Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session #3, Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Date: Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, Virginia
Length: 3h 8m (video)
Official meeting video (Granicus): https://albemarle.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=938
Official agenda: https://albemarle.granicus.com/AgendaViewer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=938

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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[00:00:10] on this 13th of March, 3:00 p.m. in Room 241 of the Mexicanair Building. I'd like to note that Supervisors present include the Supervisor Ann Mallis at Whitehall District, Supervisor Ned Galloway at the Iowa District, Supervisor DeAnthony Keele at the Jack Jewett District, Supervisor DeLa Fista-Curtley at the Rodana District, and Supervisor Mike Krudel at the Scottsdale District, and myself, Jim Andrews, representing the Samuel Miller District, the forum is present.

[00:00:33] We're also joined here by our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, and Mr. Steve Rosenberg, and our clerk, Ms. Claudette Ferguson. Obviously, we also have many staff abilities as we go. I believe that we also welcome Alamo County police officers present, serving, Lieutenant Angela Jamerson and Master Police Officer Dana Reeves.

[00:00:56] We thank you for your service today and every day in the neighborhood community, keeping us safe. And before I begin, before we begin, let me remind people to staff and guests to at least introduce yourselves prior to speaking and to let everyone know that smartphones are in the ceiling.

[00:01:16] So speak up literally. At this point, I will turn the meeting over to Dr. Andy Bowman, our assistant chief financial officer. - Thank you to the chair for the introduction and good afternoon to the board.

[00:01:33] Today is budget work session number three on the county executive's recommended fiscal year 25 budget. We will continue today with some items in the general fund and then start the CIP and VET chapters. Anything we're not able to finish today, we'll pick up on Monday, or I'm sorry, Monday the 25th.

[00:01:50] And then the work session on the 27th is when the board will be asked to take action to propose a budget and tax rates for advertisement. To take a closer look at the agenda today, the Board of Supervisors has requested some additional time to discuss the Sheriff's Office request.

[00:02:06] We're going to follow that up to finish the non-departmental chapter that we were not able to get to on monday including some uh discussion around tax relief for the elderly and disabled programs that's a discussion that really started on december 13th and will continue today leading to eventual board action in the public hearing on that item i will then continue with a discussion of the fire rescue system deputy chief david bucket here will walk through some data and uh he's that's what the maps are related to that item and then we'll come back to kind of recap the general fund uh that may be a good time for the break if the board desires and then we'll we'll come back and start on the CIP.

[00:02:42] But certainly that break, depending on the timing of how things are adjusted, we can move that. So I am going to kick off things very briefly on the Sheriff's Office item. Sheriff Bryant is here today and we'll be doing the bulk of this presentation, but just to provide a recap for the board, there were two unfunded requests that were not included in the county executive's recommended budget.

[00:03:04] The court's complex security, this was a request initially submitted by the sheriff, and this is not about the merit of the request, it's just about the timing of the request. There's a sequencing of events that will happen as the courthouse opens, and we expect these positions will be needed, just not in fiscal year 25.

[00:03:20] So we would expect those will come back in another. The second request was 4.5 FTEs for temporary detention orders. These are the amounts not included in the fiscal year 25 recommended budget. There's a portion at one time for the vehicles and the other outfits, outfitting of those officers.

[00:03:40] And then the ongoing portion we can see in fiscal year 25 and 26 in the total. so at this point i will turn it over to sheriff bryant for her presentation i'll say sheriff bryant you're welcome to either stand or join us at the seat next to us and i do have a clicker for you in the slides or if you give me a sign that works yes they're in the presentation so click that button and that will advance the slides for you well thank you thank you chair thank you board members for giving me the opportunity to come to present on our request for positions for tdo and and to answer any questions that you have.

[00:04:16] So the very first thing in case some of you don't know your need to the board, you might not know what we do at the Sheriff's Office. So the first thing I want to bring your attention to is actually the Code of Virginia that actually is the transport of TDO patients rely on the primary law enforcement agency, which is the County PD.

[00:04:33] We are in an MOU with the County PD that we provide those transport forms to keep their police officers in the county to enter hospital service. And that's the same for juveniles and adults. So what I did for the last three years is I collected data from our actual transports that we performed over the last three years.

[00:04:56] We admitted 19 and 20 before the COVID and the numbers weren't realistic because everybody's shutting down and staying at home. So, and this was the information that was gathered, the issue time of the TDO, the time that we responded And the return time, the location of where we started and where we ended up the hospital throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the cost of mileage and the deputy cost.

[00:05:24] So each transport requires two deputies to respond to take a mental patient from the hospital to the receiving facility. So in all that data collected over the last three years, this is the breakdown of TDOs that happen during the day or during the day of the week.

[00:05:42] so you can see the breakdown of the percentages the majority of the tdos happen during the weekday it's during our operation time monday through friday and that's just a little chart to show you when the most come in tuesdays for some reason is a high call volume for tdos to be transported as well as fridays so the low numbers are saturday and sundays and this is the actual time that we actually begin our transports to arrive at the hospital and take patients and arrive at the

[00:06:21] facility and as you can see our operation hours are from eight to four and the majority of these transports fall within those hours of time let me know if i'm going too fast i know y'all are strapped on time so with that being said 88 of the tdos affect my operation staff and that could be and that they are being transported during the eight to four hours or they are being transported before that at two three o'clock in the morning or and carry out through our operational day

[00:06:58] to the fact that they can't be at work that they're being tied up on a tdo transport and can't perform the operations of the duties of our office and this is our transport time so the time that we arrived to the hospital to take these patients and the amount of time we're spending to deliver them to the facility as you can see most of our transports it's taken us four to eight hours to arrive at the facility where we're going to and the zero to two the

[00:07:35] majority of those transports are to western state and the eight to twelve hours are the ones going very far out um close to the state lines of virginia so this is our frequency of where we go the most um as you can see western state is high and the county pd has in the last year and a half has been transporting some of the patients to western state for us um but the others are being transported out of the area and this is miles one way i know it's kind of hard to see

[00:08:11] but it was kind of um hard to put all that data on one sheet this is the mileage that we are accumulating on our vehicles per month just doing nothing but tdos i mean you can see the chart by years 2022s in blue 23s in orange and so far 24s and and yellow so we're racking up a lot of miles on the vehicles just doing transport of mental health patients and in case people don't know where russell county is or any other i know there might be some questions so we did a heat map so

[00:08:49] the bright white areas are where are we doing a majority of our transports so we're going anywhere throughout this facility vicinity of almar county to transport people throughout the commonwealth of virginia to deliver them to the accepting mental health hospital and that's alarming to look at it actually on a map of how far people are leaving out more county to seek treatment

[00:09:24] this is cost per deputy um of how much it's costing our office to to handle these transports per month so we're averaging anywhere from three thousand to six thousand a month just on tdo transports and i think a lot of questions coming out of the county exec's office is dealing with alternative transportation and the heart program so i wanted to spend a little bit of time on that the heart program is an excellent program in almar county we utilized it this morning

[00:10:04] in court one of our court providers um was experiencing some suicidal issues we contacted the heart people they came and responded and transported them um to region 10 which ended up He is now at UVA leading transport to a mental health facility.

[00:10:22] So the heart program is great. I just wanted to show the impact on our transports from the existence of the heart program. So and as you can see, there's not much change in the RTO transports in relation to the heart program being established.

[00:10:45] It's I think it's varies by one person. So even though the H.A.R.C. program is doing wonders for the citizens of Alamore County, the ones that still need hospital treatment are still having to be transported to the hospital. So another concern of the county exec's office is alternative transportation.

[00:11:08] So the Department of Health has entered into a pilot program with Allied Universal, which started last Monday. And this program also started in Southwest Virginia in 2015 and 2016 initially to alter alternatives to law enforcement doing these transports.

[00:11:33] That program ran out of funding in 2019 and is not being funded at the moment. This program is started and it encompasses five CSBs out of region one.

[00:11:52] So this is a chart of the five CSBs so not only is it covering our region 10, it's covering these other CSBs and as you can see they're Winchester, Harrisonburg, Rockingham, Rappahannock, Fauquier, Spotsylvania, a lot of cities and counties which actually is 24 if you count them.

[00:12:20] And a little bit about alternative transport. a company that bought out g4s that started the um contract with the state in 2015 they have entered into this agreement with um department of behavior health where during this pilot program they are providing two three two-person teams and providing three vehicles to encompass 24 cities and counties

[00:12:55] somebody that has been involved in the sheriff's office since 95 and the Elmore County Sheriff's Office has been doing TDOs before I even started for the police department. So we've been doing them for a long time. So back to this. So these three vehicles are based out of Front Royal.

[00:13:17] So they get a call. They are responding from Front Royal to Elmore County to transport these patients. And it's new to the program. And I will go over in a little bit so far what that program has accomplished. From references, I know y'all got the PowerPoint, but just two different references that talks about alternative transports. So for the figures of March so far, we have

[00:13:50] conducted five TDOs so far this month. Four of them have come after March 4th when alternative transportation has been established. The first one was on March 8th to Virginia Beach. The second one was on March 10th to Western State. The third one was March 12th to Williamsburg. And the one this morning was, the deputies were called at three o'clock in the morning, and all these alternative transportation was not available. So the deputies were called at three o'clock this

[00:14:28] morning to transport a mental health patient to Bristol. So my deputies have been gone all day long. When they arrived back at work at 1 30, I had to send them home. We're in the middle of during a jury, a murder jury trial, and they are not able to be utilized to do sheriff's office duties. So my request is because TDOs are now affecting the ability for me to do the duties that are dictated by the Code of Virginia for me to do.

[00:15:01] And I guess the most important slide is we haven't had many added positions since 2005. We have actually had four positions that have been added since 2005. Two of those were part-time positions that were working full-time that were upgraded because they were working full-time hours and only receiving part-time benefits.

[00:15:26] And if you can look at it compared to other agencies on the public safety pay scale, and I actually threw in the Commonwealth's attorney's numbers, too. And they have received 10 positions. So we don't ask for a lot.

[00:15:44] But when we ask for it, it's because we need it. And we have been asking and haven't been receiving. So that is the end of my -- I'll be willing to answer any questions that you might have.

[00:16:00] I know it's a lot. Sorry. I went through it pretty quick. Thank you. Thank you very much. And we'll go through our usual order for questions from board members.

[00:16:16] Okay. It was very interesting to see the wide range of facilities were there throughout the Commonwealth. I don't know if this is a question for you or not, but do you know of any other treatment treatment centers that will be built, or is UVA considering such a facility?

[00:16:40] Is anyone considering such a facility? No. So what happened for the hospitals to expand is after Senator Deeds went through his experience, the state created a list that you have to go down to the list for accepting hospitals.

[00:17:00] So they actually have to take all the hospitals in the state and call each one to see if they're willing to accept um the patient based on what they're the what they're showing and that's a problem do we know if our area anyone closer was contacted so they have to go by the list that they have they can't randomly call people okay so but we don't have that list i mean you have the list no i do not oh okay yeah so we don't know where we are so it's all region 10 calling the the

[00:17:35] hospitals to see who's willing to accept the patient yeah i guess i'm just trying to get a hold of an idea that it looks south like we need additional facilities that are definitely closer and and we do have hospitals around here i'm just wondering you know why that's i know you don't know but maybe that's a question for us five east is only so many limited beds available for somebody to go upstairs from UVA ER to Fobby's there's just not enough beds and the fact

[00:18:10] that we are making the original jail and proving that and you know the second floor for mental health patients those are just for people who have been incarcerated has nothing to do with this no okay that's what I've done yeah that's what I okay I didn't know that if I got it I'm more County Police department do they i thought i've read in my materials that they do assist they have transported everse people to western state force but that's the only place they go to western states correct

[00:18:48] all right those are all the questions i have now thank you supervisor mckeel just to comment i have family in russell county so i know that is a hike um so you have um just a couple of questions i think here. And we can ask questions of anybody. I mean, this is fair game, right? So I'm just trying to figure out on the map, I think this is 21, not now, but the slide 21, trying to figure

[00:19:25] out when the HARTs program started. Maybe that's a question for you, Kat. September 23? July 1st of 23. July 1st. Oh, so actually, yeah. Okay.

[00:19:39] All right. And I guess I did notice that the high usage for the TDOs was, or is, I guess I should say, during the times when the HART team is available, and I'm not sure how relevant that is, Hakeem, what I'm saying about that is, the HART team is available Monday through Friday.

[00:20:08] and the TDOs are highest Monday through Friday and then I was looking at the times and you quoted eight to four and those are the same times that the heart team is I'm just trying to put some perspective to it.

[00:20:26] There's been a 23% increase in the number of behavioral health calls in the last year over year so it's not surprising that the number of TDOs would be roughly the same. The percentage of the calls is actually going down. It doesn't affect the sheriff's office operations, but in terms of HARTs' impact, there's something to infer there.

[00:20:47] It is also really early to assume that HARTs would have a significant impact on the number of TBLs. So if you feel like it's early, it's because the HARTs team has not really been in existence very long. So just from your experience or your educator, I hate to say yes, but how long do you think it would take for the HARTs team to be able to figure out what the kick-in time really might be.

[00:21:15] We really felt like the first full year of operations would give us some indication, and then a year or two, that's why we sort of identified the initial period of the pilot is something like 18 to 24 months, so that we could look at some data to see its impact. We notice already that there's significant impact on well-being for the community, that system impacts are yet to necessarily be realized. However, with the 23% increase in calls for service for behavioral health, the idea that TDOs have actually stayed relatively level might suggest that we're actually

[00:21:51] having some impact. There are a number of five or six different things happening in this community around the behavioral health context that I think individually sort of by themselves might have a big impact on these numbers, but layered together they would. And that includes region 10's expansion of their CTAC program so that folks who are not appropriate necessarily to drive away from but may voluntarily go to Region 10 for a more fulsome evaluation, have a soft landing, might de-escalate further there and not necessitate a TDO.

[00:22:28] There's sort of an interim step now with that CTAC, and they're expanding all the time with staff and hours. The 988 sort of call center diverts folks experiencing suicidal thoughts and feelings. Certainly the alternative transport program hasn't had a lot of time for us to be able to measure that impact.

[00:22:51] UVA is creating a mobile crisis unit, which will respond to students, faculty, and staff. And it will obviously affect us in some way. It will bump into us a little bit. UVA is developing a mobile crisis unit. And they're calling it the UVA Crisis Center for their school.

[00:23:10] I don't know what they're going to call it. The shorthand has been UVA Mobile Crisis Unit. They'll respond much the same way that a heart does to folks experiencing a behavioral health crisis anywhere. Anyone who is a student, faculty, or staff.

[00:23:27] I'm not sure how they're going to do a geographic overlay with that yet. Just an aside, that's wonderful to hear. And then finally, the ECC is in a very sort of early sort of about potentially embedding a clinician in the ECC center.

