Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Finance/Government Operations and Economic Development Committee, Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Place: Board Room, First Floor, Government Center, 1 Harrison Street SE, Leesburg, Virginia
Length: 6h 40m (video)
Official meeting video (county, Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/player/clip/7763
Agenda (Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/AgendaViewer.php?view_id=73&clip_id=7763

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 2026-10-23. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:11:36] good evening very good all right welcome to the October meeting of the finance government operations and economic development committee this room has a hearing loop if you need hearing assistance switch your hearing aids to telecoil mode you need a headset we have those available as well please see the clerk to request one we'll begin with the adoption of our consent agenda we have nine items proposed for consent and they are item two quarterly report upcoming contracts second quarter FY25. Item six contract renewal architectural services for building renovations. Item seven contract award architectural services. Item eight contract award

[00:12:16] and FY25 capital improvement program amendment construction of the crisis receiving and stabilization center. Item nine contract award construction engineering inspection services for route nine and route 287 roundabout. Item 10 contract award roadway and civil design services for Route 15 and Braddock Road roundabouts.

[00:12:34] Item 11, award authority increase 911 equipment and emergency notification software and services. Item 12, award authority increase educational software solutions and services. Item 13, CY25 payment standards and utility allowance for the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

[00:12:55] I will make a motion to approve the consent agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Supervisor Briskman. Any discussion on the consent agenda? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries, 5-0.

[00:13:11] We are pleased to be joined by Supervisor Dr. Crony for a portion of our meeting tonight. We have a really long agenda. This actually may be the longest agenda I have ever seen in the Finance Committee. So we're going to do our best to try to move it along. We will take a break at some point in for the board to grab some dinner and improve our moods, hopefully.

[00:13:32] But we will go ahead and get started with information item number one, which is our monthly Department of Economic Development reports. Good evening, Mr. Reiser. Good evening, everyone.

[00:13:55] In front of you, you have the DED annual report for FY24. As they have been for much of the last decade, the numbers are really great. 164 wins, $7.8 billion in investment, and more than 5,000 jobs.

[00:14:11] We also had a great year for economic diversity with lifestyle, businesses, and retail at 36 wins, rural 33 wins. We also saw significant momentum in the clusters such as health, highly specialized manufacturing, ICT, and logistics.

[00:14:28] But what we wanted to highlight this year was the people and the faces of Loudoun. Inside, you'll find nine great stories of local business leaders who are leading the way in our community. We'll be delivering hard copies to your office. And there's a great digital version, too, at our website, biz.loudon.gov slash annual report.

[00:14:49] August is the most recent month for local unemployment data. The rate was 3.2 for Loudon compared to 2.7 for Virginia and 4.2 for the U.S. The jobs report released last week showed unemployment was 4.1 for the U.S. in September. Nationally, jobs increased by 254,000 in September, which was above expectations.

[00:15:08] and supports the notion that the economy is having a soft landing, as was referenced in discussions about the Fed lowering the interest rate. There are currently 15,983 active jobs open in Loudoun County as of September, with 3,220 newly posted jobs in the month.

[00:15:27] EDAC had Renee Haltom, the vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, at their meeting on Friday. Great, great presentation. She said that the economy is doing well, expectations around a 2% growth rate this year and into 2025.

[00:15:44] Unless there is a major shock to the economy, there is no recession expected this year or next. Quick reminder that the annual fall farm tour is coming up next weekend, October 19th and 20th. This features one of the largest number of farms participating we've ever had and some really new farms that we're very excited about.

[00:16:02] which is a great transition for our update on the USDA farm market and local food promotion program. In 2020, the department applied for and was awarded a multi-year $250,000 grant to determine the effectiveness of the Loudon made, Loudon grown marketplace and to increase access to local Loudon food products with the goal of increasing Loudon food production.

[00:16:27] Building on the data we received from these studies, DED pivoted towards a more traditional way of increasing the access to local foods through increased education and marketing efforts for producers and consumers. We overhauled our Loudoun Farms website and marketplace in line with the recommendations.

[00:16:46] We offered continuing education opportunities in conjunction with our partners, and we hosted stakeholder workshops and events to identify opportunities for our farms and rural businesses. We have implemented nearly all of the recommendations from the grant related to marketing, education, mentoring, and resource allocation.

[00:17:06] As a result of these efforts, the county actually saw a big increase in sales over the last few years. Farm markets increased from 12 to 14. On-farm stands increased from 15 to 23. And, of course, we had the opening of the Lovettsville Cooperative Market. Observation from the various studies conducted suggests that Loudoun's strength continues to be direct-to-consumer market.

[00:17:28] The number of small to mid-sized farms and specialty products lend themselves to this market, and we will continue to support these operations. The full study is in your item tonight, and with that, before we take questions, I'll turn it over to the REDC Chair, Kelly Fultman.

[00:17:45] I've been here in a year. How are you all? Thank you. So some of the things that REDC has been collaborating on is we are looking forward to working further with trying to accelerate our marketing programs and how we can get products out to various consumers.

[00:18:06] We'd love to get into some of the HOAs and see how we can get all of our products in there. We also just had an update with Colleen today on Seeds for Success and getting some various programs together. We're putting ideas out in front of her to get a 2025 program for our rural businesses and structures for that.

[00:18:29] We have had speakers every month. We've had the ag tech finalists come in. We have had one of the drone aviation farms come in and talk to us. Just today we had Jill Kovaldian give us a talk and an update on the arts program.

[00:18:49] So we continue to have those, and they have been very successful. And I did want to introduce John Magistro. He is our Business Development Officer for Rural Businesses and Business Services. We're happy to take any questions. Outstanding. Thank you very much. Thanks for the update.

[00:19:06] Do we have questions? We'll start with members of the committee. Start on the side with Chair Randall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good evening, everybody. Buddy, congratulations. I will see you on Thursday. Congratulations on being one of the 50 most influential people in Northern Virginia, stacking on top of all the other many awards you so richly deserve.

[00:19:26] And to you as well. Thank you. And by the way, the numbers are, as always, amazing. Ms. Fultman, I just want to ask you a quick question or a favor, actually. Recently, there was a little bit of a discussion about an equine quarantine center.

[00:19:45] And I realize that some of my colleagues may not have been aware, let alone privy, to some of these conversations and some of the data and information that's been put together on those, on that. been we've been talking about this for years do you mind sending me any information you have on on that issue just so i can share it out with people be happy to do that thank you so much i appreciate it thanks everybody thank you uh supervisor brisbane uh thank you chair letourneau and um thank you for the great annual report um i love the faces of loudon and we really showed a

[00:20:22] lot of diversity and um in the report and hopefully we will continue to have a lot of diversity in our economy. And I also wanted to say congratulations on being one of the 50 most influential people according to Northern Virginia Magazine. You, Beth Erickson, and our illustrious chairwoman, Phyllis Randall, was also named one of the 50 most influential folks in Northern Virginia. So congratulations. So we have a lot of influence in our room with us tonight. Any other questions or Any comments for Mr. Reiser?

[00:21:00] Can I tell Scott that he did not hear any of that? Is that okay? Thank you very much. All right, thank you very much. Appreciate you being with us tonight. Next up is overview of our Department of Information Technology Workforce Innovation Program.

[00:21:34] Good evening, I'm John Bayless, your Director of Information Technology. We're gonna provide an overview of the Workforce Innovation Program. Internally we call it the Learner's Program, so we'll refer to that throughout the presentation. I'm joined by Julie Crim, she's our IT business manager, and Scott Boggs from the Metropolitan Council of Governments, we'll refer to it as COG throughout the meeting, and he is the managing director there.

[00:21:58] Thank you, and welcome to Loudoun tonight. Thank you, sir. I'd also like to acknowledge the collaboration on this program by Carl Rush, our chief equity officer, and Michael Drager, our deputy director of human resources. Scott and I will be doing the presentation, so we'll get right into it with a background So the learner's program was in our proposed budget, and it was recognized, we recognized that there was an opportunity for a mentor-driven program to develop local talent and to support non-traditional sources and to support our technology projects and our social and racial equity resolution.

[00:22:36] Year one of the program is included in our adopted budget, and this summer we worked with, the county worked with COG, and we're here tonight to talk to you about that and what that program entails. So the goals for the program were to develop underutilized talent for IT careers within our local community through on-the-job training and mentoring led by COG.

[00:22:57] Secondly, is to provide additional staffing support for county IT projects. And then lastly, to create a pipeline of local talent to fill future county vacancies. And with that, I'll turn it over to Scott. Thanks, John. So right now, as many of you are aware, we at COG host many regional programs.

[00:23:18] And Loudoun County participates in those things like the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the National Capital Region Geospatial Data Exchange. and these are hosted by COG because it makes the most sense to have a neutral party that's hosting a program that multiple jurisdictions are participating in. So COG is providing you a trusted partner with the systems that are already in place for this pilot program, and hopefully we will extend this to other parts of our membership and even outside of the traditional COG membership

[00:23:53] footprint if possible it is because we are a non-profit we can easily leverage grants and or donations from private industry to support the program and we have had some interest in those spaces so we look forward to pursuing those as soon as we kick this program off and this will be established as a standalone project much like we do with our public safety programs and the reason i say that is because the money that comes into cog for this program will be spent exclusively on this program and not on anything else.

[00:24:23] So it'll have its own accounting and program management and oversight. Next slide, please. So what's COG's responsibility here? We're gonna source the hires and learners and provide the training and mentoring for those learners, provide continued mentorship and oversight.

[00:24:42] And I'll talk a little bit more about this in a later slide. But the point is that we have resources immediately available to these learners at all times. The county will contract through an MOU with COG for this service. And obviously we will be working with the county on oversight and the mentorship as well as defining the program's needs.

[00:25:06] The projects, for example, that these learners will be working on are defined by Loudoun County and specifically Loudoun County IT. The learners, obviously, they will be employees of COG, full-time employees. I want to make a point that these are full-time employees with benefits while they're in this program.

[00:25:24] So they will have insurance and actually be contributing to a retirement program, things of that nature. And then they will complete all of the training, which, again, I'll talk a little bit more about on a later slide, exactly what their training is going to entail, at least right now, based on Loudon's needs.

[00:25:41] And we will be providing them.

[00:25:45] This is the one that I wanted to highlight a little bit.

[00:27:44] The technical mentorship is obviously important. We're bringing people in, we're giving them a 12-week basically crash course on these IT topics, the computer programming, and if we can get a grant that I'll talk a little bit more about later, a cybersecurity component.

[00:28:01] But there's a business mentorship program here. This is focused on making sure that these folks not only have the technical skills but has the soft skills to do things like teamwork, how do you talk to your customer, how do you communicate with people that are not in IT about what is their goal of this particular project the certifications that they we know that they're going to walk away with right now are certified scrum master cloud engineer ServiceNow which I think is the primary focus because that's where the needs are in the county right now CompTIA security and some cyber certifications and don't ask me to explain all of those up and we'll have John if you have any questions

[00:28:40] about any of those I'll let I'll let him handle those the so really what we're trying to do here there's several things we're trying to accomplish the first one is workforce modernization obviously it allows the department to have a pipeline for talent with core skills and mentoring support but also you're building a group of people and the hope is that they're going to have some loyalty because of the opportunity that comes with this program they're basically being elevated in their status especially in the employment

[00:29:15] capabilities. We're reducing the vendor dependence and these are very difficult positions to field and I get that. That's not necessarily a Loudoun County problem, that's actually an NCR problem. So by investing in some Loudoun residents and leveraging to do them to do Loudoun projects, you're actually accomplishing two things and getting beneficial use with a significantly lower cost. The enhancing the applicant pool for county positions right now the county requires that you have a certain number of years of experience in order to qualify for certain positions. This gives them the professional experience

[00:29:54] to now apply for and potentially be successful in gaining a position in the county. The county's not obligated to hire those folks but the learners will they're going to get those skills and experience that they need to apply for for other open positions should the county not have one available for them at the time.

[00:30:12] So we're initially starting with six learners and as we said we're going to be sourcing those from non-traditional sources. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have about that. The technical skill qualifications that they're going to receive. I talked about those behavioral skill qualifications that so you know round a full full rounded employee not just someone that's good at programming and then supporting the county service now environment as I'm told that is continuing to expand into other departments departments are asking for support and IT doesn't necessarily have the capacity so they're bringing on contractors to do that this this is going to

[00:30:52] fill that gap and they will have on-site immediately available resources to to manage and convert or not convert but customize the service now environment for those organizations um right now as you know they're budgeted for a million dollars a year the uh the return on investment that we expect that technical work workforce and retention value hopefully building that loyalty with these these learners and their the folks that are participating in this program the community impact you know the high tide rises all raises all ships this is hopefully going to continue to

[00:31:29] improve not only their employability but their their life their lifestyle stop there and answer any questions that you might have all right thank you very much for that presentation so we'll open up for questions i'll just start with one maybe so is so cog is actually doing the hiring and these

[00:32:07] folks would be essentially cog employees during the period of the training not not loud and counting that's right so we would bring them on as limited tenure employees with the understanding that it's a 24-month limited tenure. At the end of that 24 months when the program is completed, they're either going to move to Loudoun or they're going to move to a private sector position.

[00:32:28] But the tradition, actually the program, the way the program has worked in the past, and we don't have a ton of experience, but the last one that was very successful saw those folks actually exit the program earlier than that. So they were getting positions in either county positions or they're getting positions in the private sector before that. And are these Loudoun residents specifically?

[00:32:48] Yes, they will be Loudoun residents for this particular program. So they have to be a Loudoun resident in order to be part of it. Okay, but they don't have to go work for Loudoun County Government. They can go take a private sector. No, no, it's not required. But I assume our hope is that some of them would come work for Loudoun County Government.

[00:33:04] Yes, so absolutely. The talent that we're going to bring in and build is going to build that characteristic that they're really going to work for the county. And if they do, then there will be an opportunity for them to apply for those positions.

[00:33:19] So really, I've heard the board over the last couple years is it's really hard for us to find talent first off and then find talent that really wants to work for the county and serve the public. So we can buy talent, but we want to build talent with this program.

[00:33:34] So that's really the aim of what we're trying to do. And we know that we need a diverse workforce, particularly in the IT. As we program things, we have gaps and blind spots. So we need a diverse workforce that programs AI and all of these things that we're doing so that we have a better picture of what we need to do to serve our citizens.

[00:33:58] Thank you, Mr. Chair. On your list of those you're reaching out to, so you have Catholic charities, and we get frequent email updates from them as to what they're doing.

[00:34:16] You don't, as far as I can tell, have the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area. I worked with them quite a bit when the refugees from Afghanistan came.

[00:34:33] So why would they not be included on this list? It's just something that we're not necessarily aware of. So if we can add them to this list and include them, absolutely. I think that would be a very good idea. The other is Leesburg is a hub zone, and we have quite a few small businesses in Leesburg that have hired folks from underserved and under-resourced communities.

[00:35:05] And I wonder if reaching out to our hub zone businesses would be a good idea. They have been recruiting the kind of folks you want to recruit, and they might have some good advice or some good networking opportunities for you.

[00:35:23] Obviously, what we want to do is we want to do whatever will make this program the most successful and help as many people as we possibly can. Great. Thank you.

[00:37:09] who might want to do a tech job, so not just the people who are already in adult education, but just kids who are in juniors and seniors in LCPS right now, and grabbing them when they're 11th or 12th grade is really just the exact right time to grab them.

[00:37:30] But I appreciate this program so much. I was kind of excited when I read about it. I didn't know it was going to be you that came into my boardroom, so I appreciate that, Scott. But just the OAR question and the behavioral services wraparound. Yeah, on the OAR question, being candid, we hadn't considered that, but what I'm going to have to do is work with Loudoun County HR and see if there are positions that would be, someone would be disqualified for because of previous convictions.

[00:38:00] Can't come up with any off the top of my head, especially if they, I mean, there's some violent crimes that we obviously don't necessarily want to. We don't even have that question on our applications anymore. So, really, that's probably going to be, well, it will be driven more by what Loudon wants than what COG wants.

[00:38:22] Okay, that's a good answer. Because this is really a Loudon County program. That's a good answer. And so I'm not opposed one way or another, but I'll also say that whatever the case may be, we're going to make sure that they've got those social skills and we're targeting those social skills to make sure that they're successful.

[00:38:40] I mean, I will be honest. I have met some of the most, some very smart people who are sitting in incarcerated settings now. Obviously, yes, there's some violent crimes and other things, or just sociopathic crimes that you just cannot do anything with. But otherwise, I would consider those. So thanks a lot to everything.

[00:38:58] On the public schools, we actually have already sort of laid the groundwork for some of that. So we're hoping that, because a lot of public school systems, I'm sure Loudoun's not any different, have technical programs where the young people that have that skill set and propensity to do that work.

[00:39:19] So tapping into something like that is definitely something that's on our radar, and we've already started making contact. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Sains. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Very good to see some of the partners that you're going to be utilizing. And just to clarify, so we're going to post the job posting, I guess, on the county website, COG website, and obviously with these partners, then get the applications, screen them, interview, then say, okay, congratulations, you're accepted into the program.

[00:39:50] So there will be a 10-week mentor program. Once that's done, then they'll start the extra hands-on. 10 to 12 weeks, and then they'll be working on projects within? after that period of time, and then the duration will be the two-year period.

[00:40:05] Correct. Okay, just to make sure you got the right. And then you mentioned earlier how in another program some people left early because they got job offers, which is great. So would you fill those vacancies or leave them open? I would immediately refill those. Okay, awesome. Good to hear that too. And then I sent in the question right before this meeting, but do we think about partnering with any nonprofits or organizations that kind of already do certification training, say, for example, on IGEL Scrum or Google Analytics, where they already went through a program and then say, okay, let me talk to those three or four people that already went through your program and certified, interview them.

[00:40:42] Are we thinking about that as well, or are we going to think about going that route? Yeah, well, what I would say about that is we're really not looking at whether or not someone has a certification or a bachelor's degree. If they've got that, that's great.

[00:40:58] We're probably going to put them through some training again just to do some refresher um the the strength of this program is not really and i'm speaking from my perspective and everything that i've been working with with john over the last year on the strength of this program is not the certification that the individual gets it's the experience because you can have a bachelor's degree a master's degree and and 10 certifications and nobody will touch you because you have no real world experience So, bringing them, getting the certification is a plus, but we're really focused on giving them the experience so that they qualify for the position.

[00:41:37] Very good. Thank you for bringing this back after I know we had a conversation before and gave some ideas and some suggestions and bringing back, I think, what we received back is on point. So, thank you. Okay.

[00:41:53] Any other questions or comments? Seeing none, thank you very much. Thank you for being here tonight. We look forward to getting underway on this. Great. Okay, next up is item four, which is our quarterly report on capital improvement projects for the first quarter.

[00:42:15] Good evening, Chair Letourneau, members of the committee, members of the board. We are here to present the quarterly report for the capital improvement project for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, which ran July through September.

[00:42:38] New this quarter, the report features a new format, which you may have noticed, for the project pages, which we hope more clearly delivers information for the projects. Also new this quarter, DTCI thought it would be beneficial to show some progress on our projects.

[00:42:58] So we put together a brief slideshow, which we will use to highlight a few select projects and provide some visuals of the progress on those projects. And this also works out well this quarter, as DGS has a few projects to highlight this quarter. So before we get to DTCI's projects, I will turn it over to Ernie to go through a few of DGS's projects.

[00:43:18] Thank you, Scott. Good evening, Charlie Turner. members of the board. Thank you for the opportunity to allow us to drop in this evening. I will be sending this information out. Yeah, somebody got the pun. I'll be sending this information out after this presentation and email to the whole board so that you have it in writing should you desire to provide updates to any of your constituents. But the three particular projects that we wanted to highlight for you this evening and provide an update were the Lovettsville, what we call the Northwest Recycling Drop-Off Center, the Sterling Recycling Drop-Off Center, and some of these are

[00:43:57] particularly recent uh changes but we wanted to provide some updates on that and i actually scripted this so i could stay on on track this evening so with your permission i'd like to do a quick rundown on these with your permission i'd like to okay mr brown thanks sir next slide please thank you for hijacking the presentation sorry so as you may recall on october 17 2023 the board approved the funding and the relocation project of the lovitzville works cycling center from the leased site within the town of Lovettsville limits to the Lovettsville community park outside the town limits. Of a particular note it was onto county

[00:44:36] property, county owned property. Relocating the existing drop-off center to county owned property mitigates the risk of being forced off the site due to a lease termination. The county has completed conceptual design and confirmed that the park is a viable location. While the approved project relocates the recycling center from inside the town to a county-owned property outside of the town, the town had expressed some concerns over the site's proximity and visual impacts.

[00:45:05] So consequently, during the last year, after the town had expressed this concern, staff has been working with them to identify other suitable locations. Unfortunately, to date, no suitable alternative location has been found, and the only viable location is still Lovettsville Community Park.

[00:45:22] The town of Lovettsville provides recycling services for its residents, and the County Recycling Center offers recycling benefits for all Loudoun residents living within the northwestern area of Loudoun County. So recognizing that the town does not have legislative or regulatory oversight of the proposed location, staff desires to continue to work collaboratively with the town to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

[00:45:46] To this end, staff has requested another meeting with the town to discuss additional screening from Milltown Road to mitigate the concerns over the visual impacts to the southwest entrance of the town itself. While this may result in an increase of cost, we believe that this approach will result in a better outcome, and we hope to have something more to report to the board in the next six months with some hopeful progress with the town on that solution.

[00:46:12] So that's the update where we are with the northwest of the Levittsville Recycling Center. Next slide, please. The next one we'd like to highlight is the Sterling Service Center, or what we call the Eastern Loudon Recycling Drop-Off Center. As you all know from the email that I sent out on this topic, the recycling center needed to be removed or relocated due to the upcoming construction of the Parkview High School site.

[00:46:37] As noted on this slide, the optimal location was found at Claude Moore Park itself on the other side of the Parkview High School. so you'll see the existing site on the lower site says old site and then just literally across the other side the new site which is technically on claudemore park area is a the new site that was identified and it's uh has been deemed viable because we have worked with parks and rec and others for to ensure that it would work and our consultant solid waste services is working on the site plan and the construction drawings the site plan was submitted for review to building and

[00:47:12] and development on October 1st, and another one of our consultants, WSP, is completing the landscape plan and coordinating the United States Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species process for the northern long-eared bat. The northern long-eared bat concurrence process with Fish and Wildlife is expected to be completed by October 30th, which would allow us to begin clearing the site on November 15th. Construction will be performed through our job order contract process once the permits are received this allows us to avoid any further procurement process for this effort construction is anticipated to take take approximately four to five weeks once permits

[00:47:51] are in place which if it is if all permits are in place in november we anticipate a completion time frame in january of 2025 i will also note that there is an overhead power line that needs to be adjusted they require a 24-foot clearance at 22 and we're working with the power company on that, but that will not hold up the construction. It may have some delays if we are not able to get it done in time for the actual opening, but we will be able to continue to proceed for that construction. Just one more. Next slide, please. And the third project that I wanted to bring to

[00:48:28] your attention is the electric vehicle charging stations. Back in September of 2022, the board approved the electric vehicle charging station at county facilities phased plan. The plan was added to the 2023 CIP to provide funding as part of the charging station project a study was also performed to assess the viability of incorporating zero emission vehicles into the county fleet and ascertain the demand for charging stations for the county's use. The board directed staff to prioritize the charging stations at more public facing facilities including community centers libraries park and rides and parks. This prioritization ensures that the first phase of

[00:49:07] this project is dedicated to the public and the county fleet charging will be addressed in later phases. In 2023, the CIP provided $1 million in local tax funding, and in fiscal year 2024, it allocated approximately $2 million for federal grants, which was replaced with local tax funding because the grants did not materialize. In 2025, the CIP 2025 process, approximately $5 million in federal grants was allocated in 2027, and then another $3 million of local tax funding was allocated in 2029. As noted, no grants, such as the bipartisan infrastructure grant, were

[00:49:45] successfully awarded for the installation of EV chargers. We do have one grant that is currently being pursued, but the award determination will not be known until February 2025 at the very earliest, and then it is not known when that funding would be available. Phase one of the charging station projects consists of 32 locations, totaling approximately 85 charging stations. To date staff has purchased and received 20 dual head electric vehicle chargers that's a total net of 40 charging heads of the first 10 sites eight of which have been completed in two locations away permits and construction start dates the two sites that are awaiting construction start dates we

[00:50:25] anticipate to be completed in the next quarter bernie can you just move your mic a little closer oh i'm sorry apologies i'm not usually used to reading from a script the cost of the first 10 sites uh is one million dollars depending on the required infrastructure upgrades the additional 22 sites uh in the phase one are estimated to be two million dollars the estimated timeline to complete phase one is december 2025 and that would include all the 32 sites uh staff is currently assessing the funding and timing needs for the projects remaining in all the other phases as most locations in phase two and three are primarily focused on county fleet vehicles and their

[00:51:03] charging needs so as i mentioned the information that provided on these three particular projects We will make sure that email goes out to the entire board tomorrow so that you have that information in writing. This is the update that we have for these three sites, and I'll make myself available for any questions that you may have.

[00:51:21] Okay, so we'll pause on this section here first. Thank you. Thank you, Ernie, for the update, especially on the Sterling Park Recycling Center project. Could you email me that timeline that you ran down?

[00:51:37] Yes, sir. So we can get that information out to our constituents because we're getting, obviously, I'm pretty sure you're aware, we're getting a lot of questions and asking for updates. So we can get that information out. Then, of course, they can please keep us updated as time progresses because I know this is a very ambitious timeline that you laid out, which hopefully everything works to plan.

[00:52:01] But, you know, sometimes that does not happen. um so anyway you can just follow the office and email that the information that would be greatly appreciated yes sir um then when well you didn't cover it i guess the eastern loud and group home will be in the next section uh wait all right thank you thank you sir thank you um supervisor briskley thank you thank you for the update on those projects glad to see the recycling center is um going to be kind of close to where it was before it wasn't quite clear on there though are

[00:52:34] Are you going to be able to access it from Parkview High School or from that street in Sterling? Like, they're not going to have to drive all the way through Clawmore to get to it, right? No, ma'am. There's an access road that has full frontage on Parkview. I can't see the road, but they will literally use the same access road that they have always used it, just to be a little bit further down.

[00:52:55] Okay, great. And it's going to be the same number of purple cans? Yes, ma'am. Okay, and then the, oh, can you go back to the charging stations, please? What you're showing here is just phase one, so that's 10 out of, did you say 30?

[00:53:11] There are 32 sites in phase one, yes, ma'am. So the first 10, I actually have to do the math, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10. That's 10. Yes, thank you. Those are the locations that we currently are in process, eight of which are complete. The government center is one that is not complete.

[00:53:27] We have one that's going into the Government Center Visitors location. Oh, okay. And I believe Cascades, actually, there's a delay. It was supposed to be done October 1st. It's actually going to be done tomorrow, which is one of the- You're talking about the Cascades Library and Senior Center?

[00:53:43] Okay, because I didn't see it on there, so I was- Because I didn't see it on there. It's not on there. That's north of 7, the Cascades Community Center. I'm sorry, Cascades Library and Senior Center is north of Route 7. I'll go back.

[00:53:58] This is actually the geo hub that we have available for the public, so that's a good point. We'll make sure that that is identified. This may be lagging because it hadn't gone online until, but I'll double check on that. Okay, because I thought it had gone online. The library has made some big announcements, so I thought it was online.

[00:54:16] Okay, and have you cited where the other 20-some will be? We can provide the board the proposed list. The difficulty with that is the infrastructure is kind of a driver in that.

[00:54:31] So we have identified those 32, but if the infrastructure becomes quite complex, for example, we have one of the projects, it's about $60,000 per project on average. We have one project because of the infrastructure challenges that is close to $200,000 just to put the infrastructure in. So we have done a little bit of moving on that, but they are all within the board-approved phase one projects.

[00:54:50] okay okay so yes we'll send that list out again as well okay thank you bye bye like i'm on the phone like i'm on the phone okay anything else no sir okay nothing else from the committee why don't we move on to the rest of the presentation thank you i will highlight a couple facility projects we'll be quick this is the eastern loudon group home which achieves substantial completion in september 2024 we're wrapping up some punch list items and moving furniture at this time next slide Aldi fire and rescue station is progressing well with the building exterior going on with the stone veneer and being weather tight allowing for

[00:55:30] some of the inside finishes to to occur and site work is ongoing next slide and this is the Ashburn Recreation Community Center project which is also progressing well the exterior shot on the left of the front of the building and a progress picture of the competition pool as viewed from the seating area is on the right.

