about 186 000 and it's based on our regional agreement which is based on the actual transient occupancy tax revenues from the most recent completed year which was 23 and it it comes out to there's a formula that's like 5% of the 25% of the 30%, but it comes out to roughly 30% of the prior year's actuals, just for simplicity's sake. Looking at the cultural,

[02:39:33] arts, and festival agencies, different criteria were used here versus these in the Human Services Agency that continued into F-25. Eligibility requirements didn't change. Staff did revisit this process with the board in July 23rd, and the board approved some process modifications.

[02:39:49] One, in the past, agencies were scored by a team of staff from five different departments using 13 criteria, and there was a prioritization of funding based on how they scored. This has instead shifted focus to are you eligible and do you qualify and not go through the detailed scoring once agencies have demonstrated that they meet these minimum requirements.

[02:40:10] And this helps staff support staff capacity for a piece of the budget that's really relatively small compared to some others. Within this process, agencies would be considered in one of the four areas, the smaller local cultural agencies, the larger programs that bring in visitors and sports, arts focused, and then recreation or educational.

[02:40:33] The larger programs that bring in visitors to the community and have economic impact, they have been historically funded at larger amounts than other agencies in this process. And so acknowledging that there are notable differences between these categories and funding accordingly. Third bullet speaks to creating a consistent tiers within each category.

[02:40:56] For example, smaller local cultural programs receiving different amounts of funding. Staff would look at making those more consistent across the agencies that all fall within each of these tiers. We didn't get all the way there in FY25, but it's improved from the prior year, and we're continuing to work our way through that.

[02:41:13] And then the last one speaks to a concept that is similar to the ABRT agencies, where agencies who meet the qualifications and are intended to be funded if possible whether they were previously funded or not um so um yeah but less emphasis on that existing like you're good and more on the new county funding finishes up our arts cultural recreation questions

[02:41:52] thank you so much i just want to begin by saying every time i hear the phrase open biscuit run I have to really resist the urge to stand up in my seat. And so it's very exciting just every time I hear it. So I don't want to, I don't want to breeze past that incredible.

[02:42:09] And help me understand when we're and I realize I realize this is an issue that this board has previously litigated at some length. But I just want to make sure I'm getting my hands around it. The increase in operating costs around fields.

[02:42:27] You also mentioned that we're bringing additional fields online. is it should I be expecting to see that continual budget creep for a number of years and like what does that actually look like? So as part of our we can discuss this but we'll discuss this more in more detail when we look at our capital budget because we do talk about the operational impacts when we're looking at our capital budget but as part of this what I was referring to there was the Darden Tau field rebuilds at one each year for four years and as those come online there is a different level of maintenance that will be required with the new fields and so there's some irrigation costs some seed maintenance other costs that are related to that that will continue to

[02:43:06] increase um not to the level that we showed on that slide of 90 000 per year because that was a system-wide look at the improvements so there is a smaller incremental amount that will come on each year and we'll re-evaluate that annual remaining three years of the current dart and how uh cip plan yeah we'll look at that for each each of the four fields as we bring those online yes sir um i do want to i see that there's um uh in the unfunded list we do have um uh apart or a half of a trail crew technician like what looks like half an fte of a i also know we recently

[02:43:42] advertised trail crew technician is this just to bring trails online faster i'm assuming this is mostly related to um where there's significant um yes it's uh yes to both uh it's not only going to assist us in the trail building capability that this can run but also to assist with the over 80 some some miles of trails and greenways that we

[02:44:10] currently have uh and the ongoing maintenance um is this currently projected to be a a timeline impacting item right like is this if i looked at the three-year plan for the remaining elements of biscuit is this expected to shift anything we don't have uh the the requested full complement of trail technicians sure that's all i have thank you so much for that um i did just have um and i

[02:44:49] think i know the answer to this but i just want to say it out loud my understanding is um the when we talk about the jmrl budget i know that they are preparing for a a major ask for their their downtown uh my understanding of that that's currently not captured that wouldn't be captured in the operating budget and that it's not yet i believe captured in the cip i just want to make sure that am i correct in that that shoe has not dropped it is it is not part of the operating budget on wednesday it is included in the cip with design in year three construction in year five conditional point a few things happening and we'll talk about this things being city coming along