[00:23:46] And each one of these things sort of layered together promise to have a pretty significant impact on the number of folks who show up at the emergency room or in a jail to get into a behavioral health crisis. There's data that just came out, the first national data around this kind of layered approach from that 87 percent of calls can be diverted that's amazing 87 percent of calls can be diverted um the national data suggests that if you have somebody who's doing those screening and diverting at that layer uh that you can um only three percent of the time you just dispatch a

[00:24:24] mobile crisis unit and then even with a mobile crisis unit which is the catch-all for co-responder units and other kinds of units that of those only nine percent results in a tdo so these are all things sort of actively in development they don't certainly haven't been in development to impact this data but we hope will be very impactful in the next 12 18 24 months that we can start to see some of that layering effect both in terms of well-being and in terms of our source system

[00:24:55] impacts um the fact of the matter is when you do have a tdo our available beds are far away yeah that is a that's a statewide fact we must go to the first available bed regardless of what location it's in and we are ranked 47th in terms of that yes it's like that in the country oh just some additional information the two well some of it was really great to hear because i didn't know

[00:25:29] some of it and you're just a wealth of information thank you um jim so let's get back to a question for you i'm i wrote confused so i'm confused on this on the slide 22 help me understand a little bit more about the pilot program the alternative trends and it may just be me and i'm sorry but help me understand what's happening has contracted with allied universal to provide alternative transportation for mental health patients throughout region one of these five

[00:26:07] csbs okay and so we're region 10 no we're region one of the state oh okay region one of the state maybe one was so region one actually consists of nine csbs and they're doing this pilot program in five of them right and we're included in that pilot yes so that's the album law yes So, keep explaining a little bit more. These are all the cities and counties that's involved in the pilot program. And this pilot program, I think I forgot to mention,

[00:26:47] is ending in September. So, they're seeking additional funding to continue with this pilot program after September. And we learned all this in a meeting that was on February 29th with um the state and region 10 that we attended a meeting and learned of this alternative transport company that was taken over okay all right so then the slide the next slide down which is 24 talks about what that team consists yes it talks about what this company is providing to these five

[00:27:24] csbs or what they're guaranteed to provide they're providing three vehicles two people per vehicle to respond to tdos that means they have been issued by the magistrate to all of those counties so three vehicles for charlesville almar flavana green for every right um county or city on that list three vehicles for 24 hours a day seven days a week three vehicles for all of them i'm just trying to be realistic yeah and i really appreciate you walking me through it again i was i got a

[00:28:02] don't look at views and lots of them in the data um and i think those are my questions for right now thank you super manager gavin thank you sheriff the um i missed something on the eight to four you're serving outside of me no so your operations are from eight to four or four but when you're for your tdo that's operating outside the 24 so so what your point just so i make sure i understand because i was missing the point the point is you called for transportation

[00:28:35] at 3 a.m it takes eight hours now they are not there to be assigned to the court duty these before operation or even the rest of the day because the shift has been so long at that point like this morning they left home a little after three got back at 1 30. they've been out since three o'clock in the morning that's a good clarification and they can't be utilized they've been on the road driving to bristol from three o'clock in the morning and back so they are tired and i can't utilize them to work then kind of in the weeds question do you i don't know how you staff for

[00:29:15] this you you've got a certain idea of what your work volume is for tdos and then obviously your court operations do you rotate your staff through these different like you get court tuesdays but you're going tdo wednesday or you got people specifically assigned so for after hours we have a tdo call out so they show up to work every day at eight o'clock if the tdo comes in between the hours of eight to four we have to say who's available and pull somebody from civil process to go on a tdo because everybody else is tied up in four so we pull somebody from certain papers

[00:29:52] pull two people because we require two deputies on the transport to go on the tdo if it happens outside of the four o'clock then the on-call deputy for tdo's response to um to handle that and if it's during operations then we have to replace somebody in civil process to take over their duties if they are assigned to court so really ahead of time staffing is just simply that on-call person after four the rest of it you're kind of managing as it comes in with what you had yeah we have staff selected into like there are certain staff selected for general district court

[00:30:31] and each court has their own staffing and then civil process is permanently assigned to each area in the county to serve papers so they're pulled like this week we're in the middle of a murder trial so we pulled people from civil process to help out because there's some heated debates between victim and suspect's family so we have to add more people to court to address that issue and then just so i'm following the train of thought here that was being suggested you're saying that eventually the hearts team because the service they provide when they go on the call

[00:31:11] I don't know other way to put this. Is it a better service that prevents a call, a transit call being needed? For the call where it's appropriate, this provides an alternative to a police officer moving towards a hospital or jail so they can spend all day if they need to.

[00:31:33] They can spend the time connecting somebody who's in a behavioral health crisis to their current caregiver, as opposed to sort of moving forward with the deep end outcome rapidly as has happened in the past. So in other communities where they have these kinds of co-responder teams, they see a decrease in the number of TDOs, a decrease in the number of transports to the ER, decrease in the number of transports to jail.

[00:31:58] So that is a predicted outcome for this kind of work in addition to the well-being benefit. to our community. And so by itself, I don't know how big of an impact we can predict. But together with all of these things, there's some layering effect to getting to this place where we might actually be diverting a substantial number of calls away from the deep end emergency service to higher general upstream. So the idea is the service provides them an alternative than needing to be sent where it's the right thing at the right time, as opposed to the only thing available

[00:32:34] down there. But the reality is very different at the moment, and we'll have to wait to see what happens. All right. Thank you. Those are all my questions. Thank you. Thank you all. So when you hire, what is the lag time between when you get off the last for a position and hire and train? How soon can that person be ready for you? It depends. We used to have a high number of applicants.

[00:33:06] Our last job posting we had four. So and it depends on whether they're certified or not certified. If they're not certified, we have to send them to the academy. And we send all our deputies to fully certified law enforcement officers except for one and the previous sheriff allowed that.

[00:33:28] And they get through law enforcement certification and then they have to go to the courtroom security. So a process certification. so it depends on how long it takes us to hire and whether they're certified or not so and then they have to go through a 14-week fto program so a while so six months to a year i'm guessing yes and um the crisis beds at region 10 i think there were 16 and i understood those were mostly full

[00:34:04] all the time but are they designed for and have clinicians available to help the kinds of people you are taking transporting so could a crisis person who you were going to transport be taken to region 10 if there were a bed so they are they're taking a region 10 to be evaluated like the one we had today staying so they left court with part and went to ctec spent time over there now they have been transported to uva hospital for additional care and then we're waiting to

[00:34:39] see if that turns into a tedium does that understand that i think so the 16 beds are They're probably for less crisis-oriented things. - The people that are going on TDOs or being transported to a mental health facility need the care of a mental health facility.

[00:34:58] - Very good, thank you very much. - I guess I'm just trying to understand a little bit of supervisor proof. Oh, supervisor proof, thanks, everyone. - Thank you. - We knew this was two days ago, and I got my phone.

[00:35:15] - I wanna begin by just noting that this is, I think, a very, This is a conversation that nearly every jurisdiction in the state is having. I know I just attended two days ago, the Morton session for each account of Scottsville, and it was exactly what they were talking.

[00:35:32] It's one of the main things driving their acquisition of one new deputy. And also, it speaks to what Supervisor Malik was talking about and asking about, because they are not able to advertise the competitive pay rate in Scottsville, which means that they're necessarily looking at a year lag time to get the officer certified.

[00:35:51] because I acknowledge the ubiquity of this problem. Sheriff, can you help me understand, have you had an interruption in court operations or schedule that you would contribute to this at all?

[00:36:08] - We have had on numerous times to pull people and work under stress to make up for the people that we didn't have on our TDO. And we used to have 60 volunteers, but everybody knows in the county from public safety about the volunteers.

[00:36:28] We are down to 18. So even our volunteers aren't able to help kick in and provide what 60 were providing. - Kind of to, I think a lot of questions I've been getting at.

[00:36:44] - I can tell you like today when we need staffing based on what we're encountering in court for the last week of this murder trial, I had to pull supervisors off their supervisory duties to put them in the court. Okay. I know a lot of us are trying to get at the underlying problem piece, which I think can be fairly characterized as state has not invested in community-based services adequately, meaning we're relying more on state hospitals, meaning we have overtaxed state hospitals, meaning we're trapped, to kind of put that in a sentence.

[00:37:19] So I have a few questions on kind of the progress that we're seeing on our community-based services as kind of the first mover on this problem. And a lot of it's going to be state level questions that I just don't know the answer to that. I know the state has previously been relying really heavily on contracting with private hospitals and service providers feel like bed shortage areas.

[00:37:47] And that was their solution for a few years. Are there any like third party contracts that I might make you look at the back of the road, Jess? I don't know that. I don't think so. I know the CTAC expansion statewide are kind of a new initiative.

[00:38:10] I don't know how long ours has been online, or if there's additional funding and additional space that's going to become available in the future. Can you kind of talk me through the timeline of our own CTAC expansion of recent times? CTAC started off slow only as a partnership with Alberta and PD.

[00:38:27] So only so far can folks come from Alma in the process of expanding to the entire Region 10 district and have recently received within partnership with funding from the Opioed Abatement Authority to do the expansion of the receiving center so that it operates more along the lines of what I hope, which will increase the staff capacity and sort of make them more sort of robustly available for 24 hours to be able to be responsive and is that able to help us absorb

[00:39:03] more say shorter term uh emergency tdo patients it's like a second step so if we respond in the community with somebody who is despondent and um and having trouble sort of regulating we spend a couple of hours with them they may be okay but we may spend a couple of hours or connect them to a service and we may not be 100 ready to drive away from that scene and so we may say we we'd like very much to with your for you to voluntarily come with us to the crisis intervention uh center and then get a more sort of full sum of that evaluation sometimes this year bryant was

[00:39:40] describing about what happened this morning may lead to actually for uva i mean for region kind of say it's you we need this to go to uva but but often it can be we've got 23 hours that you can stay in this bed with some sort of de-escalation crisis intervention clinical support and then if you need more of that you might actually end up coming to the wellness center at region tech for a longer stay or to return home connected to the natural supports you already have so it's not an either or it's sort of the next step in between trying to create some nuanced

[00:40:19] steps as opposed to just one response to crisis calls on the subject of one response to crisis calls i know there's a big effort at least a year ago for forensic tdos that seem to be related to substance abuse to give officers more flexibility and how those are dealt with and not necessarily require bed committal i'm looking around because there's i think a few different people who could answer this question i don't recall where that effort left but i know this was a big thing basically um give a a cool off option for people whose mental health uh problem is maybe associated

[00:40:57] with addiction and they need a moment to come down and that doesn't need to be a western state but i i don't know status of that reform um i'm just throwing that out there because i know it's something of interest and it would potentially significantly help the tv evolve um we talked a bit about mobile crisis centers and i know that those have been very slow do are we actually being served by one of the state's funded mobile crisis centers is you know step va also promises full

[00:41:31] implementation by the end of this year which seems unlikely is is there anything i think it's coming to us i think it's the definition of full implementation you have one team that's sort of available for everybody but it's not functional coverage uh you know the marcus alert will will eventually apply to all of us, but a very slow rollout in terms of the requirements.

[00:41:54] And so I don't think it's until 2026 that we're required to even start creating a local mobile health for region 10. But it sounds to me like UVA is in the process of developing one, but that looks like. I don't think we have to do that.

[00:42:13] - I believe so as well. - Thank you. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this and I'm alarmed, but let me just add a few questions. It sounds like the pilot is expiring, but maybe renewed if we can get the funding, but it hasn't really helped.

[00:42:34] The folks that I've talked to are pretty confident that they're going to get the funding, but the impact has certainly not yet been felt in this community, and it's not a sufficient response in the community's work has tried so far. Together I think, together with some of these other things, it may actually sort of result in a bigger impact, but we can't say that for sure.

[00:42:54] And I certainly don't see us as getting a handle if we look at the slide that shows the number of calls each month for two plus years, it's certainly not going down. But it has been a problem for some time now. I don't know when it was first identified, but it really looks like it's ongoing for some time.

[00:43:16] And this is part of the MOU with the Police Department, which I assume is open-ended with respect the PDOs, whatever is needed. The actual request, the ongoing as well as one-time funding, and the one-time funding I assume is for vehicles associated with four and a half positions.

[00:43:37] So depending upon how that would go, that's four vehicles? That's four. And is there any knowledge whether there's any state legislation that's been pending or proposed that has been up or down that would affect this issue?

[00:43:56] because it certainly seems like the state problem. - I mean, that I'm aware of. I don't see if there was anything, but there's always suggested legislation about expanding the number of treatment beds, making it mandatory that you receive mental health treatment within a sort of certain radius of your community, which is the best part of this.

[00:44:17] But I don't remember hearing of any success of those things, but we can go back and check and get that. It may be something we consider in our legislative priorities, particularly our representatives. I think they vary into this issue.

[00:44:34] Are there other questions? Yes. Coupled with the, and Chair Andrews mentioned this regarding Allied, you'll probably get additional funding.

[00:44:52] Do you think that funding will be expanded? In other words, will they get the same amount, do we know, or hopefully expanded? I don't know. I can certainly agree. We don't know about that. All right. And the heart program, it sounds like, from what you're telling me, that has kept the numbers of TDOs from rising.

[00:45:18] It's too early to make such claims, but I certainly, it is usual to surmise that at some point. I know we have all these things that are in the process of going forward, and we don't know. I I mean, and I certainly agree with Chair Andrews that maybe this should be one of our legislative priorities for next year, because I'm not sure the legislature is aware of this.

[00:45:45] They are. They're very aware. But, well, aware of it in such a way that they're willing to do something about it, because it doesn't sound like there's going to need legislation unless you know if there's some legislation currently. The only legislation that I know that is pending is House Bill 832, which addresses the amount of time that it's going to take, or they're given alternative transport to get to the hospital to transport somebody.

[00:46:16] And I think that's moving through the House. And I don't know the status of the outcome of that bill. In order to be able to get someone to a facility sooner, you're going to need additional funding and assistance, right?

[00:46:33] All of the state interventionists really budget more than necessarily legislation. Okay, well, if they increase the budget, that would be nice. And the HART program, HART's program takes the people to other facilities, not necessarily the TDO that you transport people.

[00:46:55] to mental hospitals under a tdo under a tdo the hearts program they can go to home they can go to a hospital they can go to region 10 they can go okay and they still may end up with the tdo and they still may end up with the tdo yes okay um yeah those are the additional questions i have thank you just to add to the conversation a little bit um the state is famous for requesting JLARC studies and then putting the JLARC study report on the shelf and ignore them.

[00:47:35] There was last year a JLARC study about the community service boards and I read it carefully and I do think we ought to add part of our legislative packet this year. We really ought to jump on that. The big takeaways from that JLARC study said that the community service boards are underfunded, underpaid, and undertrained. You can read the whole report yourself. I have a copy and I'm happy to share it, but those are the three takeaways, as with many things in the state of Virginia. We could probably talk about a lot of things that are underfunded, underpaid, and

[00:48:10] undertrained. Having said that, I do think it would be worthy of us having a discussion about this with our legislative packet and our legislators. I really appreciate your report and your request and understand the conundrum we're in.