[00:55:53] Next slide. On the transportation side of things, next, this is the Arcola Boulevard Developer Project, which we wanted to highlight that is now completed and open to traffic. Next is the Belmont Ridge Road Widening from Toro Parish to Croson.

[00:56:12] The segment achieves substantial completion in August of 2024 and we are wrapping up some final punch list items and ribbon cutting is scheduled for October 28th. And lastly the North Star Boulevard phase one project from Route 15 going north up to Evergreen Mills Road is progressing well with the bridge work as shown in the background of the left picture progressing well and nearing

[00:56:39] completion on that. So those are the highlights we have. I think you've had a potential problem with

[00:57:29] shifting easement because of floodplain, I believe, but you're going to try to start construction next year, next calendar year, regardless, to try to keep it on schedule.

[00:57:50] Is that an approach that you can use either in other phases of the Route 15 North project or on other road projects around the road location while we're still in the design phase again so we can do things concurrently?

[00:58:41] So, on Route 15 in particular, we are essentially done with the design work, and we're working through land acquisition and utility relocation, but a large percentage of the work is within existing right-of-way, especially between Battlefield and North King Street, and a lot of the tree clearing that we're going to need to do for construction is within existing right-of-way.

[00:59:10] So we currently have the land rights to that area right now. So what we're doing right now is developing a plan to begin that tree clearing, you know, as a precursor for construction. So when it comes to the time that a contractor is brought on and we start all the road construction, that will be already completed.

[00:59:35] And it also helps us in that we can time that work where we don't have to be concerned with the northern long-eared bat restrictions. And that's, you know, another reason for doing that. And frankly, we actually do a lot of tree clearing ahead of construction now because of those restrictions.

[00:59:53] For example, on the Route 7690 interchange project, we have not bid that project out for construction, But we have used a job order contractor to begin to do some of the tree clearing that we needed for utility relocation.

[01:00:09] And that is just, you know, another step we can do concurrently with utility relocation and right-of-way so that we can, you know, compress the schedule as best as we can. So, I mean, that is a strategy that we are using more and more, and we're looking more holistically at, you know, not how can we get the phase done, But how can we get to the end point of the project, you know, as quickly as possible?

[01:00:35] And if we can do things concurrently, we will. That's really helpful. Thank you. I really appreciate the kind of coordination and planning that takes. And I know the people who live along Route 15 and are waiting for this project to be completed are going to appreciate it, too.

[01:00:55] Thank you. Appreciate it, too. Thank you. Supervisor Bruskin. Thank you. Is it my imagination, or are we seeing some improvements in projects being more on time because the supply chains have opened up and inflation has eased?

[01:01:14] Because I feel like I haven't – there's a lot less, I think, in the report that says things have been delayed. Yeah, we've noticed a lot more easing of the market. It certainly hasn't gone back down to where we're pricing.

[01:01:29] but we're getting materials more or less on time. There's always going to be a few issues that we run across, and it may be project-specific or product-specific. And so we work through those, maybe getting an alternate product or something like that. But in general, we're seeing less of those issues.

[01:01:46] Yeah, that's good. And then the Eastern Loudon group home, it says substantial completion achieved. Do you know the occupancy date? And also, I'm not remembering how many will be in there, if you recall. That'd be great. It's a four-bedroom home, but I don't know the official occupancy.

[01:02:06] But we can work with MHS-CDS to figure that out. Okay, all right. MHS-CDS has to go through a licensing process. Oh, they do? With the state. Okay. So they'll need to move everything in. We're getting furniture in right now. Okay, great. We're working with them, and they'll go from there. I'll be very interested when it opens.

[01:02:23] Thank you. it does say four to five clients in this item yeah so um okay just one quick question the brambleton west park um delay i feel like this one's been hanging around a while at this point um and it felt like it already was delayed to me maybe i'm wrong on that you can correct me but now it looks like we're seeing another delay for completion into winter of 2027 and it what's being identified here is permitting of off-site sewer line connection location

[01:03:02] and overall project completion so i don't is there is there more to this story or context or um as far as as far as the sewer connection yes we had some issues with loudon water where they asked us to look at an alternate route for the connection uh that would connect more into the Their regional park that they were building with Loudon Water, or with Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, that wasn't working for us.

[01:03:33] We could not get those easements through NVRP. So we're back trying to work our connection underneath Delmar Ridge Road. So they delayed us by asking us to go on this wild goose chase for this? Okay, that's great. Are they going to compensate us for the cost associated with that?

[01:03:51] No, they're not. I'm sorry. mean it just like i feel like we always get this from various utilities and they just sort of throw their weight around but you know there's a real impact to these costs and delays and so now we lose like a whole season of use out of this because they wanted us to do something different than what we were planning on doing and you know when i i know that park already has water and sewer that runs into it to a restroom facility so i thought that would be relatively straightforward but

[01:04:21] i guess not okay thank you any other questions or comments all right thank you very much okay so i know everybody is excited tonight to talk about taxes and particularly personal property taxes it is very i guess fitting that we're having this discussion a day after the personal property tax was due and so i'm sure all of us heard some from our constituents on this We have two items on this, item five and item 14. I think effectively Mr. Wirtz kind of traditionally

[01:05:00] presents item, this item five to us, but let's just kind of go ahead and roll right, you know, roll both of them at the same time and so let's just get staff up. Maybe we kind of have the presentations and then we sort of just roll up our sleeves and get into this a little bit. So we have both our constitutional officers, Mr. Wirtz and Mr. Eichelberg with us this evening and then you you can introduce others as needed. Thank you. Steve? Steve Allshaus, Office of Management and Budget. And Megan's here from the Budget Office. I don't have a voice, so Megan. Okay, well, that's

[01:05:40] Megan. We'll answer for her tonight. Hope we do a good job. Mr. Chairman and board members, this is an annual item that comes to you to begin discussions about next calendar year's tax rates. New this year is Table 6.

[01:05:55] It includes the various classes of property for which you are authorized by the code to establish a separate rate. And it also tells you what those rate limitations are. There was a legislative change that was effective this year that breaks out vehicles.

[01:06:13] So now you governing bodies are authorized to set a separate tax rate on vehicles this year. The rate on the general class, as you know, is $4.15 per 100 for calendar year 24.

[01:06:30] If you make any changes to your rates, it's going to affect the current fiscal year and next fiscal year. Attachment two in the item includes the rates and revenue by class, if you're interested in that information as well.

[01:06:54] Then I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. I know that Budget Office has a presentation relative to item 15 as well. Yeah, so let's kind of keep most of this discussion for, let's go through the next item as well.

[01:07:10] I do just want to ask specifically on what you're presenting. You kind of reviewed two different ways that localities are setting values for vehicles. I'm forgetting the terminology, but there's a variation.

[01:07:28] You gave an example of the most common vehicle in Loudoun County, which is a 2023 Tesla Model Y, probably white, but we'll see. But there is a significant difference, clean loan versus clean trade-in.

[01:07:44] Do you want to just explain that a little bit? J.D. Power, which purchased NADA a number of years back, provides localities with multiple values. And they used to call it the blue book. It wasn't actually blue. It was actually gold.

[01:08:00] But when you look in that book, it's a document, a service that provides car lenders with information. It provides localities with value information. It provides insurance companies with value information.

[01:08:16] And in that guide are various values. And I want to say currently there are five of those, and we use the next to the lowest value in that book. Localities are permitted to use any of those values by code as long as it's uniform across the vehicles in their locality.

[01:08:37] We used to use wholesale value, but then they converted to other values. So what exactly does that mean, though, like clean loan versus? If I give you a range, like retail would be, MSRP would be the highest, and then retail, and then wholesale would be one of the lowest values in there.

[01:09:02] I don't know them off the top of my head. I can get you that information. It appears that everybody around here either uses clean trade-in or clean loan. But the reason I'm asking is, you know, in this particular vehicle, there's a $4,000 difference between those, which is pretty significant. Yes. So you would think clean trade-in, you know, as consumers, trade-in is usually a lower value, but that's the higher number than what we use, which is clean loan.

[01:09:25] So I just don't really understand what clean loan actually is. I'm happy to provide you with that information. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions just for the Mr. Wirtz kind of basics here? Supervisor Brisbane. So just so I'm clear, is this – this is just an information item?

[01:09:44] That's correct, but I believe that some of the board members may be interested in taking some kind of action, is my understanding. And item 14 is under action items. I will note at the onset of that discussion that we don't have to.

[01:09:59] We may not want to act tonight. We have a little bit of time. But this is just his sort of annual report to us on the basics of what we currently do. And then item 14 is the policy discussion around what we may want to do. Okay, so this isn't the time when we have to confirm the second half of the fiscal year personal property tax week.

[01:10:21] We would do that in item 14 if we were to do that, but I think there's been some discussion about some changes. Okay, I'm tracking. Thank you. Yeah, Supervisor Franny. Yeah, thank you, Chair Letourneau. So, Mr. Wirtz, I thought that the table that you gave about the assessment schedule was really interesting.

[01:10:44] I guess it was an attachment, particularly for computer equipment and data centers. How do we change the assessment ratio? So it seemed like that was from 2019, that assessment ratio. You had a study done by an appraiser, and I noticed that our assessment ratio was lower than some other jurisdictions.

[01:11:08] Like some have it at 65 percent, some even go more than that. So I'm just kind of wondering if we wanted to look at that, would that be an opportunity for us to change or do you have to do a study within a firm again?

[01:11:23] That is a decision that I make and then the board can concur with that assessment ratio change. If we make some changes, we should go through a public process where citizens are afforded the opportunity to provide input.

[01:11:42] We did hire a consulting firm to look at our schedule. There was a concern that maybe we should adopt assessment schedules that were more aggressive on depreciating computer equipment.

[01:11:58] Some localities go down to 2% in the fifth year. We go down to 10%. And so that was the purpose of requesting a study, which didn't indicate that we needed to make any changes to that schedule. Oftentimes, when we hear from our data centers, they would communicate to us that they refresh their equipment on a three-year schedule.

[01:12:19] But what we've seen through reporting of business personal property is that's not occurring. It is not depreciating as quickly as may have been stated in the past. Some of that equipment is being held for longer than five years.

[01:12:36] So you don't see a need to update? I'm more than happy to undertake another study and have a consulting firm, an independent firm, look at what is occurring with the value of equipment and data centers and bring that information to you all if you're interested in looking at a change to that schedule.

[01:12:55] Okay. Okay. Because that would impact the revenue that's brought into the county, correct? It would. It would. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Could be positive or negative depending on the outcome though. That's correct. Yeah. we maybe want to discuss that a little bit before we okay why don't we flow into item 14 Mr. Hempstreet's at the podium which I will say is a bit unusual so we're excited about that Mr. Eichelberg's here Mr. Wirtz here is here who is who is going to lead off Mr. Hempstreet's going to lead it off okay so just to place I think Vice Chair Brisman's thank you Mr. Chair

[01:13:31] But just to place Vice Chair Brissom's question into context, we typically, unless it's planned as part of the budget, don't make changes to the personal property tax rate, which January, unless we planned it as part of the fiscal year budget.

[01:13:49] For fiscal year 2025, we had previously not planned to make a change as part of the budget that was adopted by the board. And so, however, because you could make a change, the Commissioner of Revenue typically brings this item as an information item just as kind of a heads up or information to the board.

[01:14:07] If you want to make a change, you need to start thinking about that now because you would have to make it or adopt whatever changes in a tax rate in January. Correct? I'll make sure I got that correct. That's accurate. So now, separate from that, we have we received direction as part of the FY25 budget process to come back in the fall to talk to the Finance Committee and then the board about personal property tax relief or personal property tax relief based off of a couple of things.

[01:14:42] One being a change in legislation that allows the board on a regular basis or permanent basis to have a separate classification for vehicles and to adopt a lower personal property tax rate than the general rate. So if you recall, the board has had that authority on a temporary basis for the last three tax years, including this one, but it was set to sunset at the end of this tax year.

[01:15:08] And so as staff, we had recommended that you not adopt a lower rate for vehicles because if the legislation stayed the same and at sunset, you would have to go back to the general rate upon the sunset. However, there was legislation introduced in the last General Assembly session to get rid of sunset.

[01:15:27] That legislation passed during the budget process. The board directed us to come back in the fall when that occurred. So we are here as part of Commissioner Wirtz's item. We are also here seeking guidance around whether or not the board, Finance Committee, and then the board wants to grant any level of personal property tax relief.

[01:15:47] We have three different ways that that could happen, which we'll go through in the presentation. I am looking for guidance as to whether or not you want to do personal property tax relief. If so, how much do you think you might want to do?

[01:16:03] What scenarios do you want to see run? Now, the reason for that is I am coming back to the Finance Committee in November, your November meeting with budget guidance for FY26, which will then go to the full board at your first December meeting. This item tonight is scheduled to proceed to your October 16th meeting so that I can get similar guidance from the full board after the Finance Committee makes a recommendation.

[01:16:28] So this gives you, it gives the board a couple months to kind of think about. If you want to modify your personal property tax rates in January of 2025, and if so, how much. There's also an option on the vehicle license fee, so I need to correct something that I said to you during our briefings because I was wrong.

[01:16:49] And I've been corrected this evening, so I'll fix that during the briefing. So, go to the next slide. So, what this presentation is about is personal property tax relief. The first one deals with modifications to the personal property tax rate.

[01:17:05] either the general rate or the classification for vehicles, that any adjustment to the general rate or any adjustment to the classification on vehicles would impact all equipment or vehicles or everything that's within that property class, okay? Commercial, personally owned vehicles, whatever else is in that classification are affected if you make a change to those rates.

[01:17:29] The second option, which is something that the county attorney and I do not personally believe you have the authority to do is to supplement the Commonwealth's program on personal property tax relief. So this is a concept or idea that was first brought during the budget process by Supervisor Tocroni. If you recall, I think Commissioner Wirtz was talking about personal property tax relief, and we were also talking about the budget process, and I believe Supervisor Tocroni mentioned the supplement of personal property of that program. As we said then, we don't think we could do that, we still don't think we could do that without a

[01:18:07] legislative change. However, in the meantime, the treasurer has also taken a close look at this and has identified a way to operationalize that which the treasurer will present this evening to you. And then the third option is a reduction or elimination of the vehicle license fee, which is a $25 once-a-year fee that is paid to the county. Now I had said during our briefings that that's collected in October. That is incorrect. It is not collected in October. It is collected in March in the in the payment that you make in May. Sorry it's billed

[01:18:43] in March paid in May. So I think I got that right now. That also means that we would need to make a correction I think to the motion that's in the packet unless you want to impact fiscal year 25. So I think what we had placed in the item is that you could eliminate this fee effective January 25 and not impact fiscal 25 that's not correct right so you if you want so when we get into the the item will make it clear which fiscal years are impacted by which which reductions so we're talking about personal property tax just a little bit

[01:19:22] of reminder where we've been with personal property tax and the rate revenues from personal property tax have been the source of growth in the county budget of last decade, a lot of the growth in the county's budget has been funded through growth in the personal property tax portfolio. A couple years ago, a few years ago, the staff and I started to become very concerned about the amount of personal property tax revenue that's within the property tax portfolio. For example, I think we said in 2013, when you look at just the property tax portfolio, about 72% of that came from real property. A few years ago

[01:19:58] that had dropped as low as 51 and a half percent. We went out and did a study. We hired a consultant to help us with this. We came back, made a recommendation to the board, which you have adopted as part of your fiscal policies, that 60 percent of general fund property tax revenue should come from real property. And to get there, right now you're about 53 percent, 53 and a half percent. To get there over time, you should lower the personal property tax rate while that portfolio continues to grow and then slowly increase the real property tax rate to get the percentage of

[01:20:38] your property tax portfolio coming from real property to be 60 percent. So those were adopted. We make recommendations to you around the budget and tax policy based off of that guidance.

[01:20:54] And then last year, you also created a revenue stabilization fund around personal property to help address some of the fluctuations in that revenue stream. Bless you. This also explains kind of the difference between tax year and fiscal year.

[01:21:12] One of the things that I do want to make sure the Finance Committee and ultimately the board is fully aware of, when we make recommendations to change the personal property tax rate, we are typically making a recommendation to you that you do that in the second half of the fiscal year, okay?

[01:21:29] Because what you can see here is the fiscal year is in blue, tax year is in green, all right? So if, for example, for fiscal 26, if you are going to grant personal property tax rate relief and change the personal property tax rate, our recommendation would be that you consider that as part of your FY26 budget.

[01:21:50] And typically, we would say make that change effective January of 2026. That way, you can consider whatever revenue you're foregoing and all of that as part of your budget process so you understand how that tax rate relief or revenue relief fits into your overall budget picture.

[01:22:08] Part of the discussion that we had coming out of the budget process and the reason why we're here tonight is potentially to grant personal property tax rate relief in tax year 25. So if we did that, that would be all the way to the left of the chart here, which would be for tax year 25, which would be in the green, which would have impacts on the rest of fiscal 25 because that would lower revenue that you collect in fiscal 25 and then also impact fiscal 26.

[01:22:39] So you normally don't do that. If you want to do that, that's perfectly fine with us. We've got some recommendations as to how you might do that. Just understand that there's unplanned impacts to fiscal 25 because you did not plan for that. And then you would be locking yourself into whatever that foregone revenue is for fiscal 26 without seeing the FY26 budget.

[01:23:01] I just want to make sure that's clear. The other thing that we want to make sure everyone understands about fund balance is that, if you recall, over the past couple years, we were concerned about real property revenue coming from data centers.

[01:23:18] because of the way that data center real property was being valued, and the way a general assembly action read it should be valued, there is a difference. So consequently, we were holding some of that real property money kind of in check, just to ensure that if there were appeals on real property value, we would have enough money to pay back those appeals.

[01:23:45] Consequently, for your last couple years, your year-end fund balance has been abnormally high. So 23, you will see another for fiscal 24, fund balance again will be abnormally high. However, we believe that that situation is stabilized and so starting with fiscal 25, we have fully budgeted real property revenue from data centers.

[01:24:08] So what that means is your fund balance for fiscal 25 should come back down to a more normal level, which will be somewhere in the 100, $130 million range. So you need to consider how, if you grant personal property tax relief in tax year 25, how that impacts your year-end fund balance for fiscal 25.

[01:24:29] The reason why that's important is because fund balance at the end of the year goes to a number of things. Those are here on the chart. It goes to contribution to the fiscal reserve and revenue stabilization fund.

[01:24:45] We do send a large amount of cash forward into the next year's CIP, capital program, to offset expenses in the CIP. And then we also use year-end fund balance to replenish CIP contingencies and also to fund a good portion of our land acquisition budget.

[01:25:00] So as we have been dialoguing with the board, particularly since your strategic initiatives retreat, there's a lot of money that you're asking for us to set aside in land acquisition. We also, as you know, we've had some price pressure on a lot of our projects, so both our CIP contingency as well as the schools are in need of replenishment.

[01:25:23] To the extent fund balance is diverted from these purposes, that needs to be made up in the real property tax rate for the following year. So our recommendation typically is not to divert a lot of fund balance away from these purposes. - Okay, so we had proposed as part of the FY25 proposed budget to reduce the general tax rate from 415 to 410 for tax year 25.

[01:25:50] The board did not approve that. And so you kept the general rate at 415 and then you directed us to come back and have this discussion with you in the fall if the authority to establish the rate on vehicles was lower than the general rate.

[01:26:05] And so that is why we're here to tell you, can now do that and that is definitely an option to you. These are the options that you should you could consider lowering the general rate you know that we staff would definitely recommend although we would recommend that at this point you do that effective January 26 as part of your FY26 budget process. You could lower the rate on vehicles and lower the general rate and then that would mean the rate on vehicles is lower than the general rate. You could also keep the general rate the same

[01:26:42] and then lower the rate on vehicles that would affect only vehicles and that's everything in that classification however as we as we've stated previously we don't believe that necessarily lines up with your tax policy but it is an option that you could definitely do and if you were to enact that as of january 1 in 2025 you would need to consider how much that would impact your year-end fund balance for fiscal 25 because that would be an unplanned reduction so i'm going to stop there

[01:27:18] i'm going to turn it over to um to the treasurer to uh go through personal property tax relief so this would be a supplement to the state's program again this is what supervisor decony was talking about during the budget process but then the treasurer has uh determined how to do it mr chairman thank you and uh colleagues i appreciate your time and willingness to listen to this my presentation matt did you want to invite any questions on what uh mr hemstreet covered before we go on to this or just do it at one why don't we go ahead and go through all of it and then

[01:27:56] we'll give everybody time to sort through it all all right next slide so right now uh i think since 2002 bob i would lie if i told you that i knew the exact yeah we've been getting 48 million from the commonwealth which is a fixed dollar amount and that's been allocated to the taxable value of every personal vehicle so it's not all vehicles it is only personal use vehicles

[01:28:30] business vehicles pay what has been the general rate on everything without any offset That allocation is done by the Commissioner of the Revenue as part of his process of setting the levy.

[01:28:48] Those levies are then passed over to my office individually, and I print them out and mail them to people, and we collect off of that. That $48 million is hardwired into a statute. The towns also receive an allocation of personal property tax relief, and they, in a likewise manner, allocate that back to their citizenry on the first $20,000.

[01:29:17] So that's something that's in place that will continue to be in place, and if you lower the overall rate on vehicles, that will still continue to be applied. Next slide.

[01:29:38] An alternative to lowering the rate is to look at potentially using a different mechanism to provide a supplemental credit in the same way that the Commonwealth gives us money.

[01:29:58] The board would decide, hey, we're going to keep the rate at some level, and for the first $20,000, in addition to a reduction in the taxes on that, we will provide a pool of money and have the commissioner of the revenue compute a further credit against that.

[01:30:23] So that's basically the mechanism of it. And that's what Tim was talking about. We'll just leave it at that. We don't believe at this point that we've got the authority to do that as a locality.

[01:30:39] What that does is it gives you a lot more control instead of if you have to back up things, you don't have to go back to the citizenry and say, hey, you know, that rate that we just lowered, well, we're bringing it back up because we need the money.

[01:30:55] What you do is you have a rate that you think that's reasonable on vehicles because you can set it apart from general property. And this credit would only apply to personal vehicles. So the rate for vehicles would apply for business vehicles, but they would not get this credit.

[01:31:19] And about 20%, maybe 10% of the total vehicle fleet, I'll call it, that we have is business use. The rest, 90%, is personal use vehicles. And so if you lower the rate, then you're going to lower the rate both below $20,000 and above $20,000.

[01:31:43] If you take this process and you use this process, you would have the same rate. It could be a higher rate, so you're going to collect more on above $20,000, and you can provide more financial benefit to people that have less valuable cars.

[01:32:00] Now, everyone gets the rate, or everyone gets the advantage of it. So if I have a $100,000 car, I get the benefit on the first 20. But if I have a $15,000 car, I get the benefit on my entire vehicle. And if you argue, which I would, that the value of your vehicle tends to be a fairly rough proxy of your income, I would think you would benefit people in a lower income.

[01:32:29] And we all know in Loudoun County you need to have a car to get around. So go to the next page. I think I probably covered a lot of this. It would only apply to personal vehicles. You would not have to lower the rate to provide the benefit, but we would need a legislative change for it.

[01:32:49] It is not to say that you could not lower the rate. You could lower the rate. This could be used in combination of that. I would encourage, it's obviously your call, but I would encourage the board to consider this a data center tax credit and ask that the staff, and I'd be happy to be part of that process, come up with an algorithm that's sustainable, that's tied to what we know will be some very healthy growth in the data center revenue over the next few years,

[01:33:28] and then use that to allocate that back against the cost of owning a car in Loudoun County. In my office, the commissioner of the revenue would factor that into the levy, and it would be shown as a discrete amount on a person's bill.

[01:33:52] And if somebody's bill was zeroed out, we would still send them a bill that would show them that they would have otherwise owed X dollars, But that because of the credit from the Commonwealth and the credit from this locality through this data center tax credit, that they did not owe any taxes on it.

[01:34:18] So it is both a financial relief, but it's also important, I think, to have it as communications tool for the board. Go to the next slide.

[01:34:35] And we talked about the legal authority. We're going to pursue that vigorously. We would ask that the board consider adding it to its legislative agenda for the upcoming session.

[01:34:52] I'm a member of the Treasurer's Association of Virginia. We'll certainly add that to ours for that association. And then pursue an administrative, if there is a way for the administration to say, look, you currently have the authority and everyone can get us comfortable.

[01:35:13] You know, we just want to do what's right. We want to help people. We want to do what's right and certainly do it legally. Okay. And then we've got the vehicle license fee. We all stood for election.

[01:35:33] I can't tell you how many times people ask me when I'm going to get rid of this. Well, that's not my prerogative as a treasurer, but people hate the $25 fee. They're like, if you're going to charge me $25, then give me the sticker.

[01:35:53] We collect about $7.8 million. Which costs about 50 cents to make, by the way. We collect about $7.8 million in revenue off of this. It's an irritant. If I have a car that's worth, pick a number, $700, because of the current requirements of the law, all of my car tax is abated by virtue of the personal property tax relief amount.

[01:36:23] It's $1,000 unless you don't charge them. So they're getting a bill just for this $25. And some people don't pay it, and so now we're spending staff time chasing them around just to get them to pay it. If there was a way the board could see its way clear to getting rid of it, I think it would be a great benefit to literally every car owner in our county.

[01:36:58] So I would just advocate setting it to zero as opposed to, you know, asking legal counsel to withdraw the line item on the ordinance. I think that's the most appropriate way to go through it.

[01:37:16] Do we go through the financial impacts or you guys? Okay. So just to run through real quick what that looks like, obviously, lowering the personal property tax rate effective in January of 2025 would impact fiscal 25.

[01:37:33] So that's something that you would need to consider. I think in talking with the treasurer, we think, well, actually with finance, we think that for FY25, you should have about $130 million in fund balance.

[01:37:53] We think that you could safely, the maximum amount that you could forego in personal property tax revenue is about $60 million for FY26. Should you decide, that's the maximum. So these are maximums. If you decided to start with personal property tax revenue in tax year 25, which is January 25, the maximum amount we would recommend you look at is maybe $25 million, which would have an impact on your FY25 fund balance.

[01:38:25] So, for example, instead of collecting or having about $130 million in fund balance, that could be $105 million, for example, because that would be foregone revenue. So some of the questions we would ask you, well, I think we've got some other charts that kind of illustrate what this looks like.

[01:38:45] These are notional scenarios for FY26. Depending on when you or if you do it, when you do it, there could be an impact on FY25. So that amount is also listed there. So when you look at this chart, those tax rates are based off of that second to bottom row, which is total foregone revenue.

[01:39:09] So these are maximum amounts. So the maximum amount we think you could look at is about $60 million for FY26. That does have an impact on your FY26 budget because it's foregone revenue. And so just keep in mind, those tax rates up there are based off of the amount.

[01:39:27] So if you do a lower amount, those tax rates will obviously be higher. Okay, notionally we have broken this out between lowering the general rate and then potentially reducing the vehicle license fee. So, but you could ask us, so one of the things we're gonna ask you is, do you wanna do personal property tax relief?

[01:39:47] If so, how do you think, what scenarios do you wanna see when we come back to you in budget guidance? So would you wanna, so for example, are you interested in reducing the vehicle license fee? You know, so you could keep it and then the treasurer would continue to have people upset with him for collecting it.

[01:40:07] You could decide to take it to zero. You could cut it in half, whatever, but we would want some guidance on what you would want to see there. Also, for the vehicle license fee, we would need to know if you want to eliminate that as of January 25 or January 26.

[01:40:23] Keep in mind what I told you in your briefings before it was wrong. I was thinking that that was collected in October, so if you eliminated it in January 25, that would have an impact in fiscal '25, okay? I think a staff recommendation would be, if you're gonna eliminate that, eliminate it effective January of '26, which would make any fiscal '26 issue, but that's completely up to the board.

