Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Finance/Government Operations and Economic Development Committee, Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Place: Board Room, First Floor, Government Center, 1 Harrison Street SE, Leesburg, Virginia
Length: 4h 4m (video)
Official meeting video (county, Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/player/clip/7809
Agenda (Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/AgendaViewer.php?view_id=73&clip_id=7809

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 2026-10-21. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:16:01] Good evening, and welcome to the November member meeting of the Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee. Call the meeting to order. This room has a hearing loop. If you need hearing assistance, switch your hearing aids to telecoil mode. If you need a headset, we have those available as well.

[00:16:18] Please see the clerk to request one. Chair Randall is not able to join us this evening. She's not feeling 100%. Moving on, we will first adopt our consent agenda. we have seven items proposed for consent. They are item two quarterly report FY25 first quarter financial up rate cash profit and debt report. Item three Loudoun County Communications Commission 2024 annual report. Item four contract renewal job order contract for general construction work.

[00:16:47] Item five contract renewal task force roadway and transportation design services for federal projects. Item six contract award construction engineering inspection services for the route 7, Route 690, Hillsboro Road Interchange. Item 7, Award Authority Increase Information Technology Consulting Services. Item 8, Countryside Boulevard Area Pedestrian Study. I will make a motion to approve the consent agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Supervisor Umstead. Any discussion on these items? Supervisor Briskman. Thank you. I don't know if anybody read the entire

[00:17:21] countryside boulevard um study there were a couple different scenarios in there um tonight's uh motion that we just that will pass is to um move forward staff's scenario number one however they i may bring something a little bit different when it comes to the board meeting i need to have some conversations with dtci and vdot to make sure the the proposed projects align correctly and to see if there's if there's any way to accelerate the um project thank you okay thank you miss briskman

[00:17:57] any other discussion on the consent agenda all in favor of the motion say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries five zero okay next is our monthly update from our department of economic development mr riser good to see you i know that we have visitors from visit loudon today miss erickson welcome as always. And JJ Singh from EDEC. Excellent. September is the most recent month for local unemployment data. The rate was 2.8% for Loudoun compared to 2.9% for Virginia and 4.1%

[00:18:35] for the rest of the U.S. The jobs report released on November 1st showed that the unemployment remained 4.1% for the U.S. in October. Nationally, only 12,000 jobs were added in October, which was below expectations even after projections were lowered to account for the hurricanes and the Boeing strike. It was the lowest monthly increase in more than three years. Out of those 12,000, we had a lot posted here in Loudoun County. Newly posted jobs in Loudoun in October were 2,600.

[00:19:06] Active open jobs in Loudoun County is now about 15,000. On November 6th, the Fed lowered the Fed funds rate by 0.25 after having those rates pretty steady since August of 23. Inflation continues to stay low and the interest rates should help encourage investment in business and commercial buildings including projects that are incredibly important for Loudoun County like our metro projects. With that I'll turn it over to JJ from EDAC who has a quick report then we'll get into tourism with Beth. Thank you, buddy, and thank you, Chair. EDAC Chair Siobhan McFadden and Vice

[00:19:46] Chair Chin Shinbar were not able to come today, so they asked me to speak in their stead. First, the EDAC is grateful for your recent vote on nine members to the EDAC. We feel that we brought a lot of talent and diversity to the Commission. We've also been engaged with the Rural Economic Development Council, REDC, which focuses on our Western and rural businesses. Bill Hatch of Zephaniah Farms is the REDC liaison to the EDAC, and Mayor Kelly Burke is also a member.

[00:20:16] We invite all of you to our next meeting, Friday, December 6th at 8 a.m., where we'll be discussing artificial intelligence. We're going to be focused on AI's impact on workforce in particular. During the past year, we've focused on a variety of critical topics impacting Loudoun, including commercial real estate, the state of financial markets, entrepreneurship, innovation. And on a more personal note, this next meeting in December will be the last for our chair, Siobhan McFadden, and our executive committee member, Dr. Julie Leidig, who is the provost of the Loudoun Campus of the Northern Virginia Community College. More will be said about them in the coming weeks,

[00:20:52] but I personally want to share how kind and generous they've been to me and others on the commission. Thanks. Thank you very much. Any questions for EDAC? All right. And with that, I'll turn it over to Beth. We focused on our partnership for tourism, and she has some great updates on what's been going on in the world of tourism.

[00:21:15] Thank you very much and good evening. We announced in September, so following along with Buddy's lead about September night data, that Loudoun again leads visitor spending for the Commonwealth of Virginia, topping $4.5 billion in 2023. 12.5% of that, or $2.7 billion, comes from transportation. So again, that speaks to the importance of what we are seeing at Dulles International Airport. And Dulles IAD had a record-breaking 9.3 million international passengers

[00:21:51] and with the addition of nearly 800,000 annual seats, including expanded capacity to South America, Washington Dulles was named the fastest-growing international airport in the U.S. in 2023. One of the things that also came out of the economic impact information that we released in September is that in 2023, tourism supported more than 18,000 jobs, up almost 6.3 percent over the previous year, generating 1.1 billion in salaries. As you know, this year in 2024 has

[00:22:27] marked the 40th anniversary of winemaking in Loudoun County. We have been celebrating that and commemorating that throughout the entire year. This industry alone attracts 1 million visitors a year and generates more than 48 million for Loudoun's economy.

[00:22:46] Our wineries remain our number one visitor attraction and the data that I just gave you concludes both wineries and limited breweries. This year has also marked a really phenomenal year of collaboration with economic development and Visit Loudoun and I just wanna touch on a few of those projects, 'cause I'm very proud of our partnership with DED.

[00:23:09] Using ARPA funding, we were able to pilot three hop-on, hop-off transportation pilots that surrounded the spring and fall farm tour, as well as garden week, to take visitors that came out from Metro into designated spots throughout Western Loudoun County.