[00:48:28] Just, I mean, I think we all do. I'm not just speaking for myself. I think we all do. And I don't have any other questions. I just wanted to make the comment that there is a JLARC study out there that was really good and had some great recommendations for the state. So based on what I think I misheard, something that Supervisor Andrews was asking questions.

[00:48:51] So included in the budget are an increase in operations for like vehicle replacement fee, vehicle equipment fuel type things but if the four and a half ftes for temporary attention orders was filled is that would that need vehicle new vehicles to accommodate or is that already in fleet no we i think we asked for four vehicles for four and a half positions so that i guess i don't know that would be a one-time cost of the vehicles and if that's in here then i don't see that that was not funded or if that was included on the unfunded list i haven't looked for it

[00:49:29] but give me a ballpark on a vehicle again for a i don't know that's the same as the police department so like 120 grand yeah they're fine page 113 there is the third the last bullet in white not filled in of 918 000 for the four half ftes in addition to the vehicle that includes the lights oh wait the vehicles in the 918 yeah that's that yeah the reference to any increase in other costs that would just be for the existing fleet existing operations and that so the 918 is the

[00:50:09] there we go the ongoing one time thank you any other well i guess this is a question for staff from the board we often have as we go through the budget and the discussions we often have sort of a parking lot that we create and issues that we don't come back to and i we haven't really talk about parking lot up until now so i guess i'm just putting it on the table um starting our little parking lot because i'd be interested in having a brief discussion about this correct

[00:50:54] very concerned about this thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you i'll say later today we can be able to revisit the staff some of those other parking lot items as we prepare

[00:51:14] but we're now we'll uh forward all right we're going to move to uh the last functional area in the general fund that we have not covered yet which is non-departmental uh this is one we're

[00:51:49] going to cover briefly uh because it is largely made up of the transfer to the public schools that we talked about on monday includes our transfers to capital and debt with the formula and includes revenue sharing payment in the city of charlottesville but there are other items in this but i want to spend most of the time in this chapter continuing the discussion on tax relief for the elderly and disabled i will have a lengthy presentation on that so i'm just going to pause very briefly in case there's any questions on anything else in the non-departmental chapter

[00:52:17] other than task relief so this topic is to really consider and continue a conversation the board held on december 13th over the last two years and continuing this year for the third consecutive year the board is looking to refine the criteria and expand their relief in this program Back on December 13th, the board at the time achieved consensus on four items, the first of

[00:52:55] which is that there is an income criteria in this program that is currently benchmarked at 80% of the area median income for a family of four. The board endorsed continuing with that criteria. The second item was to revise the net financial worth criteria. That amount used to be $200,000 until two years ago. Last year, that was increased to $205,000. It is now proposed to go up to $305,000, and that is benchmarked with the inflation-adjusted value of $200,000 in 2007. That may seem like a random reference point, but that is the last time the state kind of had that cap and then removed

[00:53:34] that. So that is where that number comes from. The third item we had consensus on is the board discussed potential joint-y program-wide cap of funding where the total amount of the funding would be capped at a certain level after discussion the board was not interested in pursuing that at this time and the fourth item was the board just discard just desired further discussion and a property specific cap and uh so that is the conversation today and to look at uh just a few options i want to set the stage for what this timeline will look like uh today the board's not asked to take any action but we are looking for some direction on a preferred option so that staff can come back on march 25th on a consent agenda at this work at a work session

[00:54:14] to advertise a public hearing that will set the stage for future board action and public input. That action, it would be scheduled for April 17th, and that is important because we really need to have that action done at that time in order for the current program participants and everyone else to be factored in before the tax bills are sent out in May and then due in June. So that is the rationale of the timing working backward from April 17th to March 25th and today. I'll say that action on the 25th is not to approve anything other than just to suggest a public hearing.

[00:54:45] So I just wanted to lay that out for the process. So before we look at options, I just want to share a reminder of how this program works. In order to be eligible in this program, you would need to be 65 years old or totally and permanently disabled, as determined medically.

[00:55:04] You need to be the title holder of the property. That property cannot be used as a dividend. And it would need to meet the income and financial net worth criteria that are shown on the slide. These amounts are what is proposed based on the board's consensus from December 13th.

[00:55:20] It shows also that based on your income level, there is a proration where if your income is $44,400 or less, you can receive 100% relief, and that is staggered as we work through that. The other important thing on net worth is that excludes the subject dwelling in 10 acres.

[00:55:38] So the example in the slide, if you had a residence of 15 acres, the first 10 acres in that residence would be exempt from that calculation. So the other recap, because it's been a while, is taking a look at the data in the program and who are those who are benefiting from the program already. One thing we know, when the board expanded the criteria in 2023, we saw an increase in the success rate of people applying. It was 89% in 2022. It was increased to 94% in 2023. The average income of the applicants was $32,000 and the average net worth was $48,000.

[00:56:18] This suggests to us that when we look at this program, this is not serving people who are just below their thresholds. They are among the most economically vulnerable people in our county. Another way to really reinforce that is the table below, where of the people who qualify in the program, 73% of them are getting 100% relief.

[00:56:36] So kind of go back to the previous slide. That is that net income of $44,400 or less, or $305,000 net worth. Now, there are still about another roughly a quarter in that middle category and then 5% who are in that income of $66,000 to $88,000.

[00:56:53] So another way to look at this graphically is to take a look at the, for those who are in the program at 23, what was the relief they were receiving? Because most of the people in the program are receiving 100% relief, this is just a chart of those in the program for 23, and we rounded this to the nearest $1,000.

[00:57:13] So we can see the most common relief tends to be between $1,000 and $3,000. And we can see the kind of picture of a mountain. It slopes pretty gradually on the left side to zero, and on the right side it does. But there's a tail that extends all the way out to $8,000. The orange line on this chart is the county-wide average tax bill on the recommended tax rate for calendar year 24.

[00:57:35] So that signals to us that, you know, typically the financial well-being, or I should say the financial situation of the folks averaging the program is well within the criteria on average. And most of the people who are receiving the benefits of this have a relief that is less than the average tax bill for 2024.

[00:57:56] So a program can always be improved, but this was a good check to us working with our revenue administration staff about who the program is serving in terms of getting a landscape of that. So moving into new information, these are the options staff has prepared for some further board discussion and direction.

[00:58:15] We've prepared three, the first of which would be to continue the program without a cap, just as it is right now. We would force factor in the board's December 13th direction, and then the program would remain as it is until the board revisited. Option B would be to institute a property-specific cap, but it would be setting that cap high so that no one currently in the program is being impacted.

[00:58:37] And we'll walk through what that looks like. The third item would be if the board would like to put in a property-specific cap, we would set a basis of that, and that would be different because it would impact existing recipients. Now, I know the board's desire from December was not to reduce relief, so the idea there is we would increase some relief thresholds to kind of redistribute some terms of how that funding for the relief was provided.

[00:59:01] So I'm going to walk through on the next slides just, you know, get some analysis about, you know, to what extent each criteria expands relief and how understandable it is. How is it grounded in the budget and what is the impact of program recipients? Today, this is the most straightforward one is because it's really continuing the status quo.

[00:59:23] Based on the board's action in December, or really direction in December, this will expand relief by about $120,000 in the upcoming budget. In total, this program is going to increase just under $270,000 or 15%. That is a combination of the $120,000 of new relief plus the historically trend, the growth we see in this program year over year of about 8%.

[00:59:46] The basis of that is understandable because, again, where it's the current program, nothing new needs to be communicated, nothing new needs to be understood. This is able to be funded in the fiscal year 25 recommended budget, and there is no impact to current program participants, assuming they remain eligible based on the criteria.

[01:00:03] It's always possible someone's circumstances may change individually. So option B is where we begin to start looking at some differences by introducing the property-specific cap, which is a fundamental change in the program. So the board still in this is providing that increased relief, just like option A of $120,000.

[01:00:22] This is an updated basis that we would need to communicate to staff to ensure it's understood by everyone applying for the program. But the important thing here is if there's a cap that is set where it doesn't impact anyone, which would be relatively high, that's going to be a future impact people need to consider.

[01:00:37] No one is going to be impacted in the program right now, but they would need to know in their financial planning, should their financial situation change where their relief would go above that cap, there would only be a certain amount of relief they would be able to receive. This option is also able to be funded in the recommended budget.

[01:00:56] And the program participants here, there is really no impact to current recipients because we're not impacting anyone. But we're also not able to expand relief because we would be setting the cap so high that any additional applicants if we were increased there would require additional funding in the budget so to give some perception of what a max or maximum cap could look like the highest amount of relief provided in calendar year 23 was just over eight thousand dollars from there there's a pretty steep drop off to about sixty four hundred dollars and i'll go back to the slide just to

[01:01:31] reference you can see that very small dot added eight thousand um a slightly bigger uh part of the tail at 6 000 as we would then work from right to left where more people are getting relief third option for the board's consideration sorry my slides right is uh instituting a cap but we would uh have a really an objective basis for what that cap is and this would be impacting people who are currently in the program coupled with relief so this does provide again that 120 000 expanded threshold the board is continuing to do that the very big difference here is this is going to have

[01:02:10] immediate impact to people who are in the program right now uh there are people who are as we've seen of limited financial means who are not who are not used to getting a bill because they get 100 relief or some of those people they'll now be in a situation where the board could take if they took this route would take action in uh august i'm sorry in april bills would go out in may they would be due in june and people would need to manage within their limited financial means to plan for them so that'll be one thing that the boards would need to consider as part of this process of uh just the the difference in the immediate versus the future impact should they

[01:02:45] consider this is also it will be funded in the budget but let's walk through in a little more detail what this looks like for those individuals uh so the first thing we need to determine is what could a cap look like uh staff just to for illustrative purposes a different cap could be picked but to have something that is really objective tied to a metric it could be updated annually, staff said, what if we used a cap based on the average tax bill on calendar year 24? So that's that 3869, the orange line that we saw on the slide just a few slides ago. So if you imagine this, if you're to the left of that orange line, you would still receive 100% relief. If you were

[01:03:23] to the right of that line, you'll start to get a tax bill or before you didn't. So for example, if your tax bill is 3869 or less, you continue to have no tax bill. If your tax bill was 4869 and you're used to having no tax bill, you'll now get a tax bill of $1,000.

[01:03:40] So looking at the group of the recipients in the program to the right, there would be 45 current recipients who would have their relief reduced in total by a combined $35,000. That would be everyone's individual experience is going to be very different based on what that amount is.

[01:03:58] It's not really an average, but there are 45 people in the program who would be impacted. The one thing that staff did next is to get a sense of, you know, who are those people in that 45? Are they people who are typical of the program or are they people really just the fringes of qualification?

[01:04:14] I want to thank our revenue administration team again for this analysis to say that if you look at those 45 folks, average income and average net worth is very close to the average of the overall program. We can see 26,000 average income, that's compared to below average income for everyone in the program is 32,000.

[01:04:30] Their average net worth is $57,000. That's a little more than the average net worth of 48,000. So, again, this is, you know, these collectively on average, again, in a group of 45, you'll have some individual differences, but they're pretty typical of the average recipient. And, again, when we look at those averages, those are still well within the 100% relief qualifications.

[01:04:55] So, to think of next is because, again, it's not about reducing relief in total. It's about if a cap went into place, how would the board make further changes to modify that program? So we would assume at a minimum, by taking $35,000, that provides at least nine people could be eligible for the full cap.

[01:05:16] And that number could be more depending on what the actual circumstances could be. So in suggesting or considering how to change those criteria, staff said the 100% AMI has a pretty good basis or 80% of AMI. I'm sorry, I misspoke. Lots of percentages and data and financial terms here.

[01:05:34] 80% of AMI is a pretty standard metric that we said, we're not going to change that one. Net worth based on the inflation adjusted to 2007 is a little more fungible in terms of what could be a reasonable basis. So we said if we were to increase that net worth, what would that look like for that $35,000?

[01:05:53] First thing I need to make very clear is we have very limited data because we only know who applies what their net worth is. We do know there were three applicants who didn't qualify in calendar year 23, and they had a net worth of over $500,000 at a minimum. So we cannot raise the net worth to $500,000 or greater without additional revenue in the budget.

[01:06:14] We did think, looking through this, that if you were to increase the net worth from $305,000 to $350,000, that would probably be able to be accommodated in this budget, or it would be so close where we could manage that as a budget issue. Because, again, we don't have the data, but we have a little bit of the impact on how this has changed over time.

[01:06:32] So in option C, you really go from that version of capping that relief to the average. Those 45 folks will begin to receive bills, and they'll need to come up with that by June in their financial picture. That does provide the board to provide more relief.

[01:06:47] It would be nine plus if we would receive those applications for, and we'd be able to open that portal of eligibility up to $350,000 rather than $305,000. That is a lot of data, so I think it's really the question of the board and the tradeoffs in terms of, you know, what is the best design of a program in terms of, you know, who benefits with the thresholds, the consideration. I'll be happy to go through any of this in detail, but these are really the three options staff has put out there for the board's consideration. And again, I'll turn it over to the chair for discussion. I'll be happy to answer questions, but if there's direction we can get, we can then come back to March 25th to start the legal process for the board to take

[01:07:26] action in April. Thank you, board. I think we've got a good question when we also start to weigh in where we are, which will be efficient. Thank you very much, Mr. Bowman, for your presentation. If you go to slide 35, option A, I just wanted to know, okay, so that does expand the program.

[01:07:52] Total increase would be up to 268K, right? - I'll clarify, the total increase in the budget is 268,000, just so that number is not clarified, mixed up with net worth or anything else. But exactly. How many people have you had mentioned later in option C, 45 people, nine people not being serviced?

[01:08:18] All right. How many people do we actually have? Did we this past year have serviced? How many people did not receive tax bills? Approximately, if we know that. So I guess to answer your question of really how many people are made up to the left of that orange line?

[01:08:38] We can take that as a quick follow-up, and I'll ask our revenue administration if they have that answer, as we're working through other questions, if you could share that with us. Okay. I guess my concern is because when you went to option C, there'd be a lot of work that would need to be done, and people would be getting tax bills.