[01:40:47] You do have fund balance to absorb that if you want to make that reduction. General rate, general rate, obviously we would recommend you lower the general rate. So the two scenarios that are up here a reduction to the general rate and the elimination of the vehicle license fee or a reduction general rate and a reduction to the vehicle rate and elimination of vehicle license fee. But we can run any combination of scenarios that you would like us to run as part of budget guidance. But those are just some notional scenarios based off of the maximum amount we would recommend you

[01:41:23] consider. What you will see here is how is how that kind of impacts you on the expenditure side so we did a briefing today with supervisor to crony and supervisor turner they identified that our chart was incorrect so we have corrected the chart since uh this afternoon's briefing thank you uh supervisor crony and supervisor turner so this is a little bit different from what was in the packet this is just based notionally the board over the last few years has been growing the budget by about nine percent that's between us and the school so that's the

[01:41:58] total budget uh if you had if you use that nine percent that would generate about 215 million dollars in additional money if you four went 60 million dollars that would bring your new your new local tax revenue to 155 which then impacts the amounts that you have available for your budget so i just wanted again to just give you that kind of in a notional fashion what that might look like. I think this is the last. Then we just have the recommendations which are in your packet which is really just to give us some guidance on what you think you might want to do

[01:42:34] and then what we will do after this is put the put it into a budget guidance item. We can run you know several different scenarios for finance to consider and then ultimately the board. So you have until next month to make any decisions although I would appreciate some guidance as to what you want to do tonight this will go to the full board on tuesday so yeah we left blanks in it so yeah which is what's in the motion because we weren't sure what you wanted to do right and again you have until january to make a decision on personal property tax rates for 25 so we did want to give you plenty of time to consider the information ask questions

[01:43:14] and get to a place where you're coming okay thank you very much everybody um i think what we're going to do is perhaps just first have questions for everybody that has them and then maybe get into sort of more statements and kind of indicative of where we may want to be going with this i definitely have some questions though why don't i start with supervisor umstead just for questions all right thank you thank you mr chair um is it still the case that the full reduction of the

[01:43:50] vehicle license fee as in taking it to zero and eliminating it would be about 7.8 million dollars is that number still good yes all right I mean I would be inclined to do that as soon as possible and then I'm pretty happy with the staff recommendation to provide to lower the personal property tax rate I would do it

[01:44:20] on personal vehicles personally um so i'll see where where you all come down on that um okay supervisor brisbane thank you um so if we were to eliminate the decal fee where they don't get a decal it's about 7.8 so the last time we did our budget that was about a half cent on the tax rate correct yep okay i just i want us to be very aware that if we eliminate revenue coming in

[01:45:00] that there may be the case that we need to make that up somewhere else and that's almost exactly a half cent on the tax rate so just wanted to clarify that um and then as far as lowering the general rate um didn't the data centers have a didn't a bill go through the general assembly that effectively lowered the valuation for data centers.

[01:45:30] So in other words, we're already collecting less now that we've gone through that. Is that not correct, the valuation? On real property, there was a bill that attempted to give the commissioner direction on how to value data centers. There's another, Mr. Wirtz should speak for himself, but essentially there's another statute that tells him to do full value.

[01:45:51] So I think you've been valuing full value. Yeah, that was a real property tax assessment legislation, and we're talking about personal property taxes in this item today. Oh, it's a different, it was a different tax. It's a different class, yeah. But effectively, it's not the same tax, but effectively they already got a tax break.

[01:46:12] It did not result in a reduction in their real property assessment. Oh, okay, okay, well that's good to hear. They've been paying it. We had been not budgeting all of that for the operating budget. been holding some of that back because we thought we were going to get appeals okay we've resolved that issue so for fy25 we have fully budgeted those amounts which is impacting your fund balance at the end of the year okay all right um and then should we do 60 million so to speak which i i don't

[01:46:46] know that i'm in favor of that i would probably want to start lower um as i'm i'm thinking of it it as a rebate almost, the data center rebate program. But effectively, if we were to accomplish that, then it would be effectively $60 million that we don't have in our budget for services and pay raises and those sorts of things. That's correct. That's correct, right? So I just want us

[01:47:19] to be very cognizant that just we're moving that. It feels a little bit like a shell game to me. but we need to be cognizant of the fact that if we do all of this we're at 67 almost 68 million of revenue that we can't spend on county services pay raises for our employees opening facilities which take a lot of staff correct so the amount of revenue you would forgo

[01:47:53] would be you would either have to make it up or reduce the the increase in the budget exactly right right now and we'd have to make it up probably on the real tax rate yes yes yeah the only other thing i would say is the 60 million includes the vehicle license fee oh it includes that okay so it's not 68 it's that would be the total okay okay the maximum amount yes okay um i am in favor of if we do this of not starting in january of 25 i don't want that mess um 26

[01:48:28] maybe and i would like more scenarios with a reduced rebate amount thank you yeah we'll come back to that part this is just for questions initially mr saints thank you thank you for everybody for their presentation and and walking us through this very complicated um scenarios so you said you possibly will we'll come back later on for more budget discussions could we reach out to the virginia tax commissioner administrative and get an opinion before you come back or would

[01:49:04] that would there be enough time to do that or do we or would it happen after we have our discussions uh we've already started that discussion but i think that the real uh recommendation is that the board this board can ask the full board to consider adding the item to their legislative agenda that they would try to get it passed in the spring i don't i i would love to move early on this stuff obviously everybody would but you know as supervisor prisman just said i mean this

[01:49:40] stuff takes time i don't see a program like this really being ready until implementation january of 26 so i think the board would be well served to instruct the staff to come up with a mechanism that's clear and understandable for the board that financially how we're going to sustain this at whatever level you decide right now we have 48 million going into it you can put any other

[01:50:13] number you want next to it but it should be sustainable the last thing we want to have that want is people well last year's tax bill was 850 now it's 1250 people don't budget for the car tax that's really the the rub of the problem so don't want to maximize too much time I'm sorry so in your opinion when do you think we could hear back from the Virginia tax commissioner it's probably going to be after the first of the year at the soonest I mean it's not going to be in time to implement. It would be in my opinion and Leo certainly can weigh in on it. I mean you're

[01:50:52] looking at factoring this in for the following budget year. Okay well the reason why I asked the question is to your point about possibly putting into a legislative program because right my hope would be we put out the request we get it before we start our conversations regarding our legislative program because as you know the the general assembly is going to be starting in January It's a short session this year, so it's going to be very action-packed.

[01:51:16] So that's what I was asking through the timeline. But it sounds like it would be kind of running against each other. In regards to holistically, if we were to do anything, my preference would be yes, to start in 26. I would be in favor of possibly.

[01:51:32] I'm going to come back on holistically. I don't want to let everybody, because some people have said it, some people haven't. So let's get all the questions out there. All right, that was my only question. Go back on opinions. Chair Randall, questions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First, Ms. Zuckerberg, thank you. No matter where we come down on this, I think, you know, the idea that we are trying to figure out ways to continually help our constituents financially is a good thing, no matter how we end.

[01:51:56] So thank you for that. Mr. Hemstreet, as Ms. Brixman said, $8 million on the tax rate would be about $7.8 million on the tax rate would be about half penny. Did I hear you say something about that can be covered with fund balance? I thought I heard you say that.

[01:52:12] Did you say that just then? Yeah, well, I think what I said was if you make the decision to do that in January 25, that amount would be foregone revenue that we did not plan for, which would have to be covered. So it would be a one-time, because it would be a one-time, okay.

[01:52:27] It would be covered by FY25 fund balance. So for that one time, because it wasn't planned for, a fund balance could be, I understand. We would roll it into the. I understand, that makes sense. To that issue, though, of what we're already starting to plan for, If I'm not mistaken, you are already starting to build the budget that you will present to us.

[01:52:45] That process is underway. And so we have to be, no matter where we land, we have to be very cognizant of we're in FY25. And we're doing FY25 budgeting already. And so to a very large degree, you have already assumed to, well, not a very large degree, to some degree, what FY25 could look like.

[01:53:08] and they're already talking to department heads about what they may or may not need. Is that correct? So for FY26, so we're currently in FY25. So let me for a second. Yes, exactly. So the FY26, yes. That process has begun already. Absolutely. Okay, that's really important to know.

[01:53:25] Mr. Eichelberg, I think it was on slide number 11, the local personal property tax relief concept. You said something, and again, you were moving kind of fast, and so if I misunderstood you, I apologize. i know what that is i know where that came from another how that came to be did you say that the towns get that separate from the county because i knew cities did because they're because they're separate but i didn't know that so our incorporated towns get that separate from the county the answer is yes i didn't know that and i appreciate you raising it because it is important to understand

[01:54:01] that whatever the county does, the towns are not bound by that, which is fine. But if, let's say, you get rid of the $25 fee, they also have their own $25 fee, and we would assess that for them.

[01:54:19] Are you saying people in town are charged twice? No. No. No, if you're in a town, you pay it to the town, or you pay it to us. But the towns don't have to do it at all, or they can make their own decision. Just like our locality doesn't have to either. I really did think that only applied to cities.

[01:54:35] I did not realize that applied to incorporated towns, so thank you for letting me know that. That's good information to have. There's three towns that don't have the car tax. The other four of them do, and they receive money from Richmond for that purpose.

[01:54:55] That's good to know. Is it based on population? It's based on, go ahead, Bob. that it's based on the percentage of relief that they received got it back in which is actually 2006 all right that makes sense um so i uh mr mr um i will make i will save comments for comments those are my questions thank you um i'll jump in with some comments and then we'll go to our non-committee colleagues um a question sorry um so the the 7.8 million the vehicle licensing fee we used to call it the decal fee. When we, I don't know how many, Chair Randall, you were on the board

[01:55:34] and Supervisor Umstead and Mr. Sainz when we eliminated that, right? So you all probably remember the reason we kept it in place is it was supposed to be used specifically for enforcement of overall car tech. So we had this thing called Project Fairness. The Sheriff's Office had two deputies detailed to the Treasurer's Office. Yeah, and we got pushed because we needed, there needed be resources allocated specifically to actually doing enforcement and identifying vehicles and so on. So I feel like we're completely missing that entire discussion in this. So I would like to turn it over to our constitutional officers to ask some questions about it. You know where we are with

[01:56:13] enforcement. What happened after we lost the deputies? The sheriff wanted them back on the street so they're no longer detailed to the treasurer's office. But you know what where are we with all this and what should we be doing about it i i can get sorry the long and the short of it is project fairness ran for about 20 years from 1997 to 2018. in 2018 we started doing tax collections for the towns in exchange for doing the tax collections for the towns there was a

[01:56:51] decision made that we weren't going to handle stickers for the towns and for the county and it it was going to be a bear to mail out the right stickers to the right people so they got rid of the stickers effective july 1st of 2019 at that time the sheriff's deputies no longer were on duty for enforcement and the commissioner of the revenue got two people for compliance and that's that's

[01:57:26] where we're at today I can tell you I would if I thought that keeping the 25 bucks would help on compliance I wouldn't be here recommending getting rid of it but unless you want to go back to stickers which had the effect of compliance because you could visually see hey it's got it the car's got it or it doesn't the 25 in itself serves no purpose other than it's 7.8 million dollars to the county. Which we could argue are funding those two compliance positions that the commissioner has.

[01:58:00] Well, they're also generating money from their compliance efforts, regardless of whether there's a license fee or not. I think the board's decision back then when vehicle license fees or vehicle decals were eliminated was they weren't interested in foregoing the money.

[01:58:15] They wanted that money from the license fee, and that's the board's decision that they made. I don't quite agree with that. The understanding was that the Project Fairness was going to go away, and I was going to have two folks in my office who were handling the compliance activity, which they do.

[01:58:36] I think there were unknowns unknown at that time with what it would cost to do the equivalent work that we were having done, right? Yes. So I guess my question, though, is so if somebody is registering their vehicle in Virginia, we find out about it.

[01:58:51] supposed to file with with your office the commissioner's office but eventually you'll likely get that information from the dmv the question though is what about all those vehicles out there that are not registered in virginia whether they're the exotic vehicles registered in montana to avoid sales tax and all that or there's i mean not to throw my neighbors on the bus there's cars in my neighborhood with maryland plates that i know are living there so i feel like Like what we've lost since Project Fairness went away is our enforcement of that.

[01:59:22] So have we lost that? I don't think it was Project Fairness. I think it was the decal license enforcement mechanism that existed when you had a decal. But if you see a vehicle. The way that it normally operates now, the majority of our vehicles, we do receive information from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

[01:59:41] If you do what you're supposed to with DMV and you go to DMV and you tell them that your vehicle moved and when it actually moved, we will get that information on a weekly basis. We will mail a notice to you as a property owner and we will tell you, DMV notified us that you moved a vehicle to Loudoun County.

[02:00:00] When did you move that vehicle to Loudoun County? Is this the correct address? One of the reasons we do a mailing is we want to verify the mailing address for collections purposes so the treasurer's office will be able to send out a bill to those people. So I would tell you, first on the list of things that a new resident to Loudoun County does is not go to DMV to tell them that they moved from Fairfax to Loudoun.

[02:00:26] Their tags are still good, right? So one of the reasons we're communicating with them is we want to know when it came to the county, not when did you tell DMV it came to the county, but when. We're a prorating locality, and you're supposed to tell us when it came in so that we can charge you tax by the month.

[02:00:46] On those vehicles that are registered to other states, my compliance people do discover those. We do have some very astute citizens who will communicate with us on a regular basis of vehicles. We used to have like a tip line, didn't we?

[02:01:01] Yes, we do. Are we still? We do. I don't think anybody's promoted that or anything in a long time. And you can call it what you like. It's equitable for folks to pay the tax they're supposed to pay. We also communicate with our apartment complexes on an annual basis and get a list of tenants who reside there.

[02:01:24] so that we can match that with the vehicles that are located in the county. I will tell you those out-of-state vehicles with Montana tags is a challenge. If you see those, take a picture and send it to me, and we'll be more than happy to reach out to those individuals.

[02:01:40] That is actually an industry these days. If you go online and look up Montana licenses, there's an industry where they set up limited liability companies to own exotic vehicles. We are more than happy to bill those limited liability companies, and we are doing that.

[02:01:58] And we actually got a call from a taxpayer the other day. He was wondering how we found out about his vehicle. It was through the LLC? It was. You have to have a registered agent for a limited liability company.

[02:02:14] So the attorney that received the bill was more than happy to reach out to the property owner about his exotic vehicle with his Montana tags that he has here in Virginia. So, anyway, we do use multiple efforts trying to locate those pieces of property, but that's what's going on right now.

[02:02:33] Yeah, for those of you that don't know, the Montana thing, basically, if you buy, like, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, or a Bentley, which I'm sure everybody up here drives, you're worth hundreds of thousands, you can, yeah, you can register it in Montana. If you have an LLC, they'll set up a P.O. box for you.

[02:02:49] You don't pay sales tax on it, which is big money on a million-dollar car, and then you avoid property taxes and things like that. You think you're avoiding property taxes? Okay. Well, I feel a little better, Mr. Wirtz. So the bottom line is the vehicle license fee is not going really at this point toward enforcement.

[02:03:06] No, it is not. Compliance enforcement. It is not. My other question was going to be just on the ratio. So we're trying to get to 60%. We're at like 53% now. I guess my question would be, if we eliminate the vehicle licensing fee and forego that almost $8 million, how much can we lower the personal property tax rate on vehicles specifically and still not drop under at least the 50-50 ratio that I think we identified as a problem?

[02:03:38] And you may not have that number on hand, but that's... So the ratio wants you to increase the share of real estate taxes? Yeah. So any less coming from personal property or other local taxes would benefit your ratio.

[02:03:54] Oh, I know. But I want to know exactly how much on a scale basis so that we could figure out, if we wanted to, what we could reduce the property. And I know, Mr. Hemstreet, you're going to argue for reducing the general tax as well, which would include data centers. I think you're going to have some policy opposition to that or at least principal opposition to that here.

[02:04:13] But what is the reasoning for that from your standpoint? Well. Why would you argue to lower both? I think we would argue that the vehicle portion of the personal property tax portfolio is more stable than the computer equipment portion. And so when you start making that a lower percentage of your overall revenue portfolio, it just creates some additional instability.

[02:04:38] And it also makes the board more reliant on the computer equipment portion. It just decreases your diversity in terms of your revenue stream. All right, Supervisor Crony. Thank you, and thank you for all this.

[02:04:55] So during our FY 2025 budget discussion, we did talk about lowering the vehicle tax from 415 to 410 if SB 195 passed.

[02:05:11] And SB 195 passed, so now we can split out the classifications. And I just want to confirm that if we lower the vehicle tax to $410 million starting in January 2025, that reduction from $415 million to $410 million is worth $2.8 million.

[02:05:32] On an annual basis. On an annual. It would be half of that for fiscal 2025. So it's about $1.5 million, correct? Mm-hmm. Can that be absorbed? Do you think the county can absorb that in the 2024 fund balance? would recommend you absorb that in the 25 fund balance okay that's right okay but it's one it's worth about 1.5 to lower it and that's what we discussed during the um budget during the fy 2025 budget so um i do have a question can we go to the table um uh scenarios for fy 26 okay

[02:06:11] So is that $60,000 that we talk about that we have to forego, is that where it comes from? Or is it half of the $130 to do a personal property tax relief program that I do support because I did bring it up?

[02:06:29] So what this chart represents is we're saying you can, the maximum amount of personal property tax relief that staff would recommend in FY26 is about $60 million. Okay. How you get there is up to you, and so that's part of the guidance that we would want to receive from you.

[02:06:49] Yeah, thank you. But it includes non-vehicles, right, as far as foregone revenue? Yeah, so, yeah, sorry. If we take that out, if we keep the general rate at 415, we won't really have that, right, the foregone revenue of $28 million.

[02:07:11] So again, yes. I think what you're saying is correct. What this is is based off of a maximum amount of $60 million in foregone revenue. And so if you were to forego $60 million, we kind of put together notionally how you might get there.

[02:07:31] So that first column is reducing the general rate to 395, which then has those impacts on the vehicle classification, even though it's a subset of the general classification. We just broke out vehicles and non-vehicles so you can see how that reduction in the tax rate impacts those classifications.

[02:07:52] And then we assume the elimination of the vehicle license fee. But you can get to that 58 or 60 million in any combination of those things. So you could tell us, which is part of our question, which is what scenarios do you want us to run? So if you wanted to, instead of doing $60 million in relief, you could do $30 million.

[02:08:12] And so if you did $30 million, then we would say, do you want to do that 100% on reduction of the vehicle rate? Or do you want to do that between reducing the vehicle license fee and a reduction on the vehicle rate so that we can come back to you with those scenarios for budget guidance? So this is just an example, it's just a notional way you could get there, but we could get there any number of ways depending on what the board wants to do.

[02:08:36] Yeah, because I don't support lowering the general rate. I just want to say I don't support that. And the general rate includes the computer data center equipment. So how can we guarantee the money to provide the tax relief is coming from data center revenue for the personal property tax relief program?

[02:08:56] How do we guarantee that? so the board would just designate that it's that so if we were to do if we were to get authority from the general assembly to to supplement the state's personal property tax relief that would be an expenditure that would be the credit that that the treasurer was referring to and we would just say it's coming from data center revenue we could do that through a formula we could do that through just a straight designation so it could come from either pot either the data center real

[02:09:34] property tax or the data center personal property tax am i correct i mean it could come from from either one of those sources we would say it's coming from the increase in revenue from data center from data centers taxes paid by data centers yes yeah i just want to be clear your it's money you're not collecting so you're not paying anything and you're certainly not going to charge the data centers more because you offer the credit you're just saying instead of me

[02:10:06] charging you 700 on your car i'm going to only charge you 400 on your car because i'm going to say that 300 of it was as a result of a data center tax relief for credit because and that That would be based on this new data center revenue as it starts to roll into the county.

[02:10:29] That's why I think that taking a look at this and how you can come up with an algorithm that adds some certainty to it as data centers come online, as they buy equipment, you're now sharing in that additional revenue by reducing a real pain point for individuals.

[02:10:48] That's the point. If you lower the rate, then you've got to increase the rate if there's a problem. If you keep the rate the same and you just offset it with this credit, then the algorithm takes care of that for you. And then it's easier for people to understand, oh, hey, we had a data center.

[02:11:07] They didn't refresh their equipment. That means that the credit that we're going to get this year is going to be less than it was last year. Yeah, but in any event, it's foregone revenue. Right. You're not collecting. it yeah yeah but it's for on revenue well i guess my concern is that um i wouldn't want to see us have to increase the personal property um or not the personal the real property tax rate to do this program so we got to figure out a way um where we're doing this where we're not you know

[02:11:41] giving residents a credit on their cars but increasing their real property tax rate see what I'm saying right now I do it I totally I totally get that and that would be the point of coming up with uh with the algorithm well so I just want to be clear the board has been increasing the budget every year so it's foregone revenue totally so to to do the control on that is on the

[02:12:14] expenditure side of the budget I'll just say it that way thank you supervisor Turner thank you Mr. Chair, can we stay on this chart for just a second? I want to walk through this because I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails.

[02:12:33] So if we reduce the vehicle tax rate to 410, it's currently at 415, and we kept the non-vehicle tax rate at 415, we would give up a half penny, and if we did that now and it took effect in the second half of fiscal 25, we would forego $1.4 million for that half cent of the vehicle tax rate, correct?

[02:12:58] So it would be five cents. $4.15 to $4.10 per hundred. That's correct.

[02:13:16] So that would be about $1.5 million for six months, $2.8 or $2.9. For the full year? For the full year. Okay, so we would forego $1.4, $1.5 for the first half year. If we got rid of the vehicle licensing fee, we'd forego $7.8 million. So now we're sitting at $9.2 million foregone if we did it that way.

[02:13:39] If you did that in January of 2025? Correct. Then we would roll into fiscal 26, presumably with a 415 general rate and a 410 vehicle tax rate. We could implement the PPTR program discretionary and decide what percentage of additional relief we want to give people for their personal vehicles. We would roll over that 9.2, I think I said million, that would roll into fiscal's 26's budget, and we would add the percentage that we chose as part of the PPTR program to that 9.2 million as a starting point,

[02:14:16] and we could decide where that percentage would be. We're now foregoing, this is all personal property tax revenue we're foregoing, so that tells me if we don't do anything else, we are helping the ratio is that correct yes because we are only affecting personal property tax and it's a computer personal property tax that's throwing the weight ratio out of whack so if we reduce personal property tax no matter where we reduce it we're improving that ratio yes but we are forgoing that amount of revenue every year and the foregone revenue from january 25 to june to

[02:14:55] July 1st, '25, would affect the fiscal '25 end-of-year fund balance, which would be December of '25, that we would see that reduction and foregone revenue. Correct. That's correct. Wow.

[02:15:13] Thank you. Okay. Another question for Supervisor Brisbane, and then I think we're just going to run down the dice here and get everybody's thoughts and see if we can find a consensus. This confused me a little bit when you put it up there, because this is the '26 notional scenarios. Why would it impact the '25 fund balance?

[02:15:30] I thought we would only impact the 25 fund balance if we started on January 1st of 25. That's why we put it there. We put both of it there. So if you change your rate or made all these movements effective January 26, then that impact on 25 fund balance would be zero.

[02:15:49] It goes away. It would be zero. We just wanted to have a chart that kind of notionally shows. Okay, all right. Thank you for clarifying. Okay. Jay Randall, you want me to start on your end? Sure, sure. So thank you. And again, thank you, Europe, for being here.

[02:16:06] I think we just informed a lot of people about how to do a car scam that they didn't know about before they sat down today. Oh, trust me. But that's okay. If you buy one of these cars, you know. But there's a lot of people who didn't know. They know now, though. So I think the one thing, well, there's a lot of things we haven't talked about yet.

[02:16:25] So I'm obviously not ready to make any decisions, and we'll look for much more information. But one of the things we haven't talked about is county growth. So as we're talking about cutting taxes, basically, I would want to see some comparisons to how much the county has grown year over year over year and who has come to the county year over year over year and what some of those expenses are for whether that be roads or any other infrastructure expenses.

[02:16:58] And so it's hard to have this discussion kind of in a bubble without having that other side. I am of the belief, and to be quite honest, Mr. Eichelberg, it's interesting because I didn't hear one person ask me about the card, about $25 when I was running for office.

[02:17:15] Not a single person. Now, I think it's a good idea to do it. Yeah, I think that's probably a you question for lots of reasons because your name's on all the tax bills they get. So, yeah, that's the burden you carry. I think it's a good idea to do it. But, you know, it's always a hard balance.

[02:17:34] because we want to make sure that, you know, what I always say is I want to have the lowest tax rate possible while still offering needed county services. And I'm careful to say not every county service, but needed county services. And so I'd have to give a lot more thought about what's needed county services.

[02:17:53] When I look at some of our departments that, you know, that we've done a much better job funding departments that we hadn't really, you know, for a long time were underfunded. But we still know that there's needs out there for a lot of reasons. When we do it to the Comparator counties, and our Comparator counties are still the ones we use are just the ones in Northern Virginia.

[02:18:13] Although what we know for a fact is that we have the county we lose people to work to first is Fairfax. But second, it's Montgomery County. And so we don't even do what we do for part of it for Maryland, but not all of it.

[02:18:29] So there's all these things I wanted to know before I could make any decisions. After that, I know that if, you know, whatever we do, it wouldn't be for this fiscal year because it's just too close in and we've already started.

[02:18:46] We, Mr. Hemstreet, have already started working on the budget. But I am certainly open to having, I'm always open to having discussions about how, you know, we are fiscally responsible with our spending and how that looks and what that looks like.

[02:19:06] Obviously, we have to have the same discussion with LCPS for obvious reasons and want to know what their growth is as well. So, you know, the only decision I would be able to make right now is that I'm not really able to make any other decisions except for the vehicle license and fee right now.

[02:19:24] But I'm certainly open to having these discussions, getting some of those questions answered. And truthfully, if we can do something, I would. I think 60 is a really high number. But I don't think that there's, I think there's probably something from between 0 to 60.

[02:19:42] I just don't know what that is yet. But once again, let me say I really do appreciate you and Mr. Crony, who started talking about this during the election cycle. I appreciate you very much having some of these talks. I think this is a great way to start this discussion.

[02:20:02] Mr. Eichelberger, I think you want to say something. Very quick. We're only asking about removing the VLF and seeking the legal authority to give you a tool. That's it. That's it. But the decisions about what to do later has got to be made later.

[02:20:19] And both of those things for me are, if I hadn't said that already, those are kind of the obvious yeses for those two items. So thank you very much. Yeah, although, Chair Randall, the question is when to get rid of vehicle licensing fee in 25 or 25. We'd do it now. You would do the $8 million now.

[02:20:35] No, I would do the $7.8 million now. Knowing what Mr. Hemisphere just said about the fund balance discussion we just said, I would do that now. Yes, I would. Okay. Supervisor Emstead. I would agree with that. I would do it now and go along with staff's recommendation to, or the treasurer's recommendation to add an item to our legislative agenda while he also pursues it through his administrative network. Thank you.

[02:21:09] Okay. I think there's going to be split opinions up here on this. Mr. Sainz. Thank you. All right. Well, I'll ask for some scenarios to come back to us regarding if we kept the general tax rate at one price point for the data centers and then we brought it down for the vehicle tax rate.

[02:21:33] That'll be one request, and for me, it would be in 26, if we were to do that. Secondly, and can you clarify, if we were to remove the vehicle licensing fee, one of my two colleagues just said now, are they meaning like now in 25, or is that January 26?

[02:21:55] Can you clarify that real quickly? That's your decision. They said they wanted it in 25. Yeah, Chair Randall and Supervisor Umstadt said 25. 25 and then use fun balance to make up that the difference yeah so we bill the 25 dollars on the may 25 bill which falls in the last half of the 25 year and so it would be either don't put it on this may's bill or don't put it on the following may okay thank you for that clarification um you would need a little bit i would have to see what the fund balances make my decision but i am open

[02:22:35] into removing the vehicle license fee, and then can we get clarification regarding getting the opinion from the Virginia Tax Commission? You said you already reached out and said, officially asked for that request, or you need us to do that? Just talk, what I would need from the board, what the staff would need from the board is just to add it to the legislative agenda in case that the administrative process, they say, hey, we can't help you, we need a law change.

[02:23:05] Okay. And I'm fine with that. I think we have our legislative discussion will be coming in the meeting after the November election. So I guess you can obviously check with your request and then give us an update when we have that item coming back to us in November. And then depending on the timing, we can add it into our package.

[02:23:24] I'm perfectly fine with that. So, yeah, that's all for me. And, again, thank you for the discussion and walking us through this complex scenarios here. Okay. So Rosa Brisbane? Yeah, I would just echo thank you for putting, you know, your brain power behind this.

[02:23:42] We appreciate it. For the, I call it a rebate, but for the relief program, I definitely would not be starting it until 26. I'm a yes on putting it in our legislative agenda.