[02:45:28] an agreement we need to have place with the city looking at fundraising and everything else but we'll discuss that a little more in detail on uh wednesday appreciate that i don't normally have the opportunity to get ahead of my reading either in here or the school room still um get it day by day so i have not yet done my readings for uh for the wednesday uh discussion so i appreciate that um what should we be expecting additional operating uh costs pursuant to that once that does start coming online in future years it would be outside of the five-year period uh that is something we'd be at the earliest stages at with the evaluated libraries thank you so much very

[02:46:08] thorough i appreciate it i don't really have uh any questions i'm like supervisor pruitt when you mentioned darden town and i'll jump up and down happy happy happy but otherwise i mean i i don't really have any questions at this point um don't have any questions at this point this section yeah no questions i'm just endorsing the fact that you're going to be re-evaluating the field maintenance of dart and towel with each year to make sure that we've got the proper funding for that because this board did commit

[02:46:46] with the choice we made over there to do the proper maintenance on that to keep the both the life uh lifespan and the quality to a certain level so if those costs are to change that needs to be i mean that's just a commitment that that was voted on them so be appreciating that in the budgets to come that we receive kind of update on what this costs are thank you thank you thank you thank you i don't have any questions either but i will applaud two things uh i'm grateful that there is a proposal for more staff in parks and rec because for 50 years there have been

[02:47:25] six people doing the work of 20 and i'm really glad that there are more people on the ground everywhere to do um and also regarding the field maintenance there was basically none for so long that any increase in doing it right is going to look like an increase and so that's why based on i agree with with uh yeah that um we need to be doing the right amount of work to keep these really growing money thank you thank you i i don't really have any questions one maybe if we go back one slide just want to clarify something we we had actually i don't want

[02:48:04] to get ahead of ourselves on this contract's shelf of thoughts of increasing their transient occupancy tax and and you made a comment about how you calculate what used for what and i just want to make sure i capture it if there were an increase in that what part of it has to go to convention and visitors bureau and yeah the the in the current regional agreement the cacv receives uh 30 of the prior year on the first five percent of the tax the first five percent that's what i thought that's what i want to make sure we clarify i have no other questions

[02:48:41] if no one else does i think we can move on moving on uh to community development um looking at 17.6 million roughly four percent of the general fund budget um again this is made up primarily of our community development department followed by our regional transit agencies at roughly 39 along with the economic development department and our other community development agencies as you look at community development department there are no major changes here and as we discussed with some of the areas on last wednesday in our first work session this is

[02:49:20] an area where the focus is more on continuing what we've started rather than newer additional funding with some examples bringing being the continuation of ac44 and some of the various ordinance updates that are underway um as we discussed the financial management system project under our core system modernization when we discussed the administration portion of the budget now our chief financial officer mr jacob sumner is going to discuss the community development portion of the core systems modernization good afternoon board james summer chief financial officer of the county um last one is that we started the conversation about the uh our core

[02:49:56] system modernization of project and i'm going to take that a little bit further today as we enter the community development section of the budget so uh i am the financial officer but i'm filling in today for our chief operating officer who typically leads this area so um i will do my best uh impression of our our coo she did leave me some great notes i will say uh several years we've spoken with with board about the need to not just update our software that powers our daily operations but substantially overhaul them we call this our core systems modernization project

[02:50:31] There's been work to prepare for the two systems to go live in FY25, and today we'll talk a little bit more about the community development system. This new system will launch in FY25 with a modern technology with more transparency for our customers. You can include, as you may see on the screen, a couple of sample dashboards to include a dashboard with my permits, my plans, my inspections, my invoices, my licenses, all in one place.

[02:50:59] We also include requests for inspections and the ability to pay fees all in one place. It will allow customers to upload attachments and to make corrections to their applications. And there is also a fee estimator. This will often provide accessibility options such as a translator and screen reader for residents that may need those options.

[02:51:19] Staff in CDD of works, it creates a 70% reduction in processes to improve processing efficiency and staff retooling by combining similar workflows. This should result in reducing the overall training of both staff and our community members. This results in the technical platform to change significantly, and that requires significant change management for our employees and for the community.

[02:51:43] All technology advances hold best practices from a large set of functional expertise so that technology is built with the development process in mind. However, each system is unique. We must learn the nuances and special exceptions of our county code and our policies.