[01:09:00] I think in option B and C, they'd be getting tax bills as they didn't before. I'm more of a simplistic, you know, simplistic mode of operation, thinking that if option A seems a reasonable thing to do, I would like to keep track of it to know whether or not are we serving the people we need to be serving. And the assumption is that we do check on people to make sure that they absolutely qualify, even though they've been receiving no tax bill year

[01:09:37] to year after year do we continue to check yes there's a three-year process that they go through i'll ask our chief of revenue administration jennifer metheny if you would like to just in a nutshell just kind of explain how that process works sure jennifer metheny chief revenue administration good afternoon so it is a three-year cycle so they have to complete a full application to qualify in the program and then for the next two years they do a recertification a testing that nothing has changed and on the third year they have to go through a full application again

[01:10:13] so it's a cycle and we do verify that annually but then they have to prove up with the full application on that third year as long as they're in the program it's a cycle okay thank you and and you said um for option c that if we went from 305 000 to 350 000 that would be able to be absorbed if we chose to do so within the budget yes and that would be a combination yes that is correct but it would be a combination of instituting the gap and increasing net worth if the board were to

[01:10:50] the board also has the option to just increase the net worth criteria from three hundred five thousand upwards but that would require other adjustments in the budget in order to fund that okay so if we go back to option a which seems i'm fixated on and like um would we be able to And I don't know if it's necessary or not, but the total increase is 268, or that's the total increase or the total we have?

[01:11:22] The total program is about 2.1 million, and that amounts as a 15% increase from the prior year. That's about 120,000 due to the board's expanding criteria that they gave consensus on in December. and then the remainder of that about 140,000 is what we experience about just year-to-year growth as additional people become eligible, property values may rise, just other people coming in and out of the program.

[01:11:47] That changes, about 8% growth is what we can expect. So it seems like to me that what you're proposing in A, that does increase the amount that does allow more people. It simplifies it in that same people who are in the cycle won't be getting the tax bill, which I can see if you get a tax bill and you haven't been getting a tax bill, that can be pretty confusing.

[01:12:13] And I certainly don't want them to throw it away and then penalize and everything. So I guess that answers my questions. Thank you very much. And I am leading for it, obviously. Thank you, Supervisor McKibbs. At this point, I support option A.

[01:12:30] I think for this program to keep it as simple as possible for folks is important because the more complicated we make it, we lose people in the application process and they just don't want to do it. The other thing, and maybe I'm looking at it this wrong, but coming out of the pandemic, we really had high inflation.

[01:12:55] We had a lot of challenges with the post-budget. Things are settling down now. Inflation's coming down. I'd like to, I would support option A with the caveat that we're going to look at this again next year we'll have more data next year on what the folks have what the folks have done i mean what the people that are in the program have done and what it looks like and um yeah so i without belaboring it i'm at option a

[01:13:28] really option a is just kind of watching b and c let me reverse that option b and c are about putting in some limits on what this costs is correct so option a just leaves it open that way yes but it's still what is option a again raising the net worth to uh three hundred five thousand dollars yeah from from 250 to three hundred five that said that there was an option to raise it to 350 in one of the others but in option a to raise it to 350 would take budget

[01:13:58] dollars correct um i don't remember the conversation in december other and in what i'm remembering from december was that the property caps were being brought up from folks who were concerned about just opening the blind checks putting some sort of cap on what we're expending each year is that am i remembering the right rationale for the property cap or maybe whoever was speaking to that and we haven't done yet so if i'm calling out whoever was saying that just remind me of the

[01:14:33] rationale but my understanding is that it was putting a cap on we're saying there's an incentive available but it doesn't go beyond this one and option d is basically taking everybody that's in it anybody comes in later over eight grand then they get the tax bill option c the student grandfather right is that right all right i got it supervisor allick thank you um thank you for all the progress on this jacob and jennifer and andy so i do have some confusion so please help me out um let's see

[01:15:12] I'm starting at the beginning here someone might be able to conjure up if this is on slide 30 they if there was just a question about if we went to 350 000 how much more would we need to so that someone might come up with sometime and I do understand why I think some citizens had tried to figure out ways to cap individual benefit in order to exclude those who needed at least and expand more money or at least get some changes for people who need it the most which i

[01:15:48] think we've done some significant improvement over the last couple of years which is great um all right so let me go back here all right so now we're looking here at option i understand option a and that's based on the 305 and higher income okay then option b would basically freeze the

[01:16:25] people who are in now and if you were a future applicant at any level you would be held to the new a new monetary standard is that right it will also impact the current recipients only if their value goes over eight thousand dollars so they're not frozen forever i would say if your belief value is you know a thousand dollars you'll probably be okay for a long time when you get to eight thousand dollars but not knowing everyone's financial circumstances and how they may change and so that's not to say anyone in the program is locked in forever it's just that that limit would

[01:17:00] be pretty high and for them to get there and that will also apply to anyone new in the program okay so i guess i'm having a hard time imagining how the net worth and the income levels are where they are and yet someone would still have a tax bill of eight thousand dollars so i'm guessing is this an old family house that the elders live there now and it's large and its assessment has monstrously gone up help me understand not not knowing that exact circumstances it must be

[01:17:36] something like that where that person um i mean they have a high assessment for some reason and their financial net worth and their income just that actual circumstances but that is the base the tax bill but um i don't know and really what those circumstances would be for anyone in the program because it seems counterintuitive except when you think about people living well into their their 90s, as many of my constituents are, on the same place where they were born. So I understand that. Is there a way to stagger the beginning? Because I was horrified at the thought of getting

[01:18:12] an announcement in April that you have to come up with $1,500 by June 5th. Is there any option that the county has to manage that? I'll think of this a couple ways. I don't think the county has the ability to, or they don't, to either kind of forgive or extend those deadlines for groups of folks i mean i guess an approach the board could take if they wanted to start a cap high and then be visited in future years that could be an option but we would need to do the analysis to get a sense of what that would look like we can't say that this part of the program

[01:18:49] would not take effect until the next fiscal year for example to give people more i will uh we can take that as a follow-up i think it's a question i would ask with the attorney's office because i I know we do have questions where legislation goes back to a certain date, but what do you, I will leave that thought. I love something that was missing behind.

[01:19:13] So I guess that is all of my questions. As I said, I very much appreciate the effort to keep increasing. I'm a little worried about losing the 2007 increase because that's really where we lost 20 years worth of participation of ability so i don't know if that's going why would that go away i guess would be well i would say just clarify it's not going away it's just working we're really last year the board talked about taking that two hundred thousand dollars and

[01:19:47] adjusting that for inflation right this has been yes right yeah well 250 was a two-year step in into that okay because of the unknown financial impact we did a partial step into 250. now we're recommend you go to 305 and then the intent would be in the future whenever inflation changes that 305 will be in to get adjusted 40. but that would still continue under any of these options yes uh i misunderstood thank you that's sorry that was not clear that was good okay um all right and so you were looking for inclinations um if you have one if you want to hear everybody's words that's

[01:20:26] fine i just want to make sure that i do get that from i'll come back with my explanations after everybody else is out of turn thank you um super much thank you i'm not the best at math but am i correct in understanding that an eight thousand dollar assessment is roughly equates to a million dollar estate i'll say my math in my head is not my strong suit um and i recognize that's the tail exempt of which we only have like it's the hour but i'm pretty sure that's about a million dollars

[01:21:05] um and then the the smaller cluster we have at 6 400 those are roughly 800 000 um okay not i i can think of ways that could happen um i think what leaps out to me as someone who has in recent memory taken his property and trusts class right because it seems very realistic that if someone really wanted to they could choose to retire here in a multimillion dollar state place their assets

[01:21:44] in a trust disperse the trust themselves annually and never pay taxes that's just true based on my understanding of that because the trust is not an asset that's in your i can disperse it to myself and i can easily screw the tax system if we don't have a property cap um i i'll let any lawyers in the room correct me but i think that's appropriate right like it would not be an asset that's in my name so it wouldn't flag recurring asset caps and it isn't a property cap so my multi-million dollar state wouldn't disqual them i don't have an income other than the disbursements i'm getting from

[01:22:20] myself for paying my own property tax meaning i don't have an income that's flagging our income threshold because it's only going to be 10 to 20 000 to pay my taxes i just say that because it is not that's not happening based on your data but it very much could so i'm uncomfortable with option a um i think a property cap is is really and i think b seems abundantly prudent to actually

[01:22:52] curb that kind of future um that's what might be maybe i just gave a citizen somewhere a terrible idea i'd like to hear what staffs do you think i'll look just just to clarify in term i don't know if this would help in terms of how the network is calculated to fix assets um and and Ms. Matheny i'm not sure if you heard the full question how that was calculated is there anything that you'd want to clarify um just on the spot and

[01:23:32] how that works in terms of the application review process well we they have to provide us supporting documentation so that includes tax returns if they've had capital gains we typically can identify with the group that usually applies situations like that and it does depend on the type of trust but we request trust documents and review the trust documents as well and those are trusts of which their beneficiaries are treated as assets that they have yes so we get all that documentation this statement does not cover everyone to the right but there

[01:24:12] are situations where someone inherits a family property and it's not a property they would have been able to afford themselves and so the property is something that they've inherited later in life sure um while we're talking about what what counts and what doesn't i've seen different ways that people have determined like different states have determined what income is um are you including government benefits annuities in addition yes we do take all that into

[01:24:49] thank you and we also look at bank statements and sometimes we identify what is the source of this or you know there are a lot of things that we can find through the bank statements as well thank you um i'm going to ask some questions and then we'll go back around we have a couple follow-ups that we can provide to previous questions but please mr chair um so you said there's a three year uh application three-year recertification process is everyone done at once or is that a

[01:25:24] rolling research just so i understand yeah it's rolling based on when you came into the program Okay, thank you. Slide 38. With 45 current recipients but have relief reduced by a combined $35,000, I can do the average, but I was more interested in the median, sort of where that amount, $35,000, came from among the $45,000. Because I suspect that distribution isn't very

[01:26:00] uniform that in fact uh a few current recipients are getting them yes certainly a few people would be in the thousands others would be less but we can uh we can provide the follow-up on what the median relief is and i'll ask you know unless you know mr wilson a revenue analyst is uh calculating that as we speak i won't put any pressure on him right now that's sort of sense of the district to know how many people we're really dealing with here he's already answered one question of the spot so we'll see how he does impressive i guess i feel that i don't think we would lose people in the application process by doing option c because they're already applying it's just a

[01:26:37] question of when they apply they'll recognize at some point that they don't necessarily qualify for 100 belief so they still would get a tax bill that first time as they if we were to implement something as significant as the average tax bill, that would be a shocker for a few people. I don't know how many because I don't know how this distribution plays out. It's obviously, it's going to be a shocker to 45 people, but it may be 45 people, many of whom get a few dollars tax bill and a few of them get thousands of dollars in additional tax. Well, obviously, we know it's

[01:27:12] capped at 8,000, so it'd be one or two that might have pretty large additions and a few more that have moderate positions to their tax. And in part, because of my interest in recognizing that I think the cap is still low on net worth. And part of that, as I've explained in the past, some people do choose in their retirement to have their retirement come to them in an investable portion that they still own, but they could only live off of that investment for the rest of their lives. And so enabling the cap to be a little bit higher would serve those people

[01:27:47] who choose that which is why i lean towards c not necessarily capping at the average tax bill but but capping somewhere where we look at that long tail and we say wait a minute that's that's not what this is intended to do that said uh the data on this slide is different than what i might have expected and so i recognize that this is highly impactful for for some people i don't know how many um because of the fact that they have such large tax bills due to the value of their property

[01:28:23] even though um they have very little in terms of income or net worth um and uh so that's that's where i'm out so that i understand that we still haven't heard from everybody so i think that's do you have any other folks well one follow-up question on slide 31 it says applicant is the title holder of the property does that not mean a person because that seems like that would have removed some of the consideration about trusts and stuff so that's

[01:29:02] just a non-lawyer question the trust in that case i think was referring to an asset trust not the property but still it's the person who would get the benefit and if you're not in this program you wouldn't have to be a person oh absolutely but not not in some llc what i was suggesting is that It could be possible for a very clever, very wealthy person to hide their assets in the way that they're not there.

[01:29:29] It sounds like we have a lot of good controls against that, but I never try to underestimate the cleverness of people trying to save a buck. They're not hiding their home, they're hiding their other assets in a presumably revocable trust in that case.

[01:29:44] I was going to have military intentions are all part of everything that's handed in, and it rules a lot of people out, even though they have no money. So, that's hard. Okay, let me just, I guess that was the only extra question that came up. I'm still struggling, frankly, and I would love to hear, and I don't know how to achieve this with the timeline that we have, some people about what the real-life circumstances would be.

[01:30:16] So, I'll work on my notes while other people talk. I mean, the way that I understand how these have been presented, in december we made some brief comments about people attempting to gain it but the process is such that they'd have to be really committed just because the steps they have to go through to qualify for the program is probably precluding some people that actually need the program not alone somebody trying to gain the program that's for sure um but i'm satisfied with controls in there option a and option b to me are very similar this option b is saying that in the future you may have a tax bill that goes up but at this point if we're going to revisit it next year i'd be fine

[01:30:55] and stay with option a that that increases the the piece for the inflation um it gives us another year of data before deciding if the cap is necessary based on budgetary concerns or liability down the road so i'm fine with option a for the for the next year i also do just want to slightly make a note on what i was saying i felt that b was a necessity but i actually think as a policy issue i would err slightly towards c for some of the reasons that chair andrew um it seems like it It actually allows for a great accommodation of the things that people who are struggling

[01:31:33] actually need to survive, rather than at the cost of potentially ruling out that or creating some tax liability on some of the most expensive estates. So I do think it seems to allow for just a little bit more of what we're actually trying to accomplish with the program.

[01:31:53] So my preference for UC, if I were to do a ranked choice ballot, CBA. I would go B, A. That's my first choices. And A is fine.

[01:32:12] Time will help to answer some of my other questions. So I guess A, B would be my two choices. So I'm hearing a consensus for A. With some interest in B, but that's something that could be revisited. Or will be.