[02:23:57] I would like staff to present us with tiers of, you know, what would happen at $25 million, what would happen at $60 million, what would happen at $10 million. that, that sort of thing. Um, and I, you know, I don't know that I would agree that we should not do the, um, vehicle licensing this coming in this fiscal year. We budgeted for that. We budgeted for that 7.8 million. And I, I, that makes me nervous. I feel like we probably could cover it in our fund balance. I know it's going to be rather large this year, but I would prefer to do

[02:24:36] that in 26 I'm not opposed to doing it I understand you know all the reasons why and that it doesn't seem to make sense to have it anymore but we did budget to it in the 25 fiscal year so I would that would give me a little bit of heartburn and then for the program overall I feel like we're in a little bit of a pickle because we are we're trying to plan for basically a surplus that we are not sure is coming, right? We think it's coming. We've seen it maybe the last two years, but we're not

[02:25:11] sure. And so, and I don't want to throw a wrench in the works or sand in the gears, but I would much rather see a program that says, and starting in 26, that says some percentage of the surplus that we have from data centers should go to the following year as a tax rebate. In other words, I feel less comfortable committing to a tax rebate of $25 or $60 million when we're not positive the surplus is coming in.

[02:25:46] Does that make sense? So it would delay the implementation. I think doing it, and I think that might be the algorithm you were talking about, where each year we say whatever. I'm repeating myself. I apologize. But I'm uncomfortable planning for a surplus.

[02:26:04] We're not sure it's happening. So I'd rather see it go into implementation in 26. We agree that a certain percentage of the surplus that comes in would be a tax rebate the following year. I don't know if staff can work out some sort of scenario like that, but that would make me a lot more comfortable.

[02:26:23] So we can. That is different from any of the proposals you've heard this evening. I know. I'm sorry. Well, no, I would. Which is fine. It would just be a check that gets issued. No, I would argue that. I agree with you 100%. that's what at least how i envision it what the algorithm is steve and i have talked about like what could we come up with that's constant that gets you where you're at what we're saying is you need the legal authority to do that we're asking for the authority i don't agree with that so what what what the vice chair just said is we wait until we have year in fund balance and then a

[02:27:02] percentage of year in fund balance is issued as a rebate to the taxpayer the following year that's which is different from a credit on recurring revenue that's collected every year your your mic your mic's off sorry i view it more semantically than that it's not mechanically though it's very different they're very different yeah yeah they would they would both require different actions from the board and different well i stand corrected then yeah um all right let me weigh in a little bit so i think sorry were you finished oh okay i am thank you very much okay so that's interesting

[02:27:41] so i think we need more discussion on this obviously macro i think what i'm concerned about is this is discussion about reducing revenue our budget discussions are not usually about reducing expenditure i have been saying and you all know this for about two years that i think we need to slow the rate of growth in the county and i started voting a little bit more that way in the last budget cycle and i probably will again but that isn't i'm not the majority on that and we have not slown the rate of growth in the county and then in some of our other discussions we're having that you're all aware of that doesn't seem to be the direction we're going in so i'm having

[02:28:16] trouble in my mind sort of understanding how this fits with that regardless of kind of where you come down on what we need to do what we should do the reality is right now we haven't really been doing it so i would need also to probably see the full fund balance picture before committing to eight million of it here certainly for the following year I think absolutely for 26 for 25 I'm not sure so I don't know if there's a way timing wise where we can see this in time to be able to decide and be able to implement that if

[02:28:54] we're comfortable with this as a use of fund balance what I do think we could do and Supervisor DiCroni mentioned it was it's it's pretty inexpensive to lower it to 410 which is I think we're gonna go it's only a couple million dollars I think for sure we could cover that in fund balance so I would say we could do that for 25 maybe for the vehicle license fee for 25 I want to see this scenarios I asked for on the on the ratios and what would happen sort of on a sliding scale if we reduce just the vehicle side of the personal property tax fee and then obviously let's pursue the the legislative authority and the legal

[02:29:29] authority to to try to see what we can do on on the overall program and then look at longer term allocating whether it's a portion or a set amount of of money toward that so i think there is a little bit of a lack of consensus on the committee about the timing of the vehicle licensing fee and i don't know how others feel about the 410 for january 25 it's only a couple million so why don't we have this item come back to us next month can we can we do

[02:30:06] that well based off your calendar what this is coming back to you in the form of budget guidance yes and so this discussion also is going to you on tuesday on the 16th although there's seven members here so you have two additional members that would participate in at the conversation uh yeah i mean theoretically it's with you next month but we're bringing budget guidance guidance okay that's fine we can we can use the budget so i think i think which we have to make make a decision on is what we want to do in january of 25 because it has a foundation this year you

[02:30:43] need to make that decision in on your december 3rd meeting because yes that would if you're going to change the rate that would forward to the public hearing in january mr wurtz if you're making a rate change so if you're going from 415 to 410 that decision needs to be made on december 3rd and for the the vehicle license fee when does that decision need to be made by february yeah because it gets billed in March.

[02:31:12] - Yeah, it's one use at the-- - Yeah, so we would be looking for that decision, I think for our budget purposes, also in December. So we would want you to make those decisions on December 3rd. - Well, I guess what I'm asking though is, when are we gonna actually see the use of fund balance item?

[02:31:30] - So the use of fund balance for FY24 fund balance will come to you in December. What we're talking about is these impacts would be-- - 25 fund balance. - 25 fund balance. - So we're really not gonna have more information about that no because that impacts your FY 27 budget um the only thing we may have is a little bit more indication of revenue trends in the current fiscal year when is your next is that quarterly you update us on that that'll be in November okay yeah so we'll have you know that portion of the fiscal year update we can at least see if we're running to the positive again which

[02:32:09] guessing we probably are yeah we're not forecasting a very different amount of over recovery than what's in this item which is about 130 million dollars okay all right so fy24 we're looking at somewhere over 200 million right because we can't allocate any of that to this you know theoretically you could but you'd be putting that in your fy26 budget okay i mean i why don't you think about

[02:32:45] that a little we could talk more i would just say just do it in fy25 but but the board can yeah but i think the issue which you're hearing is a little bit because we have uncertainty ultimately about what fy25 fund balance it would look like whereas we'll have fy24 in front of us so with recommended uses so let's let's think about that a little bit more sure all right so we're coming back next month i think there's no motion tonight the only thing that we need is an action item, right? So we would be bringing this to the board on Tuesday with no recommendation

[02:33:20] from finance? Mr. Chairman, if I may? Please. So I don't think there's any issue at all with making the other motion as far as going to the General Assembly. I just assumed we were going to do that in our first legislative session item in front of the full board. I'm sure if we want to do it tonight we can do it. I prefer to do it tonight because I prefer to have as little as possible to do on the Tuesday meeting, which is a really, really packed agenda. Either way we have to do it I know, but, yeah.

[02:33:47] So if you want to forego this discussion on the 16th, that just means the two members that aren't here would not be part of that decision. I know. I don't know how they didn't come. I mean, you know, it's such an issue that I was just trying to make sure the full board has the opportunity to...

[02:34:06] Could you just offer briefings to those two other board members? I'm scheduled to do briefings for them. Okay, good. Okay, then. That's what we're saying. We don't think it does. Actually, don't think it, yeah. it doesn't matter me no i i would so the legislative program part we're going to take up right and then i would i would not i would not put it on the 16th agenda the overall item overall item exactly let's just keep it here and then i'll go ahead and move the finance government operations economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors add the authority to create a local personal property tax relief program to the 2025 legislative program a second in the name of lord the crony

[02:34:44] and in the spirit of lord the crony well she's not on the committee but otherwise yes yes yes but we thank supervisor to crony for for bringing the issue forward um all right any any discussion on that motion um favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries 5-0 okay so we have that one yeah so we'll just carry that into the legislative and this is the legislative yeah yeah and then you're going to keep this overall item off the 1016 full board agenda but you're going to come back to us with your fiscal guidance item that's going to incorporate this and have we did ask a

[02:35:23] bunch of questions up here which i think so you're going to bring that back to us do you want to hear the scenarios that we heard do we want to make sure that everybody has okay sure i just don't want to make megan talk though that's the problem well i can't read her notes the good thing is my it sounds worse than it feels all right so um supervisor sayings asked for scenarios that would keep the general rate at 415 and lower the vehicle rate starting in tax year 26.

[02:35:54] and then supervisor brisman or vice chair brisman excuse me asked for um different targets instead of 60 million what would 10 million various targets look like starting for tax year 26. And then Chair Letourneau asked for similar scenarios, but ensuring that the ratios were considered in the various tax rates.

[02:36:23] Yes. Did I capture that correctly? I think so. Okay. Yes. Chair Randall. I do want, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do want to understand the growth in the county. The growth in the county as far as population, budget, positions, everything.

[02:36:38] Yes, as far as population. I'm sorry. as far as population growth population growth forecasted growth or the okay thank you thanks chair letourneau yeah then scenarios with vlf january 125 and then vlf january 126 elimination i think those are the two scenarios plus i did put on the table 410 and 25 as well one thing i didn't hear was the if we are allowed to do the um instead of forecasting to do more the

[02:37:12] the fund balance idea the rebate the rebate yeah the rebate idea so we can definitely do that that's not a that's not a budget impact because you're paying that out of fund balance in the following year but fund balance is a bigger bucket than just a fund balance is a much bigger bucket than specifically under predicting what we're getting from data center personal property tax well so So, to me, I'd like to see like a line item.

[02:37:50] How much did we get over what we forecasted that can be applied to next year's car tax, the next fiscal year's car tax? So, over-recovery and fund balance is a one-time revenue stream.

[02:38:08] So, it's either collection of fund balance and we take a percentage of fund balance and we issue that as a refund to the taxpayer in the subsequent year, which would be off-budget because it's based off of whatever amount is over-collected and a percentage of the over-collection, right?

[02:38:28] Or it's looking at recurring revenues, and we're providing tax relief on recurring revenues, which occurs every year in the same amount or same percentage, however we want to look at it, which would be based off of whatever our budget forecast is for that year and the amount of revenue that we believe we can forego and still accomplish the significant needs of the county on the expenditure side.

[02:38:56] All right. I'll talk to you guys more. I'll talk to you more offline. That's either a rate reduction or it's a personal property tax relief percentage reduction. Thank you. So I don't know if we can look at the fiscal impact of restoring the general class to 420 and lowering the vehicle tax to 410 because for 25 years we had it at 420 and then we

[02:39:29] we went to 415 for tax year I believe 23 and 24 am I right did we yeah so that's correct so I'm wondering if we might look at that too just restoring it to 420 and how that would look because you know i hear vice chair briskman and how she wants to look at the surplus well maybe this is another way to look at it if we're at with the general class of 420 maybe that could provide some of that and i know we've talked about this some of that funding for um what we want to do

[02:40:07] with the license fee and what we potentially want to do with the tax relief we can definitely run scenario that increases the tax rate. Okay. Just to understand. It would be restoring it to that, what we had for 25 years. So that would be an increase in the tax. I just want to make sure we're clear. That's an increase in the tax rate, which will have an impact on your percentage of real property versus personal property in your overall tax portfolio. We can definitely run it, but it is a tax rate increase. It is a tax increase. I just want to make sure that's clear.

[02:40:45] For the general class, and, you know, we could tease out all of, like, 48, 27, 26, 40, tease it all out and just have the general class be the 420, being utilities and computer data center equipment.

[02:41:02] So general class is everything that's in personal property unless it is a separate class that has a different rate. Right, which it does. So I just want to make clear that it's everything that is not, that doesn't have a different tax rate in a special class.

[02:41:18] That's correct. But the ones I mentioned do have a different. You could set a separate rate on those other classes that are spelled out in 35 or 36. 48 is the vehicles. 48 is the vehicles. Yes. So, yeah. But I think just look, I think basically what I'm asking is just to look at one scenario that goes to 420 for the general class.

[02:41:37] Not the vehicles, but the general class. Okay. so that's another scenario and then Supervisor Turner you want to add to the scenarios no I'm not adding scenarios I just want to clarify what Supervisor Togroni just said make sure I have understand in my mind what the effect would be so if we lower the vehicle tax which is now separate by SB what is it SB 194 if we lower the vehicle tax to 410 and we raise the general personal

[02:42:11] property tax to 420 that will hurt the ratio and the rate the amount that it will hurt the ratio is is hurt far more by the the raise because it's the bigger portion of that personal property tax compared to just the vehicle tax correct so the ratio will be hurt and it will be hurt considerably more than it is helped by the reduction in the personal property tax correct although those will be relative amounts they could be relatively small amounts but okay but yes proportionately that's correct okay thank you and you would argue that it re-emphasizes the less stable part of the

[02:42:48] personal property tax and i would argue it makes you more dependent on personal which is a philosophical question i guess we have to grapple yes all right i think we've kind of beaten this dead horse tonight um so thank you everybody we'll see you all next month thank you and the committee

[02:43:04] is going to take a break thank you all right we'll call the committee back into order with item number

[03:18:56] 15, non-profit organizations request for property tax exemption by designation, so that Mr. Wirtz can go home. Why, thank you so much, Chair Letourneau. Maybe I'll stick around for all the rest of the items. Oh, you're welcome to. You'll be welcome. You know, I don't have anything else going on at home tonight. Mr. Chairman and committee members, this is your annual item regarding tax exemptions for non-profit charitable organizations. We had, you had requested some additional

[03:19:33] information to come back regarding B-Dash Foundation. They actually do have a physical location in Loudon. They're on Silverbrook Drive. There were comments relative to Cornerstones, Inc. and relative to their foreclosure prevention programs. Supervisor Umstead had mentioned that She wasn't aware that they did that in the county, but they provided mitigation services to 16 Loudoun households to help them stay in their homes.

[03:20:07] As you know, a public hearing is required in order to grant tax exemption for 2025. The hypothetical physical impact of granting all these organizations an exemption, had they been exempt, this calendar year would have been about $90,000.

[03:20:27] and I've got Rob Drake here, my deputy of tax exemptions and deferrals, and we are happy to answer any questions that you might have relative to this item. Okay. Thank you for the follow-up information. Are there additional questions? Chair Randall. Yeah, just remind me.

[03:20:42] So we sent you back for those, well, not sent you back, but asked you to come back on those two, but we haven't done a public hearing for any of them. That is correct. That's correct? Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I think so tonight we're going to recommend to the board which organizations that we move forward then the board would send at the public hearing and i will remind everybody i am not making a motion to do any of them because i don't ever support doing any of these but i may vote no on some of them depending on which ones you all want to move forward so um and i'm staying on others so i would entertain a motion jimmy let me ask you

[03:21:21] then do you want us to i mean we we'd have to go through these well i can make a motion you can can tell us which ones that you want you have issues with or want to pull out otherwise you have to make motions one at a time yes if you wanted to move all of them I've just been to save us time I think the two that I would probably not support under any circumstance are the Society for Imaging Informatics and Medicine and Willis for Conservancy the other three I would abstain so you want to vote against two and then abstain I mean if you wanted to move the first

[03:21:55] three yeah why don't we do that um that's just a draft motion i think it's there's five total right or there's six six total okay um so the uh so would be the first motion um i move the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend that the board supervisors refer all eligible applications identified attachment one till the october 8th 2024 finance government operations economic development committee action committee action item to a future public to caring for consideration of an ordinance granting the requested property tax exemptions.

[03:22:30] Okay. Motion is made. Are there a second? All of them. All of them. I can separate. And we can separate out. Okay. Seconded by Supervisor Briskman. I will move to separate Society for Imaging, Informatics, and Medicine, and Willis-Ford Conservancy from that.

[03:22:49] All right. So then I will -- Remaining four. Opening statement. Yeah. Listen, I think overall, when I look at our nonprofits, our nonprofits save us money overall.

[03:23:05] And I do believe that there is a, there is not, I do believe, I know that there is value to doing some of the things that the county government, just because we're kind of won't do and shouldn't do. We cannot do everything.

[03:23:21] And so we ask for our nonprofit and faith-based partners to help us do some things. And so what they're saying to us is, you know, can they have some level of financial assistance themselves? I believe that what they will, what is costing us, they're going to save us more than these cost us.

[03:23:46] And so, you know, as I have done since I've been here, I'm going to support the nonprofits. Now, let me be clear. I don't think Mr. Letourneau doesn't support our nonprofits. He has been very consistent in his vote since I've been here every time. But I do believe that it is wise for the county to partner with nonprofits and do these.

[03:24:07] Okay. But this is for the four. This is for the four. This is for the four. Yeah. Yeah. So any other discussion on the motion? Yeah. So I traditionally abstain on this item mostly because I don't like separating this out, having a a property tax uh discussion that is separate from the non-profit grant funding discussion that we have and i don't like the fact that we don't have any real objective criteria on the board side for deciding which non-profits get get relief or or not i think it it leaves it subjective and it leaves us in the position of sometimes and we do sometimes vote no on certain

[03:24:47] non-profits where if we had criteria from the get-go some of them probably would know not to apply and then we wouldn't have to go through that and they wouldn't have to go through the paperwork and so on. So I will continue that track record of abstentions. All in favor of the motion? I'd like to have a closing. Oh, I'm sorry, of course. So, Mr. Letourneau, you've said that for years and I don't disagree, but I think that at some point we'd have to stop saying and then just do it. I did bring an item. Well, then bring another one, let's do it again because I supported it because I do think that that's -- I mean, we absolutely got away from what it used to be, which is if you can snag a supervisor and talk to them

[03:25:26] long enough, then your item would go forward. And we spent, my gosh, like two years putting this whole process in place. So I won't say we don't have any criteria or any process, but do I think it can be more clear, more honed? Sure. Until we do that, though, I'm not going to, with no process in place, I'm not going to punish the ones who've come forward under this process.

[03:25:50] But I am more than happy, and I supported it before, and that was another term and another board. Let's try it again. Okay. We'll try it this term. All right. I'll figure the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed. Motion carries 401.

[03:26:08] And then did you want to make a motion for the – I'm sorry, 301. 301. Yeah, 30. Mr. Katsayens is absent. That's right. 3011, I guess we would say. Right? Yes. 3011. Yes. Okay. And then, sure.

[03:26:25] Do you want to make a motion on the other two? I don't know because you had not supported them in the past. I know. And so if there is no motion, that's fine. Somebody else can make a motion, but I'm not going to make a motion. And I am also being consistent with these. Okay. No further motions.

[03:26:41] Then thank you very much, Mr. Wirtz. Thank you. All right. All right. Item 16 is update on American Rescue Plan Act spending in October 2024 reallocation recommendations.

[03:27:08] Good evening, Chair Letourneau and committee members. Just wanted to start off at summary level, as far as an update on ARPA funding.

[03:27:27] Currently, we are at about 95% obligation of the total $80 million in ARPA funding, with a remaining allocated balance of about $4.5 million. That $4.5 million, that has been approved to prior board items, will primarily be obligated through amendments to existing contracts and memorandums of agreement.

[03:27:52] So that pretty much places the county in a good standing or well-postured to end the calendar year with minimum to no available funds before the December 31st, 2024 deadline to obligate ARPA funds.

[03:28:09] The remaining, after department staff has performed outreach to other departments and offices, the remaining 911,000 that is unallocated, that is recommended, is for allocation to the eviction assistance program, based on observation of increased eviction filings supported, and currently more filings in queue.

[03:28:33] So, with that being said, at the pleasure of the committee, we are ready to answer any questions. Questions. The Peonian Springs one, was that a water project? I remember the gentleman was here, and I think we were concerned about timeline. Is that sort of what happened?

[03:28:53] Correct. Okay. And they had a piece of that as well that they were funding, or no? Or they would have to have if we hadn't funded it? I'm trying to remember. That's what it was? Okay. Yes, that's correct. Okay, so what's happening with it now? They couldn't get the ARPA money allocated in time, basically?

[03:29:12] That's correct. They have allocated the bulk of the funds. Oh, okay. Yes. It's just that there was too much. Correct. Well, that's a good problem. There was too much to be able to obligate by the timeline. But, yes, the majority of the funds were obligated. Okay. All right.

[03:29:27] Any other questions? I can ask it in the motion. Okay. Did you have a question? I did. And the recommendation for the funds then, as I recall, is that it goes into the eviction assistance. That is correct. Okay. Fantastic.

[03:29:43] All right. I'll go ahead and move the finance government operations economic development committee recommend the board approve the recommended use of ARPA funding for 911,000 as outlined in this action item and authorize the purchasing agent to increase the award authority of the contract for program three housing preservation for households with eviction filings to Loudon Cares, Inc. in the amount of $911,000 for a new contract amount of $1,911,000. Second. Seconded by Chair Randall. Discussion on the motion. I have no opening. Chair Randall.

[03:30:11] So, thank you, Mr. Chairman. This may not even be such a finance discussion as it might be for Mr. Hempstreet and Ms. McClellan. So, I have been following this program very carefully, and let me first say that I think Loudon Cares is a fantastic nonprofit that's doing the best they can.

[03:30:32] But there have been a lot of hiccups in helping them get the money to where it needed. Things like on the site, there was nothing in another language on the site to give them information about it.

[03:30:50] Nothing, which was a problem. When I went with the former director of Loudon Cares, We literally carried in our own computers and own printers, and we were there from about 5 in the evening to 12 midnight trying to get these things done, trying to get some of the information in.

[03:31:10] We were using other people who had also come for relief as interpreters because there was no other interpreters that had been sent from our organization, our Loud and Cares. Is there some other assistance we can give to Loudon Cares as they're assisting these clients?

[03:31:34] Because I do believe that there were people who didn't get their winter relief on time. There was one woman who actually was so desperate she had gone to a kind of a safe resource, to be honest, to get money for her rent.

[03:31:52] And then, of course, that money can't be paid back to the safe resource. And so now she's like, what do I do? I've got to pay this man my money. But since her rent was paid, she no longer qualified for the money. But it was paid because she went to a source she don't normally want to go to. And that was just caused because of the delays.

[03:32:10] And so, you know, I understand that we put the RFP out and really only one entity responded. I get that. So we didn't have other options. And that's fine because I think Loudon Cares did their best. But it was still, this is still, it was a heavy lift.

[03:32:27] And is it possible, or how can we, or should we help the nonprofit, help the clients, and so that these things don't happen, so we can fix some of these issues? So there's a couple of things that we've been doing, both on the Department of Finance and Procurement and also on the Department of Housing and Community Development.

[03:32:46] First off is we've been, you know, collaborating, communicating with Loudon Cares as far as their resource needs so we do know that they are going to be working to bring on board about two to three or three to four additional staff. Next we are working with Loudon Cares to establish an action plan. We do know that there's a volume of of applicants whether that's rent to or eviction or other programs that we need to at least make contact to in order to make a quality examination of whether they correct you know they meet the criteria for the

[03:33:25] assistance so we are requiring that this month as well and then from there we're just we're also looking at you know their business processes as well okay thank you very much that I think that sounds like it could could be helpful and and also put something that's in other languages on this on the information site thanks all right other discussion on the motion mr. Sainz thank Yeah, I just want to kind of follow up the Chair Randall's point, and I'll just be more direct.

[03:33:55] If we move forward with the motion, do we feel that Loudoun Cares is able to manage the increase that will come with this? Can you speak a little bit more to that?

[03:34:11] So we believe, based off of the actions that I just identified to Chair Randall, that that will mitigate or reduce the risk at least in the short term and then we'll continue to work with Loudon Cares in the long term as far as the program efficiencies and then without going into a lot of detail you know the type of review that we're conducting or working with Loudon Cares looks at their you know program performance from both right policies and procedures

[03:34:46] governance and then also processing. Okay and not to say they are not doing a good job but say after your review if it comes up that you know their marks or performance is not up to certain standards what would what would we do? So next step is is then we'll go through the contract which we've already started that process to review and you know we'll work with our procurement team as far as what's the next steps in accordance with that contract okay because obviously we want to

[03:35:19] make sure everybody's getting everything that they can qualified for in a expedient process so all right thank you sorry I do have a question yes you haven't spoken yet we're in a motion but you haven't spoken go ahead that's right um so don't did we not have time to ask if there were other non-profits in the county that could do eviction assistance because don't isn't there

[03:35:52] another organization that we provide funds to that help with eviction assistance so we currently excuse me we currently have a contract with um shelter house uh to help divert uh homelessness so we do have that in conjunction with the eviction assistance program and loudon cares is partnering with the Northern Virginia Family Service and Legal Services of Northern Virginia.

[03:36:24] So there's a collaborative effort. They are making referrals and managing cases collaboratively. Okay. Ms. Brisbane wants?

[03:36:39] We, sure. All right, then. So there was an entire RFP process. It was an entire process. I know that, but not for this leftover money in this item, there was not a separate RFP process.

[03:36:59] That's correct. To do that, to do all that again, would delay this so much? I know. I know. That's my point. That's why I'm asking, because we need to allocate and spend the funds within a certain amount of time, we may not have had time to assess other possibilities for the money that wasn't used that we're forwarding, as I understand it.

[03:37:25] My concern is that many people in the community I feel like Loudon Cares has failed to process a good number of applications in the other program for rental assistance. So it does make me very nervous to also have them doing our eviction avoidance programs.

[03:37:44] But I do understand that you guys are working with them. And there's a process that if it's not working, that we will go through. If I can address Supervisor Brisman's question.

[03:38:01] The amount of money that is requested to be reallocated exceeds our simplified acquisition process. So, and based upon the fact that we have to have the funds obligated before the end of the calendar year, it wouldn't allow enough time to go through and complete other RFP process. Okay, that's what I was thinking.

[03:38:18] Okay, thank you. Supervisor Umstead. I'll support this, but if no one had responded, if Loudon Cares hadn't responded to the RFP, what would we have done? So my assumption would have been that we would have looked at other avenues in order to make recommendations to the board to allocate those funds.

[03:38:42] I believe the initial amount was $1.5 million. Okay. All right. So we would have looked at something other than eviction prevention? Correct. All right. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

[03:38:59] I have no closing. All in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries. 5-0. Thank you very much. Okay. next up is the 2025 retiree health plan update and premium review which may be a more difficult item than the tax item that we that we had i know there were some staff briefings i will kind of say at the onset that this is coming to us pretty late in the process for us and so the timeline for decision is virtually non-existent we pretty much have to act so i know that there have been some

[03:39:38] concerns expressed which I think we probably do want to dive into but I don't know that we can do that and delay this we may have to kind of be proceeding on separate tracks but I will turn it over to staff to give us a presentation. Good evening committee members thank you for having us here as you know I've had an opportunity to speak with a number of you or your staff regarding this item it is a bit complex in terms of how our plans are structured and what our recommendations are So I have a presentation that's somewhat similar to what some of you have already seen.

[03:40:13] So some of these slides will look a bit familiar. So prior to 2013, the county's retiree health plan was open to retirees with 10 years of service and had been enrolled in the active employee plan for three of the past five years prior to retirement, including the preceding 12 months. The county's health plan was split into two classifications of retirees: pre-65 retirees and post-65 retirees.

[03:40:40] Pre-65 retirees could enroll in the same plans as active employees, and post-65 retirees had their own plan, which included a prescription drug benefit and dental coverage. And the amount a retiree would pay varied based upon the number of years of service within the county.

[03:40:58] So back in 2012, like most organizations who offered retiree health, like the county, understood that the designing costs were not likely going to be sustainable due to medical trend. And then additionally, back in 2004, there were a number of financial standards that were released that came into play, which required organizations such as the county who offered retiree health to start booking their future liabilities rather than just going from year to year as a means to make sure they understood what was going on with their retiree health plans, the status of those plans, and how strong they were.

[03:41:32] So the county back in 2008 created an OPEB trust that is managed by a local finance committee. The OPEBs are the actual retiree health plans that we'll talk about in a little bit. Each year, our actuaries determine how much that we need to fund that trust to meet future liabilities with the idea that at some point, that trust would grow to a point where we could use that to pay the actual retiree expenses.

[03:42:00] So for so long, we were just engaged in what we call a pay-as-you-go financing. we pay the claims, we pay the admins every year. We then started funding a trust at the same time, so we would pay the trust to the tune of about five, maybe five, six million each year, and that would vary from year to year. But we also contributed money from the general fund to pay for ongoing expenses. So back in 2012, the county partnered with Boomershine Consulting to review the retiree health plan and to try and figure out a way that we could retain some sort of retiree

[03:42:34] benefit for our employees, but also remain fiscally responsible. And we came up with a number of objectives within that, I think it was an October 12th board meeting in 2012. You'll see on the screen, provide a competitive and affordable retiree health benefits program while maintaining the county's financial responsibility, minimize to the extent possible the impact of changes on current retirees and those closest to retirement. That's a key piece. And then slowly transitioning the retiree health plan from a defined benefit model to a defined contribution model. Defined

[03:43:11] benefit meaning you're receiving that actual health care. It's kind of almost like a promise, but with a defined contribution, it's a benefit you're going to provide. It's more easily manageable, and you can budget for that, but it's not necessarily a full-blown commitment. So to achieve these objectives, the board approved the creation of four distinct groups with different eligibility criteria.