[02:52:03] CDD processes stand on that code, which is unique to Albemarle County. The system that we currently procured is highly configurable, enables us to build in our code requirements without reprogramming and customizing the system. So it's built with that flexibility. This configuration process requires guidance from our subject matter experts. These are the same employees that we rely on day-to-day to manage our routine workload, which is not slowed down in the midst of an ongoing project.

[02:52:32] this project also requires dedicated resources from community development information technology and performance and strategic planning to realize all the benefits that the new system can offer a large program is currently being developed to ensure excellent training for staff connecting departments developers and builders and communication strategies for all those that will be impacted by the system thank you um moving on through our community development area um we'll look at our economic development office this is another area where the focus is more on continuing what we've started rather than newer additional funding um for you there are no major budget

[02:53:10] changes but i did want to highlight two areas um one is the updating of project enabled which is not about new funding but about work plan advancement and the other area is ravana futures for ravana futures there is a small increase in the general fund which is actually shown in the fez budget so there's two different layers to this and we decided to discuss it all here um of about $50,000 to cover the ongoing grounds, property maintenance, and other routine operating expenses associated with that property. In addition, the Economic Development Fund is planning to cover the FY25 expenses that have been estimated at approximately $700,000 from now for the

[02:53:47] Ravanna Futures project. These expenses include further studying of the master plan of the property project management support, things of that nature. Now we're going to spend just a moment discussing our regional transit. I want to preface this by saying that the amounts listed on the slide are not about changes in service or changes in service levels, but rather the continuation of existing services and existing service levels. For Charlottesville Area Transit, we've budgeted approximately $599,000 increase in the county contribution for existing services in FY25.

[02:54:25] The amount in FY25 recommended budget is based upon the five-year plan that Cat has shared with us with the county as part of previous budget processes um at the beginning of the pandemic put together a multi-year funding plan that leveraged federal pandemic relief funding to offset the cost of services or potential revenue reduction losses and that lowered the locality's contributions both for the city and the county by utilizing these dollars um this lowered the county's contribution to around 500 000 i believe it was at that point and this has slowly increased each year back to the current levels over time. I will say also at the time of the release of the

[02:55:02] county executive's recommended budget, the city was still in the process of balancing their budget and having those discussions and deliberations with their departments, which included Charlottesville Area Transit. So therefore, the final amount in the CAT budget that you may see in the city budget for the county's contribution is approximately $84,000 higher than what we're showing. While the timing for CAT is slightly different than what we normally see for them on an annual basis this is no different than how we would handle any of our other regional partners as they continue through the budget development process and there's a bunch of changes as they work with their boards and therefore for all such changes in the county's contributions

[02:55:41] to the regional partners whether it's cat or safety partners or public works partners staff will come back to the board at a later work session with those adjustments along with the plan to account for them and along with any other adjustments that the board may have or may have discussed with staff as we move through the process. MicroCAT. This fully funds the county's obligation for our second year of the MicroCAT pilot program at approximately $1.7 million. This is a $1.5 million increase from what was in the FY24 budget. The FY24 budget

[02:56:19] contained the remainder of the county's contribution to fund the first year of pilot program. It was our grant contribution we committed to. As part of that program, we committed to two years of funding of this project. The first year was heavily grant funded with a smaller county contribution and the second year was 100% on the locality's dollar. This number that we have in our budget represents that second year of funding that is 100% on the locality's dollar. At this time there are really no budget or programmatic decisions being asked of the board on this but you know anything as we go through this program and as we continue to look at this program it really would

[02:56:54] be looking at the continuation of the program or service level changes that may occur in FY26 so would bring that back to the board at a later date for further discussion on this particular program as to our other regional transit partners jaunt has shown a slight decrease of roughly 251 dollars from where we were last year and this fully funds the regional transit partnership and the athman express at 25 000 or 7 000 perspective that that ends the community development sub section and and we'll turn it back over first.

[02:57:31] - Thank you. Go for it. - Supervisor Crump. - I actually don't know that I have any questions. - Supervisor McKeel? - Yes, I'm just very excited about microcat. I think there's so many good things coming from that.