[01:32:27] Will be revisited when we look at how this shakes out back for another year. that's where we are at this point i believe now today you were i'm sorry to ask this today we're asking just for some direction we're not making a final call yes it's great so they some of the information that super chair andrews was asking about i think is good information to have for a final decision yeah so staff's approach can be to prepare a draft ordinance stage going to a we will take the follow-ups um we can provide to the board in the meantime it would be meeting the 25th and

[01:33:03] that that's where you say a majority of the board they can publish a uh you know they can take action on a a or b but this is really near the universe of things that we can consider you know regardless of what is approved i hear a clear desire from the board to revisit this with additional data just as we have continued to do yes i just thank you i just wanted to ask regarding what uh supervisor pruitt said if do we have mechanisms in place so someone has uh there aren't an estate they inherited, maybe worth, I don't know, $10, $20 million, but they're doing what Supervisor

[01:33:42] Pruitt said. Do we have any mechanism? Because obviously we're going to realize where you live, that's obviously not a $150,000 place, it's a $10 million place. So do we have any mechanisms where we can, in place, or we can say, no, you don't qualify? That is, I believe, option B, in a sense we already know that the highest person the highest beneficiary is of 8 000 or roughly

[01:34:11] million dollar tax assessed value so if we were to do be in the future we would be preventing the possibility of what you're describing although at this point it's obviously not been an issue that's what yeah my second question is has this been an issue so and do we have a way of seeing that this is an issue currently i can we have the data there i don't have the data readily available for historically what that has been now i will say that uh this program has grown pretty steadily about eight percent a year until the board began expanding the relief in the two or three years

[01:34:49] which suggests to me there wasn't someone who came in with a you know tens of thousands of dollars tax relief bill because that probably would have jumped out in the data but that's my speculation not a database to answer i guess i'm i'm satisfied with the way the program is going now and i look forward to maybe you know looking at it next year and revisiting it as needed see who we can help thank you just to answer one question it was actually the very first one from supervisor lapisto curly uh the there would be 45 people to the right or the at orange line there are 550 to

[01:35:26] the left of the orange line who are currently receiving thank you mr wilson for the quick analysis on that thank you further on that i think at this point we have direction to come back and we'll obviously with the other q a we will continue andy before you go and the board had some good good conversation on this jennifer do you have anything to add i'm not putting you on the spot but you're in this every day do you have anything to add that you didn't get a chance to say today because you're not in front of the board very often and today was today was an important day for the board so

[01:36:03] anything that you would add regarding the program? I would just want there to be, we have to make additional consideration in going with B and C, because if you remember, we have those income thresholds there and where people land, that impacts the percentage of their relief. So it's not just the conversation about B and C in terms of the caps, it's also a conversation about what percentage of relief are they getting to begin with, because not everyone is getting a hundred percent and so some of the questions that you posed as i was looking at them with robert we

[01:36:42] just need a little time to think that through because we are kind of we're changing that dynamic and so the landscape of this will be modified and we've got to think through how that impacts because not everybody is just getting 100 i think sometimes we think that but there's a lot of people in this other 250 and 75 bracket that we got to give consideration thank you for clarifying that and yes and having to show the data because of almost three-fourth of people or that hundred percent is the easiest to get your head around but there are those impacts for those of the the 20 some percent at the 75 bracket and the five percent of the

[01:37:22] fifty percent bracket where there's some other nuance there too but right and when you're looking i'm sorry when you're looking at the line and you're thinking everybody to the right not all of them are getting a hundred percent many of those are only getting 50 i think just the figure of 45 residents with a combined relief 35 000 kind of demands that most of them are getting about 50 percent just based on how that matters yes that's correct so you just can't lose sight of that so i just wanted to point that out and appreciate the opportunity to think this through which also means that people are getting tax bill it's just not it's all right thank you to the

[01:38:02] board and thank you miss patini mr wilson for here uh our next item on the agenda is a discussion of fire rescue and i'm going to be joined at the table by chief deputy david bucket to walk through these slides and as he gets ready chair i'm not suggesting you take a break i'm asking does the board need a five-minute transition break i can go either way just stand okay okay i mean this is going to be an easy one too we'll just do it like this but let me write this down and then we'll be there

[01:38:39] so good afternoon board uh i'm david puckett deputy chief fire rescue uh first i'll provide a brief overview of how fire rescue services are provided then we'll review the two unfunded requests that the board add their additional information on then i'll turn it back over to the discussion fire rescue divides the county into 11 districts based off our facility locations while we look at community risk and performance by district i want to stress that all districts contribute to the overall success of the system no one station can address the needs all emergencies in their district. We have a total of 14 stations. The six represented in blue on this map have 24-hour

[01:39:17] career staffing. The six in green are volunteer stations with career staffing Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the two in orange are volunteer stations with no career staff. Our performance evaluation is based on what's called a standards of cover. It's one of the components required for accreditation is considered a best practice. A third-party consultant completed our standards of cover and provided recommendations in 2018. This resulted in the board adopting response time objectives from the county in a development area that's eight minutes nine percent of time in rural areas 21 minutes nine percent of time was that oh i didn't know okay all right i'm

[01:39:57] sorry so uh since 2018 we continue to use the various metrics included in the standards of cover to evaluate our performance and inform our five-year planning process the first request we'll discuss is the addition of a second 24-hour ambulance in the route 29 riot area the area red is what we call a seminal district and is served by the seminal trail volunteer fire department and ACFR's Burkmar Station. This area includes Route 29 from Forest Lakes to the city, East and West Raya Roads, and some adjacent areas such as portions of Barracks and Earlesville Road.

[01:40:30] There are over 28,000 residents in this 21 square miles making it the most densely populated area we serve at over 1,300 people per square mile. This area also includes over 7,500 people that are above the age of 65 along with a high concentration of nursing homes, meaning many of the people over 65 have complicated medical conditions and require more frequent care.

[01:40:52] The area continues to grow with large developments like Stonefield and Brook Hillsdale being built out. On the left is a heat map of all the calls for service in the county. Heat maps are useful to illustrate the relative call density with the hottest or busiest areas illustrated in yellow.

[01:41:09] For reference, the seminal district is circled in white. Looking at that district specifically, there were over 5,000 calls for service in 2023, which accounts for 29% of the county's call volume. Currently, that area is staffed with one ALS ambulance 24 hours a day. The standards of cover recommended that a second amus be added to the area in 2018. Now let's dive a little deeper and look specifically at the ambulance demand in that area. There were over 4,500 requests for an ambulance in 2023. The ambulance assigned to that area ran over 3,000 calls, almost a thousand more than the

[01:41:46] next busiest ambulance. The chart on the right shows the call volume of urban ring ambulances for comparison. Due to the high demand, Seminole ambulance was not available for 35% of their calls in their area so the board may be asking themselves who answered those additional 1600 calls ambulances from neighboring districts have to respond when the seminal ambulance is not available on the right are those same urban ambulances the red portion of the bar is how many times each of them responded to the seminal district while the blue portion is how many times they responded to calls in their own district as you can see hollywood and ivy are the most impacted with ivy

[01:42:25] responding to almost as many calls and signals they did in their district meanwhile those two ambulances were not available for 20 of the calls in their own district i should also point out that that ambulances outside the urban ring also respond to Seminole District, including occasionally Western Almore Rescue Squad in Scottsville. An area that is over at capacity has a ripple effect across the rest of the system by pulling more and more resources into it.

[01:42:46] So the very simple example, Seminole Ambulance gets a call, shortly thereafter another call is received in that area, the IV Ambulance responds into it, and then a call is received in the IV area, and Western Almore or Monticello has to respond to that area. Before I review the information on this slide, I just want to note that all the multi-year chart that I shared with the board this afternoon use a 12-month rolling average. So this removes a lot of the volatility or noise associated with monthly demand and provides a more accurate trend line for your consideration. I'd also like to just briefly thank Brandon Eckhart, our fire rescue analyst, for helping pull this information together. This chart represents the monthly call demand for

[01:43:25] ambulances over the last four fiscal years. It includes all incidents in the Seminole district that required an ambulance regardless of where it came from. As you can see, there's been an increase of approximately 100 calls a month since 2019, or a 29% increase. I should also note that the standards of cover recommended a second ambulance based off the call demand in 2019. If we compare response time performance to call demand, you'll see that response times represented by the blue line have increased from 10 minutes to just over 11 minutes and correlate with increasing demand.

[01:43:58] Although it's difficult to predict future performance, I think it's safe to assume demand in this district will continue to increase along with population and response times will follow if additional resources aren't available. I would also expect to be in seeing response times increase in neighboring districts as those ambulances compensate for the increasing demand.

[01:44:16] It's equally difficult to predict the exact impact of adding a resource to an area, but to provide some insight for the board, we looked at the performance of the primary ambulance in that district. This chart is very similar to what we just looked at, but it only includes calls that were answered by the ambulance station on Birkmar Drive.

[01:44:35] As you can see, that unit has continued to absorb some of the growing demand, but it's beginning to flatten out. The standards of cover suggest that 250 calls per month is approaching max capacity. If we were to add a second ambulance to that district, it's reasonable to assume that they would split the 400 calls a month, each running approximately 200 calls.

[01:44:55] So we project performance improvements in the Seminole District to be in this range while increasing ambulance capacity in neighboring districts. So this request includes nine FTEs, and based off our hiring timeline, would have a half-year impact in fiscal year 25s.

[01:45:11] We can use an existing ambulance, so the one-time costs are limited to items such as turnout gear. I also want to note that since these positions aren't specifically for fire suppression, they are not eligible for FEMA Safer grant funding. As we transition to North Garden, with the board's permission, I'd like to take just a moment and recognize North Garden Volunteer Fire Company.

[01:45:33] The board has heard from Chief Stevens last week, and he's in the audience with us tonight. I've had the pleasure of working with him and his team for a number of years. They're some of the most community-minded people that I've ever met. I want to acknowledge how difficult it can be for a volunteer fire department who's been serving their community for over 50 years to put their hand up and say we need help.

[01:45:51] The fact that their membership voted unanimously to request 24-hour staffing is a testament to their commitment to the community above all else. I also want to apply their intentional planning efforts to meet the needs of the community. A few years ago, with the board's support, they completed a building renovation and expansion.

[01:46:08] As part of that process, they ensured that when the community needed 24-hour staffing, they would have the facilities to support it. As a result of that planning, no additional capital funds were required for this request. This request for staffing North Garden is a very different story than Seminole Ambulance, but I believe the board will find it compelling as well.

[01:46:26] The area in red is North Garden District, includes the communities of North Garden, Coe Zoo, and Batesville. as well as 15 miles of Route 29 south. There are approximately 4,800 residents in this 111 square mile area. In 2022, the board provided career staffing for North Garden Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. utilizing FEMA Safer Grants, and the crawl staff of fire engine and ambulance.

[01:46:49] Volunteers are responsible for staffing nights and weekends, but don't provide ambulance services staffing. There were 695 calls in the North Garden District in 2023, although I want to note that units from North Garden Station responded to an additional 200 calls in other districts to support the overall system of the 695 calls in north garden 364 were during nights and weekend time frame and the highest concentration of calls were in the route 29 plank road area the area is somewhat isolated with the next closest stations to the majority of that area coming from ivy

[01:47:26] this is the call demand for north garden district the orange line at the top represents the total monthly call volume within the district and then it's broken out by the applicable staffing injuries below that with the blue line representing monday through friday six to six and the brown line representing nights and weekends. There's been a modest increase in call volume, the majority of that taking place during the funding through Friday the bush. NorthGarden submitted a formal request to expand their career staff into 24 hours a day in July of 2023. They expressed urgency around the request through the two-year period to hire, train, and deploy firefighters,

[01:48:01] the decreasing membership, and the increasing age of their existing members. There's also a desire to make the animals available to the community nights and weekends. In 2021, as NorthGarden saw a decrease in membership they partnered with acfr and cape to conduct a targeted recruitment drive in north garden area recruitment efforts included increased advertising yard signs flyers mailers but they saw limited success during the market research they learned there were only 1500 people in the entire district between the ages of 20 and 49 meaning there's a relatively small pool to recruit from this chart shows north garden's membership activity each operational

[01:48:41] member is listed along the bottom the bar indicating the number of calls they responded to in 2023. Multiple members may have responded to the same call for service. So for example, the bar on the far left represents member number one who responded to 568 of the 842 incidents North Garth was dispatched to. As you can see, North Garth had a total of 21 operational members that ran at least one call in 2023, but a small number of members accounted for a disproportional number of responses. Top three members account for 53% of the responses, but the top five account for 70 percent of all responses losing just one or two of these members could have a significant

[01:49:19] impact on the agency's ability to respond to emergencies in their community now if we look at member responses by age you'll notice that the vast majority of responses come from those that are between the ages of 70 and 79 and 63 of all responses are from members that are over 60 years old as the board considers this information i would ask that you recall that it takes approximately two years from the time the budget is approved to hire training deployed firefighters finally i'd I'd like to share with the board performance data in the North Garden District.

[01:49:52] This chart is in minutes, with the blue line representing performance Monday through Friday 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and the brown line representing nights and weekends. The first area I'll draw the board's attention to is the right side of the chart. In October of 2022, we added career staff, and you see a corresponding reduction in response times.

[01:50:09] This was largely driven by the addition of an ambulance in that area. As we start to think about what impact this request will have on performance, it's easy to assume that we'd see the same impact we saw when career staff was added, which reduced response times by approximately three minutes but that represents the best case scenario and assumes that nights and weekends performance remains the same based on membership information i just shared i think it's important to consider what performance might look like if membership declines again it's hard to predict how and when membership activity will decline but in this case we can get some historical performance to gain insight this area of increased response time was a result of two of

[01:50:47] north guard's most active members having serious medical conditions at the same time due to their inability to respond response times increased dramatically i think it's safe to assume that this represents what performance in the area could look like if no regards membership declines so if we use that as a baseline funding this request has a potential to improve response times about to eight minutes this request includes seven ftes and based on our hiring timeline again we have a happier impact on the square 25. these positions are eligible for fema safer funding i'm showing the potential offsets for fema funding but that would be dependent on being awarded the grant the application window is open now we typically receive notification in september

[01:51:26] both of these require our request support goals one and six of the board strategic plan and if funded uh in fiscal year 25 personnel will be deployed in the spring of 2026. the board wants to consider a fourth safer grant we need to prepare and submit our application in the next few weeks however the application does not commit the board if we're successful you will have the opportunity to accept or decline the grant at that time i've also included the combined budget impacts of these two requests with and without safer funding and that'll turn it back over to the board thank you

[01:52:03] Okay. So you're asking on slide number 53, I wrote over it, so slide 53, you're asking for nine FTEs?

[01:52:30] Correct. And that would be for Seminole Trails? That's correct. And you're asking for an ambulance also? No, we have enough ambulances where we would be able to supply the ambulance. Okay. You need the FTEs for the ambulance? Yeah. Nine FTEs for the ambulance? one ambulance correct so that's uh for 24-hour staffing so we're required to have a minimum of two on every shift uh and then we need enough surplus to provide uh leave sick leave and leave that type of stuff and you said you mentioned um they're not eligible for safe and for the safer grant yeah uh safer grant is specifically for firefighters that are uh on suppression apparatus

[01:53:06] and so since we're this is targeted an ambulance it wouldn't be eligible for fema funds because i I know a lot of your firefighters are both EMTs and firefighters. Yeah. So, so that, yes, they, they are all cross trained, uh, as an example, uh, and when we added staffing in North garden, um, that was FEMA eligible, even though they crawl staff and ambulance and engine, those positions are at least 50% on a suppression piece. Um, since we are asking for staff a hundred percent related to an ambulance, it wouldn't qualify, even though they're, they're firefighters. I know that's, that's, that that's complicated, but if they're on non suppression

[01:53:44] piece then they're not they're not eligible so they're they're eligible to be firefighters or ambulance but they're not eligible for fema funds because on paper they're all correct that is correct that's a good way to look at it oh boy and then for north garden you're asking for seven ftes seven okay and that's because of the volunteer situation yes yep that would expand our daylight coverage to 24 7. and how would that and and i think you mentioned one of your slides that that really impact it would impact by three minutes in the area i think it depends i think

[01:54:23] it would have a almost immediate impact of three minutes um but if we continue to see or see a decline in membership in north garden then it could be much more dramatic than three minutes and my last question is do you have you have a mou also with the city of charlottesville that's correct and so when you can't respond let's say seminal trail they can't respond personnel with the other ambulance you can use charlottesville you do use charlottesville the our mou with charlottesville is limited to fire apparatus it does not include ambulances um so the ambulances are specific uh are limited to mutual aid so if we need an ambulance we would

[01:55:02] request one uh and based off their census at the time they they may or may not approve that request okay okay well and i know that because i know they responded out for where i was there charlottesville But anyway, I'll go for all my questions. Thank you.