[03:43:35] Groups A and B would receive actual retiree health care. Those are our OPEB plans, and that's why we're here tonight to discuss them. And then groups C and D would receive an annual allotted amount to be deposited into a retirement health savings plan where funds would grow through a number of financial vehicles.

[03:43:52] And at some point, you can then cash that out to pay for your out-of-pocket expenses. In addition to creating those groups, back in 2012, the board approved a few different cost mitigation measures to help almost act as a safety net for the county, and there were two.

[03:44:12] One was an annual contribution cap that was set at 5% of the county's premium contribution at that time in 2013. So that's 5%. So, for example, if the county contribution was, say, $100, each year we could increase by 5%.

[03:44:31] If it increased to, you know, 105, we would, as a county, take on that 5% increase, as would the retiree. However, if it increased by more than 5%, say 7%, the retiree would pick up their 7%, but the county would only pick up 5%, and that remaining two would be shifted to the retiree.

[03:44:50] That was an annual contribution cap. We also had a total contribution cap, capped at 150% of the total contribution in 2013. So remember, everything's being anchored into 2013 rates. So for instance, in year one, it could go up to 105, 110, 115.

[03:45:09] Ultimately, over a number of years, once that total contribution is over 150% of the 2013 contribution, that excess then gets shifted to the retiree. So our plan has been running fairly well these past number of years, past 11 years, actually.

[03:45:34] However, the 2025 renewal has triggered that limit with regards to the 5%. And so we kind of knew that at some point these OPEB plans would need to be re-evaluated. Not quite sure what we would do, thinking, you know, maybe we just need to kind of modernize our rates, kind of re-anchor them, reset them from 2013 maybe to 2025 and see what would that do.

[03:46:01] Would that help the county? Would that help the retirees? And so we're here about 11 years later having that conversation. Just to clarify one thing, are you saying that in the previous 11 years we have not triggered the annual increase has been under 5%?

[03:46:17] That's correct. Actual increase. That's correct. So none of that's been passed on to the retiree because it's been under that 5%. Correct. This is the first year. This is the first year it's triggered. Okay. So with regards to Group B, Group B is structured a little bit differently in that retirees receive a flat subsidy based upon their years of service.

[03:46:38] So they, based upon whatever formula we have in place, if they were to receive a $400 subsidy, that $400 was a subsidy in 2013, $414, $415. So you can imagine that over each year as health care premiums increase, the value of that subsidy starts to decrease.

[03:46:59] And now we're 11 years later and we feel as though it's time to reassess and make sure that this is still sustainable for our retirees as well as the county. So let's take a shift away from the actual design and look at the renewal itself.

[03:47:17] So the 2025 renewal for pre-65 retirees is coming in at 10.2%. the post-65 Medicare-eligible retiree renewal is coming in at 31.1%. So you can imagine, obviously, this is now triggering that annual cap of 5%. Anything over in excess of that 5% is then shifted to the retirees. You'll see in the item, I believe I have a chart that shows if we don't take any action, such as resetting those rates to 2025, our retirees will see upwards

[03:47:53] around a 175 percent increase in their monthly premiums so in order to address this we evaluated the impact of making a couple different changes in what that would do to the opeb trust as well as for group a as well as for group b2 in group a we are looking at re essentially re anchoring or resetting those foundation rates to 2025 we still want to maintain a five percent

[03:48:26] increase cap and a 100% increase cap prospectively beginning in 2026. That's for Group A. For Group B, we are looking to increase the subsidies by 50%. And these two changes have essentially a profound impact on the OPEB trust in a variety of different ways, three different ways mainly.

[03:48:49] One, actuarially, if we make those changes, the OPEB trust liabilities will increase by approximately $50 million. And that impacts the OPEB trust funding ratio. And the funding ratio is essentially, it just measures the liabilities versus the assets. So for instance, if we have $100 million in liabilities, and our assets are worth $70 million, we have a 70% funding ratio.

[03:49:13] So the idea was, as we started funding this trust many years ago, back in 2008, we wanted to get to a point, as I mentioned earlier, that that trust can then pay for retiree expenses. Back in fiscal year 2021, we developed an OPEB trust disbursement policy because our funding had gotten so positive, because we've been very diligent about funding that trust. So I think, I'm thinking we were upwards in the 80s where we decided we were going to go ahead and start pulling money from the trust to pay all of our ongoing retiree expenses. Now, we still continue to fund the trust because we had to do that, but we were

[03:49:52] no longer doing this pay-as-you-go. We simply pulled money from the trust to pay for all of our expenses. The challenge with making these changes is that when we increase those liabilities by $50 million, you can imagine that funding ratio just drops dramatically. We don't have the exact amount, but we're thinking it's around 58%. And when that happens, our disbursement policy prohibits us from using that trust to pay for expenses. So now we not only have to fund the trust continually as we have been, but now we have to go back into that pay-as-you-go financing for retiree expenses, and that's about $9 million per year. So that's $9 million we need

[03:50:31] to come up with to start paying for our retiree expenses until we get to the point where we get back up to that 70% funding ratio, okay? Aside from the liabilities that are impacted by this change, the annual required contribution or the ARC or the ADEC, whatever we might want to call it from the actual term, what we have to fund to the trust increases as well.

[03:50:58] So today we are funding at about $4 million per year. That's going to increase to $7.8 million. So that's another $3.8 million that we have to fund the trust. Now, keep in mind, when I just mentioned that $50 million liability increase, that's not cash that we have to shut out.

[03:51:15] That's just a liability that we have to book. But this piece, this $3.8 million, that is actual money that we need to come up with to fund that trust. So now we have our $9 million as you pay as you go for the retiree expenses, as well as additional $3.8 million to pay into the trust moving forward each year thereafter until we get to our 70%.

[03:51:35] And then the last impact, there is a provision within our disbursement policy that states once the funding ratio goes beneath 70%, the county has five years to get that back up to 70%. We don't have those exact numbers yet. We will by the time that the county audit is done, but we're thinking it could be around $20 million. So we're going to have to figure out what the best route is to get that back up to 70% within five years.

[03:52:05] So to kind of recap one of our recommendations, we want to re-anchor those Group A caps to 2025 rates, move it from 2013 to 2025. We want to increase Group B subsidies by 50%.

[03:52:21] We want to set the pre-65 retiree rate to a 10.2% increase, which, by the way, is the same as we applied to the actives last month, and then set the post-65 renewal at 31.1% increase. Now, that is significant. That's still our recommendation from an HR perspective.

[03:52:43] You'll remember in the past, we have artificially, we've asked the board for additional funds to artificially buy down those rates for the retirees. We knew back then, as we know now, that comes back to bite you every year because you're already starting behind the starting line.

[03:53:01] So really, we started at a 10% increase before we even looked at the numbers. So the 10% went up to 31.1. The reason we're not recommending is that we buy down the rates, is that we're just kicking the bucket down the road. But should the board want to, they can find funding of about $770,000 to buy down those rates, artificially buy down those rates down to the 10.2, so then everyone is in alignment, your actives, your pre-65ers, and your post-65ers at 10.2%.

[03:53:33] And obviously, if we do that, we'll have the same conversation next year. So just to recap, financially, we have an increase in $3.8 million of additional funds needed to fund the OPEB trust. We have another $9 million needed to pay-as-you-go financing until we get our funding ratio up to 70 percent, so they're either $12.8 million.

[03:53:57] And then we have maybe $20 to $25 million, possibly, of additional funding that we need to get back up to the 70 percent. We put some language in the item that regarding that 20 to 25, we may want to have a conversation around fund balance if that's a possible issue, whether it be at one time or whether it be over five years, so we will be looking for some options there.

[03:54:25] The remaining of FY25, the impacts of plan changes would be absorbed, and then for FY26 and moving forward, it would be proposed in the future fiscal year budgets. So that's, like I said, that was a kind of a summary of what I shared with some of you and some of your staff over the past few days.

[03:54:43] So we're here to answer any questions that you might have. That's simple. I'll open it up to questions. So what's being proposed has a budgetary impact of $20 to $25 million essentially immediately, which it's recommended that we address through FY24 fund balance?

[03:55:10] I don't know if finance is here. I'm not sure if I can speak to that. Megan's coming. Whether she can speak, I don't know, but she's coming. The annual effect of these changes would be $12.8 million.

[03:55:36] In addition to over the period of five years, you'd need to rebuild back the fiduciary net position, which would be an additional $20 to $25 million. You can either choose to do that incrementally over a five-year period or all at once with fund balance.

[03:55:53] So $12.8 million is, but do we have to come up with that essentially immediately as we're implementing these changes? So we can, we have proposed in the item that the $12.8 can be absorbed within the FY25 budget with personnel savings, and then the annual cost would just be included in the proposed budget going forward.

[03:56:15] The $12.8, and then we can either take all of the $20 to $25 and do it at once in $24 fund balance if we have it or we can spread that out over a period of time correct all right correct uh okay i'm sure there's gonna be more questions i may have some more myself but let's go to supervisor brisbane okay um okay so could you go back to point number two of fiscal impact the slide that had fiscal impact number two please okay so this says

[03:56:52] we need to necessitates an increase of 3.8 million to the original annual contributions to the OPEB Trust. When we spoke today, I thought that was operational not to bring the trust back up to its funding amount.

[03:57:14] No, the $3.8 million is not operational. That's just what we need. That's a required amount that we have to provide to the trust. It was the $9 million that was operational, because that's used to pay for the claims and admin expenses every week as they come in. So is the $3.8 million annually going to help us get back to our 70 percent ratio or not it should yes it will but not not at the rate that we would need that to be okay but we still in addition to the 3.8 million going in annually will we still

[03:57:54] need the 20 to 25 million correct okay so it's in addition to okay sorry yes thank you miss mcclellan did you want to jump in i think we may have just cleared it up but i'd like to i'd like I'd like to have staff speak again on the 3.8, which I believe does not increase the fund's net position.

[03:58:16] It only addresses your recommendation for Group B, correct? It actually addresses both for Group A and Group B. Okay. Guys, we can't hear up here. I don't know what's going on tonight.

[03:58:32] It's everybody. Everyone has to have their microphone closer or something. Yeah. We had to turn them down because we were having some feedback issues. I apologize. So, Mr. Krause, the $3.8 million is the annually acquired contribution, which would maintain the fund position. So to get back to the 70%, we'd have to increase that amount above the $3.8 million, I think is what clarification that we're trying to make.

[03:58:55] Yeah, I think we actually have David Bumershine here. He might be able to opine on that particular question. Sorry, say that again. We have David Bumershine here, the actuary, and he can probably opine on that. I think Mr. Hemstreet is correct, but I just want to, you know, make sure.

[03:59:12] Well, now we know the namesake of the company. Thank you for having me. So my understanding is that the question is whether the $3.8 million additional contribution does help with the funding ratio.

[03:59:29] It does a little bit because we have a 15-year amortization period that's used for the annual cost, which is pretty aggressive. That is very much a part of it. The additional $2024 million would do it immediately or, again, as you pointed out, could be spread out over five years.

[03:59:48] so there's pieces from both of it does that answer your question sir i i i don't know um i guess my my point is i think i would rather put into it gradually over the five years in order to get to the 70 rather than using fund balance but um i think that's going to be another item from omb well i think we kind of have to do both right is what you're saying you have to do the 3.8 million yeah so the fund we can have the 20 to 25 discussion in fund balance i assume

[04:00:23] okay no i'm sorry i'm not finished oh yeah go ahead okay were you go were you no okay thanks um i'm not i'm not sure i'm comfortable given the i'm not sure i'm comfortable moving this item forward tonight based on all the questions we've gotten from our firefighters union it sounds like it's not satisfactory what we're doing for group b and i think group b is the one that has consistently been behind, if I recall what the firefighters have told me before,

[04:00:59] has consistently been behind in adequate benefits. There's also an issue apparently with groups C and D that they feel should be addressed at the same time, and there seems to be a misunderstanding between when that was supposed to be negotiated. So I think you saw the email from the firefighters, could you address any of those concerns for us? Good evening, Supervisor Burstin. I think in order to address those concerns, I would point out two things.

[04:01:38] Number one, this is the same item that we bring every year in order to establish rates for the retirees. We are in a time crunch. This has been a very complicated item. We would have preferred to have gotten it to you in September, but there are a lot of moving pieces here. If we do not address this item this evening and get an approval from the board to do something for plan year 2025, we will not be able to program those rates into the system to notify our retirees and to do what we need to do in order to go through our open enrollment period and

[04:02:14] get the information out to our retirees. I think we would be in a position of needing, if we're not going to move forward with this, needing the committee and or the board to tell us what they want us to move forward with so we can go ahead and make those plan changes.

[04:02:31] With regard to IAFF, IAFF has a negotiated collective bargaining agreement with the county. That collective bargaining agreement does expressly state that if they do not agree with these recommendations, they can reopen negotiations. They have the ability to do that.

[04:02:47] The county also has the ability to do that. I think that would be the appropriate forum to address their concerns. if there are other recommendations that they would want to make we would consider that through the negotiation process. If are they allowed to reopen negotiations on just one item or does that put everything on the table again? Just that one item on the retiree health specifically they would be able to reopen negotiations. Okay. We also have the recommendations that IAFF made during those

[04:03:22] contract negotiations. Those were priced out by boom or shine if the board wants us to we can always come back with an information item to explain what was the work that was done on boomer shine and the costing for those and we can provide that information to the committee and to the board if it desires. Okay there also seems to be some concern that there were recommendations from boomer shine that that were not part of the recommendations from staff. It's not boomer shines place per se to make recommendations on how to change our plan structures their job is to determine and calculate financial risk and liability for the county. We gave them the

[04:04:01] recommendations that IAFF requested and asked them to price them. They make no recommendations as to whether those recommendations were good or not good or desirable for the county. They simply priced them. Okay. All right. Thank you. Chair Randall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do feel my staff did get a briefing on this on Friday. This is a lot. And I understand we have to do something tonight but i will be honest i don't feel ready to do something tonight because i don't feel like i

[04:04:35] i i have i have more questions um i have a lot more questions than i would like i would prefer time to just dive in this to this myself or sit and so this this feels rushed for me um having said that um miss green with due respect are we absolutely positive that if you open up one part you can only open up you can't open up one part of a negotiation and not open it all up because I've never heard that before I am absolutely positive that being said I'm not the county attorney so I don't want to provide legal advice but based on my previous experience as a labor

[04:05:15] relations manager it would be opening up that particular article and that would be it it would not be the entire agreement okay all right I think I'd like to see that in writing just to just to sure we know that's that's i'm not saying you're not correct but just to you know double make sure that that should be in writing somewhere it said that the um that group b even for proposed 50 increase um there's a proposed 50 increase capped to 30 years of service can you put that numbers

[04:05:47] what what is what is that number for group b is that about sixteen thousand dollars microphone microphone by that um ipod uh it really depends upon because there's a couple different um amounts per years of service so we'd have to do each calculation depending upon that's why we don't have a rate sheet for group b because everyone has a different rate do you believe that group b's rates would fall under or below other the other group's rates the amounts it it might it might depend that there could be a fact pattern here there where that could be true uh it's very

[04:06:24] difficult to craft these four plans to be separate and unique and distinct of each other sometimes you will have a little bit of overlap. I'm not worried about overlap I'm worried about one group being significantly less than the others. I'm worried about that. I do remember and if my memory serves me I think it was Mr. Letourneau that asked a question last time about retirement age as it relates to first responders. Remember that discussion? Was that is that Am I remembering wrong?

[04:06:56] Yes, when we addressed group C. And was the answer just no because, I mean, because the reason I think it came up is because usually first responders have a shorter work life for obvious reasons. And so we had a discussion about whether their retirement age should be calculated at age 50 instead of 55 or 60.

[04:07:16] That didn't happen, is that correct? Back in late 2020. No, I mean for this, for right now, that is not happening. That's correct. I do believe that, let me stop saying it that way, it is absolutely factually correct.

[04:07:35] The first responders have a shorter work life. And so that not being calculated in is something that I'm concerned about. And then I think, Ms. Green, I think you actually said that we purposely don't build in COLAs.

[04:07:57] Is that correct? Can you talk about that a little bit and why?

[04:08:14] That is correct. And the way that the board has directed that these plans be designed is with the intention to control the county's cost liability. So if you build in a factor where that liability is going to be increasing year over year over with a COLA, that kind of undermines what the intention was of how the board set these plans up back in 2013. Can it be done? Yes, but that would not have been a recommendation by staff based off of staff's understanding of what the intent was of the board.

[04:08:32] So at that time it just wasn't done? It was not done. The intention was to set caps, hard caps. If this was to go back to bargaining, am I correct that I read that that would have to be agreed to by December of this year?

[04:08:47] In order to affect plan rates for the middle of next year, because our plan year is on a different calendar than the fiscal calendar. It's on the calendar year, so it starts on January 1. So what if it was actually just difficult for any group to pull together a bargaining team?

[04:09:09] Because, I mean, unlike the county staff, if a group has to pull together a bargaining team, only one of those people, this is their job, kind of part of their full time. Everybody else would have to go back to figuring out hours and all that type of stuff. What if that couldn't happen by the end of December, end of this year? Again, I would want to seek advice from the county attorney on this, but it would be my belief that what we would do is roll over whatever the board approved for all retirees as of January 1, including anyone who's in the IAFF bargaining unit until such time as a different agreement was negotiated with IAFF.

[04:09:43] So whatever the board approved would apply to any retirees that were in that bargaining unit until we reached a different agreement. Okay, I understand that. And then if you started to do bargaining again, is there a deadline by which the bargaining needs to be completed? In order to impact the rates for the middle of next year, starting July 1, that would be December 1 of this year.

[04:10:06] To start? To complete. To complete negotiations. Oh, I thought it was, wait, what? I thought it was December 1 of this year to begin negotiations. No, December 1 of this year to reach a tentative agreement for any fiscal proposal that would impact your FY26 budget.

[04:10:23] Mr. Hemstreet, is that realistic? To open a negotiation concluded by December 1st on this issue? Yes. No. No. Okay. Yeah, it's not. Tell me again, Ms. Green, because you're saying by December 31st so it could be included in the budget that starts in January.

[04:10:54] December 1 in order to be included in the budget December 1 correct which would start on July 1 which means that the first part of that plan year whatever went into effect is what the board would approve if something if it could not knowing that that's not possible is there some way that if the the bargaining and then the decision start later can there be some kind of prorated amount that is returned to people something else that can be done because which which is which you're stating I I understand the reasons you're stating it, I understand the calendar, and it's very late in the year.

[04:11:28] But you're offering something that's literally not possible. So knowing that that is not possible, if we go back, if we start bargaining again and it's concluded, I don't know, April of next year, what can happen fiscally to mitigate that issue, the fact that they would have missed that deadline?

[04:11:49] I think there's a provision under the ordinance that does allow us to extend that December 1 timeframe. I would have to defer to the county administrator and OMB on how far out we would be able to push that timeframe in order to plan for budgeting, whatever we reach to. But again, you're talking about extending the timeframe to have it completed. Correct. Yeah. And I'm saying, I mean, you know, if it is not completed until May of next year, is there some kind of prorated return of revenue or cost or money that can be returned to if something else is agreed on.

[04:12:27] I'm not sure I understand the question. Because I'm not asking it well, so I understand you don't understand the question I'm not asking well. If this does not finish until April or May of next year, based on what happened in the bargaining, Could there be some type of reimbursement that is given back to them after that?

[04:12:54] To the retirees who paid the increased rate? That would be highly unusual. I would believe that the board would be able to approve that if they so chose to do so. I would recommend that that would be negotiated if that's what we were going to do.

[04:13:11] All of it would be negotiated at that point. whatever settlement authority that the board gave us. But again, that would be a very highly unusual thing to do. And I would imagine, I mean, I would imagine that even if there's an extended timeline, that extended timeline couldn't be that far out. It's just, I mean, what, two more weeks maybe? I mean, it just couldn't be that far out. I think that it depends on whether IAFF would desire to negotiate retiree health as a package. I think Group A and Group B are very different from group c and group d if their concerns were primarily group c and group d we might be able

[04:13:50] to reach some sort of an agreement i do not believe their concerns are primarily group c and group d in that case then it would have to be negotiated and it would take some time in order to get to a final agreement well no i mean we can let others ask questions i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i can it may be come back thank you yeah i apologize i'm not going to cut you out but if you need more time i'm just saying why don't we okay supervisor remstead oh thank you um i really appreciate jeanette you're getting back to us with your analysis of the

[04:14:28] concerns from iaff and you did that pretty quickly um i i am getting the feeling that staff is very very concerned about us not taking a vote tonight am i correct in assuming that if we don't move this along, imperfect as it might be from the perspective of some members of the board, if we don't move this along, staff feels that we're going to have a bit of a chaotic

[04:15:06] situation with our coverage. Yes. I would not know how to establish plan rates for my retirees for FY 2025. And if we leave its status quo, as the rates are established right now, the retirees who are my primary concern in this item will see a massive and substantial increase. And that's what we're really trying to get ahead of in this moment. That's good enough for me. Thank you.

[04:15:39] Mr. Sainz. Thank you. Just out of curiosity, when did the report or the analysis come back to staff from the consultant? - We had gone through multiple iterations, trying to get to make sure that we had a clear understanding.

[04:15:57] I believe, thinking it was sometime in June or July, I believe. - June or July, was that the first iteration? And then when was the final iteration? - No, no, towards the end, towards the end. - Towards the end? - Yeah. - So when was the first iteration?

[04:16:14] - No, no, the final iteration. - I know what you said, you had several back and forth. When was the first one? - Off the top of my head, I'm not sure. when was the first time that we received the consultant to report back and then when was the ending after back and forth when was the final i can tell you the final i believe was either june or july david i'm not sure when the first one first one was in may in may okay so it was may and then there were some in june there were some in july okay of this year all right all right

[04:16:48] well thank you okay so um i do think we needed this item last month it would have helped um I'm not going to beat you up. I think we all could acknowledge that would have been much better for us because now we are in a situation here.

[04:17:05] I read the IFF memo. I tried to read your response, but I was driving here when you sent it. I appreciate it was a quick turnaround. I think we're kind of stuck in a position. We do need to take a step back. So the plan is it was designed, and I was the only member of the board at the time.

[04:17:22] First of all, for context, I don't believe we would be funding any retiree health if hadn't done what we did at that time because we would have been just completely blown out and a lot of organizations were it's what drove some counties into bankruptcy metro actually canceled retiree health completely believe it or not so it became a just a huge issue that we had to get under control um i do think one potential culprit for this was the 10 back look 10 year look back that we put at it going forward i think we should do it much more frequently like three or five 10 years probably too much so that was a mistake that was probably made at that time

[04:18:01] but that's number one for context number two for context is status quo is much much worse for retirees so we can't in that sense let the perfect be the enemy of good here we have to move forward something if i trying to sort of drill down to what the issues are it's essentially how much of a subsidy should be particularly on group b and i don't know that i can answer that question tonight i did raise chair randall yes a question of a separate for group c a separate um public safety group because of the age of the retiree that's still something that we should probably

[04:18:36] consider the the group b discussion i think is a little more complicated and you know you all know my feelings on collective bargaining look you live by the sword you die by the sword this was a collective bargaining issue it is a collective bargaining issue it probably is something because of the financial act that would have to be collectively bargained that isn't to say that we shouldn't try to understand it better and if we have more time I'm not convinced that we maybe could have maybe found a way forward here ourselves but I don't know how we do that right now so on the spot so I think that kind of leaves us in this position of probably having to move this forward I am open to any and all the discussions with IAFF and others about how to fix this from

[04:19:15] their point of view it's going to require money from us you know we obviously it kind of I was thinking about it earlier tonight when we were talking about the revenue discussion on the personal property tax issue because this is a pretty significant expenditure now that was essentially unplanned when we began that discussion but we have to take care of our retirees is the bottom line so and i'm fully committed to that so i think what i'm probably going to do absent a better alternative is to make the motion in the package and then if we want to do an information item on costing out the various IFF proposals as they came back then we can do that if we want to

[04:19:54] have some subsequent discussion about potential plan modification changes that can go into effect at a later date we can certainly do that too and continue the dialogue I do think it would be helpful for IFF and the county staff to sit down maybe even informally if that's possible to talk this through a little bit and try to really crystallize kind of where where we're at and then see if the board can be helpful not in a formal collective bargaining so that we can be kind of involved and then if it gets to a formal collective bargaining obviously then that's a process that's that's laid out so i think that's probably what i'm going to do is make this motion

[04:20:28] and then we can sort of move forward from that okay so i move the finance government operations economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors approve re-anchoring the annual cap and total contribution cap on increases to county contributions to retiree health care plan costs plan year 2025 rates from plan year 2013 rates for retirees in group a increase the county subsidies for retiree health care plan costs by 50 percent for retirees in group b and adopt the premium outline attachment one for plan year 2025 january 125 to december 31st

[04:21:04] 2025. i further move the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors authorize a purchasing agent and the department of human resources to take the necessary actions to implement the recommended plan changes and proposed premiums for retiree health plan seconded by supervisor obstet so i think i said most of what i would say in the opening other than i think this is not the only discussion that we're going to have on this topic we probably do need to continue the discussion but just so we understand the clear timeline here this is scheduled if it's coming out of committee to go to the board october

[04:21:40] 16th and then it has to be implemented for december 1 january 1 january 1 correct notifying retirees correct when though we would typically do that in november okay is that the plan typically in october i'm sorry typically in october but we've put it back a little bit so their open enrollment now actually is mid-november through the end of november they've already been notified of when their open enrollment is but not yet the rates okay so this needs to be part of that conversation and that's one of the reasons for the really difficult timeline here okay all right other

[04:22:16] comments on the motion everybody's lights on let's just go this way supervisor umstead i would just like to in in relation to the chairs um i think very good comment about it would be beneficial for staff and iaff to uh sit down and go over this i did note in your email that staff had offered that opportunity and uh you have not yet been taken up on that offer that is correct all right so thank you for doing that and probably need to do it again hopefully they'll respond i will

[04:22:55] thank you sarah so i you know listen i i want to be real careful i think this has all happened really very quickly and you know mr the head of the union center sent an email today and I do think that there is already some dialogue and back and forth, and they are already responding in some ways, and I want to just make sure that's known.

[04:23:21] You know, to Ms. Letourneau's point, I don't know how fast, because IAFF, you know, again, they have to go kind of pull the group back together. It's not like, you know, everyone's just sitting in the building. They've got to go figure that out again and find their attorney who's actually working on another issue right now and all those things.

[04:23:39] So they can't pull that trigger quite as easily. However, I would say that I do like the idea of trying to have some, I don't know if you want to call it informal conversation, but something out of a formal collective bargaining discussion.

[04:23:56] What that would do, I think people might be, you get some ground rules down on what to do next. It would help me understand what's going on a little bit more because once you go into a formal collective bargaining discussion, Now we are not having any discussions with anybody but staff, which is okay, but that's just how that works.

[04:24:16] And, you know, after they talk amongst themselves and pull it together, you know, as fast as possible would be helpful. I don't, you know, I think these are some very large discrepancies on the two sides, and there's no way to get to it but to come together and have these discussions.

[04:24:36] So as fast as that can happen in an informal way. And I would also say, if you do have to go into a collective bargaining discussion, then I would like to see it in writing that we're only opening it up for this part of the collective bargaining agreement, and nothing else gets opened up.

[04:24:53] All right. Thank you. Okay. Supervisor Brisbane. I'll just echo what the chair just said, all of that. but um i wanted to address something that you said chair latourneau and that is are we only looking at the opeb every 10 years and should we not maybe would it be appropriate right now to have a friendly that says we look at it every five years or or so i don't want to make there's

[04:25:30] an opeb committee of the county which i sit on that meets a couple times a year so we don't just only look at it however the rates themselves were set on a 10-year look back right so when the board implemented the plan they gave us direction that in 10 years we were to review the rates and the caps and come back with recommendations and that that recommendation was very timely because it took us this amount of time in order to exceed the cap but we could set that lower if the board desire to this really wasn't an issue sorry i'm in your time but well i'm willing to offer friendly

[04:26:06] that we that we have a five-year look back or whatever you think is appropriate you're on the ope board um a five-year look back a seven-year look back i don't know how about the county minister has opinion i think five is okay i'd add that friendly sure i would accept that okay thank you yep um mr sander thank you i'll just follow along to my question earlier about when we received the report back and everything you said June was the final after going back and forth from May and I'm not trying to be cute or point any fingers with this next question is but what were we doing from June to now and can we look back maybe try to bring this to us sooner next

[04:26:45] time? I think it's important to note that we also have an active employee renewal that we work on in that same time frame, and so we prioritized the work. This project also not only includes HR staff, budget is a part of it, finance and procurement. The county administrator had to be brief, so there were a lot of moving pieces to this to get to a point where we got to recommendations to bring before the board. I agree that the timing was not ideal.