[00:23:30] Phenomenal opportunity, and we have data we will be bringing back to you or to the Board of Supervisors once we have all of that data pulled in. We worked on producing a craft beverage guide that included everything from tea to wine, beer, distilled spirits. Again, craft beverage is a key marker for Loudoun County and something that we are very proud of. When we talk about music as an economic driver for uh visitors coming into loudon we had two really exciting projects one of which is we

[00:24:04] launched a database with 105 185 artists loudon county artists that will allow whether it's a wedding coming into loudon whether it's a brewery a winery a corporate event a restaurant to be able to hire local musicians to really help to support that segment of this vital part of our economy That is called Loudon.live, and we also, which will be introduced in the early part of next year, a Sound of Loudon Artist-in-Residence program.

[00:24:38] We brought an artist-in-residence into Loudon County to work with local songwriters to write and record songs, original songs that were unique in places unique to Loudon, whether that would be a winery, a historic African-American church.

[00:24:57] There are five songs that were produced throughout the county, and we will be releasing that shortly. We have completed an important first leg of our Cannellonus project on the Harvest Interns. We just hosted a virtual winemaker exchange last month that was very important to talk about the difference between and the similarities between these two wine destinations.

[00:25:24] And we have, and we continue to work with DED on informing the lodging industry on what changes are happening within the county. So I just want to take this moment to say how grateful I am to have such great partners in our efforts with DED, but more importantly, such great support from our Board of Supervisors and elected officials.

[00:25:46] So that concludes my report. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Erickson. I know we all value our partnership with Visit Loudon. I actually have a question for Mr. Reiser first. I noticed in this month's report that we had more wins in the retail sector than we had, I think, in anything else, which is a little bit of a surprise because of the narrative around retail being dead.

[00:26:13] Obviously, I know that there is a retail study that we're doing that I was able to give some been put into, but I just wondered if you have any thoughts on that sector and what we might be seeing there, if there's any trends coming out of that. Yeah, I don't know if there's trends, but we are seeing some really good movement on several of our retail projects. Most of the retail that we're seeing is more experiential and less commodity-based, and I think that that's pretty consistent with what we've been seeing. You know, I think what we're seeing in the consumer

[00:26:51] now, they're being very cautious, but they're really valuing things like products that mean something to them or an experience that means something to them. So that seems to be where most of that growth is coming. And, you know, frankly, we probably have been focusing a little bit more on supporting our shopping centers and our retail establishments than what we've been able to do in the past. Excellent, thanks. And then for Ms. Erickson, any updates on sports tourism? I know that we've done well there. I think a few of us would still love for us to be able to take it to

[00:27:29] the next level at some point, but just wanted to get your thoughts. Chair, thank you very much for Thank you for bringing that up, and I think the best answer I can have is it continues to be an area of focus. As you'll recall, I think it was three years ago, this body really gave us a clear direction on how to move forward to land a demand generator, economic generator with community benefits of an indoor sports tournament facility.

[00:28:01] We continue to work very closely with the county and with DED on identifying those opportunities, and I believe we are getting closer as we continue to move forward. I feel very hopeful because I think that it is going to be a really key demand driver and important for Loudoun County to remain, again, that top generator of visitor spending in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

[00:28:26] It's a very important initiative, so thank you for bringing it up, sir. I appreciate it. Thank you. Ms. Umstead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Beth, I had not expected to ask this question tonight, but you brought up historic black churches. So I have an ask for you and possibly for Buddy.

[00:28:45] We have Providence Baptist Church in Leesburg, Virginia. It is the oldest African-American church in the town of Leesburg. They are looking for grants. private sector, nonprofit, to do some repairs and rehabilitation on the church.

[00:29:09] If you all have any ideas for whom I might direct them to, that would be wonderful. I would be happy to provide some information. It's been a while since I've worked in that arena, but I think that I have some ideas and some directions that I would be happy.

[00:29:26] So if you would not mind making the introductions, it would be a pleasure. I will do that tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you. Vice Chair Risman. Thank you. I was just down at Vaco in Bath County, and we had a presentation about sports, the sporting industry, and attracting that for tourism.

[00:29:45] I'm sure you know about Chesterfield. Very, very interesting work that they're doing there. And then also Pulaski County has some interest. Now, they have the raceways, but they also have some other field-oriented. Chesterfield Experience is two counties working together, actually, that have field and hard court, and they're about to do a 12-field facility.

[00:30:09] So I'm happy to share that information with you. It was really interesting, those presentations. And I don't know if I've seen you in person. I know I've seen you in person, but we didn't talk about this CTA program. And I just wanted to say the Certified Tourism Ambassador Program went really well.

[00:30:28] Your staff did a great job. It was super interesting. I learned so much about the county. So anyone that has any interest in that, I strongly recommend doing it. Your staff did a great job. Thank you very much for that. Yeah. And then, so the hop-on-hop, oh, the other thing I wanted to say, I did read some quotes from the Harvest interns in the packet.

[00:30:47] So that was really exciting, really exciting. So great job on that. The hop-on, hop-off, and also, you guys are to be commended for trying some new things with the ARPA funds and seeing if they'll stick. As you know, I've been trying to push doing some sort of a restaurant week in Loudoun County, so my ears perked up on the hop-on, hop-off bus from the metro. How far between the stops were there in the hop-on, hop-off? Do you know? Was it 10 miles, 20 miles? They varied. They varied. Okay. So we worked because we wanted to try

[00:31:24] and to see where the length of time, the engagement, and really the benefit. So as an example, one would go, one session, I can't remember if it was spring or fall, that core part was Hillsboro, and then we had them go out from there.

[00:31:43] So it was ability, we moved it around the county to really come back to you when all of our data is in to give a really good feel for how this could look. And that's why we did two with the county connector buses, one with independent transportation.

[00:32:00] Again, we want to give you as much information to see as, to borrow your term, what will stick. So these were kind of like pilots, and then you might consider doing these on a regular basis to attract tourists. Depending on what the data says. Depending on what the data says.

[00:32:16] Okay, okay. So I do want to just bring that up one more time, because all the pilots we tried, there wasn't much for restaurants that I saw. There was live music. There was breweries and wineries. So anyway, we can talk a little bit more offline about that, but I worry about our restaurants a little bit.

[00:32:31] And then lastly, on the flights that you were talking about with Dulles Airport, it just made me curious. I assume most people come to the county by car as far as tourists, but I'm curious how many are coming or what percentage are coming by plane.