[01:55:18] Thank you. Supervisor McKeown? We have a real conundrum. Yes, ma'am. And we've seen this coming for years. I guess my first question, I think B covered, made it clear.

[01:55:36] So the Seminole piece is not eligible for bibliographs. Right. North Garden is. Is there a way you can quantify or help me understand if we, I guess we can go after the FEMA grants fairly inexpensively until we have to pick them up, to put it simply, right?

[01:56:01] So we can apply for those FEMA grants, recognizing that at some point we have to pick them up, but we have the ability to put that in. But if we did that, how would that actually impact Seminole? Because I know it's like the rolling dominoes.

[01:56:20] So help me understand better. And I know you sort of addressed it, but I'd like to have more clarity on it. So we could feel some impact in Seminole District in the sense that nights and weekends, the Ivy Amulance is the primary ambulance down 29 south of the North Garden.

[01:56:36] Right. And so if a North Garden ambulance was handling that call volume, it would increase some availability for that ID ambulance and then respond into the Seminole District. And likewise, if we add an ambulance to the Seminole District, it creates capacity for the ID ambulance to respond to North Garden.

[01:56:53] So it could go both ways. OK, and I'm sure it's hard to quantify. Yeah, I don't think I can say that. Exactly. But there would be some impact on Seminole just because of the dominance. of what i'm thinking it probably would be relatively small but yeah yeah but it would be small um i think for right now that's the main question i have right now thank you thank you um i mean i'm going to do some comparisons here that i don't think are exactly

[01:57:31] fair but i just need to ask and i think both these items i can understand the urgency but is just trying to parse out if one had to be i mean we don't have budgets for either at this point so if it came to the point where we had to pick one over the other it's like well then how do you prioritize so my line of questioning is kind of getting getting at that but recognizing that i don't necessarily think these are fair ways to compare when you look at these two areas and what you're doing in contingency to serve them so you have your contingency plan and some

[01:58:10] Seminole, they get called out. They're out on a call, another call from that place, and then the dominoes fall to serve the rest as calls come in. Are you at greater concern that that contingency plan can fall apart or the contingency plan that's in place for North Garden as you backfill when you either don't have volunteers or you understand what I'm asking? You guys have got contingency planning in place because of your current staffing and equipment issues at both areas, which contingency plan keeps you up at night over the other?

[01:58:45] It's a great question. If you look at it strictly from a staffing perspective, the career staff that we have in place and, you know, there's animals around the urban ring, that's consistent and stable. It's not going to go anywhere. It's about whether you're outpacing demand.

[01:59:00] I think what I'm hearing from North Garden is a declining and aging membership is more of a question mark in how long they can sustain that level of response. So I think that's more unpredictable. And as you point out, sort of the -- but there's a lower demand in that area than it is at Seminole.

[01:59:21] So it is -- it's very hard to compare the two equal. Now, granted that I got your point on the call time, and you had the two volunteer that were high responders to events, and that jumped them up. If you could go to that slide, actually, just to show it.

[01:59:37] I forget the number, it's -- in the urban ring, in that call for service, the target response goal is eight minutes. We've never achieved it. And even with adding in the ambulance and the staff, you're still shooting between nine and nine and a half and being a minute and a half over the response time. Here, in the last few years, we've been under the response time goal.

[02:00:01] Granted, it only takes a couple of volunteers to jump us up into where we're above the 21 minutes. This is where I really think it's an unfair comparison, but those response time goals were put in place for a very specific reason and if we don't do the seminal then we're basically saying that we're living with much higher response times while helping a place that is currently meeting the response time how am I really unfairly comparing that I mean one's ambulance the other is fire is going to be taking any of that difference into consideration as a lookout the only the only

[02:00:40] thing I'll add is the north garden uh nights and weekends currently has uh fire coverage the volunteer staff, the engines and tankers, but they don't staff the ambulance. So adding career staff nights and weekends would also add by default an ambulance to the community nights and weekends. So do these current response times up there take that? The blue line to the right of that hash line is when we added career staff and an ambulance went into the station. And so having an ambulance is largely what drove down that collective response time, because prior to that the ambulance was coming from Ivy.

[02:01:16] - I mean, I say this, I don't, again, just delicate, but I mean, I think three minutes in the rural area seems to me to be, you know, how do you compare one minute in an urban ring to three minutes in the rural area? It seems like three minutes in the rural area almost has a bigger impact than a minute in the urban area, but this is probably helping you parse this to try to determine which one is, where your dollars have better impact.

[02:01:43] I mean, at the end of the day, if we're gonna put resources here, we have to determine where we get the best impact process. So this is what this data is here. We don't have, we have the data here to inform us, but how the hell does it inform you to make that life a partner?

[02:02:00] So I'm not, I've not arrived at that decision yet, but I'm still trying to understand if resources are available, where we put it, and how you all, are there other things in the line of thinking that I'm going that you would also consider?

[02:02:17] I mean, I'm thinking contingency plan. I don't know how Seminole and the onboarding of Seminole helped because it was just a fire truck at Seminole that was supposed to help calls for area through the whole urban ring, but it doesn't look like it's been dramatic necessarily in those calls for service.

[02:02:35] - And those calls are specific to ambulances. So Seminole Trail, they don't provide transport service. - So it didn't really impact this particular piece. - They do provide first response medical care. And so often they'll respond and might get there before the ambulance begin care and then transfer the ambulance once they arrive.

[02:02:55] Well, I'm really concerned about the urban rings calls in this, this, when the call goes out and other places having to go. Because there's only so many, there's only so many occurrences you can respond to before you're in a dire place and you don't have anybody to respond.

[02:03:13] So what happens in that? Is that when the mutual aid pulls in then? Yes. It could be a number of things. As you mentioned, it's entirely possible that a number of units in the urban ring could all be committed to calls at the same time. And so if we see a spike in call volume, the battalion chiefs can move units closer to the urban ring. Perhaps they move a rural unit closer. And then as we exhaust units, then yeah, we certainly reach out to Charlottesville or we would try to clear units that are at the hospital and try to clear them quicker and get back in service. How many times have you exhausted the units in that kind of scenario over the last I don't know year in 23? There's been very few occurrences where we

[02:03:52] have uh requested an ambulance from Charlottesville um probably they probably requested more of us than we have them but it's not infrequent that we've either moved units up closer to the urban area occasionally we have taken engine staffing uh in a station and and dropped them over onto a reserve ambulances at the station and surged up an ambulance to uh to meet a specific demand um and again sometimes you can have very high census that you might go on for an hour and then it'll then it'll return back to a normal level and so we we take action in that thank you i think

[02:04:26] that's all we have right now thank you supervisor mallard thank you um this is a painful thing that's been going on for all 16 years i've been here the um so i just want to put in a plug for because i met last night with um chief richardson and president lawson and they said that many many times the station for ambulance for fire engine is also coming into seminal yes which means that i agree with everything that everybody has said about the demand um this the raceway in north

[02:05:01] garden is terrifying and i think that's a very high risk raceway for them and keeps them as busy even though they may not have as many red in their map there's still lots of deaths that going on right there in that particular intersection so i get the need that they have as well um but the uh this is the dominoes is a perfect metaphor to use here because if one station isn't equipped or loses its volunteers then it can't back it as this happened and before 12 came along the early school station was running more than ever recalls the day all by themselves

[02:05:39] um a year uh so i've written some things out of order sorry somewhere in the legislative process beginning of this year was a funding study, JLARC, something about capacity for fire and rescue across the Commonwealth. Is that live? Are you hearing anything about that? Because I assumed it was going to have resources to go with it, which would be great, but I don't know. I heard some bills early on. I don't know if any of them made it out of the year. I don't know if anybody else is aware, but I haven't heard anything recently. Okay. I was hoping you had. All right. And I was

[02:06:19] disgusting to learn earlier today that the safer thing did not apply to ambulance which is sad

[02:06:34] and the percentage of calls that's rescue is 70 plus depends on the area but i think county-wide yeah 70 is a very fair so that's another reason to be recognizing that for sure um so anyway i we trying to what are we doing are we we're understanding okay good okay good um yeah

[02:07:07] because i think the interrelation interrelatedness of business is incredibly important and all the different agencies who have worked together better and better and better every year for so long it's really really wonderful um and just i guess the overall philosophy is keeping every element as strong as it can be. I guess the lead in, and I know we're not doing CIP right now, so I'm not going to blame for this, but what we're discussing for the operational people right now is the whole reason why we'll be back when we get to CIP to talk about an $800,000 county commitment to

[02:07:46] match an $800,000 already existing bank account for the volunteers have raised. In order to keep two-fold staff, two-fold every night. They can run an ambulance and an engine or a tanker in a brush truck and an ambulance, all with the number of volunteers they have now. And they've worked for years and years and years to build this momentum and to have now, this is the third cohort of volunteers that are really strong and all released and ready to go and a new place to sit. So that's the reason I will be coming back again with this, to try to accelerate this

[02:08:24] edition, the third, fourth edition over the many years for their company, the first one in County would be. And I'll stop here. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Proulx. This is going to speak a lot of my own ignorance about how this works, but I know that there exist private ambulances in the world, and I'm not sure how they get integrated in this response kind of configuration. Can you help me understand that, and Mike, is there private

[02:08:59] And with that, of course, costs like a preferred residence option that can backfill Wendler's caps. Yeah, so there are a number of private ambulance services. They do not participate in the 911 service outside of, say, mass casualty type stuff, where we would activate those plans.

[02:09:19] They have limited capacity as well. And I think we see that in some cases as the skilled nursing facilities have demands. They can't get a, they don't work on a ready to respond. They work on a program where they schedule stuff.

[02:09:34] And so they want to keep people busy as much time as they can. And that's how they are able to make money. Meaning when you call them, they can't respond immediately. They can schedule you three hours from now, four hours from now. And so it's hard to fold them directly into the 911 system.

[02:09:53] One of the things I know that Chief of Police is working on from, And I think Kaki alluded to this earlier, some of these mobile integrated health care is how do we work with the nursing homes and build those services up to decompress the system over time? I actually appreciate you mentioning that casualty because that was my next question.

[02:10:13] I imagine you have specific, when you train and prepare that casualty response, you have specific interest areas that you train around. Could you help shed some light, because I think it might inform our decision making what the specific concern points geographically the county are with mass casualty?

[02:10:32] Yeah, so just to clarify, mass casualty for us is any time the number of patients overwhelms the available resources. And so that could, most people think of hundreds of patients, it could be 10 patients, and that could overwhelm your resources pretty quickly.

[02:10:49] And so that could certainly take place with two minivans on Route 29 in an accident and require a lot of resources to that one area. But to your point, areas where there's a more dense population, if something bad was to happen there, whether it be an active threat, you know, some sort of plane crash, something like that, it's going to impact more people and require a significant number of resources.

[02:11:18] additionally we talked a good bit about the response times and the comparative response times between some urban some urban fire rescues and uh and specifically the north garden fire rescue i'm curious if north garden's performance which is really impressive with their current staffing um is something that we also see in our other rural fire rescues and rescue squad okay are we consistently meeting this 21-minute goal because i was under the impression like the average in the rural area was actually exceeding our established goal maybe i've misrepresented the response times

[02:11:58] in the rural area generally meet the uh response time goals if you were look county-wide we have much more difficulty meeting the development area response time goals again just because of the demand and available resources that's all right thank you uh if we could just look at the slide 61 again. I guess sort of the question point that I want to make is that it does seem to me that Seminol's ambulance service needs have been increasing steadily and this is

[02:12:34] what this is about. Whereas North Garden's situation is more about this slide in that it's not a question of a significant increase in the calls, but it is a recognition that The volunteer system has a serious potential flaw that needs to be addressed.

[02:12:59] And I just want to keep that in mind when we try to compare these because they're kind of apples and oranges because of that, and yet they're both asking for, I think, really important, you know, to serve important needs.

[02:13:14] I will ask about the safer grant capabilities. We've been very successful. there you know a sense of the strength of the application that we would be putting in in this case as compared to the strength of previous applications that have been successful i know the applicant pool will change and criteria may change but how does that work yeah so so we feel like it's a pretty compelling story um it's hard to predict exactly all the criteria and how you would you would meet those um the one thing i'll say is in in past years we have packaged a couple

[02:13:49] items together to try to make sure we got as much, as many points as we could in as many areas. But the justification we use for North Garden staffing Monday through Friday daylight is the same thing for nights and weekends. We can certainly, you know, fold into this additional information about membership availability and age, and I think that will strengthen it further.

[02:14:13] So there is room for this on the application? Yes, yes. Yeah, that can, that will certainly BE PART OF OUR NARRATIVE. AND THEN I JUST WANT TO CHECK, THERE'S BEEN SOME DISCUSSION OF MUTUAL AID, BUT MY UNDERSTANDING IS YOU'RE SAYING THAT CHARLESVILLE PROBABLY ASKED US MORE THAN WE ASKED THEM. WE HAVE REALLY, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE, IT'S NOT AN IMMEDIATE, OBVIOUS CALL, IT'S WHETHER IT'S AGREED TO. WE HAVEN'T DISCUSSED, AND I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHETHER WE HAD TO USE IT, HAVE WE BEEN USING NELSON COUNTY RACES

[02:14:50] services when we look at Southern Albemarle? Not really. Albemarle is a better resource than most of the adjacent counties, and so we probably feel far more mutual aid requests coming in than going out. Thank you. Supervisor, please to approve. Yes, I'm just going to call out the elephant in the room, and that is that our volunteer force is declining. I don't know if it's going to be 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, but that is finding that's something that is a board and probably future

[02:15:30] boards need to think about if this is sooner or later it's going to be an all-career fire department. Hopefully that won't take place for a long time and who knows maybe it never will, but I do believe Chair Andrews mentioned about the safer grant and I do believe that's very compelling when you see Not that any of us are between 70 and 79 age group, but I do believe that that is a huge issue or so.

[02:16:02] But I do believe that's very compelling because that's very good. And then you've got the 80 plus. So anyway, I just think that's very compelling.