[04:27:12] My preference would have been last month, but I will say in defense of my staff and everyone at this table, we were working hard to get this recommendation to you. It's just a very complex project yeah and i'm not just like i said i'm not trying to be cute or pointing your fingers but just trying to understand if maybe you can do an assessment to see if we can next time bring it back you know like you said in september or or so yeah thank you uh yeah so i obviously that's that's true and you know we can go back in time maybe we should have started earlier and so on so forth that is what it is now but it is a little frustrating um order mr chairman did the Did the second or the motion just accept the friendly?

[04:27:52] Sorry, Supervisor Umstead. Yes, she did. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do think a five-year look back would maybe help a little bit, too, with the load of the amount of work that has to take place. Although, as you said, we didn't run into this cap problem until recently.

[04:28:11] And so, you know, I guess we probably wouldn't have made changes previous to this, but it came on us very quickly. I can remember sitting here when we were talking about dipping into the trust, And thinking, okay, you know, I guess we'll be fine, but we've seen what's happened in the world with medical rates.

[04:28:29] And we had a pretty difficult conversation up here about the active employee health plan as well, because that's a significant increase. And that's kind of, unfortunately, the world we're in. We were able to sort of address those folks at least through salary increases, but, you know, the retirees are a different story.

[04:28:47] So I think there's more to come on this. My hope is that I know that, you know, in good faith, the county and IAFF can talk through this a little bit and see if it really crystallized exactly what the issues are. And then, you know, perhaps we need to bring the item back to the committee here for some board direction, get some more information about costs associated with proposals.

[04:29:07] And then if the decision is made to go back to collective bargaining, we can, you know, that can, then that takes us out of it at some point. but let's see if we can kind of continue a dialogue for a little while here and get at that while we move forward on this and then potentially make, if we're going to make adjustments, do so in the future.

[04:29:26] Okay. All in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries 5-0. Thank you very much. Okay. We're moving to item 18, Deferred Compensation 457B Plan Record Keeper Request for proposal and investment selection.

[04:29:51] Same group. Same group, yes. I don't have a presentation for this particular item, so I'm more than happy to run through the item and some of the highlights of that or be here to answer any questions that you may have. Yeah, I was actually going to propose this for consent, honestly.

[04:30:08] Does anybody have any real questions or concerns on this? It's a, I mean, the reason we should take a minute here is it's a 10-year contract, So, I don't know if you just want to give us maybe a, you know, a 60-second kind of overview just for the public's benefit of what we're talking about.

[04:30:27] Sure. Sure. So, as you -- I'm sure you know, we are -- our current deferred comp plan is with Mission Square Retirement, and they are both our record keeper, and we have all of their funds with them, proprietary funds. And so, we had not looked and done an RFP for either the investments or the record keeper in quite some time. We've been with Mission Square, I believe, since 2008. And prior to that we were with Nationwide. So we contracted with Aon Consulting and Aon Investment Group.

[04:31:00] They're actually on the phone right now should any questions come up regarding investments. But we did a thorough review of the existing investment opportunities that we have and the fees associated with that. And Aon came back to us with a number of recommendations that we selected a whole new investment portfolio for our employees, saving our employees per year approximately $670,000 in investment fees per year.

[04:31:26] This is more of an open architecture model where we don't have to go with a record keeper and just the refunds. So we selected our investments through a variety of different methodology, through Aon, kind of a vetting methodology. And then the second phase of this project was an actual RFP for the record keeper itself.

[04:31:46] Who is going to manage those funds? Who are employees going to talk to? Who are we going to work with as a plan sponsor? So we did that RFP. It was a very robust RFP, 265 pages, over 20 PAG meetings. Typically PAG meetings are, you know, maybe two or three at the most.

[04:32:03] We had 20. Our PAG members spent over 70 hours looking over $4,400, 4,400 points of data to come up with and to score these proposals. We had four proposals that came in, Mission Square being the incumbent was one of them.

[04:32:21] Voya, Empower, and Nationwide came in as well. And based upon the scoring and some evaluation criteria that was in this item, they scored Empower to win that award. And Empower is a major industry leader in this space. And the reason for the 10-year is because, given what we're dealing with here, you want a longer roadmap.

[04:32:43] You do. And it's a 10-year rate guarantee as well. So that's a pretty big deal. Obviously, if there are any problems, we don't have to stay with them for 10 years. It's simply, you know, we were able to secure that through negotiations. Okay. So, barring any other questions then, I'm going to move to the Finance, Government, Operations, and Development Committee.

[04:33:02] I recommend the Board of Supervisors approve a new Deferred Compensation 457B plan record keeper contract with Empower Retirement LLC for 10 years and approve a new investment lineup for plan participants to choose from as recommended the October 8, 2024 Finance Government Operations and Economic Development Committee action item.

[04:33:19] I further move the Finance Government Operations and Economic Development Committee, recommend the Board of Supervisors authorize the purchasing agent and the Department of Human Resources to take the necessary actions to implement this change to be effective April 1, 2025. Second. by Supervisor Umstead. I have no opening. Supervisor Brisbane. So this is just for the 457B.

[04:33:39] Everything else is staying with Mission Squared? No. So just to be clear, this is separate and apart from our VRS benefits. This is our local deferred comp plan. It's the 457B. And you also have a if you contribute to that, you also have a county match, which is in a 401A. There's a couple different programs. But Mission Square is actually going away and Empower will be the new record keeper. Oh, Mission Square is going away totally? That's correct. Well, that's a bigger deal than I

[04:34:12] thought it was. But don't you have to change all of your investments then? Yes, that's what I was referring to Aon. We did a robust investment review and have selected all new investments where employees, these are less expensive investments. It's an open architecture, so we're able to pull from a much greater pool of investments for our employees.

[04:34:38] But will employees who are part of Mission Squared have to go back and, like, reselect all of their funds they have? No, we will go ahead and put together a like-to-like mapping strategy for those employees. So depending upon the asset class, if you have a certain type of asset class investment, they'll be mapped over to a similar like one.

[04:35:00] And will employees have to manage – you said that you're saving management fees. Just the investment fees. The investment fees. Yes, the lower-cost investments. Okay. Okay. I guess I'm curious about what kind of a burden it's going to be on employees to have to, will they have to go like have a training and then have a call and?

[04:35:31] It's going to be no different than rolling out any other benefit. We'll make sure they understand what opportunity is going to be afforded them in terms of that mapping strategy. They don't have to engage that. They can essentially do their own if they'd like, or they can map as most employers do when they make these changes.

[04:35:55] Thank you. I was just going to clarify or point out that even to say if we were staying with the current firm, from time to time, sometimes you and maybe you've noticed this or think about it now, from time to time, sometimes they will say, hey, you're on this investment portfolio, but this is changing or we're getting rid of this investment and now we're adding this one.

[04:36:21] So you have to go here or make new allocations. So, you know, well, every now and again, it does happen, and investments do change. As a matter of fact, within the past week, we were just notified by Mission Square. They are pulling one of their investments and swapping it out with another one.

[04:36:36] That will happen within this transition period. So it does happen. It actually happens a lot more often than you think. You just have to pay attention to those e-mails or those letters, those notifications that come in the mail. So it's just more par for the course. Empire is a well-known, established outfit that does very well.

[04:36:56] So, yeah, it's not, how can I say, not a super big deal. I didn't even know we got this. So, okay. Thank you, Mr. Sayance, the HR professional, for that explanation.

[04:37:18] I don't know. All right. Anyway, all in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries. 5-0. All right. Moving on to number 19. Request for use of space and fee waiver within a Loudoun County Community Center by Specially Adapted Resource Clubs or SPARK.

[04:38:00] We are ready when you are. Good evening, supervisors and committee members. With me tonight is Assistant County Administrator Vincent Jones, and he's going to open up with a few comments, and then I've got an opening to kick off the item as well. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Torpy, chair and committee. So I just wanted to provide a brief bit of context before Mr. Torpy gets started.

[04:38:30] We wanted to just let you know that we are keenly aware that there is some deliberate conversation taking place about services that we provide to members of our community who may be impacted by developmental disabilities or challenges. and we wanted to make sure that tonight that this item that you're considering is considered as an ancillary part of that discussion because we want to make sure that for this you consider it as a policy discussion about the fee waiver and what your comfort level is with that and with that I'll turn it over to Mr. Torpy. So thank you Mr. Jones this uh this item request as spelled out

[04:39:06] is about a use for the Sterling Community Center spaced by the nonprofit organization, Specially Adaptive Resource Clubs, or SPARC. This program offers continuing education, leisure and recreation activities, as well as life learning skills for young adults with disabilities.

[04:39:26] However, the large part of their program is to provide social engagement and opportunities for participants to be around their peers. I do want to note that this program is not licensed through the state of Virginia and is considered a social type program, and they do not provide personal care assistance during this program.

[04:39:48] As I'm sure you are aware, we have a longstanding history of working with nonprofits and providing space at times free of charge, but this situation is unique and different from our normal operations and that this request is for an extended period of time and multiple hours at a time.

[04:40:09] As Mr. Jones mentions, you know, we recognize the ongoing discussion surrounding programs for residents. And although SPARC does provide a program that could help certain residents with disabilities and their families, really, as was mentioned, this is about do we want to allow a pilot program like this at Sterling Community Center for up to a year.

[04:40:32] There are some concerns that are highlighted in the item such as there is seems to be some uncertainty over future grant funding and the ability to secure that to date as well as choosing one group over another. However, this group did come to the county. They are ready to provide that program and staff is willing to try this pilot program at the community center. There is no direct fiscal impact as the hours are going to be during or would be during the times that

[04:41:07] the center is already open and the program does not request assistance from staff for this. The times being considered were chosen because historically at the at the center this particular room has had very limited activity during the time frame that we have talked about during the days and hours that are in the item so with that chair the turner i will answer any questions that the committee may have thank you mr torpy i imagine we do have some questions let's start on this then sir briskman thank you um do they already have clients then in loudon county

[04:41:46] that would be coming yeah so one of the uh in in speaking with them the reason why when they applied for the federal grant funding to open one location in Alexandria and one location in Loudoun was because the sites that they are currently operating in Fairfax do have Loudoun County residents that are going and participating there. Oh, okay, okay, great. And has SPARC applied for Loudoun County grants yet? Have they been part of that process? Not that I'm aware of. Or non-profit

[04:42:20] grants okay um do you know if they're licensed it's not licensed program through the state no okay are they certified somehow that i do not know i'll have to find that out for you okay well because i feel like it's a certain amount of liability if the county's letting them use the facility that we make sure that they are yeah reputable yeah definitely yeah um i don't doubt they are because i know the folks who who are involved but um it is a little bit of an in my

[04:42:58] opinion a little bit of an added risk for the county um if we don't have that understanding um and uh are we so so the room has not been getting a lot of use during these hours but it sure seems like great preschool hours have we ever thought about child care or preschool programs at the sterling community center or do we already provide them we are currently running them preschool type programs it's not a licensed program obviously but they are they do have a very strong program down there in a different wing of the community center this is

[04:43:34] this program would be in the art room which is on another side of the building and is it not on Wednesdays because the preschoolers are using the art room on Wednesdays no it's because there's actually an art program that is happening and we did not want to displace that program okay and And it seems to me like staff might be a little concerned about having a flood of requests for this if we do this.

[04:43:59] I have a little bit of concern about that. The amount that is being anticipated that would be able to be accommodated in the room is up to 10 participants at any given time. I know there was a question earlier from Supervisor Sains about does it have to just be 10 or could there be a multiple things and that is what they do over in Fairfax and Arlington is you have the option of coming one two three four or five days a week so there could be the potential of multiple people participating in this program just not on four days at a time okay oh I see what

[04:44:39] you're saying okay it does look like in the item it said this program is not licensed by the commonwealth and but is considered a social program with no personal assistance provided so that that helps thank you mr. Sains well thank you yeah to follow mr.

[04:44:56] Torpy what he was with miss Brickson's question I proposed instead of it being so you're going four days a week Monday Tuesday and Thursday Friday maybe have one block a group go Monday Tuesday and then another block goes Thursday Friday so that possibly can open it up to more participants so mr. Tarpey if we currently have Loudon residents that go to the program in Fairfax and say if we do open this program and my understanding is only going to be for Loudon residents is that correct? Yes. Will those Loudon residents that attend in Fairfax be asked to then sign up for this and leave their spots at

[04:45:35] Fairfax or will they those Loudon folks be able to still attend in Fairfax and we open it up to a brand new folks that are not you know participating with the SPAR program now. Yeah, my understanding is that you are able to sign up wherever there is space available in this program. One of the things that the executive director did share with me in one of the conversations that we had was that the reason why they were trying to open a location in Loudon was because of the requests for those folks that are participating in Fairfax to have

[04:46:11] a place closer to home. So do we know by how many Loudoun folks are attending now in Fairfax? That I do not know. Because now that kind of opens up, you know, say if people that are from Loudoun attending in Fairfax, if they just roll over, then all the spots are taken care of, and then we're not able to even add any new folks. So maybe, well, depending on what happens tonight, if we can get some clarity on that. And then another, and I don't know if we're going to, Again, depending on what happens tonight, from my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong,

[04:46:47] the funding will last, is it one calendar year or is it just from when it starts and then? So they had an amount and what she was anticipating was with the amount between what was given to start a program in Alexandria and one to start here in Loudoun that she thought that it would be able to cover a full operating cost for a year.

[04:47:11] So hypothetically from January to December. Correct. Okay. And then I'm assuming we've had that conversation, we'll possibly have the conversation again depending on what happens tonight to say hey, we're doing hypothetically from January to December. Once your funding runs out we can talk about next steps but just know once it's done then the program.

[04:47:35] In conversations about what I would be bringing forward for consideration it was very clear that this was a pilot program and that the if this went forward the advertisement and marketing would have to describe it as such so that there would not be a guarantee.

[04:47:53] Okay and then will this affect any summer camp or summer programs that we have at the community center? Not not at this time and that's one of the things that why we why we selected that is this was the one place that we did have a room that we felt for that period of time during the day we would be able to accommodate this. Okay all right and we don't need to have any county staff helping or any anything of that nature? That's correct. And how

[04:48:32] many employees will they staff or did we get that detail? It depends on the number of people that they register but usually what i have seen at the at the fairfax county programs it's it's typically three or four staff members that are at those sites okay and last question do we know how they will advertise and what's their criteria to accept families into their program i haven't seen the the criterias for acceptance but the the advertisement they do a lot of social media outreach I know that they have already been in conversations with a lot of the

[04:49:11] other organizations in Loudoun that provide services for folks with disabilities okay thank you so let me help you out with some of these questions one when it says they don't have a license is because this is not a program that takes Medicaid waivers and so a Medicaid waiver program would have to have a license they don't need to have a license because they're not a Medicaid waiver program just so you know how that is secondly everyone would be coming from Loudoun County and you know how these parents have been coming in here with their kids saying that they need some assistance that's what we're talking about we're talking about those those get these are Loudoun County young people who need to have assistance that's what they are

[04:49:50] secondly or thirdly to the question of how many employees do they have the every client has a person coming with them so it is a one-to-one program so there's other employees also but every client that comes in has a person that comes with them when it says they don't offer offer treatment. What they're talking about is SPARC doesn't do, it may not, because there's only four hours, they may not do any medical treatments or even feeding tubes. They do social and they feed them and that type of thing. They really do help them a lot with their ADLs, their activities of daily living, and they do quite a bit of social structure

[04:50:26] with them. These clients are what would be technically referred to as medically fragile, meaning they are so severe that they can't work, that most of them are bound in some way.

[04:50:42] Some of them sometimes are not verbal. They're not able to work outside the home at all. And to the question of do they have to advertise, the waiting list for even non-Medicaid care for this population is down your arm.

[04:50:58] And the Medicaid waiver list will be opening up very soon and probably will clear out to a large degree. But for people who don't have a Medicaid waiver yet, they can use that. And we can't say to them, you know, these clients come in on this day, these clients come in on that day.

[04:51:15] That has to be a decision they make. That's a decision they make. It may be that a client is having a very tough day, is not able to settle down, cannot get grounded, whatever. And they're not going to bring them that day. But they will have a list of young people or kids or just people who can come at all times.

[04:51:35] If you've ever sat down with Jim Dyke or Ellen Dyke, and if you go to their site, every single question you ask is on their site. Most questions you guys just ask is actually in the item, right? But every single question you all just ask is actually in the site.

[04:51:51] So my only question, Mr. Torpy, is during the summer when the room is used more, because it's not used that much when school is in, would it be -- and I'm careful of this because these are Loudon residents too.

[04:52:09] They have every right to use the room like everybody else. But during the summer, is that room used more often or not? And then the other statement I would have, more of a statement than a question, sometimes the best way we can help these types of organizations, this is going to be very helpful if we decide to do this, sometimes the best way we can help is to provide help with their grant writing services so that they actually have enough money to not have to have a fee waiver, they have enough money to do something different.

[04:52:40] So that might be something we want to look at to invite them to come to some of our grant writing trainings so that they know what they're doing as well. So, but the summer question. So the summer question is, I did have a conversation with the manager of that site, and although we do run quite a bit of summer programs out of the Sterling Community Center, they did feel that they could program around the limited need of that room to maintain this through the summertime.

[04:53:12] So they did not think that that was going to be an issue. Okay. Thank you. okay um i do have some questions more related to policy um it's not about the program is fantastic obviously i want to try to make this work however there does seem to be a discrepancy between our policy and perhaps what the policies are of the surrounding counties we did receive a letter from spark indicating that if we were to require a essentially a fee waiver on their end in perpetuity they could not make the program work, that they have to receive a certain amount of essentially

[04:53:48] tuition. So we have a strict policy that says, I believe in our community centers, you can't charge for service and obtain a fee waiver on using our facility. They have these programs running in Arlington and in Fairfax County, clearly using county facilities, and yet they obviously are charging tuition. So do you know anything about that? Is there a discrepancy there between our policy in other counties? Or is there something I'm not aware of? No. Fairfax County has the same

[04:54:22] type of policy. They have, my understanding in talking with some folks over there was that there wasn't, years ago, there was an exception made for them to be in those facilities. Okay. But they have a very similar rental policy for us that, you know, if you are running a program, if you're running a summer camp or running a clinic or something along those lines, you rent space in order to do that. I was about to say, you can do it and charge for it, but you have to pay for the space. What would the cost of the space that we're foregoing amount to here? Oh, it's for that art

[04:55:02] room, and I'll have that for Tuesday, but it's nominal. I mean, it's $70 an hour perhaps. I think it's around about $54 to $70, because I know the community room is about $54 to $70. But that's you know times x number of days time you know it would still add up to thousands correct dollars so yeah let's get that number so we know exactly what we're waiving and then i guess my only concern would be i want to do this and i want to make it work but you know as a pilot it's one thing then if it's successful in terms of you know participation

[04:55:38] and things like that where do we go from there utilizing space fee waiver discussion tuition on their side all those kind of issues would have to be worked out so that is a little bit complicated.

[04:55:53] It is and that's why we're here because that's one of those questions that would need to be discussed as a part of that analysis at the end of the pilot program is, is Sterling Community Center truly the place to remain? Do we want to continue to waive those fees? Has the program been so successful that they could offset those fees yeah all right mr sains do you want to make the motion since we're talking about the sterling community center oh sure thank you i move that the finance government operations economic development committee recommend that the

[04:56:30] board of supervisors direct staff to work with the specially adapted resource clubs better known as spark on a one-year pilot program for adults with disabilities to be held at the sterling community center that this program be limited to the arts room from 10 a.m to 2 p.m on monday tuesday thursday and friday and that the customary rental fees be waived for this one-year pilot program period as long as participants are as long as participants are not charged a fee by spark second which is made by mr sane seconded by chair randall any discussion on the motion no just quickly say uh glad we can move this item forward and and provide the service to

[04:57:09] much needed uh population excuse me in loudon county thank you to chair randall for advocating and bringing uh this this cause to the to the forefront and i believe also uh supervisor glass i believe uh for for her advocacy work and bringing this forward to us as well and to the staff for uh working with spark and bringing this in front of us so uh thank you to everybody who's involved and let's make this thing happen okay chair randall yeah mr chairman i i i completely agree agree with um what you're saying and truthfully you know my well i don't have any

[04:57:45] doubt doubt that we should do this because you know this is this is it may not be child care because they're not children but they cannot care for themselves so it is it is care whatever we want to call it it is it is it is person care um but i do wonder like you know when when when the the pilots over what happens and what happens to the fees and all that type of stuff, which is why I think since these clients are in Loudoun County, again, I will take it by myself to tell Mr. and Mrs. Dyke, Dr. Dyke and Ellen Dyke, to talk to our staff about looking into

[04:58:24] the grant process, not just in Loudoun, but they've gotten pretty good about showing them how to do other grants, too, and so maybe some of that could, you know, after this pilot programs up we can figure out other ways to offset some of the fees I think it's a it's a it's a financially a valid question so thank you I do think mr.

[04:58:43] Dyke probably has some pretty good resources available to him and his firm so maybe that yeah closing mr. Saints closing thank you yeah to mr. mrs. Dyke and in the spark organization again and hopefully staff you know what's this moving forward staff can work with them and maybe we'll look into finding a a permanent home in Loudoun County for this program at some point.

[04:59:07] So thank you. Okay, all in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries. 5-0. Thank you. All right, we're getting there. We're getting there. We got, I think, we have four or five items left. We're into item 20, which is proposed countywide bicycle and pedestrian wayfinding program.

[04:59:25] Let's definitely do this one. Are we going to need a break after that, or do we just want to keep going? I'll check in after that. Okay. All right. I will say this was one of these initiatives that have been around so long that I kind of forgot about it Like it was and I don't remember when it was initiated, but it was a long time ago 2017 good evening. Good evening

[05:00:05] Mr. Chairman and members of the committee we're here tonight to present the proposed bicycle and pedestrian wayfinding program Which has already been presented to T lock last month We're presenting as the Finance Committee tonight and then we'll be at the full board here in the near future Just with me today, we have Scott Worst, our deputy director, Aloysia Thring, our traffic engineering program manager, Laura Ghosh, senior traffic engineer and project manager for this initiative, and our consultant team from VHB, Kevin Keeley, and Michelle Cavucci.

[05:00:39] And I will turn it over to Aloysia to walk through the presentation. Thank you. Good evening, Chair Letourneau, members of the committee. Good evening. The slide deck that will be shown today, or tonight, is the same that was presented to TLAC last month, September 2024, with additional slide reflecting the committee's recommendations and summarizing the planning level cost estimate for the next steps to the development of the countywide bicycle and pedestrian wayfinding program.

[05:01:18] Next slide, please. The PowerPoint presentation will consist of 15 slides tonight. I will start by briefly highlighting several key events that led us to where we are today. Following my presentation, Ms. Ghosh will define.

[05:01:36] You don't have to do all 15. I know T-Luck was into it, but we're busier, so it's 11 o'clock. I don't want to cut you short, but, you know. Do you want me to move it along? Just move it along. Okay.

[05:01:52] Okay, sure, sure, sure, all right so we are in slide two, basically we're going to go over the background information, I will do that, and Laura will jump in to talk about the wayfinding, the definition of wayfinding, Mr. Keeley next to her right will go over the proposed sign family and wayfinding methodology and the proposed pilot routes and talk about the benefits of the program.

[05:02:25] And then Laura Ghosh will wrap it up with recommendations and cost estimates. Certainly we'll go over the study background real quick. In November 2017, the TLUC directs staff to work with Bike Loudon on the viability of the Western Loudon loop.

[05:02:42] Just to give you some background on that, Bike Loudoun is an advocacy group, as most of you know, that promotes a comfortable and safe bicycling and walking experience on the county shared use paths and sidewalks, including county roadways for those who are avid and highly experienced cyclists.

[05:03:01] In May 2019, the Department of Transportation Capital Infrastructure and VDOT and Bike Loudoun a conversation during that conversation by cloud and expressed interest to use wayfinding as a messaging tool to inform bicyclists of, excuse me, of an alternative route over the Dulles Greenway at Belmont Ridge Road, which is located in the Ashburn District.

[05:03:29] When the bridge was built approximately 30 years ago, the bridge cross section consisted of two lanes, one in each direction, with very wide shoulders on both sides and no sidewalks or shared use paths. To increase capacity on this bridge, in 2020, the shoulders were repurposed, providing a four-lane cross section, making it two lanes in each direction. The four-lane cross section is consistent with the roadways cross section to the north and south of the bridge. However, given the limited space on the bridge, installation of a sidewalk and shared use path could not be accommodated, so today walking or biking across the bridge

[05:04:08] is not encouraged. It's deemed unsafe. And finally, in February 2021, the board approved a budget adjustment for this group to review the program development for wayfinding study.

[05:04:28] At this point, I will pass it on to Laura Ghosh, who will go over the use of the wayfinding. Thank you, Aloysa. Okay, so today we're talking about wayfinding signs that are geared toward pedestrians and bicyclists or other people who use sidewalks, trails, and bike lanes in the county to figure out where they are in their environment and how to get where they want to go.

[05:04:52] Okay, this is not a replacement for the existing welcome to wayfinding signs that are throughout the county right now. It is really geared toward that subset of the traveling public. And I will pass it on to Kevin to introduce the proposed wayfinding sign typology.

[05:05:12] Great. Thank you, Laura. So in our work on developing the wayfinding, proposed wayfinding program, we did conduct focus group outreach and received some really important input a little bit about the program design and also what the sign should look like.

[05:05:40] So really our work focused on two key components here, what the wayfinding signage should look like and where that signage should go. The next couple slides show the six sign typologies that make up the wayfinding sign family.

[05:05:57] Each sign in the family is intended to serve a specific purpose at a particular point in in the user's journey. I won't go through all the specifics of the different signs here, but the real key, one of the key takeaways from the focus group engagement was that there was a preference for the standard green signs that you see on this slide here.

[05:06:20] So that was really in the interest of simplicity and cost effectiveness. So the bulk of the signage in the proposed wayfinding program would be comprised of these, the standard green signs. There might also be custom elements as part of the program.

[05:06:38] Here we have a few different concepts that were developed with input from the focus group members and in coordination with DTCI that serve different purposes along a journey. Again, I won't go into too much detail, but these would be subject to additional design efforts to revise and refine the concepts that you see here should the board choose to explore this further.

[05:07:12] And so in developing the program concepts, we also explored working with DTCI staff and with considering the focus group input. We developed a set of methodologies for prioritizing wayfinding, location selection.

[05:07:36] And those methodologies were built on two foundational themes of directing people where they wanna go by walking, biking, and rolling, and doing so using relatively low stress routes. So this concept of low stress routes is really critical to encouraging the widest cross-section of potential users that we will be sending them on a viable route that's comfortable.

[05:08:00] Some examples of low-stress routes include shared-use paths, dedicated on-street facilities like bike lanes, separated bike lanes, and shared road conditions along low-speed, low-volume streets. This approach yielded what you see in the schematic here, a series of organizing elements that comprise the wayfinding system.

[05:08:27] It's all built around priority destinations where people want to get to by walking, biking, and rolling. And then using those low-stress facilities to get folks to those priority destinations in a safe and comfortable manner.

[05:08:46] So here you see the core wayfinding routes, which are the spine of the system, and then you have supporting wayfinding routes that connect to the priority destinations. So rather than rolling this out on a countywide basis, DCCI is proposing a pair of pilot routes.

[05:09:08] This first one is in the eastern part of the county and connects two high profile destinations, the WNOD Trail and the Ashburn Metro Rail Station and leverages all the ongoing investments in active transportation facilities in this area of the county.

[05:09:25] This pilot route is four miles in length with an estimated 54 signs, and a cost of $270,000. Our second pilot route is in the western part of the county, and this ties back to what Aloysia was mentioning as one of the impetus for this whole effort, which is the Western Loudoun bike route.

[05:09:51] This connects villages and towns in the western part of the county using a variety of low stress facilities. It also connects to the vineyards, distilleries and breweries in this part of the county.