[00:32:52] And I can certainly provide additional data on that. We are a very strong drive county for that weekend getaway. But when you are really looking at the impact of the airport for meetings, for sports tourism, for weddings, the airport is a very key deliverer of visitors to Loudoun County and all of Northern Virginia.

[00:33:20] Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That's very interesting. Thank you for that. And, you know, like I've said a lot over the past couple years, it would be fiscally irresponsible for us not to leverage that international airport. And remind me to get back to you on the Pulaski and the Chesterfield. Thank you.

[00:33:36] Thank you very much. Okay. Any other questions, comments for our friends tonight? Seeing none, thank you so much, all of you, for being here. Okay. we'll move on to our action items the first of which is item 10 2024 capital facility standards which includes proposed revisions to the recreation center community center teen center standards as well as a proposed revision

[00:34:18] to library standards good evening chair Letourneau members of the committee we are here to present the 2024 capital facility standard recommend staff recommended changes and we have a brief slide deck to go through with you all right so by way of background the capital facility standards is one of

[00:34:55] several capital planning products that staff works with the fiscal impact committee to update the the capital facility standards or CFS as I'll refer to them throughout the presentation determine the number type and size of facilities planned for in the county these guide the development of new capital facilities they're also used within the proffer discussions and negotiations the capital intensity factor and updates to the capital needs assessment these are reviewed and recommended by the fiscal impact

[00:35:29] committee and are updated every two years by the board the last update did occur in december of 2022 which is why we're here discussing them with you now so that they can be updated in 2024 to remain on the same schedule for the capital planning documents okay there are four components of the CFS so the type of capital facilities the county would like to develop these are according to department standards for providing services and the quantities needed based on demographic or geographic figure factors the a typical square footage is included for each type of facility which

[00:36:08] is expressed as a maximum square footage also the maximum acreage needed to site the facility, and then the demographic or geographic factors that trigger the facility to begin development, which is reported in the CNA. So, as part of the update process, staff does meet with departments to understand if they have a need to update capital facility standards.

[00:36:35] Typically this is done to align with service plans or master plans. This year, the departments of park recreation, community services, and library services had had proposed changes to their standards and presented those to the Fiscal Impact Committee this summer.

[00:36:52] For parks or PRCS, the following changes were recommended, which was to remove the stand-alone teen center CFS and increase the square footage for recreation center CFS in order to accommodate dedicated teen space.

[00:37:11] So the definition of a community center was proposed to be edited to add language regarding teen space to that definition. The justification for these changes is based on trends in the Parks, Recreation, and Community Services field that based on teen preferences, the idea is to incorporate teen programming into other facilities rather than having the standalone facility where they can be amongst other groups and interacting with various other age groups.

[00:37:48] The recreation centers are the most ideal location. They're already there enjoying those spaces, having other programming occurring. The community centers can also offer teen programming, however, primarily it is expected that the teen centers would accommodate this and it could be accommodated in community centers if a need is identified in an area that's not served by a recreation center.

[00:38:20] Library Services or LCPL recommended a change to the library CFS to change from a planning sub-area calculation to a county-wide population calculation.

[00:38:36] The libraries believes that the Library of Virginia's essential level standard for facilities is calculated on a total population basis as opposed to a planning sub-area.

[00:38:52] This, okay, can you hear me okay? - We're messing with your mics. - Okay. - It's like coming out really loud and then I kind of saw, we're trying to find the right. - Okay, everybody can hear me okay now. - Just keep going, okay. - The existing capital facility standard of 0.6 square feet per capita is the same between the county and the Library of Virginia's essential level standard the difference being the interpretation of how that standard is calculated if libraries believes that if this new standard were applied to the adopted CNA

[00:39:30] which the board just adopted this past January then two libraries would be triggered rather than one and one of the other core justifications that LCPL presented was differences in services provided amongst the library branches as well as the differences in the sizes of libraries in the east versus the west is an issue for their service delivery. So the FIC recommended that the majority of the adopted CFS remain the same as shown in

[00:40:06] attachment one to the item with the exception of the four changes are proposed by parks and library. So again, removing the standalone teen center, increasing the square footage for the recreation center, adding language to the community center's definition, and then changing the library's CFS from a planning sub-area population to a county-wide population. So essentially they just forwarded the request of the LBOT forward. Staff has... Say that again.

[00:40:40] Sending the recommendation that LBOT had for changing the library board. Yes, I'm sorry, Library Board of Trustees to just sending that recommendation forward for consideration. Staff analyzed both the operational and capital standpoint of the capital facility standards.

[00:41:04] Again, staff does recommend the changes to the park standards, but recommends no change to the library standards. The issues noted by Loudoun County Public Library and identified in the facilities master plan that was recently adopted relate to services provided at existing facilities and the size of the existing facilities. Staff believes that these are operational issues and are not solved through the capital facility standards. The capital facility standards are

[00:41:43] looking at new facilities future planning for new facilities they're also again a variable in the capital intensity factor which is associated with proffer negotiations and aligning residential development with mitigating those costs through proffers also staff believes that if the size and/or layout of existing facilities is contributing to why services are not provided at all branches,

[00:42:17] then those should be considered for renovations, and that is not something that is addressed through a capital facility standard change. Also, changes that are made to the CFS as part of this 2024 capital facility update are not applicable to the existing CNA. They would be used for the next iteration of the CNA, so that if this change is made that does not trigger to library facilities now.

[00:42:50] Also in terms of the facilities master plan, the current CFS and the adopted CNA shows that one library is currently triggered in the Ashburn planning sub area. This does align with the facilities master plan, which showed that overall the library system is undersized by 35,000 square feet.

[00:43:15] The facility standard for a library is up to 40,000 square feet, so the CNA showing one triggered facility does align with that finding. Also in terms of the Western Loudoun Library, one of the justifications that Loudoun County Public Library did discuss is if two libraries were triggered, one in the east and then they would designate one in the west. So while there is no current CNA that provides funding for the

[00:43:50] Western Loudoun Library at this point, there is site identified at the Western Loudoun Recreation Complex that would be at this point assumed to not be a net new facility. It has been determined as a replacement for the Percival Library therefore that does not again net a new library.