[02:57:49] The fact that we've had what, 8,700 people sign up for that since October. I think that's just, this is gonna be a game changer. I'm hoping, I'm hoping. And I know Supervisor McKeel as a chair of the RGP and spearheading all these things.

[02:58:08] And it's just really, really exciting to see something like this happen. And with so much being in a rural area, this is what's going to enable transportation to happen. Thank you.

[02:58:24] So other questions? Thank you. The only question that I had was I'm just trying to make sure that I understand and going forward because for the regional transit partnership discussion where we charge the city and the county get together and and you were one of those folks and we're looking at moving into an authority and at the point at some point obviously when we get to an actual authority the idea has always been the regional transit partnership will go away you will not need it If we get to that point, and hopefully we will.

[02:59:02] I just want to make sure that we're not missing or that we need some funding to help that transition period between the Regional Transit Partnership and trying to wrap our arms around the authority and what your all's thoughts are on that.

[02:59:23] Maybe we're just on hold and we're waiting to see exactly what it looks like and what it will cost. and then it'll come back to us in another in another time that might be the answer to my question but i'm just wanted to put it on the table so so we've had um the the city county tjpdc staff team we've had our first meeting we've identified sort of a scope of work for that group and one of those items is the budget for what the what the budget would be needed for the regional transit authority but it's just very early on we we've set up regular a regular schedule

[03:00:00] of meetings and identified those issues and as soon as we're able to really talk about what um the budgetary needs of that rta would be then um we can start we'll we'll come back to this group into the city can you answer my question i just know that the community is interested and just trying to put on the table to make sure that i understood and we knew where we were going thank you man that's great that's all i have um the cat the cat increases does that how does that does that take into account where the city's at with collective bargaining increase in cost that

[03:00:36] that would be yes sir the um the number i referenced of the eighty four thousand dollars in additional funding um that does include where they they ended up with their collective bargaining um the counties would be the county's portion of our services for that so that that difference is specific to that particular i would have to go back and look at i would say yes that the majority that increase is directly related to that but they get we put in the 599 000 increase based on their five-year plan they went back and looked and as part of this as part of all of their increases

[03:01:12] collective bargaining was a piece of that and so when they came back with the final number they gave us this the final number final number of yes that would be roughly 680 thousand dollars so the 599 included some possibility for collective bargaining i'm just trying to isolate yeah so it was obviously whether collective bargaining or not in the 599 there had been some sort of there there could have been a proposed salary adjustment in any collective bargaining specifies so it sounds like whatever portion of the actual salary increase that was

[03:01:50] already in there the 84 is just the difference beyond that yes sir that's something that up yes sir when um okay and then you said that that 84 000 i'm sorry i went off on my brain was off on a tangent when you finished out the story there so that 80 that adjustment comes back when and and and how does that get ironed out so as we've done in the past at future work sessions as we we will keep a list of all the adjustments that are being made with budget administrative adjustments adjustments made by the board and we'll provide that list we'll provide potential um

[03:02:27] how how we would potentially look at solving those adjustments and then bring this back to you for further discussion um and we don't have a set work sessions scheduled right now um to say this is where we're going to bring back the adjustments we would need to work you're looking to work through today 13th and then potentially at the 25th would be that that opportunity we're able to come back with some of this the thank you the um the items on our list of unfunded it just helps me to ask some questions about that just to get them prioritized in my brain so specific to the economic development fund then it says ongoing costs but this would

[03:03:05] have been to the fund not to the department correct yes so the fund is like 2 million or just under 2 million or something i think so you're saying that that's what's being worked on not 250 000 in support of the office no this would this as part of the five-year plan we had contemplated additional of speaking to the sun funded list we contemplated additional ongoing funding, operational funding on an annual basis of $250,000 with ramping up over time.

[03:03:35] And that $250,000 represents like an ongoing operational transfer to that fund on an annual basis. And so it would not, you're right, it would not go to that department. It would go to the fund on an annual basis. Same with- Help achieve whatever the fund does. Right.