[02:16:19] I'll just make one quick comment about this slide as well. uh in addition to what it means from a from a workforce standpoint again i go back to the commitment to the community uh you've got a number of people that are uh 60 and plus and still very very active in the community and running running golf so i applaud that thank you i wanted to make sure before we move on but i call out the heroes right i think they're all and um but i just think that's compelling for the safer brand but certainly you know people in their 80s are very active

[02:16:55] it's it's a hard decision i did want to ask one other thing regarding seminal trail that would be the nine ftes would be for 24 7 is that that's correct okay and the predominant number of calls take place when was there a slide i think there was a slide i did not include that in a slide i do have that information to the board though um in 2023 the monday through friday call volume was uh 183 per month on average the nights and weekends was 202 so it's pretty close to 50 50

[02:17:32] um split between those two periods so not saying what to do or anything but i mean your heaviness calls would necessitate what four and a half hdes yeah yeah so so i think to answer your question, yes, we could scale this and do a Monday through Friday, you know, peak unit to relieve pressure during those periods. It wouldn't necessarily help the nights and weekends, but it wouldn't be a step in the right direction.

[02:18:01] Right. But you would allocate that staff for the peak. I'm thinking. I don't want to, I can't tell you what to do. But you would have that during the peak hours where most needed, where you have the most calls. So just for clarity, we're not making a decision today so and i guess my thought is this is another parking lot issue that we'll need to come back to right because we all have to look right yeah i just want to ask a question no i think i'll pick a second on that question uh supervisor mcgill to to really explain that the topics that you've

[02:18:39] talked about today thus far are topics that i would consider are significantly budget impactful whether it's four and a half FTEs for TDO or trying to look at a solution or a step-in solution or a step-up solution for Seminole Trail or thirdly the North Garden which as you as you've heard today the staff is able during this application period I think that is over April 12 to make application now we're successful on three and and and there are some costs associated with

[02:19:14] going after that application. There's costs associated to FY25 and then costs associated with FY26, but it's certainly not anywhere close to what we would incur without that safer grant. What we hope happens today before we run out of time would be to get some indication from the board on anything that you've heard today that you'd like for staff to work on between now and the 25th because we're going to come back on the 25th and you're going to set your ceiling for your tax rate on the 27th. But if there's an interest from the board to explore

[02:19:52] any of the items that we've talked about today as it relates to budget ramifications. So to give some guidance, Ms. McKill is talking about the list and Mr. Bowman is going to keep a list of things that the board's interested in. So if you've got some initial guidance today on things you want us to look at, or if you say, no, not really. We want to think about it until the 25th.

[02:20:17] We understand that. But as we move through the budget process, just to understand that it's a tight budget and the board knows that with six pages of unfunded issues that we were not able to fit into the budget. And so the more leave time we've got to work on scenarios in 12 days between now and the 25th helps us to be able to think through this, even if it's just general direction and general interest. So I hope that's not clouded your thinking about where we are.

[02:20:44] I hope it's helpful. And you may have follow-up. And I'll look to board members, but I do sense that there is an interest in trying to determine what the impact would be to address some of these, whether that means shuffling other priorities or whether it requires taking the tax rate.

[02:21:10] Yeah, the dreaded tax increase. Even using a step-up approach that you mentioned, you know, if we do this, we do this. I don't want to speak for everybody when it comes to which of these would go for what, but I just sense that these are priorities.

[02:21:27] Right, and to just piggyback on that, I would need to know what we need to do, because I think we're all looking at the FEMA safety brand is great. But then that leaves another hole at Seminole. So what would we need to do in the way of, is there something we could cut that wouldn't create yet another hole in another place? Or what would it look like if we were going to raise taxes? I mean, I don't know what it would take to wipe taxes. I haven't liked it. But that would be helpful for me. Or even, if I can just jump in, maybe something that could be deferred. I mean, none of us like to defer anything,

[02:22:06] but sometimes something can be deferred somewhere in the budget that you could suggest. My concern is that we have six pages of things that we already deferred. No, no, no, no, just saying.

[02:22:22] No, no, I hear you. I hear you. I guess I'm looking for any and all options. Creativity. I think it's appropriate to say that we would encourage staff to work on the SABER grant.

[02:22:41] I guess I would, I would, don't wait on that, that's kind of non-stop, right, and I think that we're in agreement with that, yes, that's a helpful direction, and thank you to the county executive for teeing up the discussion very well, it's actually the very next slide that we had of, as we prepare for March 25th and 27th, staff has got some time before the 25th and plan out what uh what scenarios look like and i don't expect the board share everything on their mind but if there are other options out there for example if staff has to put a scenario together for north garden the sheriff what else might there be out there that we need to think

[02:23:17] through those options and so the board is at this point we've gone through a review of the general fund including a really in-depth dive with a lot of data on a few topics today the board's gotten a lot of good direction for us uh we have uh you know had q a with the board the unfunded list so this is just kind of a checkpoint either before we take a break or start on capital that any direction we can get now will help staff help the board on march 25th and then lead into the action on the 27th so i would kind of ask this question more or more simply with all that context if there's anything else in the parking lot aside from the sheriff of the fire rescue it will help staff in order to help the board if we know what those are we want to go through speaking

[02:23:57] aware of this so i would like to do that i think you're a supervisor i i think that i've said everything and i would like to see available options frankly all available options for fire and rescue right um that's more of my main interest um frankly more so than the other question i guess i hear you asking not only that but also if that's the case then what are we looking at that we might previously have seen it well yes correctly yes anything and really we've covered

[02:24:35] the first three four exceptions it takes us time to think about it yeah reference on this meeting so i know what i would put my parking lot right now supervisor mckinnon well for what we've heard just in the last couple of hours i would be very interested in the fema safer grant and what it would take it do we have the funding for that to that application or what where we could get that money uh pretty quickly now because that seems like to me it's a no-brainer having said just to say this back and i think staff's direction would be how do we identify the what was not covered by

[02:25:13] the grant for that what do we look like in terms of options for burkmar whether that be a phased in our full approach and what are the other impacts in the budget um but i think it's one is we help the board if we're able to solve those with options um if there's any other things we can anticipate that will be on your minds we can prepare scenarios for those as well i think that's now just on something related to your question if if we if the board comes to consensus right now we're going to have a safer grant can we give that to you so that you don't have to come back on march 25th and say you want to save for grant i mean if we feel strongly enough they've only got

[02:25:50] till april 12th yeah so i i think there's two actions one is i think we are hearing from the board you know go forward with the grant uh the section the second action is we will need to amend the fiscal year 25 budget so that if we are successful in the grant the funding is in place for the roughly hundreds of thousand dollars of one-time cost in the first year they don't have that's great to hear yeah that helps a lot i mean i want to see it all about the you know at some point i have we have to start making the decision what does this cost and where does it come from so i'm not ready to limit hearing the

[02:26:28] fire options i mean i get it the safer grant i hear phrases like no-brainer and all of that go but eventually it costs us something just going after the safer stuff to the to the expense of things that we don't have that grant for that we're putting it on getting to those positions that can't be used by the grant in some ways it's like using one-time money in a lot of ways you've got it you've got to take the operational hit at some point so i'm not ready to go there yet i'm i want i want to see it think on it a little bit after what i've seen today and then start looking at numbers and how we can get creative in it the safer grant amount

[02:27:07] for 100 grand doesn't get us very far with anything else but if we're going to step up and have to add revenue somewhere then there may be a way once we look at what those dollars are it could maybe get somewhere to both of them. I don't know yet. I mean, there are still things that I haven't talked about that are on our six pages of lists that we haven't had extra. I don't need extra sessions on the fact that we're not adding a police position. And I'm concerned about the DSS not getting some of those positions. But in the years past, it's up to me to come in and go, I think we need to do this. And that hundred grand needs to come from here. So I don't need your all's help to prep for that. But these are bigger options that are more than just a hundred

[02:27:47] thousand or a two hundred thousand piece so at that level yeah i still need to see the sheriff stuff up there i still need to see that for all the fire elements up there um because that's that's to me is not moving money around um if you had money to move around you would have for a million dollars you would have had that in there already um you know the smaller items that are hundred thousand fifty thousand those i know there's some flexibility that doesn't have huge consequences elsewhere. But these big chunks, I think they all need to be on the table so that we can look at

[02:28:23] them. Just reminding myself, because I couldn't find the note, I know what a penny on the tax rate means for revenue. But just to say that out loud, just remind us with the split. Yeah, that's a total of $2.9 million for one penny on the real estate tax revenue.

[02:28:42] The split will go 0.3 million to capital and debt, 1.6 to public schools operations, And about a million to county government operations. And then the question was asked, and I couldn't find the answer for the property tax worth of $342 for the car rate.

[02:29:02] Yes, that is about, for each penny there, about $100,000. So about $6,000, $54,000, and $36,000 split that way. And my other revenue question earlier was about the business tax, the vehicle business tax.

[02:29:19] Yes, because you've got a question that will come in the next follow-up to the board. I'm sorry, a response to that question that's coming out from the next follow-up. So that's the history of what that fee's been, and then I'd be looking at that in the same way that I just asked about the other taxes, what kind of income that could bring in if that was not.

[02:29:38] That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Malin? I think quite a few questions have been asked about the HARTS team, perhaps expanding the hours of the day when that might be available. So that's something that you may have already on there. And if there's a way to help us understand how we balance operational investments that are going to be annual to capital investments of the same amount, I mean, it's one-time version forever, basically.

[02:30:06] So that will help me. And I will promise to scour the rest of my stuff and make sure I think I had everything else that was on here. Thank you. Just to add, as part of our scenario to expand hearts, were some questions with dss we can put that in the parking lot as well as options so president um kind of to continue on super birthday always point i do just want to if we talk about what a pain on different tax rates are but i feel like if you're talking specifically about personal property i feel like there's a specific number we should maybe be working with that which is

[02:30:42] what is the split and the total revenue if we were to return to our pre-covered amount and And that is not something I have readily in my back pocket. It would be helpful to think if we return to our previous personal property tax rate, what is the full implication of the budget?

[02:30:59] I'll say we'll take the follow-up on what the peak was a few years ago. But if the board were to take a step to go back from just where we are to the revenue from the prior, the adopted budget from last year, that would be 13 cents to generate about $1.2 million and change. It would have to be split.

[02:31:15] Yes, that would be split. yeah to go back a little bit further it would be greater than those 13 cents so we can get that as follow-up to the board as well you may have information available about how where the used car market has come because i think on the radio they were talking about it's come back 30 but not 100 yeah that's another follow-up we'll have for the board about the history and how those values changed over time there there were just i i think i've made very clear some of the issues that i know

[02:31:52] from our unfunded list that i am concerned about and i think are impactful toward my community towards the issues that i'm focusing on but um i do just want to make sure those are clearly stated they are not as big of boulders as what we're talking about today but i i'm just as far as you're doing as far as budget scenario planning i am curious about the the trail technician and whether or not that pushes back in a significant meaningful way the opening of sections of discovery because that is something that a lot of people are eager about and i think half of tte shapes that in a meaningful way i think that's worth entertaining um

[02:32:31] i've said several times that i think the emergency aid fund is a deeply impactful for dollars uh spent and i think the increase that was proposed plus the additional fte to administer it is an incredibly modest cost for that kind of value filters i believe there's only a 40 000 that was unfunded in the request for that but i'll double check and lastly i know this is a moving target and something that um our social services our human services team is working on real time but we know that there's a significant request for an acceleration of funds dispersed to southwood

[02:33:06] to keep them solvent while they're continuing to roll their image that makes it that makes it very and there's potentially increasing construction costs and sewage mitigation costs if they do not stay on schedule um and i know that's probably going to come from the housing fund but it is not clear to me yet whether or not through reprioritizing it it will be able to be met given additional obligations that we have and just timing um in time so if there is an additional amount that it's going to spill past what we can use to reprioritize the housing fund in order to

[02:33:45] meet southwood's request that that one again as you can see this is a thorny one because it involves several but if there is a amount over the amount allocated to the housing fund that we cannot deal with through reprioritizing other commitments i would like to know what that number is i would like that to be part of the conversation because i think even though it just feels like oh it's a timeline thing it just means southwood is deploying slower southwood deploying slower means that they have to pay for additional mitigation for the existing properties, and that may also have construction costs continue to creep. So I think that needs to be really urgently flagged.

[02:34:23] Those are the, that's my parking lot addition. So, you know, I think that we are not going to come to any consensus on all of those issues. We need to each think hard about what we think is I was just going to say that might be maybe we should carve out a little bit of time from those six pages and for some of us if we were ready to leave because yeah that's right so

[02:34:57] yeah that's exactly right so yes yeah I just want to clarify that as you give us maybe tax rate whether it be real property tax or whether it be personal property tax, when you give us that amount, you also give us a split.

[02:35:16] I think that's important to know what our split, what we would be able to use. Thank you. If I may, just because I want to make sure I'm correct and it's right, just to say that to revise Pruitt, there really is three items of the trail technician, the emergency aid fund, and then Southwood support were the three that I took in my note.

[02:35:37] Make sure I didn't miss anything else. uh thank you and again no board no board actions requested today but this is helping staff prepare for the 25th sorry that's all i wanted to say that that's important of course the other six pages yeah but we have six pages yes so then they go through them again um i think we have to all go back and look hard at this conversation um and it is i apologize for not taking a break earlier it's

[02:36:12] 5:36. Can we forge ahead? We can think of five minutes. Really five minutes. I've looked at staff, actually, because you really have been on the seat for the whole time. I apologize for not recognizing that earlier. Thank you. Given the time, are we going to do all of the CIP tonight?

[02:36:30] We will not be able to finish it. I was going to say, let's see if we are. We can tell us the timeline. Yeah. Five minutes? Yeah, five minutes. Five minutes. Figure it out. Figure it out. Thank you.

[02:43:23] - Recording stopped. Recording in progress.

[02:43:43] - I'll touch people. - Just like, if he's out there, that'd be great.

[02:43:59] - Yeah, you're too big. - My God, you scared them. - That's the first out of me.

[02:44:14] - They're here. We will resume, thank you, and put the staff to give us some direction of where we're going next so that we can start the CIP. - Yes, we will start the CIP. We have much content to cover. I know the board has stopped at six, So my goal is to cover an overview.

[02:44:31] We talked about goal five, the strategic plan, which is around the education. Want to thank the school staff over here. And then anything we don't cover, we can pick up on the 25th for the rest of the next day. The good news is the board saw a lot of this information based on the information at the time on December 6th, when we had an inter-joint information, joint work session with the school board around the CIP.

[02:44:52] So this is really now the next iteration of how that has evolved. So to spend some time looking at the process, Back in the five-year plan at that joint meeting, we said we would develop, staff would develop a recommended CIP once following plan. First is we would take the starting point of the balance of fiscal year 24 to 28 CIP. So years 25 and 28 are, we have at least a starting point to go for.