[00:44:17] In summary staff believes that the issues identified by library services are addressed through existing processes and that the CFS is not the avenue to address those issues. So staff does recommend that the board adopt the CFS changes as recommended by staff.

[00:44:37] then we can take any questions okay i do see the library director is here do you want to come up and participate up to you um but you're certainly welcome to so so i'm a little confused now on who exactly wants what we have three entities we have fic and what their recommendation is we have county staff which i assume you mean you guys yes department of management budget and then we have the library board slash I assume the library staff who works for the library board. So if you think

[00:45:13] about it in those three buckets, can you clarify for me of who exactly is asking for what? Yes. So the library services submitted on behalf of the library board of trustees, the request to have the changes to the CFS. So it wasn't FIC that originated the changes. It was a request from libraries correct to make a change correct and the change was what to switch from a sub area population sub area to a county-wide yes so the library services standard is 0.6 square feet per

[00:45:48] capita currently calculated on a planning sub area population basis and the recommendation of the lbot and the library department is to have that change to calculate at the county-wide population level okay so then fic did what with that recommendation fic has recommended that change okay but staff does not agree with that change correct okay so first i'm going to ask the libraries and i'll get let me ask the libraries why they recommended it and then let's get back

[00:46:22] to why staff has a concern with it good evening with me this evening is kate gordon the trustee from the conducting district and mike van kempen the deputy director so i'll answer your question the input for the request came from the library's facilities master plan which took place earlier this year 2024 we worked with the DTCI we hired a consultant and we spent a grand money from the library of Virginia to work on this master facility plan that required extensive community input

[00:47:01] and lots of site visits and data analysis so the master facility when we received over a thousand responses from the public from online surveys and in-person meetings and based on those responses from the public certain themes and emerged one of them was that oh i wish we had a maker space in our library and those were almost always from the the branches in western loudon in western loudon right now we have three branches percival lovetsville and middleburg middleburg and lovetsville

[00:47:40] are literally 4,000 square feet, Percival is about 15,000 square feet, which is the smallest size of the eastern branches. So all four of our maker spaces and dedicated teen centers are located in the eastern branches. And we also have data showing where people, you know, where people live as well as where they use the library services.

[00:48:09] It was through the data analysis we discovered 0.25% of patrons living in eastern part of Loudoun would go to western part of Loudoun to use the library, while almost 50% of the patrons living in western Loudoun travel to eastern Loudoun libraries to use services. So based on those data,

[00:48:33] The trustees wrote, I believe, a letter to FIC just asking the FIC to consider the LBOT's request to change the CFS from the planning sub-area population to county-wide population.

[00:48:51] Because through the survey, we realized that people, we knew also anecdotally, but the survey showed that people do travel, people do use the library system as a system. So that's impetus for the request.

[00:49:08] Okay. But you could potentially achieve that without necessarily changing the entire standard, right? I mean, I know there's planning for a new Percival library, which presumably could be a larger footprint and accommodate Makerspace or other amenities that other libraries have.

[00:49:28] So you could just accomplish that and not have to change the entire standard, right? Correct. It's the fact is we need a larger library, a full-size 40,000 square foot library in the western part of Loudoun with the full amenities of services.

[00:49:47] Okay. All right. So I'll get everybody else in on this a minute. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to get everything out on the table here. So staff's concern is that changing the standard results in too much or a higher requirement for library space than what you think we need?

[00:50:06] No. So staff's recommendation is because the issues that have been identified are more of an operational issue of service delivery amongst libraries, whereas the CFS is a capital process looking at future need for new facilities.

[00:50:23] Right. So it's not that there's this agreement that there may need to be a larger person of the library, for instance, with additional amenities. It's changing the standard. Correct. OK, I'll let some others ask questions.

[00:50:39] Supervisor Briskman. Thank you. I generally agree with staff on the recommendations. i just wanted to uh drill down a little bit on the um the teen center recommendation excuse me because my fear is then it would be a while before we actually get new teen centers if we have to wait for new recreation centers to be built because there's no teen center in clobmore i don't think there's a teen center at dulles south i don't know if ashburn was

[00:51:17] designed with a teen center in it. Now, maybe the Western Rec Center, we could accommodate this standard. I'm not sure if that's in design or I don't remember. So that, that, that's a big concern for me because I think we already have in the CIP a standalone teen center. It's not in there. No. Why did I think that was in there? Was it in there at one point? There, there was a teen center listed in the projects identified for future future years okay from it's been there for

[00:51:51] several years however there is no triggered teen center in the cna so there's no proposal to fund one in the cip there's no triggered teen center in the cna okay um what did you want to say mr it's in the future years is probably what he says well no there was a teen center that was in the CIP, the board removed it and placed it into future fiscal years. And I wasn't sure if the finance committee was satisfied with staff's response on what Ms. Spade just said, but there

[00:52:30] is no trigger and there is no standard right now. And so what we are proposing is that we have the standards. So at least it gets triggered. So now we're able to recommend space for teen centers either as part of renovation projects or as additional space comes online or include it as part of our capital facility standards for when proffers come through.

[00:52:55] So that's why it's in there. Okay, and this board or last term took the Teen Center out of the CIP and put it in future years? I would need to check which board it was, but it was in the CIP at one time and then it was removed from the CIP for funding and placed into a future fiscal year.

[00:53:12] We can determine which year that happened. Okay. I mean, this is kind of where it does not seem logical. But anyway, so my question is then, because we don't have a teen center in Ashburn, right?

[00:53:30] There's no teen center getting built there, right? Correct. Okay. So I guess could we still build a standalone teen center while we wait for the renovations on all these other rec centers? And would this, putting this in the CFS, would that trigger sort of renovations or additions to our existing rec centers?

[00:53:53] Because rec centers are really hard. I mean, that's a tall order to build a rec center. Yes. So currently, the CFS for a recreation center is six for the county.

[00:54:09] Based on existing facilities and those planned in the CIP, we would still have a need for two. So, future recreation centers would be built to accommodate the dedicated teen space. Currently, my understanding is that Parks does provide some teen programming at recreation centers if it is a need to renovate a facility to accommodate teen space.