[05:10:07] And it's an estimated length of 43 and a half miles with 205 signs at a cost of $990,000. And then just to circle back to the program benefits, these are the benefits of wayfinding generally, but also of a formalized countywide program.

[05:10:33] First and foremost, it helps people orient themselves within the county's active transportation network and as that network continues to grow and become more robust and gaps are filled in, it helps direct people to comfortable direct routes to key destinations.

[05:10:49] It also aligns with the county's vision for safe and efficient travel to multiple destinations by multiple modes. It promotes retail centers and commercial activity And it also really compliments the county's capital investments, the substantial capital investments in the sidewalk and trail program and celebrates the fact that the county does have and continues to build out a premier active transportation network.

[05:11:16] I'll turn it back to Laura to talk about recommendations. Okay, so we presented the previous slides to the TLUC on September 18th, and at that time, the TLUC is recommending to the Board of Supervisors that they endorse the proposed countywide bicycle pedestrian wayfinding program, which includes endorsing the two proposed pilot bicycle wayfinding routes, the prioritization methodologies, and the recommended wayfinding sign typologies.

[05:11:46] The cost of the next steps for those elements are listed in the table on this slide. And you can see here that the total cost of implementing the pilot wayfinding routes is $1,260,000.

[05:12:06] And the total cost of doing the pilot routes plus the additional sign design and application of the prioritization methodologies is $1,730,000 estimated.

[05:12:28] Okay, so our staff recommendation tonight is to forward the funding discussion, totaling $1,730,000 to a future CIP budget discussion.

[05:12:48] And that is it for our presentation. All right, very good. I know Supervisor Brisbane has potential modifications to the motion. Why don't we just go right to you? I move that the Finance, Government, Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend that the Board of Supervisors direct staff to send the funding discussion for implementation of the pilot, bicycle, wayfinding routes, development of customized wayfinding signage,

[05:13:21] and prioritization analysis for further route selection totaling $1,730,000 as described in the October 8, 2024, Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee item to a future capital improvement budget process for consideration and prioritization by the board.

[05:13:45] I further move that the FGOEDC recommend that the Board of Supervisors direct staff to identify the feasibility of an additional pilot route in eastern Loudoun, and I'm going to add a bit to this sentence in eastern loudon as part of the proposed wayfinding program which is made by supervisor brisbane seconded by supervisor saints opening thank you so i i added that just to make sure that it's part of the same cip project um if that makes sense um i did have a bit of heartburn

[05:14:21] over this item um when it was first presented to me because uh i felt as if we were spending three times the amount of money on a pilot route that was not necessarily functional for the majority of our residents.

[05:14:44] But recognizing that this is a project that started back in 2017, I also understand that there may have been some shifting in policy intentions from the board.

[05:15:00] So initially I was thinking about trying to shorten that 40-mile route because the 40-mile route is really only something that's going to be used by very, very serious cyclists or tourists. And so in my mind, if it's more for the tourist industry, maybe we should be using, you know, like transit occupancy tax or something like that.

[05:15:23] but i also understand this is a project that started in 2017 so uh as a as a compromise i would like for my colleagues to support an additional more functional route in a part of the county where it can serve more of our residents and less of our tourist crowd if that makes sense so um that's why i added that particular part to the motion and also there there was a little bit of a change from 2017 to our general plan in 2019 because in the general plan it says that bicycle and pedestrian wayfinding should provide small parking

[05:16:02] areas and should focus on the suburban and transitional policy areas so that actually was a little bit of a change in our policy since this project was first started so that's the addition but I'm really happy that we're doing this and and i'm really happy that we will be working again toward multimodal forms of transportation in our county thank you chair thank you mr saints thank you um thank you mr prisman for the motion just to clarify the motion says to a future cip budget process do we need to spell out exactly

[05:16:38] which one because are we talking about 26 are we going to talk about 27 or 28 cip which do we need to be a little bit more it's really up to your discretion so while the acts with the way the motion is now would you be putting it to the most the upcoming cip discussion or um thank you chair supervisor sayings the way staff would um incorporate this motion is we would incorporate it into the next budget process but if you want to be specific for sake of the motion i would say into the FY26 CIP process, but I think we would default to trying to do it in that process

[05:17:18] and then talk to you about where we're able to put it. Okay, no, as long as it's involved. Well, I can accept that as a friendly, just to identify the CIP process as FY26. I'll second that. Thank you. Yeah, just want to be a little bit more specific. Thank you. Okay, so the motion was amended and then seconded. Chair Randall. Sorry, I'm not going to support this motion with with this with this listen the let's start with we're one county and so anything that's in the in the east is also in the west people can go to the

[05:17:51] west and and and and right and there is a a pilot in the east it's the WOD in trail to the Ashburn metro the WOD trail runs all through Loudoun County Eastern Loudoun County. It's there anyway. Eastern Loudoun County right now does have more sidewalks. It does have more trails. It does have more already. There's a lot already there and more coming and more coming. And this is the same discussion we have a lot. And later on when it's time to fund something somewhere else in the county, people are going to be like, I don't want to fund that because there's nobody in that part of the county.

[05:18:32] you know at some point you you know yeah i'm just i'm just not going to support this okay um yeah you can have a closing i haven't spoken on the motion yet well i just went next no there's no we're in a motion so um okay so i i i think i'll i guess i'll support it at this point i don't know when we get to the cip um i mean look the cip is just a prioritization of projects that

[05:19:08] we we want to get done using a finite amount of money so what i prioritize a 40 mile you know 205 sign wayfinding projects over a intersection improvement or a safety improvement somewhere probably not but right now we're just sending it to the budget process for a discussion um you know i i always feel a little left out of these conversations in all seriousness because we have virtually nothing in the southern part of the county whatsoever you can't cross route 50 so you can't connect to any of the wonderful things we're doing everywhere else in the county

[05:19:45] and that is why which i'll bring up and i guess the next item i have really need to get this interchange done at some point so that we can connect these things but you know it is kind of left behind completely on all this because there is no w and od trail anything else that you can get to so um but you know i'm not gonna obviously if if i think it's fine to move this forward staff's done a lot of work on it the one question i did have is i mean technology seems like it's changed i mean we're now you know making phone calls on our watches and things like that so i kind of wondered i don't mean to sound um you know is there a better way to do wayfinding i guess than

[05:20:23] sticking 205 signs out there you know is there a way using technology is there like a you know a qr code you can use to sort of follow it on i don't know i mean have we looked at anything like that or is this just very focused on kind of what the board directed you to do now seven years ago?

[05:20:40] So as part of the focus group discussions, we had a lot of discussions about QR codes or other pieces of technology that would support it. Certainly there was an ADA component discussion as part of that that relies on technology to interpret the signs. There are virtual direction apps that you could use, particularly when you get at West and cell service is spotty, those become challenging right so we see this as kind of a hand in hand if you if you lose power with your phone you still want to know how to get to where you want to get to okay no fair enough

[05:21:19] but maybe in the east you know if we're looking at pilots it could be something we looked at so okay closing surprise uh thank you chair letourneau it's um it's also not really safe to be looking at your phone when you're trying to ride your bike they do have a little holder thing um so so uh i i will point out though that nobody is i'm not asking this motion to not do the 40 mile route i didn't ask to unfund anything

[05:21:54] i'm just asking to have another route where that could be functional as we move toward trying to reduce the car centric um nature of our county our entire county so i appreciate you guys being willing to work on a second route that could be more functional and used by more people and i look forward to using all of them thank you all right all fair the motion say aye aye I am opposed motion carries 4-1 all right moving on to

[05:22:33] item 21 now we're into the FY 26 budget development process items and we have a lot of friends from our towns tonight we also have I believe it's 75.5 million dollars worth of requests this is only a budget development item we aren't voting on anything tonight so i want to make it clear to everybody who's here for these items this is just sort of an introduction but the board can give some general guidance county administrator kind of looks for that there he is over there we're giving you guidance tim so you have to be here for this

[05:23:08] so sorry uh but we're not necessarily deciding tonight what's going in what's going in and what's going on and all those kind of things it's more of a general direction sort of discussion so with that's good evening still evening good evening chair letourneau and members of the committee on the item before you transmits the capital project funding requests received from the towns each year the the county solicits funding requests from the towns with general project guidance being for capital projects that are improvements to facilities that are owned by the county

[05:23:47] or located within a town and operated by the county. Also, pedestrian and transportation-related improvements that benefit the county. Typically, the board has prioritized funding for projects that include town funding and leverage other funding sources rather than requesting 100% county funding.

[05:24:10] The item includes a summary in Table 1 of all the requests received. were 20 projects totaling 75 and a half million dollars. Attachment one to the item includes the details of each of the project requests. Of note the town of Leesburg did request to partner with the county on the South King Street route 15 route 7 bypass interchange improvements project. Planning level documents associated with that project are needed in order to have the project ready to begin once

[05:24:50] the county's Route 7 improvements, Route 9 to the Dulles-Greenway Long-Term Improvements Project concludes. The planning-level documents are estimated to cost $4 million, so the town of Leesburg is requesting that the county match the town's $2 million contribution for those documents with funding provided in FY25 or FY26.

[05:25:14] Should the board decide to partner with the town in FY25, then staff would recommend that that discussion be included as part of the FY24 fund balance discussion if the board would like to do that. I just want to make sure I understand what you're telling us. This is the $17 million project that's listed here in our item, but you're saying that the request is actually to do $2 million of that up front?

[05:25:37] Yes. And include that in the fund balance discussion? If the board would like to partner with the town and provide that funding in FY25. Okay. All right. And those are my opening remarks. We'll take any guidance or questions that the committee has.

[05:25:54] Okay. We did get a communique from Supervisor Kirshner, who could not be here, but wanted to note that nine out of the 16, well, 16 total projects are in the Catoctin districts. Nine out of 16 have local contributions three out of five towns have local contributions And then he noted in particular a request that we look at the smaller requests of 500,000 and below and prioritize waste and wastewater Requests which are really important for smaller towns And then he asked the question which actually I was going to ask as well

[05:26:33] which is whether any of the pedestrian safety improvements would be included in any current county initiatives that we have ongoing or in which we've ranked or looked at potential improvements. If I may bring or ask staff.

[05:26:50] Yeah, you would probably need help with that question. And they may not have the answer to that this evening, but Mr. Hoffman, good evening again. Good evening. So I reviewed the request. The one request that may have some overlap is in the town of Hamilton where they requested funding for pedestrian improvements along Colonial Highway.

[05:27:20] And we do have projects in the planning stages of the sidewalk and trail program that also include some missing links in the town of Hamilton. Based on my original view of the application, it was hard to tell specifically from where to where all those segments would be in the Hamilton request versus where it is on the county's planned project.

[05:27:46] So that's the only one that we would probably have to coordinate to see if there is any overlap on some of the town's requests versus what the county has in its program. Would we consider putting some of these projects potentially into the sidewalk and trails program ranking criteria the next time we do that?

[05:28:10] Because we have a lot of projects in the county that have to go through a ranking list, and we can't take them out and just do them in the CIP. We all agree that we're not going to do that. So it's always kind of tough when then the town projects come in and they're sort of outside that process.

[05:28:25] I don't think they should be excluded from getting funding, but I wondered, you know, we have to prioritize the funding, so could we potentially look at doing that? I think we could. Okay, and that might be a way to help sort of prioritize some of these things. Well, just in terms of general guidance, I guess comments, which I think we're sort of being asked to give here a little bit, I do continue to wonder if we should have some discussion with Loudon Water about some of the smaller water systems and potentially taking some of those over, obviously, with some assistance to help with that.

[05:29:02] That might just be a more feasible way. But understanding, you know, for me, of these town requests, wastewater, understandable. That's something that we should probably consider. Obviously, the ones that have town contributions would be prioritized for me. but I struggle with the intersection interchange improvement projects. There's two in here that are big because I'll go on my soapbox for a minute. I don't have any interchanges in the entire southern part of the county with over 100,000 people and now we're talking about improving interchanges that already exist in a part of the county with fewer people.

[05:29:37] It doesn't make sense. I'm not yelling at you guys. It's not your fault but as you all know I have been trying for literally now 13 years to get a project moving at Route 50 and Loudoun County Parkway. It is a half a billion dollars. I am not spending money on improving another interchange until I have that thing funded, and we're not close. So that's just where I am. I know that's not necessarily where everybody is, but at some point, we've got to take care of the southern part of the county and prioritize it, and we can't keep getting diverted here and there and everywhere to improve other things. We got Route 7 done. It's great. I'm glad we did it. Those folks deserve it,

[05:30:13] but now we've got to look at the southern part of the county so i would not be supporting the larger interchange upgrade type of projects considering the status of the lack of interchanges but i certainly think that we can incorporate some of these projects into the cip and work with our our towns that are trying to improve their their situations and help that's me all right mr saints well thank you just had a question for the committee chair and and staff Do we, so the request from the towns, is it pretty much just, again, we're not trying to be cute here, but it could be anything and everything, or do we have a criteria for them?

[05:30:49] Because we do see a mixture of road improvements, safety improvements, then there's water treatment requests, but then there's a request to fix up historical buildings, churches, the like. Is there, does that match the, so we just have an open-ended criteria?

[05:31:07] The typical guidance has been for pedestrian and transportation-related improvements, facilities that the county owns or operates that are located in the towns, and the board has supported in the past water, wastewater, sewer-related projects that also benefit county residents.

[05:31:27] Okay, so off memory, I hate to put you on the spot, but have we ever funded restoring old buildings? Yes, we have. Okay, so it's pretty much an open-ended request, then? They can submit any request.

[05:31:43] Okay. All right. Okay. Supervisor Epstein. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I very much sympathize with Supervisor Letourneau. Is there any way for us to get him his $500 million quickly?

[05:32:03] So I could quit saying this every meeting? No. I mean, I don't disagree with you on that. I mean, but I do think, and this is something Supervisor Letourneau said, that water and wastewater projects are of special importance for the, especially the smaller towns.

[05:32:30] And I would tend to prioritize those over other projects. did eliminate from its list of requests a hugely expensive project which is the bypass the route 15 bypass interchange at Edwards Ferry Road in Fort Evans it would be a huge project probably three hundred million dollars and when the

[05:33:05] Leesburg town manager met with Mr. Hemstreet and me I I told Mr. Dentler at the town that the county would never have that kind of money and unless the federal government wants to come in and provide that kind of funding I just don't think we could support that project at any point so the town did come back and request much smaller amounts of money um in this year or in the next fiscal year certainly

[05:33:40] uh two million dollars from the county for uh basically accommodating the widening of route seven from route nine to the greenway with uh planning documents for the the interchange at the bypass and south king street i i would like to see us put two million in out of the um 2024

[05:34:15] fund balance um and that's that's with all all the respect in the world for mr letourneau and his frustration and i would be happy to support him uh on on his project down in the south um probably above a lot of other projects so anyway that's that's where I'm coming from thanks okay thank you Supervisor Amstead chair Randall I'm gonna ask the same question again so looking at all the requests and of course I always want

[05:34:52] to support our towns always but looking at all the requests it feels like that Leesburg and Percival their local contributions that they use was in one other place was NVTA. Well, it just could be Leesburg and Terraceville, no other local contributions that they put in but NVTA money. And then they came to the county for the rest.

[05:35:12] And I have to say again, there are so many pots of money out there that we are not accessing. Leesburg and Percival, because of their sizes, could apply for CTB money. Why they haven't, or in some cases have, and kind of gave it back to some degree, especially if it is a historical building, there's a lot of grants you can apply for.

[05:35:38] I mean, obviously I want to support, especially with what they're doing in Middleburg with the church, with the historic African American church, and I really do appreciate the mayor of Middleburg giving me a call and telling me about that, but the number of grant opportunities out there for these types of um projects are vast and so you know i i keep thinking it's you know yes you know if you have to come to the to the county for for funds okay but the first thing you come to the county for is talk to our grant writers and find out what you're not accessing because the money is out there and and also i want to remind everyone that you know when we do this

[05:36:17] and then you know the tax rate goes up a half penny or a penny the same people who are here are going to be yelling at us about the tax rate going up, a half penny or a penny. So I don't, you know, I'm supporting my towns. I'll vote for this. I'll push it on. But I think that we, the big we, all of us can really look to do things that are a little more inventive than NVTA, which I know is coming out of NVTA because I'm the chair of NVTA, and then coming straight to the county.

[05:36:45] There's just other pots of money, and we seem to be just not accessing them at all. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Chair Randall. all right any other so as usual a little bit of conflicting guidance but i think there's consensus around looking at wastewater projects looking at smaller projects that have contributions i think obviously anyone could add anything at any point in the cip process so you know if if there is a desire to bring one of these really large requests into cip that we can you know supervisor umstead could do that and obviously she's asking that we consider for fund

[05:37:22] balance the two million so we can have that discussion at fund balance for 24 money but i think in terms of what you're looking to incorporate into the base budget i think there's general support for the things that i discussed and then we'll have to sort of hash it out on some of these other things is that good enough guidance yes thank you good as you're probably going to get all right thank you very much to staff and to our towns all right item 22 home stretch transit

[05:37:57] services program updates i really feel badly actually that we're doing this at 11 30 at night just because it's an important topic we're coming back on some kind of weighty things that we've been discussing here and some service changes um so i apologize it's so late but um no worries uh supervisor it's at your preference we can go through the agenda at a high level or go straight to the money slide whatever your preference is literally it's the money slide so well we got a lot of money here for trash collection so i definitely want to cover that that's right um

[05:38:36] i'm not so sure on that one but uh i don't know what you think we need to know ernie okay so i i will um i'll give a real high level and and then we'll just kind of i'll go to the go to the uh the money slide and we'll go back to the trash slide. And then we can just ask questions as we go because there is some good detail in here that we can maybe hone in on. I really do have a money slide, I promise. The money slide. Okay. So real quickly, during the transit summit, which was

[05:39:13] really an amazing event, we gained a lot of guidance from the board and we really appreciate that opportunity to do so. We had a lot of conversations about the discontinuation of of the underperforming commuter routes, the cessation of the service to and from Bramilton Park and Ride, the fare increases between 25 and 26, the paratransit service area boundary increase and then extended weekend service.

[05:39:35] Those were the board's direction out of the summit. And what we have here is the costing associated with that. This is why it's really a budget development item because we're looking at some savings on some sides and some increases on others.

[05:39:51] The net LTF impact for 2026, you're looking at just over $1 million for those items, I'm sorry, $2 million for those items. The biggest impacts are paratransit service increase, and I'll let Scott talk about that because I'm wading a little deeper than I should.

[05:40:08] And the increase in weekend service, basically mimicking the Saturday and Sunday services, which is a net increase in that. The other two elements that we talked about at the transit summit was the micro transit feasibility study.

[05:40:25] We do not have numbers on that yet. It should be back in December. The feasibility study on that will have a better feel of what that would look like as a cost impact in the 26th fiscal year. I know that's very late in the process, so we will just have to have a discussion about how you'd like to proceed on that.

[05:40:44] And there's no way you could have that -- sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but there's No way you could have that for the FY24 fund balance discussion? I would certainly talk with Mr. Just the cost. The answer to that question is yes. We will talk to -- if we have that, we may be able to get it in with -- talk to Mr. Hempstreet and Megan on that to see.

[05:41:03] Okay. I mean, I really prioritize that. Okay. All right. Then we'll take that for action to see if we can get enough of a nugget out of the feasibility study. Fund balance is in one of your December meetings. So we maybe get something early from them, okay.

[05:41:21] The other thing that we don't have, well we do have numbers for, I didn't want to bring it tonight because we're going to talk about it on the 16th. And so I want to kind of leave the commuter bus feasibility study for that evening. But it has a notable cost for a couple year pilot study on that.

[05:41:38] The final element that was added during the feasibility, I'm sorry, the transit summit was the question about trash and recycling receptacles. And there's a price delta there. One is the board that was specific about all bus stops, which, you know, the stick and flag versus shelters. Now pending other guidance, staff is recommending in this to put into the budget if, as a budget development, the lower of those two prices. $22,000 is one

[05:42:14] time expense and $187,000 for a recurring expense. And here's the nutshell on that. I do need to show you another money slide. Okay, so the cost to purchase trash and recycling bins for all bus stops. We're looking at the one-time cost of about just under half a million dollars and a recurring operating expense of 1.5 million. That's a pretty heavy expense for trash. When I'll just be blunt,

[05:42:49] the stick and flag sign the Poland flag signs what you get is dog poop and I would ask if that is really the goal then let's put those things up through part of our water quality improvement efforts and not create this this this expense for those purposes I'm just be blunt that's our recommendation however we do think there is value in putting it in as anybody brought to you the term

[05:43:22] dog poop at all tonight so during dinner oh then i must say i'm glad i was not there that supervisor has since departed the meeting okay we thank you for that i thought i was gonna be the first but i guess i'm not sorry um this would be if the board wanted to by the way leo this was not a privileged item in any way just to be clearly clearly clear there's no FOIA violations here at all all right So if the board wanted to pursue that we would recommend that we only pursue it at the existing shelters. As the shelter program expands they will be part of that process and that is is built into

[05:44:02] the CIP and the growth for that. So yes we will not have doggy bins at the the pole and and and flag sites but I don't think that's really where we need to go. Again that's staff recommendations this would be our recommendation i think it's an observable amount so wait a minute up here this is this is the right so it's 22 500 to buy 25 10 gallon trash receptacles 25 10 gallon recycling receptacles and 50 lids and then you're serving it through servicing it twice a week yes sir

[05:44:38] those are those locations and this is just where there are shelters correct okay now for full transparency as we get more shelters there will be more trash cans and the and the service will also increase proportionally but that's that's already built into the expectations as we build more shelters because the shelters will have back to the the lovely schematic on the right hand side is the schematic of what the uh the trash cans would look like on the new shelter built so that would again unless other directions provided that would be what we would uh put in the budget for

[05:45:15] that purpose um this is this uh the board did request uh some some more a little more detail on the bus shelter. I will tell you that we chose this shelter not for glamour, but for practicality and long-term maintenance and effectiveness and durability.

[05:45:32] It is probably the best one out there from the ones we could choose from that provided appropriate security and safety, visibility, compliance with VDOT and zoning, and the maintenance is ideal for us.

[05:45:48] General Services looks at long-term maintenance as a pretty critical and core factor of what we do and make sure that it's cost effective in the future for uh the citizens of loudon county there's my spiel um so that's that's that is the prototype that we provided back to dtci as they move forward on the bus shelter project and if there are any questions about the the actual status of that project i do know that mark's here if you if you wanted to delve into that but we were not prepared to discuss that from a dgs perspective all right so i'm going to go back to this money slide and if there are any questions uh did i say everything pretty right

[05:46:29] did i do okay well let's just talk for a minute scott so we what we have on here is the list of routes to eliminate which is serious business um and i'll you know this is this is the same list that we had discussed the transit summit and this is being implemented was it december 4th second december 2nd correct okay um has that does that that decision has been made by the board already to do that right correct so this is just an update reminding us that we have correct decided to do that okay both the commuter bus

[05:47:06] routes and the local routes that are being eliminated okay and then also on december 2nd the fares go up by a dollar on the long haul? Yes. And does fare-free on local get implemented then as well?

[05:47:22] January 2nd for fare-free on the local fixed-route services. Okay. Okay. Questions and or guidance? Supervisor Briskman. Thank you. I agree with pretty much all the recommendations.

[05:47:38] The bus shelter that you showed us, it says it has incorporated solar. does that mean that it has lights yes ma'am our goal is to minimize the infrastructure that we bring to it and solar is the right tool for that okay great and will it have digital signage as to when the next bus is coming and those sorts of things Scott that's the goal uh we won't I don't know that we're going to be there ready to do that out of the gate but yes that is the goal okay okay great and I agree with the with the assessment on the trash but um it would be for

[05:48:17] 125 shelters and how many bus stops do we have in the county? Just under 500 500. Okay. So would this be an appropriate time because I think we also talked about this at the transit summit and since we're talking about bus shelters, would this be an appropriate time to discuss or have a motion about as we talked about accelerating the installation of the bus shelters. I think the program calls for 20 or 30 a year, and I would frankly like to see that doubled at least.

[05:48:52] So if I may, Vice Chair Briskman, that would certainly be a question or a topic that needs to be discussed with DTCI, because I suspect there are constraints on how quickly they can actually roll those out. And so I would not be comfortable speaking to that, because that's the DTCI side of actually constructing and implementing those.

[05:49:13] So you buy them, and they construct and implement them? So they'll buy them. We did the design specs because we run the transit system, and so they are actually doing the builds. And to be fair, it's quite complex.

[05:49:30] They're actually doing all the land acquisition and all that stuff, which is not our thing. Okay, but not your department. Okay, thank you. Yes, ma'am. That might end up being a budget question that you submit. Supervisor Staines? Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I agree, yeah, let's do the trash and recycling for the best shelters and not for just the standalone flagpoles.

[05:49:55] And for the recycling receptacles, will these be nailed down or attached to anything, or they would be freestanding? They'd be attached. Okay. And for the shelters, it says glass, but I'm assuming these are very hard to break but easy to replace if...

[05:50:17] yes these are the the big thing with those shelters is they're already approved by vdot and they've got much heavier duty or standards than we do or that most bus shelters do so the glass is rated much higher okay and then in the image it looks like there's a bench with a divider so that looks like for three people so we are is this what we're envisioning just one bench with for for seating for three or will there be two benches for seating for six or we would probably So the way that they're set up now would be one bench and then leaving space for wheelchair accessibility.

[05:50:53] Okay. Well that's a lot of space for wheelchair accessibility. So pretty much what's in the image here it would be looks like three people would be able to sit on the bench. Yes. And then the reality of it is if we have any shelters that end up exceeding that it's very easy to get another bench put in if we need it.

[05:51:11] Okay. Then the microtransit, so the study will be completed in December of 24, and then I'm assuming at some point in the new year we'll get the study presented to us. And what we will do, as mentioned by Supervisor Letourneau, is we'll work with Mr. Hemstreet in budget to see if we can get some preliminary numbers to get that, you know, as part of the consideration for fund balance, if that is the desire of the committee.

[05:51:41] We should be able to get some preliminary numbers out of that study before it's finalized. And which vehicle will we get the study back, everything looks good, the board approves it, to implement, which vehicle would we use? Would it be our current vehicle that's in the right of the picture or one of these that are in an image or these are just here for?

[05:52:04] They're there for show. And Scott and I have had wonderful conversations about this. There is a goal if we go, certainly if we go full-time to make it a more versatile vehicle that can handle paratransit as well, and so that would be more aligned with what the smaller paratransit vehicles we have now.

[05:52:25] There are a lot of options out there, and so we are looking at the best practices which will come back with the feasibility study for those recommendations. Okay, yeah, just if we can plan ahead when you come back to give us a little bit more detail and proper images of the vehicles that you're proposing for us to use if we move forward with this.

[05:52:44] All right. Thank you. Supervisor, I'm step. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So how confident are we that people will use recycling containers for the proper items and not use the trash container?

[05:53:05] I don't even want to ask you guys this question, but do we analyze what people put in two different types of containers. So putting on my solid waste hat, there are very low percentages of actually recyclables that trash cans are usually a mixed bag. Scott's team has done some assessments of this and they've truthfully wound up being two trash cans. Is that fair? Fair. The problem that I struggle with is it's leadership by example, right? So while it does happen, not providing

[05:53:44] that option is a very difficult thing for us to do because we are trying to promote a stewardship ethic out there that would encourage those to do so. Now, again, it does result in low return. We are rebuilding our waste management team by creating several new positions, and we're going to spend a little more time working with PAC and developing some stronger communication strategies with promoting those kind of efforts and trying to simplify our recycling.

[05:54:12] so we're hoping to see an increase in that but this particular setup uh unfortunately it is usually two trash cans okay thank you chair handle i just want to be real clear because mr sainz asked you guys a question and and the answer was not quite accurate he asked you were you trying to set three people that bench is not about how many people you sent that bench is because you're trying to reduce loitering you don't want anyone in that in there laying down correct yes ma'am that is the purpose the primary purposes of this area and truthfully I don't think he was gonna come out too loud into loiter I just don't see that happening like we're

[05:54:50] gonna like and and I'm fine with the bench it's fine but I but I just think there I've never liked the idea of punishing people for being poor or homeless and I don't think he was gonna wake wake make their way out here to loiter so if somebody does happen to be out here and they wonder I wouldn't have any issue with all with that I think we need to go find that person and help them get housed versus telling them, sorry, but you can't lay on the elements. So that's just my comment.