[02:45:22] This is an important point because it also says with that starting point, we're not looking so much to add projects in year one. Most of the new projects tend to be in the outer years. staff at number two would continue our just normal financial work to update assumptions the county did a bond issuance in the fall we now know the impact of that that's speaking to our numbers on december 6th there was a joint meeting with the school board when the school board was able to book boards were able to learn about the total context of the cip school board had an opportunity to tell the the work they've been doing in their long-range space planning committee their funding request and the board was able to engage with that from there as we looked at

[02:46:00] revenues we would then see staff prepare a starting point for the board's deliberations of really using the strategic plan as that milestone this is another slide from the december 6 work session which actually ended that on those next steps there are some revenue options that are available to the board should they choose amendments to the cip some of the items in the cia cip have already been incorporated we know the impact of the calendar 24 reassessments there's some one-time funding that the school board is uh recommending to contribute to that but the last thing i want to take a moment on is an update from december as the board may be aware there is legislation in the

[02:46:39] general assembly that would allow enabling authority if approved for localities to hold a referendum for sales tax of one percent one percent sales tax in the county is in the range of 24 to 25 million dollars and that would be very substantial for school construction that is now for the governor to take action on and we'll we'll see what happens and go from there So like we do in the operating budget, we take a look at our strategic plan, we weave in our obligations, our financial policies, and that leads us to a total five-year CIP that totals $335 million, 36 rounding up.

[02:47:16] This is the revenue side of the CIP, but the first thing I need to point out that the board is aware of, but for the public or anyone else listening, the first year of the CIP is the capital budget that is appropriated. That is where the legal authority will be enabled.

[02:47:32] Years 2 through 5 are the CIP, we refer to them as the out years. Those become the basis of planning, but they are not legally authorized to be spent. And what we typically see is projects will work their ways through the CIP. So, for example, the Southern Elementary School construction has been in the CIP.

[02:47:49] The construction is now going to be part of the fiscal year budget 25, should the board appropriate that as recommended. So, in the revenues, we see most of the CIPs from planned borrowed proceeds. This will be for things, just to continue the example with the Southern Elementary School, because of the type of expense, it's a long life cycle, the nature of it, it is eligible to borrow funds for that and pay that back over the next 20 years.

[02:48:14] The next category of funding, about 28% is cash equity. This is the general fund transfer and the other one-time money that comes into the CIP. I'm not going to talk about the small revenues in detail because they tend to be assigned to projects. For example, the Darden Athletic Field Rebuild, the city is contributing funding to that.

[02:48:34] The city can't take that funding and reprogram it for something to public safety. It's tied to that project. So looking at the expenditure side, in summary, we have the public schools making up 62% of the CIP in the upcoming five years.

[02:48:50] The largest county government portion is in community development, which is the transportation leveraging program. We'll talk about more of that on March 22nd. So I'm going to start, rather than go by functional area on the previous slide, really talking by strategic goal. So goal five, education is what I'm going to focus on today. This is a slide from the county executive's presentation that shows the total school CIP of $207 million and the big projects in there with additional funding for high school center two in the first year, construction of the southern feeder pattern elementary school in year one, followed by the northern feeder pattern in years three and four. That would be design three, construction four.

[02:49:29] Then funding in the all years for renovations, maintenance, and school bus replacement. to focus on the big boxes and some dollars there uh system-wide renovations totals 14 million i know we have the other schools that are out there i'll share that in february the school board provided a letter to the board based on their upcoming deliberations prioritizing increased costs at high school center 2 and the southern elementary school those are addressed in this recommendation which school board chair they acknowledged on monday this does not fully fund the school's capital request but it does reflect their priorities where we coordinate closely with

[02:50:06] school staff to understand where the school board's priorities are and then allocate that funding down the list as we can go let's take a higher look at these projects which i'll be brief on because the board has seen these before uh this is the capacity of projects with the southern and northern feeder pattern the slides reflect not only when these are appropriated but the additional time and when they would actually be open for operations with the southern feeder first and then the northern feeder and to follow a system-wide renovations is a broad term but i want to clarify this is really work that is planned for almaro high school and western almaro high school

[02:50:43] for a host of projects that are planned as one of the strategies as part of the overall high school project with center 2 and modernizing the other facilities and with that i will pause since school staff are here and this probably gets just that there's questions from the board and we can end today after we go through the schools again thank you for the school staff for being here thank you supervisor please i just uh have one question i wanted to know whether or not the northern feeder pattern school it should that one percent pass pass and then i know

[02:51:21] the referendum wouldn't be till i think 26 or next year and then take effect till 26. would that move everything forward give us the opportunity to move faster on the school because when you're projecting an opening of uh what 29 that's uh uh keep those uh rosalyn schmidt i'm the chief operating officer i'll actually defer more towards the um county financing to do the

[02:51:54] more the modeling of it i would assume increases in funding would be able to accelerate projects and that is one that has been deferred basically available funding um so i don't have as much acknowledges the timing of cash that would how that would impact the overall model certainly we would i think there's two dynamics one can we implement it which i'll need to defer to the school staff um i would expect you would you would find a way um the second is really we're working through now if that bill was approved by the governor what is the c what is the sequence of events for things to happen mr sumner would you add anything to that sure so uh looking at the

[02:52:34] the calendar and what's in the the bill of what the timing is there some timing components of when that we put into effect the earliest election that that potentially could be on the referendum would be this November election that would be it that would be assuming if the if the governor was to pass now there's a lot of activity that we didn't need to collectively undertake to make that happen and and it really depend on when the governor signs it based on our early estimates of early vote, when early voting would start and the timeline that we need to have before that

[02:53:08] and from approval from the board of supervisors to get that on the ballot. We would need to be before the board probably in May, if not June would probably be very tight, but probably May for that. So we're watching the activity in Richmond very closely on that and we have some planning efforts underway just with staff to make sure that we have the timing correct.

[02:53:34] And so that would be the fastest. Now when would the tax actually be collected and revenue start flowing? So hypothetically, if this was passed by the governor, if all the steps fell into place and it was approved through referendum, the earliest we'd probably see tax dollars flowing in would be June of '25.

[02:53:54] There's some time and there's about 120 days that the state would need after the approval referendum and approval ordinance are actually by the board to implement that additional sales tax for it to be start collecting by the state. So that all will play into the timing of them when we see revenue and we have some estimates on what the revenue is. Thank you. That was great. Thank you. I'll just make the comment that I think it's really important if we can at all possible

[02:54:29] in the past and I thought he had 30 days to sign like 10 days ago but who knows um it's really important that we do this during a presidential election cycle if at all possible because that's when people come out to vote and we'll have the best likelihood of getting asked and to hear June of 25 money flowing would be great so I appreciate that I don't really have any questions I don't think right now. I just think a lot is up in the air right now still with the schools and we need to just keep following them and see where they are as we go through the process.

[02:55:09] Supervisor Conaway? I know that we increased some of the CIP based on the letter that came from the school board with the Southern Elementary School. I think when I asked the question at that time, that was before or after the school board made some decisions to modify the costs on that.

[02:55:32] And I think you all told me it was after they made those decisions. It was a combination of increased cost and scope changes. But I would ask the school staff here to speak to that to clarify. Well, my specific scope question is it didn't reduce the 500 level capacity. Correct. It's still a 500 seat school.

[02:55:49] So I'll take a general and I'll let you get more specific. The school board was presented with a schematic design of that school and it had a significant funding gap. we presented value engineering options to get that down and there was still a gap so the gap the new gap is what was presented to the board of supervisors and is included in that but to get down to that there were some value engineering options that we can share details around playground services window glazing and this net we did not reduce the capacity of that building

[02:56:28] we do continue to plan to build to bid three classrooms as an ad alternate to give us some flexibility on bid day but if we're able to afford those three classrooms the capacity is 500. where we did have to cut is the size of the classrooms we had originally planned that as a kindergarten through fifth grade school and so our kindergarten classrooms and our first grade classrooms are typically bigger and have bathrooms the decision now is that that is a upper elementary school uh third through fifth and so we reduced some of the classroom sizes

[02:57:04] because of that now that does limit our future flexibility of that facility in the future so that's probably the biggest concession that was made but the overall capacity is not and you made that decision probably because there's an elementary school right there next to it right yeah yeah i just think it's important that we're approving cips based on student seats and i'm fine with that justification but that those numbers can't change without because i wouldn't be as supportive if we started cutting back seat capacity in one of these two

[02:57:36] projects thank you i don't have any questions right this minute thank you supervisor prude i don't know that i have any questions thank you i'm actually also good with this point as much as i would like to ask mr david's interest in the county government cip in two minutes probably be best uh coming back from march 25th so i'm going to skip to just the next steps on

[02:58:09] the agenda debt management will be part of that as well so we'll be back on march 25th to continue the cip and then we can bring back some of the scenarios on the parking lot options then on march 27th would be the work session where the board would take action so also march 25th will be the consent item to approve that scenario a on tax relief and i will uh just clarify in april those town halls have been scheduled we'll update that slide for the future reference they're all on the website um and i'll say that april 10th is out there is to be determined that will be determined

[02:58:46] later whether we actually need that or not and uh that'll wrap up everything we have had a lot of really in-depth discussion and a lot of data i appreciate the board's attention and direction for a very uh very busy very productive work session thank you and your staff for excellent presentations and willingness to hear all of the concerns and all the farmers that we've made and i'm glad to remind us about the town hall because it's an opportunity to sort of get some feedback about some of the things that we've put in the circle parking lot and looking at those

[02:59:19] priorities um is there anything further from the county executive that's right i know you want to check with me i know i know we will have time i'm good to go okay and then i want to check the board budget presentation will be tomorrow night at places uh 29 north cac and i'll let you all know how it goes if you don't see me again that could be why but anyway let's see anyone else That was fun.

[02:59:58] We're in a good mood at 6 o'clock. And I do have something I want to propose. This is a lot more fun than some of the hard challenges that we had up until now. And tonight I am proposing the final step in the Sense of Place Transit Art Initiative.

[03:00:19] And I want to thank Garland Williams, director of CAT, for being here tonight to answer any questions. As you all know, this board has been receiving quarterly updates from Jessica and Kevin as the work with VDOT, the city, CAT, and Elmore County began pre-pandemic.

[03:00:39] Bus Stop artwork makes a statement that we believe in public transportation as a service to our community. It is the best environmental solution, a solution that reduces car traffic congestion, a way to do work, shopping, recreating the region, and our solution for when we grow older and we have to give up the keys to our car.

[03:01:05] It is visual evidence that we are proud of our public transportation solutions. Bus Stop Artwork provides a sense of place to the neighborhood where the art is located, providing a pride of neighborhood and ownership in the deep history of the places where we live as reflected in the art.

[03:01:26] Bus Stop Artwork is a huge bang for our buck. It has proven its worth in city after city throughout the world. to get to the nitty-gritty. This initiative comes to us now because CAT has a bus shelter prototype and progress has been made regarding placement of bus shelters along VDOT roads. Yay!

[03:01:50] CAT will be ordering approximately 60 bus shelters over the next five plus years to be located at designated CAT stops in Albemarle County and within the city. The Sense of Place initiative would place art at one bus shelter in the county and one in the city each year. Jessica has provided a list of 30 shelter locations to the group, and the ones that are best suited for art will be

[03:02:25] then determined. All of the artistic work, art installations, and maintenance are under the direction of the Charlottesville mural project through an agreement with the city of Charlottesville and CAP. Albemarle County is not a signee of the agreement, which is currently with the city's legal department, so we are not a signee on that agreement. Albemarle County's commitment to Sense of Place bus stop art is funding with bus stop installations of two a year at a cost of $6,000

[03:03:02] per bus stop. The total art installation cost equals $12,000 a year, which will require a contribution of $4,000 a year by Albemarle County, $4,000 from CAP, and $4,000 from the city of Charlottesville. So tonight, I am asking for a consensus to allocate $4,000 of ongoing funding in the community development budget to support Art in Place.

[03:03:34] The community, I mean, sorry, the community development department has a transportation transit budget where this allocation can be located. And the first sense of place art location has already been determined to be at Stonefield, where a shelter has already been installed.

[03:03:55] And so I know there are probably some questions. I think Ann might be able to answer some questions. Garland is here to answer questions, and I know Jeff is willing to speak to the project. Thank you. Supervisor McKeel? No questions. Are you in favor?

[03:04:11] Yeah. Okay. We need a reaction. All right. I'm trying to show you the time. I'd like to be efficient if you can. Supervisor McKeel? No questions. Okay. Support. Are you in favor? Yes. I'm good.

[03:04:28] I'm in favor and have no questions. Supervisor Brown. I'm in favor and have no questions here. Supervisor Brown. I'm in favor and have no questions, so we're good to go on that. Life is good. Now I could turn back to you and ask if there's anything further from the county executive.

[03:04:45] I don't believe so. I know we're at five minutes after and folks have six o'clock obligations. I'll look to Andy and Ryan. Do we have what we need for the 25th? Yes. So we will be working, Mr. Chair. We'll be working between now and the 25th to look.

[03:05:01] I've heard several board members express some interest in what you've seen today. And we'll be looking to generate options for the board to consider if your interest turns into direction on the 25th for any of the topics operationally that we've talked about.

[03:05:17] The SAFER grant, specifically, that's got some obligation attached to it in FY25. And I know that we're still considering that. But in addition to that, the Birkmar station with the ambulance will be looking at options within the budget for the board to consider.

[03:05:35] Is that, am I getting ahead of the board to do that? I don't know. I think we definitely are looking at options. And of course, those options would be both directions, both tax rate implications and also what might be reprioritized. And I appreciate, and I know B's got a question.

[03:05:52] I appreciate you saying that rather than me because you're exactly right. There are tax rate implications to this and the staff wants to be able to respond to the board with real estate and personal property. But then also, if you were to say, just look at moving money within the budget, we would come back with recommendations for the board to consider.

[03:06:13] And the board knows by the six pages that you've looked at that those recommendations would be service cut related at this point. So basically you're trading something off of the current budget for something on those six pages orders. And I didn't mean to cut in front of you.

[03:06:29] No, no, no. I'm just concerned regarding the SAFER grant because I know April 12th is the deadline. And I want to give them the fire rescue enough time to apply for that. And if we wait and give you the decision until the 25th, that's really pending their time.

[03:06:47] Because I, you know, let us know what you do and say it doesn't matter. I felt that the consensus was already that we should apply presently, and then we do. Go forward. I think either way, I'm just going to finish. I think either way, we want to apply for the Safer Grant.

[03:07:04] Even if we had money, I think we'd still apply for the Safer Grant. Yes, I'll say this, and if I don't have this right, please chime in. I think staff will move forward with the application. To find the $100,000 or so deficit, that is not going to be a disruptor in the budget in the same way that some of these larger changes would be so that is one that we can come back on the 25th if that's all we had to solve that would be a pretty easy ask yeah and so i think we we know we can proceed with that and the rest we would need to part of we don't need to follow up and come back on the 25th one thank you that's all i wanted thank you yeah thank you sir further

[03:07:43] we will adjourn to march 20th 2024 at 1 p.m in the lane auditorium opportunities for comfort access and purchase paid in this meeting are posted on the albabao county website and on the albabao county calendar participation will include the opportunity to comment on those matters for which comments from the public will be received thank you all thank you thank you

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