[00:54:38] If they are unable to have the space there to consistently offer that programming, that is something that could be considered but the intent with this is to adjust the standards so that the future built recreation centers could be built to this standard to accommodate dedicated teen space but does it trigger renovation of our existing rec centers it doesn't trigger that does not trigger renovations now okay and so so i'm going to correct that so if we have it as part of So what this does is it triggers funding for teen centers as part of your proffer program.

[00:55:18] However, staff uses these guidelines also for space when we recommend changes to the CIP, right? So in many cases, we'll see a trigger for a facility or a need.

[00:55:36] As long as it is part of the CNA and it's part of this program, that is part of the basis for which staff comes and makes recommended additional projects to the CIP, right? So if you add it the way it's being presented and we understand that that's a goal of the board, then as we come through with renovations or proposals for additions or proposals to changes in space, we would be able to incorporate this as a need that the board or an option for the finance committee and the board to consider when we add projects to the CIP.

[00:56:13] Okay. But it would not trigger it. It makes sense, but it's – and then my other question was, does putting this in the CFS preclude us from building or even leasing space for teen centers in the meantime?

[00:56:33] Because we know Cascades Library is busting at the seams. We know that Supervisor Sains has been asking for a teen center for I don't know how long, either to go into the community center or I don't think they have room at the library. So I guess my concern is the community really needs these spaces ASAP, and, you know, we aren't going to get two more rec centers online, like, really, anytime soon.

[00:57:06] I mean, that's probably going to be, like, 2030 before we even consider the other two rec centers that are called for. So can we still do those other things because our teens need space? So the capital facility standard is meant to help the board with your proffer negotiations to mitigate the impacts.

[00:57:33] And so the CFS exists to help that. If the board wants to fund teen space, yes, you can do that. You just cannot fund it with cash proffers that we collect. And so there's a difference here between what ultimately the proffer system is trying to identify versus if you want to add it to the CIP and fund it with non-proffers, then yes, you can do that.

[00:57:59] Okay, okay. And I know that we often get wrapped around the axle on these sorts of things, but it also, I think it's a worthy conversation. but in the end I'm happy to support staff's recommendations but I would also be very happy to figure out how we can get more teen space in the immediate future thank you mr. Saints thank you chair thank you for the presentation so to clarify if we go with staff's recommendation for the teen space we could in theory look at adding it down the road with a renovation to say Dulles

[00:58:37] or ashburn or to the the western uh facility once that is that is that correct that's correct okay all right so just want to clarify that and then in regards to the libraries especially for western loud and clearly there's a need so with staff's recommendation not to move forward with changing the model we still could look at right now uh adding in library space and bigger space at the the western uh facility is that correct that's correct and remind me again where the western

[00:59:11] facility is supposed to be is that percival or um yes it's um located well it's right now it's the site of where the western lounge recreation center um is proposed to be built where's it supposed to be built yes i believe that's in percival okay percival yeah thank you yeah i couldn't remember exact location now to library folks with that if the you know if we have the about adding space at the the western facility could that uh help your cause and take some of the pressure off in the for people traveling west to the east and have that bigger facility

[00:59:48] at that location yes having the western loudon right western loudon library full size 40 000 square feet would definitely help the customers or patrons living in western loudon but i just want to as I was answering uh chair latourno's question earlier I forgot to relay another part of the trustees uh requests the impetus rationale for their request is also for it's true that right now ashburn area sub planning area already has a library triggered um and then the western loudon

[01:00:26] library is in future years CIP listed as a board priority. The trustees obviously appreciate that but they were hoping by requesting a change to the library CFS that would serve the long term planning purpose for future libraries, not just these two but for future libraries as the demographics in Loudoun County change. I just want to relay that aspect of trustees request to all of you but but i'll go back to my question though if we were to look at putting 40 000 square feet of library dedicated library space at the western recreation facility

[01:01:04] would that in theory take care of your your concern for not having a bigger facility out west absolutely for the time being yes okay so i think we have our answer there um and then yeah i will you know speaking miss brisbane yes we will definitely continue to look at and talk to parks and rec in the library regarding, because I've been saying this for some time now since when we get our reports from the folks that bring us the teen report every single year, have we expanded our teen night?

[01:01:35] Have we expanded our teen night? And the answer is no, no, no all the time. But I think we have space at the Sterling Community Center where we do have a dedicated teen area and we can use that facility for teen nights. So I possibly will be, I need to talk to staff and possibly bring in BMI to do that because I think we do need to expand our teen operations.

[01:01:53] But, you know, answered all my questions on these items. So thank you. Rev. Romstead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I actually agree with the logic of the Library Board of Trustees that this is a countywide system.

[01:02:14] I'm concerned that if we don't have enough library services for the population currently in Western Loudoun, they are going down to eastern loud and libraries which adds to the burden of those libraries and i i don't know if those libraries were designed or staffed to handle the influx of that many western loudners and i get the impression they were not um so either either we we change the

[01:02:51] current presumption and go with the library board's recommendation and i guess fix recommendation or we make sure during this budget process that we get a new larger perceville library as part of our cip and i'm reading here the board has not yet been presented with a capital improvement program request to fund a new library in Western Loudoun even

[01:03:28] though we have the land even though you know informal discussions about this indicate that is what we want to do but we haven't formalized that so tonight my preference would be to vote to go with the request from the library board of trustees. But let me ask staff, what is the process for getting the larger new Percival library built? What do we have to do? If we wanted to get it in the CIP sooner rather than later,

[01:04:02] what do we have to do as part of this budget process? I guess we could take a recommendation from the Finance Committee to try and incorporate that into the planning for the CIP.