[05:55:17] And I would just add, Chair Randall, because it is a problem that we're trying to get our head around with our, you know, our social services teams. We are seeing an increased number of unhoused at our metro stops. We are. We are. But I think that the answer is not, you can't lay down. I think the answer is, it's a different answers to find the solution answer yeah yes ma'am thank you um yeah and i mean to that point that you're making we do find at wamada it is a deterrent for everybody else to use the system if somebody is doing that it's just a reality that's how people react so it's like you got two

[05:55:54] goals you want people to use the system you have to have a certain level of standard that they have to feel safe and so on it has to be clean and so on so that's you know those are the two two things um uh the trash thing i mean i'm barely there on even the 187 i just think this is a we're in search of a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist um i mean no disrespect to any of my colleagues but i think we got literally like one complaint about this and now all of a sudden we're going to spend you know 187 000 um is it is it a i mean is it a best practice is it normal

[05:56:31] Does Fairfax Connector have these at all their shelters and so on? It is generally hit or miss depending on the jurisdiction you're in. And even in the jurisdictions, I can go over to Fairfax County and I can go into X percentage of the shelters and they will not have trash cans in them.

[05:56:51] Yeah. So it really is a hit or miss. I mean, I think in some locations it makes sense probably, but I'm not sure it makes sense in every location. So, I would probably like to apply a little bit more of a common sense standard to this than just blanket do it.

[05:57:09] I mean, you know, the one-time expense is not a lot. It's just more the proliferation of the trash contract. I assume we have to bring in a contractor to do this and so on. Then you get the traffic associated with those pickups and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, definitely not the high end.

[05:57:25] That would be absurd. but even the low end this is something that's going to you're asking for this in the 26 budget discussion or is this we would propose to to implement this in the 26 okay so maybe as part of that we can just get a little bit more information about absolutely what what the norm is here because i mean like i said i think some shelters it would make sense i'm just not sure it doesn't all of them um otherwise uh yeah the microtransit stuff i mean i've in my head and more thinking that when our current provider contract with Keolis is up, whatever happens

[05:58:03] at that point, that's probably when we do primary implementation of a completely new thing like microtransit. Am I being too cautious or conservative with that? And were you thinking of doing that sooner? It depends on when you define when the contract is up.

[05:58:21] Okay, because there's renewals associated with it. Right. So the original contract is up in about a year and a half. Yeah. To try to implement a system wide and replace many of the routes with microtransit would probably be a difficult proposition.

[05:58:39] Yeah. You're talking about having to identify thousands of virtual bus stops and where they can actually work. And we have to have a discussion around internally and externally around how do we handle bus stops when you move out of a local fixed route world into a microtransit world for wheelchair customers, right?

[05:59:02] If the wheelchair customers are riding the bus every day now. So there's a little more depth to it. It's definitely doable. It's probably the future, a mixture of local fixed routes and that. but it's not as it's not as simple as i think to be able to get that done in 18 months to that level no i wasn't thinking it was i was thinking this would be a multi-year yes kind of transformation i'm really excited about it i think there's a lot of opportunities here for us but it would take us probably some time to get there so i still would like to see if there's some upfront costs you know associated with vehicle purchase or whatever that we would discuss as part of fund balance if

[05:59:40] that's part of this study but understanding it better a little bit after talking it through with you, I think it's probably more something that's going to be over the long term. And then when our contract is up, I would want to see us reallocating some of the resources currently in that contract that are being used to run essentially empty buses all over into microtransit. You know, it's just a different model that we would need with our contractor.

[06:00:05] So I would just, I would just, I'm going to shift over to the paratransit issue because we are amazingly maxed out with our existing seven vehicles for that. And we are, because As we're pulling a number of the commuter buses off the road, we're reallocating those resources this fiscal year to buy five more paratransit vehicles so that we can actually solve that -- address that service need is the right way of saying that because that is the right answer when 26 hits.

[06:00:32] Because we have -- by making the boundary where it is, which is people are responding and which means it's being used, which is a great testament to the services needed. So to that point, when we start decommissioning other vehicles, those are the prime opportunities to reallocate those resources to buy the right vehicle as we transition.

[06:00:54] The pilot study is really designed to help us -- the feasibility study is really designed to say here's what a pilot study should look like. And then the pilot study is to really give us the hard data about our routes and our services. Not the whole thing, but how it really works in Loudoun. And as you well know, things are changing, and there may be a suite of opportunities that presented to us as a county as it relates to how transit is run.

[06:01:18] And I think this provides us an opportunity to be pretty nimble with that. Okay. One last question. Is there enough value left in those buses that are retiring that we'll get some money for them and be able to reallocate? These buses run, like, millions of miles.

[06:01:36] It's amazing. Like, we think about our cars, 100,000 miles is a lot. These buses will have, like, one million-plus miles. The 12-year buses that we're selling right now, the top end we're getting out of them is $35,000 or $40,000. Wow, okay. So the buses, the 15 or 16 buses that are left right now are about halfway through their life, most of them.

[06:01:59] Most of them are 2017s. If we can get other jurisdictions to pick them up, we've got a couple that are interested to do them. we might be able to get some decent revenue back on them. If we end up selling them outright, I don't imagine we're going to get much more than $60,000, $70,000 top end on those things.

[06:02:22] How much are the paratransit vehicles? About $150,000. And so, Supervisor Attorney, what I kind of highlighted, where the opportunity is there is instead of replacing a million-dollar bus in the replacement fund, we're then able to reallocate those funds into purchasing these so that's really where the economy of scale comes not necessarily the resale yeah i know i just was curious right well did you mention the supervisor saying oh you want to know what the wait period is for a new bus in general oh it's long he wants to know what the new new bus

[06:02:57] wait period is just a regular one on an electric bus right just a regular one regular one is 15 to 18 months uh the electric buses so we just got into two electric buses that we ordered in april of 22. And I do want to go back and just touch on the equipment. We do want to run smaller buses on the microtransit. And we definitely know that there are efficiencies gained between operating between microtransit and paratransit in down periods. So it makes a lot of sense.

[06:03:35] Okay. Anything else on this item then? All right. Well, thank you so much for the update. Appreciate all the work that's going into this. Thank you very much. I look forward to getting that study I guess next week. All right we've reached the end our last item FY26 budget development proposed

[06:03:52] Mickey Gordon Memorial Park and Little River. Storpey. Well good evening it is still evening I believe. You got two minutes. I got two minutes. All right I'll try to get through this quickly so this item is is seeking guidance from the board through this committee on

[06:04:30] improvements to Mickey Gordon Memorial Park. As I know you all are aware a while ago staff was working to add an additional cricket pitch and potentially light the existing unlighted pitch. During that time there was a lot of back and forth and it was discovered that back in the 80s when the site was built there was no legislative action at all that was done for this park. So as a part After that, we started, began, and submitted a special exception, and it was at that time

[06:05:06] that we started to receive significant pushback from the community as a part of that process. We agreed to pause this process and started a series of community meetings, which in hindsight we do agree should have happened prior to the submission of that special exception.

[06:05:28] the feedback that we were getting at those initial meetings and through discussions with county administration as well as several board members we ultimately withdrew the application with a commitment to continue those community engagement meetings to determine what the community needs were for this park all of that occurred over the summer and fall of 2023.

[06:05:53] we took that feedback and i know that you all are aware it was significant amount of feedback and working with dtci in the budget office worked with a contractor to create three different concepts that was based upon the feedback from the community all three of those concepts can be found in attachment one of the item but in generally all three of them leave the one lighted ball field that's at mickey gordon still lit um but it does convert it back to baseball uh all of them

[06:06:27] add i'm sorry from you said convert it back to baseball that's correct from what is it now currently it's cricket yep um interpretive signage historical signage uh it adds additional parking to all three of the uh the concepts uh the recycling facility a lot of folks don't realize that there's a recycling facility at Mickey Gordon Park but it's on the far eastern part of the park it relocates that up into there and adds real restrooms in all of the concepts. Additional

[06:07:07] excuse me additional buffer plantings along Little River Turnpike as far and Carter's Farm Lane and all three of those concepts. Concept B one of the differences in concept b is the addition of pickleball courts in the northeast section of the park and there's a a new relocated entrance drive that's closer to the intersection of carters farm road and little river turnpike and then that serpentines through the park and there's an actual secondary entrance on the eastern side of the park there is additional playground and pollinator garden in this con in

[06:07:45] concept b as well as a second pavilion with restroom and enhancements to uh to the pond concept c has the things that we originally discussed it also adds a a grouping of pickleball and tennis courts in the central part of the park but this one does maintain the existing entrance road existing entrance road and has the playground and pollinator gardens so those concepts were completed and staff from PRCS and DTCI met once again with the community back on September 5th of this year. Presented those concepts to the community and and

[06:08:25] also place those concepts online and provided time for the public to review and provide the feedback. So from all of that concept A was the one that garnered the most support. I will say that the primary comments that we received throughout this process was please put Pop Gordon Field back to baseball, eliminate all lights from the site, and if at all possible, don't pave the driveway or the parking areas as they wanted that to remain gravel, which is in the community's opinion more in line with the rural character

[06:09:05] of the park. You'll see in the option A, we do not have a recommendation to remove the one lighted ball field, and we have in there for paving. That's just our current standard. Obviously, that has been taken care of in other park applications as we go through the special exception process.

[06:09:28] Lovitzville is an example where gravel was replaced, replaced the paving up in that particular park. So from this, staff is recommending Concept A, but we also would like to add a few amenities that came up in conversation as well.

[06:09:47] A couple of pickleball courts added to Concept A and a second pavilion with restroom, all of that in the central part of the park, and a few associated parking spots with that. So it is our recommendation that this concept be endorsed and included as a part of the upcoming CIP discussions, and that based upon the outcome of those discussions, we would move forward with the appropriate legislative-type application.

[06:10:19] And with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Chair of the Tournament. Thank you, Mr. Torpy. Mr. Torpy, we should have bought you a suit of armor for the amount of work that's gone on in this. Been a very difficult process. Appreciate your work and patience. I'm confused about why we're even here at this point on this, honestly.

[06:10:38] We have completely, no, let me, I'm sorry, let me ask the question first. We have completely deviated from what the intent was of PRCS, which to actually try to provide services that we have a demand for in the county. And now we're pivoting to something that, quite frankly, to me, doesn't seem to have very much value, especially considering the massive demand we have and unmet needs across the board and the county and lots of other money that we could allocate to actually address them.

[06:11:04] So I'm kind of confused. I admire your persistence, but I feel like if this was the starting point today, you would never have initiated this project. So there's no doubt that the process was backwards.

[06:11:19] There's no doubt about that, and one of the things that we're trying to do here is, as we do with all of our projects, is be responsive to the community that we're trying to serve, and one of the things that also has come to light, I mean, you are correct in that we have a growing need for cricket, and we have a large demand for that.

[06:11:45] one of the things though just like in other sports one of the things that we hear from that community as well is the travel time that they have to go all the way out there and so you know in some of the other projects that have been initiated or have come through your approval process even while this is going forward the arcola project is a perfect example of that uh we're trying to deal with that uh by adding pitches where we can further in towards the

[06:12:20] population base and so yes it's different from where we started um but that also that that change was really based on that feedback that we got no and i understand but i'm just questioning the allocation of money in this at this point to something which is not really addressing a demand issue I'm not saying we should stick with the original plan community doesn't want community doesn't want it but at this point why would we prioritize funding this over I could you know Supervisor Briscoe and I could give you a list a mile long of things that we we know we really need yeah well and and and I think that's where the the discussion would come as far as priority in

[06:12:58] the CIP discussion and some of these things um we could and and we have been like for example we recently as a part of the park renovation fund renovated one of the pavilions that are out there just as a normal maintenance type thing and so this this very well could be a combination that it's a cip project for certain things in the future and we have a discussion at that time about okay this is the priority thing that needs to happen out there perhaps we we do that in another manner all right last thing i'll say and i'll turn over others is i wish timing wise we have

[06:13:37] not approved the dull south community park plan yet which i know i believe is going to be a prcs cricket recommendation but i also sat through a community meeting on that project in which there was similar type of opposition to the cricket pitch or any pitches for that matter of any sport especially with lights in that area so i'm really uncomfortable doing anything that eliminates a pitch until we're darn sure that we're replacing it. And yes, we've got the one at Arcola as part of that project. But other than that, you know, this Double South project would be big and I'm

[06:14:15] not sure it's going to happen. So timing wise here, that's tough. Well, one of the things that's happening also currently at Hands and Park, we do have the overlay pitches that will be done this month which is similar to what we did at bowling yep all right let's go this way this time chair randall thank you mr chairman mr chairman um so i was at the meetings um in middleburg with mr crony who did a fantastic job and mr torpey my gosh you you were just incredible i mean you took a lot of

[06:14:51] incoming you you turned it around it was just incredible one of the things that was said over and over again because i did take the stats out to them and say like how often the fact that they weren't using these baseball fields very often and if they weren't using them very often and what they said to me and as it turns out after I checked on it it was true is that the county for whatever reason had for the most part stopped caring for this field so it was kind of so the whole place was overran and it was not someplace that was particularly I mean I mean even the baseball dime it

[06:15:26] was it was just kind of it was like the forgotten park and so it was almost like kind of if you build it we will come back kind of thing and so and and i i did hear that i did hear because i because i i i confronted them pretty hard and said you're not doing you're not using it anyway and they talked about how the community themselves had gone out and been the ones that had been mowing it for a long time because the county had stopped doing that and then when the community didn't do it as much it just kind of got overran and so they would find someplace else to go play baseball but they were very clear that they wanted to still play baseball there and so

[06:16:02] So I don't, you know, I've never had kids that play baseball past T-ball. I hear all the time that baseball fields are needed. So I honestly don't know. Obviously, we do know cricket pitches are needed as well. And so I don't know what is that.

[06:16:18] I don't know that I can say one thing more than the other. I think that, you know, there's communities that are loud, and I understand that, too. So I just don't know. The one thing I would agree is, because I haven't gone out there more than once, is the light, the one light that's out there, you drive from that light to the closest house.

[06:16:39] I don't know, I don't quite understand that complaint because that light does not shine in that house. And the new light would be very directional, so it would just be kind of down. And so they wouldn't see that light at all. And if they really, again, I don't know how baseball, what happens in baseball.

[06:16:58] I guess it's just a summer sport, and so you don't really play in the winter anyway. But they want to use that field in the winter or use it at all later on. You need to have a lit field out there. Even for the summer, if you want to go past 8 o'clock, you want to have at least one lit field. So I do believe the field should be lit.

[06:17:16] And, you know, I'll support this effort because, you know, the constituents are saying that they want and still need the baseball fields. But, Mr. Lutonno, I also hear constituents who talk about the cricket fields just as much, too. So I understand what you're saying.

[06:17:35] Okay, Supervisor Sainz? Thank you. You know, it's a tough situation. Yes, you have concerns or suggestions from the community. Definitely want to hear from the community. But at the same time, the county does have needs. So when we see an opportunity to add more programming, especially as the need increases, we need to try to figure that out.

[06:17:59] So I think this is an opportunity to, yes, restore the baseball, but at the same time, keep a pitch at this facility. And to me, it makes sense to enhance what's already there because we know people walk the trails.

[06:18:25] As one of our former colleagues would say, they've made a goat trail. So why not enhance that? Because we know people are there doing that already. And Chair Randall is absolutely correct, we went and visited the site, we were in that area, met and then went to an event and drove past that area at night, stopped.

[06:18:48] And yeah, the light that's there is definitely shining directly onto the field and not in the pathway of the house. And so I think if we improve the lighting, there's still not going to be any issues with lighting. So I think we need to keep the lighting and improve the lighting there.

[06:19:03] So to me, my personal opinion, I'm only one vote, but my vote would actually be option B. Because we know we need these things, and I believe it's kind of the old saying in the old movie, if you build it, they will come. You know, people are already going there, and I think if we enhance it and keep up the maintenance, people will continue to go there and use this area for many years to come and enjoy the recreation in various stages from in the morning or lunchtime afternoon and in the evening and be able to have fun in that nice setting.

[06:19:38] So if it was up to me, like I said, I'll be voting for option B, but I think we definitely need to have the pitch there in the lights. So thank you. Supervisor Briskman. Thank you. If I read in the item correctly, 17 years ago, Parks and Rec decided to decommission the baseball field because it wasn't being used?

[06:20:03] Not 17 years ago. There was two soccer fields that were not being used, and 17 years ago, those were converted over to a cricket pitch. Okay, and then? About seven or eight years ago was when the baseball field was converted as well.

[06:20:20] Because? Lack of use. Lack of use. People weren't registering to use it or asking to use it. That's correct. So it was converted to cricket as well. Yeah, it's a modified cricket field because it's not as large as a normal pitch because of the size of the baseball field.

[06:20:38] Help me understand. I don't understand cricket actually that well. So help me. And then when that happened, the cricket club actually formed their club and started playing there. The community came to us, and actually we run the Loudoun County Adult Cricket League.

[06:20:56] parks and rec does and that started the 17 years ago when we built that first pitch okay okay so they're used to going out there uh they've been playing at mickey gordon for some time yes and are both pitches used consistently and constantly right now uh the fall season uh the one pitch is only used on the weekends because it's unlighted um the other one is not used every day but it is used every Saturday and Sunday and several days during the week. Okay. Um, and if there's a cricket

[06:21:34] tournament happening, um, is it better to have more fields in one place? Like if you're having a cricket tournament, are there more than one, is there more than one game game going on at a time? If you are holding a cricket tournament, typically what they try to do is like when the tournaments come in historically they oftentimes are held at Bolin or Hanson because those pitches are of the correct size they're not modified neither size at Mickey Gordon is correct when the the

[06:22:12] unlighted cricket pitch is a little bit small as well that's why if you see any item there is a thing for regrading of the existing cricket pitch and making it larger that's correct I guess I'm confused as to why we would remove a cricket pitch that is getting a good amount of use after it was put there because the baseball field was getting no use and we didn't have any demand for baseball there so baseball is something that that comes up and down but the the biggest issue

[06:22:49] that we are seeing out there is not just with cricket or baseball but with with every sport is the leagues don't want to travel that far. Yeah, okay, okay. And so when we're going through this process, one of the things that we are trying to take into account also is what is happening in other areas of the county, where can we provide the service the best, what is the best way for us to utilize the funds that would be coming and looking long-term because we have heard, as I mentioned earlier, that if there were other options, the folks that are currently playing out there would rather not

[06:23:28] be making that 45-minute ride. Right. But the plan as it stands, well, first of all, the original, so the original plan was actually to add a cricket field. Yeah, at that time, we did not have other options that were available to us, and that was... Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay. But if we're going to have the baseball field with lights now in the new plan, why wouldn't we put lights on the cricket field well that could be an option but the uh as you know we have had challenges with

[06:24:02] lighting fields in the west particular okay even though we have dark sky lighting technology um okay and what was the original well first of all mr torpe i i'm not sure i agree with you that the process was backward because your department came up with a plan based on needs and demands of the county. So maybe the plan could have gotten to folks earlier. Maybe the messaging could have

[06:24:39] been better, but I don't know that I would call it backward because you did it based on how long have you been with the county? Over 27 years. Right. So you have a good understanding of what the demands and needs are for recreation in the county. So I just wanted to tell you that I don't think it was necessarily backward. I just think maybe the messaging could have been better. Maybe the community could have seen it earlier. Something like that. And my last question is how big was the first budget? Right now we're looking at 10 million versus upward from there. There wasn't a budget.

[06:25:18] was something that we were going to raise correct okay okay thank you um all right let me just jump in i do know a lot about baseball as you all know so baseball field allocation is all driven by leagues whether it's travel organizations or rec leagues or whatever it is and sometimes both or hybrids so the issue here and you say in the item that you have surveyed leagues even currently and there is no interest in using this field for leagues that's correct one of the things that were thinking is you you have a significant number of independent teams that are popping as well and

[06:25:53] this could be a thing but the one thing about independent teams is uh they they typically are older yeah and uh so would have a later allocation is usually the way it goes um but if they they would not be interested if there was not lighting yeah so just to be clear which proposals include lighting all three all three right yeah um but only on the baseball field being converted away from cricket that's correct okay all right um well someone i'm not going to make a motion on this

[06:26:30] because i'm just being honest like we could send this to the cip but i know i'm not going to vote for funding for it in the six-year period just because we barely have any room in the cip anyway and there are other parks and rec projects that i'm just going to see as a higher priority and i am not going to vote at this point take away a cricket field unless we know for sure we're getting another one that will replace it as part of dull south and we're not there yet we haven't gone through the process yet we haven't approved it yet i don't know where it's going to go so i i'm not comfortable with doing it yet maybe i would be down the road so um chair randall

[06:27:10] would you like to make the motion i'll make the motion i move the finance department operations and economic development committee recommend the board supervisors approve concept a from mickey gordon park with the addition to this concept of four pickleball courts parking an additional pavilion restroom facility and direct staff to be to bring the necessary to begin the necessary work to initiate the specs process based upon this plan i further move the funding consideration for mickey gordon park improvements be sent to the fy 2026 budget process for prioritization in the capital improvement program motion is made is there a second motion dies for lack of seconds

[06:27:45] guys laura come on well all right i'll i'll second but i have a question to ask all right i want to opening yep that's true randall's opening we're in motion so at the very least just out of just out of some professional courtesy knowing how much laura mr crone to budget 20 has done on this issue we should at least let her talk about this when we because it this this just is moving it to to the board of supervisors meeting that's all this is doing tonight has moved into that meeting. You can vote against it there, but to not even allow her to speak on this after all this time that she works on this.

[06:28:20] Again, there's there's a level of professional courtesy that I think we seem to have for one another. Listen, you know, I don't know anything about baseball. I know what the community has said. I know and I feel like I said it, but then it just got ignored that they said that they weren't using it for the reasons I stated I don't need to state it again and and the truth was when you will look at the field they feel the field wasn't the the whole place was not being well cared for it was overgrown there wasn't there wasn't the baseball fields were not at all cared for and so it is realistic to me that that could

[06:28:58] have been the issue you know the people in that area in st. Louis and then Middleburg feel very much like this is their park and and you know these are always hard decisions because it's a big county and there's need all around the whole county there is there just is and so you know we'll see what happens I will support it when we get to the when we get to the full meeting because I you know I followed this I have followed this all the way through including going to the meetings and so I don't think it's just as simple as we have a park that wasn't being used.

[06:29:37] I think that there was a reason it wasn't being used. And you know, there are leagues that are saying that they want to be out there now. In fact, they literally reconstituted their league to start playing there now. So I'm going to support it but I will definitely push us to move this forward just to, if nothing else, to let Mr. Crony speak on this item.

[06:30:01] Thank you. Just a procedural question, Mr. Hemstreet. if the board were to not approve the concept this would still go to the full board just with a recommendation of no recommendation just with no yeah with the recommendation that we not approve it right already not well i guess so we would ask you to just say that on the record that you're not making a recommendation yeah yeah so you but it would still go to the full board i guess point okay yeah so mr crony will have an opportunity either way this is just the finance committee's recommendation um okay mr saint thank you um clarify for mr tarpe for the rule any option

[06:30:40] it says re-establish a cricket pitch one but none of those would have as right now you're being being proposed none of those would have lights that is correct the the lights would remain where they are right now which is on the uh um converted baseball field okay and then can you speak to The assumption that people were not using the fields or the baseball field before it was converted to a pitch because they're not being maintained.

[06:31:11] Who was supposed to be maintained and how often were we maintaining it if we were maintaining it? Can you give us more information on that? So that is the maintenance that was occurring is no different than was happening at all of our other unstaffed park sites.

[06:31:30] I think where the opinion of that in the community may be coming from is that if we don't have scheduled use on ball fields, we do not go out and do the dragging of the ball fields and the lining of the ball fields and things like that.

[06:31:48] That's, I mean, with 300 and some odd ball fields, we have to direct the resources towards the ones that are scheduled for use. So I could see where there was periods of time where the infields were not drug or lines put down on something like that.

[06:32:07] And over time, that does make a ball field look different than the ones that are being maintained. But there was maintenance being done out at that part. So at least cut in the outfield, and then is it true or not that if there was a league playing, sometimes the league will take it upon themselves to drag the little thing for the dirt or put the lines down themselves?

[06:32:32] I'm not going to say that leagues don't do that because I know Chair Letourneau is sitting there and has probably done that many times, but we discourage that simply from a liability standpoint, but I do know that that does happen.

[06:32:48] Okay. And I don't know if you know this or not, when was the last time there was a league using that facility? Well, I mean, it's been converted to cricket for several years.

[06:33:06] And there was a period of time where we had both cricket and the infield skinned. But that's obviously problematic when you have a pitch behind second base and trying to have multi-use.

[06:33:22] So it's been a while since the baseball league was in the field. Yes, that's correct. And so in your opinion, though, would you prefer to have lights at the reestablished cricket pitch? I'm sorry, I didn't catch you. Would you prefer to have lights at the cricket pitch?

[06:33:39] Well, any field that is lighted is obviously a benefit to us as far as overall programming.

[06:33:55] challenge that I have with with recommending adding an additional light lighted field out there is it is a lot of money and as we talked about earlier as we have other things come online in different areas of the county I would fear that there would be another situation where we have a lighted cricket pitch that is underutilized after spending that money gotcha okay all right That answers my question.

[06:34:25] Thank you. Cereza Briskman. Thank you. I think I'm going to abstain because I'm not sure that I would recommend approval for concept A, but I am okay with this going forward for a conversation at the Board of Supervisors.

[06:34:46] I'm just not ready to recommend A, B, or C. I need to have more understanding of what's going to be lit, what's not going to be lit. And so I'm probably just going to abstain from this motion. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not going to vote for the motion.

[06:35:01] I don't know if I'm going to abstain or just oppose it. But I think for me, it's really a timing question of understanding what the big picture is before we approve one of these plans. Because, like I said, we have some uncertainty over what the replacement for this is going to be.

[06:35:18] And so I would really need to be able to look back community in the eye and say we have something for you. it's coming before we vote to endorse a plan that gets rid of something that they're currently using and i'm really highly skeptical that there's a lot of use for baseball out there for this it's just it's baseball is a type of sport that's played every night and yes travel teams travel all over the place and you know i've been through that but you know the rec leagues need something pretty close by in volume for that and we've provided you know we have we still have needs but we have provided some of that and been able to accommodate that at Hanson and other places where the

[06:35:57] population is growing. So this is not going to be a great use for this compared to a use that is existing. So I just think it's premature to endorse a plan now that, you know, until we have what the big picture is for the services that we need to provide. That's bottom line for me. So I wouldn't say I would be against this, you know, forever, but at this moment I'm not, i can't vote for it closing chair in the population is not supposed to be growing in that part of the county that's the whole point of that part of the county and the zoning in that part of the county

[06:36:31] so if we're going to base things on where the population is growing the west is never going to get anything because it's not supposed to be growing out there um these meetings were not one or two people or 20 people these meetings were packed packed with the constituents in st louis and middleburg which by the way this is st louis and middleburg not just middleberg um and you know these people who have been there for a long time and have lots of history playing on those fields lots and lots of history going back generations playing on those fields

[06:37:06] playing baseball on those fields so mr septurby i don't know how a field it's supposed to look i don't i don't know but i do know that i go to our parks if i have because i because i'm because because you dragged me there enough to know that this one did not look like it had been cared for very well at all.

[06:37:24] And not just the baseball pitches, the park, overall the park did not look like it had been cared for. And I understand what you're saying is you know, do you care for when those games play? But the entire park, it just didn't look like it had received the care that other parks in Loudoun County have received.

[06:37:43] So, you know, I'm not going to say the community is wrong when they say that they want a baseball field, or as they call it, their baseball fields back. And we'll see what happens at the meeting. Thank you. Okay.

[06:37:58] I'll appear on the motion to say aye. Opposed? No. Abstain? Abstain. So the motion fails 1-2-2, but it would be forwarded to the Board of Supervisors with just no recommendation.

[06:38:18] or a recommendation yeah it's not a recommendation to deny we just didn't endorse at this time concept day no i don't think so that means something different let's ask staff okay miss mcclellan your light's on so would you like a motion for me to forward this with i think i think this is a no recommendation from the committee or you could vote to have a denial recommendation no I don't think that's okay necessary at this point so it'll

[06:38:57] be a it'll be a no recommendation forward to the board the board the Finance Committee declined to endorse the concepts but it should still go to the board for discussion okay at this time yes we don't go to the board with no recommendation but not with a no recommendation with no record without any recommendation yes yes yeah not not no right right i i apologize chair randall worded it better yes that is what i meant yep you got it okay with no further business to become before the

[06:39:37] finance committee we are adjourned

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