[03:03:51] Yes, sir. So what is lost by not doing this additional $250,000 right now? like what obviously you've already made the decision because it's not funded that it's not a priority given other things for that being. Speaking of that as a long-term strategy where the board's investments in the housing fund and the economic development fund both been primarily one-time funding. The board has expressed interest over time to blend a little more ongoing funding so that if in a year one-time funding is not available it can create more of a drumbeat to assist with planning that may appear in both either the housing or the economic development fund so it's tough to look at those funds right now and say we're not also because

[03:04:31] 250 000 depending on the project doesn't necessarily you know purchase much but it's more about a long-term strategy and to have a blend of revenues into that funds to position the county for when opportunities arise the county may not need to uh you know go may not need to reprioritize a lot of funding it's already there in either the bucket for the housing fund or the economic building

[03:04:52] thank you good um all right that's all thank you supervisor mel thank you um several places throughout different chapters it's talked about money from the water resources fund which i know is up to 2.2 million because of the increased value of the pen and are there sort of criteria

[03:05:26] about which positions qualify to mute that money i mean i would have was if my question really was is that providing extra money for fixing the underground pipes and things that we've been trying to get started for a long time or is this being used for staff in a bunch of different departments or so how do i find out that information all of the above uh we can provide a more detailed breakout of what's involved in that but as part of our transfer um as you said it's based on the the um dollar of a penny or excuse me the point seven cents of the penny um and then that gets transfer to the water resources fund and then we have a where we look at certain positions that are

[03:06:05] dedicated specifically to water resource activities um within our facilities and economic our facilities environmental services division some within community development some of our regional partner agencies as well and so we we've compiled that entire list and see how much needs to be transferred back into the general fund to cover that and the remaining balance whatever is left over after that then goes into um the water resources reserve funding that can be used for capital or operating and that's would come back into that would go into their phone house and come back to the board for their decision on how they would want to use that so so i guessed almost

[03:06:41] right when it was greg harper's shop the stream health people the water quality people yes ma'am the uh repanna conservation alliance and stolen water conservation district would all be things consider water related in addition to the other stuff pipes and stuff okay thank you that's great and I will look forward to that homework um I understand what you were saying about the timing on the information to come on the bus the cat um are you getting the detailed budget information

[03:07:20] from the city appropriately time wise and even though decisions might not have been made and have you been given the background the homework that they've struggled with getting in the past I mean, are you getting it all this year? Yes. Yes, ma'am. They're providing it to us. That's a really great thing. And do I understand with the micro count, this is the last year before we could consider having fees.

[03:07:45] This year is required to be no fee. And then after that, we can decide if we're going to have fees or we're going to stop altogether or what. That's a next time, this time next year situation. Yes, ma'am. That's correct. Okay. I will stop there. Thank you. My questions have been addressed.

[03:08:04] So I appreciate the thoroughness of all of this. We are looking at a short half or six. We only had one section, you know, but- Yeah, it will not be a short one because I want to spend some time talking about match relief and it's totally fine to pick that up on Wednesday so we can.

[03:08:23] I will ask as we break though, as I alluded to at the beginning, there's certainly questions we've answered on the spot, questions could come. I did not hear clearly one topic that the board would really want to dive into as as maybe we heard from the sheriff and fire rescue at the first work session uh you know there are obviously questions to come but if i've misheard or if there's anything in the board's mind uh please let us know and that can help us out plan the work session on march 25th as we support the board for our proposed budget i understand yes it's not a last call it's just the next opportunity

[03:08:54] to help us try to clarify uh yes i wanted to take an opportunity mr chair and board to recognize it's Mr. Mike Murphy, who is here today from JAWN. He's actually the interim director of JAWN. And in addition to thanking him for being here today, really to publicly thank him for his leadership as he stepped in as interim director.

[03:09:18] And that was in that December timeframe. And so, Mike, I appreciate you being here and thank you for your leadership in the short time that you've been helping the county. mr summer is also on that board and and and uh he he spends significant amount of time uh since he's been appointed to that board but thank you mr chair i appreciate that well uh the board if uh matters on the other word if i think if anybody from the board needs to add anything if not um Thank you.

[03:09:55] Mr. Richardson, do you have anything further? No, sir. We will adjourn. Thank you. It's 13:00, 3:00 PM, 3:41. Opportunities for the public to access and participate in this meeting, on the website, on the Board's Supervisor Homepage, and on the calendar.

[03:10:10] Participation will give you the opportunity to comment on those members with the public team. Good evening. Thank you.

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