[01:04:21] Staff would typically look for funding capacity and evaluating all the CNA-triggered facilities. The Western Library is, I'm sorry, excuse me, the Western Library is not a CNA-triggered facility. Staff would take the Finance Committee's recommendation and consider that for the CIP, look for funding capacity to do that okay mr chair would it be appropriate for us to amend a motion tonight to add that language into it um when we get on the motion maybe if you want to offer that as a

[01:04:59] amended language or extra language i don't know where everybody is right so it might just be you know easier to do it that way okay if you wanted to do that thank you um so okay yeah let me just so i will go to motion i i think on the teen center issue um you know i had this discussion i think maybe maybe it was youth in government night when we had folks here i i feel like to some extent we overthink this a little bit because we actually have facilities that are ideally situated they're just not open hours that are going to be real accessible for what i think we're trying to

[01:05:38] accomplish with the teen center so for instance you know there's no we couldn't have a better location than we do right now for the dull south recreation community center for a dull south teen center and when i talk to teens and i'm around teens a lot all they really want to do is have a place to go play hoops late into night or to sit with friends or whatever we have a beautiful facility there it just closes at like nine so i think a lot of what we could do to try to accommodate this would be on the operating side with prcs or even potentially with libraries in some cases where we don't have those facilities and just try to you know rather than throwing a standalone facility up which is given the status of

[01:06:18] what land is and where we can get land it's probably not going to be in a perfect location and is really expensive from a capital side I feel like we could do more with what we have and we haven't maximized those facilities that to any means yet so that's where I would prefer to go with it before we you know and then I agree you know changing changing the standard for recreation centers make sense to co-locate you you do kind of use community center and recreation center interchangeably in this presentation but i don't know that they are are they no so there there are two separate recommended changes one is to increase the square footage of the recreation center

[01:06:56] the other is in the cfs for a community center to adjust the definition so that it can address dedicated teen programming so that would be not and that would not necessarily be at a recreation center right just be at a standalone community right if if there um was not um if there was an area that had a need and is not served by a recreation center parks has identified that a community center could accommodate it yeah okay um and then the final thing just back on the library so i think my concern to completely detangling this to the planning sub area is that i do think

[01:07:33] there are geographic differences in density and potentially services and you know if we go to a county-wide standard I would be concerned long term that we we may end up actually getting away from what we're trying to do which is providing a service closer to where people are so I think I'd probably prefer just to I mean one I don't remember the exact timing on the land acquisition but we you know i know for a fact the board has discussed that length the opportunity to try to build a new percival library on and when we made certain strategic decisions on acquiring land it

[01:08:12] was with that i i don't know that it's been that long that we've even had that opportunity right i could supervisor letourneau yes the board had um pretty robust discussion when you were considering purchasing that land that it had sufficient space for multiple facilities so staff is already master planning the site working on master planning which includes a 40 000 square foot library so one of the suggestions that that i would have for you if you wanted is you have

[01:08:45] budget guidance tonight if you want to tell us officially to program a library onto that facility in that project when we're ready to put that project into the cip you might want to put that on budget guidance and just deal with the cfs here that's one thing you could do but staff is already um under kind of the the presumption that you had intended for us to explore putting a library on that site which we are currently doing okay all right and so maybe supervisor said that to bring this up during budget guidance might be the way to go okay you had another question

[01:09:23] all right okay but i'm going to move the finance government operations academic development committee recommend the board of supervisors adopt 2024 capital facility standards as recommended by staff and shown as attachment to the november 12 2024 finance government operations economic development committee action item which is made seconded by supervisor sayings i don't know there's too much left to say i really appreciate libraries bringing forward this discussion and thank you for uh for explaining what the thought process is um i don't know that I'm willing to make a really dramatic change to the FIC process right now but if nothing else it kind of gets us thinking about that and you know maybe it is something we come back and revisit

[01:10:02] and I think in the time being certainly um looking at what we need to do specifically to address the two that are triggered currently um is is going to have to be a priority for us along with a lot of other ones in the CIP which is a challenge if I may request I want to say something about the teen center the sterling library the entire library is open on friday evenings which includes the dedicated teen center and the staff does team programming every friday evening so we want more teens to come to our starting life yes that's right yeah so chair can i follow up well let me

[01:10:39] finish my yeah yeah no and that's what i meant you know i think that's a great example and a model i think we can we can look at doing more of that with our existing facilities of all whether it's PRCS or library and I know libraries have been a great partner with with working to try to bring teens in um you know it's it's a good opportunity there so anyway so I will support uh the staff recommendations and we'll have continued conversations on actually funding a lot of this stuff um supervisor saints but you know let me ask the question then because every time when we have the state of the teen address or you know during that time when we ask they always say we

[01:11:14] need more teen uh teen nights and everything and it's always said oh well we only do it here at cascades we do it sometimes in in leesburg and that's it so you just said they're starting to do at the sterling library is that recent no they have been doing that um for the past three or four years every every friday evening they have the entire complement of staff you know working there the entire library is open but they also have dedicated team programming every friday evening okay well then something's not adding up because every time like every time we get the steam the team report they say they only have the one location which is in cascades you mean the acoy

[01:11:53] report yes yeah we have tried to explain that to them too okay but yeah but i agree we need to look at expanding looking at the dawes uh rec center uh claude moore or even the sterling community center and having okay this friday on in november this friday in december or every other friday whatever using our resources parks and rec in the library team to partner together to do the expand these these teen programs and our team nights or lock-ins whatever it's called all right thank you supervisor Brisbane thank you is it branded differently or something or does

[01:12:31] parks and rec is parks and rec involved at Cascades and not at Sterling like what what's the difference why the confusion no the after our teen center at Cascades library is a library program okay it has been in place for almost 15 years. And you're saying you have the same exact program at Sterling? So the difference between the Cascades program and the Sterling program, the Cascades library is closed on Friday evening except for the teen center. Well, the Sterling library, the entire library is open including a teen center. So that's the difference. I got you. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. Interesting.

[01:13:11] Okay. Thank you for explaining that. Also, do we have access to the consultant's report? Oh, yes. Thank you for asking. It's posted on the library website under About the Library. Okay. And then lastly, you had mentioned when you were discussing why the request came through that 50% of Western Loudoun Library users go to other libraries, assuming east of 15.

[01:13:38] do you have the raw numbers on that like how many people are we talking about we we yeah i'll get all the numbers okay all right yeah because we have the computer system for people so we know where people live we know every item they check out or check in gotcha that's how we got this okay yeah i'd love to take a look thank you thank you all right supervisor i'm still all support okay uh all in favor of the motions signify by saying aye aye anyone opposed motion carries 5-0 okay

[01:14:14] um i feel like item 11 is going to take us a while um so i think i may i hate doing this i may skip around a little bit on the agenda because i think we want to take our dinner break shortly if food i think is just arriving um why don't we do um item 12 which is the peonian springs and water for joint water and wastewater feasibility study next and we'll go back to item 11.

[01:14:45] may i make a comment um i just noticed that the catoctin supervisor sent us all an email okay supporting the connected yeah okay all right just wanted to make everyone on the committee aware i think item 11 is going to take us a while so i know but i'm saying i'm skipping 11 for now so we can eat sooner okay miss mr brown good evening uh uh chairman letourneau members of the board thank you for the opportunity to bring this item back to you it has been some time a little over

[01:15:23] a year since we last spoke about this and um with me this evening is mr scott fincham our um water wastewater program specialist and uh the individual trying to figure out where our powerpoint presentation is is mr marcovini so were you able to find it mark okay well we'll wing it do you all have it do you all have it in your in your presentation okay we'll uh we'll get it we'll

[01:16:00] get it up and running as soon as as possible did i wait then we can all right on the first on the well that's the second slide um what we've done for you is to provide a pretty much a high level project overdue over overview just to reorient us as to as to what this project actually is so over the last several years um the board has entertained a number of concerns uh that uh

[01:16:38] are needed to address public health and community sustainability by providing adequate quantity and quality of potable drinking water supplies to the villages of peonian springs and to the village of waterford as well as addressing long-standing wastewater issues in peonian springs so this particular item focuses on both of those elements the purpose of this item is to provide you with the findings of a 2024 peonian springs and waterford joint water and wastewater system feasibility Study and to seek your endorsement and further guidance regarding the continued design of that system.

[01:17:14] So a little bit of background, this is on slide number three. In 2019, we completed the first Peonian Springs Water and Wastewater Feasibility Study, which addressed and identified a number of wastewater problems and water quality problems in Peonian Springs.

[01:17:31] You may recall that Peonian Springs actually still has privies or outhouses that exist today due to the very poor soil conditions that they have in that area. In 2022, the Punion Springs water and wastewater boundary and treatment alternatives were further refined.

[01:17:49] We need a little bit more detail on it. We actually made it a little bit smaller, so it honed in and focused in on those clearly identifiable water and wastewater issues. At that same time in 2022, 2022 was a very busy year, we also completed in partnership with the community, the Historic Waterford Water Feasibility Study.

[01:18:11] Now, as you may recall, Waterford has an existing wastewater system in place. If you can go to slide number, back one. Has an existing wastewater system in place, and this was to address the water feasibility study.

[01:18:27] You may recall actually from previous presentations that in the '60s and '70s, there were recommendations for water, communal water supplies within Waterford. on those occasions also in 2022 the board approved 3.5 million dollars in arpa funding to assist in the design of the peonian springs water and wastewater system so as i mentioned 2022 was a busy year and in 2023 the board endorsed a communal uh water system in the village of waterford and allocated 1.5 million for the existing capital improvement project which is the from the water

[01:19:06] and wastewater program fund to conduct that preliminary design work within the village of Waterford. The board also approved staff to continue the evaluation of a feasibility study for an interconnected communal system for water and wastewater between the two villages of Waterford and Punion Springs and that led staff to initiate a feasibility study with Loudon Water and their professional consultants to initiate that feasibility study. At this time I'd like to to turn it over to Mr. Fincham to kind of dive into some of the details of that study itself

[01:19:41] and the findings that we have brought forward today. Good evening. I'm going to follow up on what we found out to look into this interconnected feasibility study that we completed. First I want to go over the scope that we put forth for the feasibility study. In the scope we are to evaluate the technical feasibility of an interconnected wastewater system. We were to evaluate the technical feasibility of an interconnected water system, identify any construction challenges that may exist, summarize the technical feasibility of the water and the wastewater system solution,

[01:20:19] and we would need it to bring forth opinion of probable construction costs of the feasible solution. The study results in general are fairly simple. Assuming that land acquisition and easements are completed and groundwater wells with sufficient yield are found along Clarks Gap Corridor, the study confirmed it's technically feasible and financially beneficial to design, permit, and construct all components of the interconnected water system and wastewater system.

[01:20:46] Development of separate systems would require construction of three new treatment plants instead of one, resulting in increased operation and maintenance and rural viewshed impacts. So what the components that would make up this wastewater system are as follows.

[01:21:01] A sanitary sewer collection system serving all connections in Peony and Springs, so within the service boundary sewer collection system. A sewage pumping station located within Peonian Springs or adjacent to. Sewage force main to convey water, convey flows from Peonian Springs to the Waterford Sanitary Sewer Collection System.

[01:21:22] And an expansion of the Waterford Wastewater Treatment Plant to meet additional flows from Peonian Springs. Now, on this slide, the top picture right there, that is the existing wastewater treatment plant that Loudon Water owns and operates in Waterford. One of the things that the study is looking at is that plant is actually getting ready to go through an upgrade with Loudon Water.

[01:21:43] Whether this project is a project or not, that project is going to continue. They're required to do that as part of an upgrade for ammonia regulations. That particular system right there has been in operation since the 70s. As part of this work, what is proposed would be as the upgrade, and right now Loudon Water is in a planning stage, that we would work with Loudon Water to basically incorporate any type of design work that we could do initially ahead of time into their design.

[01:22:15] So basically, it will help with everything from funding to a lack of wasting resources. Below in the exhibit, what you see is what a collection system would look like in Peunin Springs. The purple that you see there would basically be the gravity collection lines all running around the road, the right-of-ways within Peunin Springs.

[01:22:36] The light blue, kind of green you see there in the middle of Punion Springs, that is actually, we're pointing that out because there is going to be, no matter what choice is used for the conceptual layout, for the layout of this system, there's going to be a section that's going to require some deep sewer. That could be over 20 feet, and there'll be some challenges and extra costs that would be incorporated with that. And then near the bottom, you see kind of a red line.

[01:22:58] That's where gravity cannot be met, and we would have to install grinders at those helms to send it to the gravity system. Next. So the water system would require groundwater wells. We're estimating four, potentially up to five wells that would be needed for this system.

[01:23:15] A treatment facility, storage and pumping facility to be sited somewhere along the Clarks Gap Corridor. All those items would basically be in the same fenced area. A water main conveying treated potable water from the wells and treatment facility to Peonian Springs and Waterford.

[01:23:31] and a water distribution system within Peonian Springs in Waterford. To the right is an exhibit showing what the water distribution system would look like within the two villages. As you can see in Peonian Springs, it's very similar to the sewer because we would be looking to have it within basically the same right-of-way with about a 10-foot separation.

[01:23:50] Below is Waterford. The water distribution lines, again, would be following the road in the right-of-way. And then we would have the water treatment system would be somewhere between these villages, serving both villages. So to the right here is a conceptual layout of what it looks like from a high level.

[01:24:09] The blue lines that you see right there is the water distribution system, and the purple that you see there would be the wastewater system. Now, there's a few things to actually point out in this drawing. One thing to look at is where the purple ends at Waterford. So the wastewater that we believe in Peonion Springs would basically be, would enter the system, the existing system in Waterford outside the community.

[01:24:33] Up at the top, you can see a star. That star identifies the existing Waterford Wastewater Treatment Plant. So the wastewater would enter basically a manhole outside the community, and we would not enter the community with that wastewater system. Now, the water distribution system, the goal, obviously the location of the water treatment plant is going to be based on where we actually found the groundwater wells.

[01:24:54] But a perfect scenario, it would be somewhere between the two villages, obviously with water running north and south to each of the villages. The table that you see here is very important. To make this system work, we would need about 20 acres, is what the estimate from our consultant, of different easements to make the interconnected system work.

[01:25:17] So that's going to include anything from groundwater wells, the pump, the lateral lines, the force main, et cetera. Next. So some construction challenges that were identified in the study. Roadway impacts on Clarkscap Road would occur.

[01:25:33] We're estimating that it would be about eight months worth of disturbance. As part of the design, if we move forward with the design of the interconnected system, we would do a traffic control plan to address that. The W&D trail crossing, we would have to cross it in some locations.

[01:25:49] This would be something that we'd have to coordinate with the regional authority. But at the same time, our goal would be to basically do a trenchless install. So basically we would, or we would go under the W&OD trail to prevent any type of impact. Archaeological and cultural resources is going to require a considerable amount of coordination between our county, state, and federal agencies.

[01:26:12] In the study, we don't have a slide up here that identifies all of them tonight, but if you look into this study, it identifies several different historical resources that we've identified that we'll need to address and look into. Easement and property acquisition is addressed on the previous slide. 20 acres of easements will be needed, and this is vital for the construction of the property.

[01:26:34] So some advantages of doing an interconnected system. Utilizing the Waterford Wastewater Treatment Site eliminates the need to acquire new land. The existing Waterford Wastewater Treatment Discharge Permit can be modified to accommodate the Peonean Springs flow. This is something through preliminary discussions that have already occurred between Loudwater and DEQ.

[01:26:53] Maintaining proper treatment and meeting effluent discharge requirements at one facility instead of two reduces the risk of environmental impact and violations. Next. Or is that the next one? The use of a single wastewater treatment plant and a single water treatment plant through the interconnected system helps to avoid visual impacts.

[01:27:12] Obviously, if we were doing two separate systems, we would have to construct three different facilities. By doing an interconnected system, it would be one new system and basically an upgrade of the wastewater treatment plant in Waterford. Increasing the evaluation area of Clark Gap Road significantly increases success for an adequate water supply originally when we were looking around just Waterford as an example you're already in a low yield area trying to find good water source if you're opening up the larger area 2.5 miles we have a better chance of finding the yield that we need and consolidated systems significantly reduces the overall operation and maintenance costs

[01:27:46] significantly for the life cycle of the facilities next so some additional considerations the study estimates that it's around 20 to 30 percent of overall life cycle cost savings would occur most of that is going to be in operation maintenance. There's a high savings within that operation of maintenance, and then there's six to eight million is what we're estimating in capital cost savings. Basically, that savings is going to be from the wastewater treatment, the not installing a second wastewater treatment plant. And then we have better estimate accuracy. What that's indicating is because the Waterford wastewater plant exists already, we know the flows, and Loudon Water is deep into their planning phase already.

[01:28:25] So we have much more accurate numbers to work with instead of working with an unknown new treatment system. So some essential project timing items that reflect specifically to what's being asked tonight in design. We've received the $3 million in ARPA funds for the Peonian Springs design.

[01:28:42] Those funds have to be spent by December 31st, 2026. We know that it's going to take us a good two years to actually do that design work. So any lack in that could create us an issue where we could have to reallocate those funds. The Loudon Water Waterford Wastewater Treatment Plant upgrade, as mentioned earlier, Loudwater is already in that process. So for us to take advantage of this opportunity, we would have to react quickly. And the DTCI Waterford Infrastructure Project, exact date, it was probably, it was either 2023 or this year, DTCI had brought the landmark study

[01:29:18] to you, which had to deal with infrastructure projects in Waterford, had to do with street lights, traffic calming, sidewalks, et cetera. That is currently in the design phase. And so So with two complex projects like that in historical Waterford, it's imperative that these projects work in parallel.

[01:29:37] And some other potential services that could come out of this. Typically, when we're dealing with water and wastewater projects, we're dealing with a smaller project, and fire flow isn't usually brought forth. One of the issues is it's much more costly. It's harder to find the yield that's necessary for the fire flow.

[01:29:52] In this project, because of the size of the project and the potential of identifying a larger water supply, we can look into adding fire flow to the project where we're not just addressing the potable, but the public safety needs. And then the last thing would be here is adaptive reuse.

[01:30:09] In the comp plan, obviously, some of the stuff that you'll see when it comes to villages is ways to do adaptive reuse for the preservation purposes. In the item, we did attach a letter from the Waterford Foundation that addresses the potential of water supply and adaptive reuse.

[01:30:25] Next. So here are the costs of a project to deal with the interconnected systems. So up top is what we've come here tonight to request and what we would be working for in the short term. So the design, permitting, and surveying of $4.5 million, that has already been funded.

[01:30:44] As I mentioned earlier, it's been funded by ARPA and the Water and Wastewater CIP Fund. The land acquisition, land use approval, and contracted services is our next steps, and we're estimating $2.7 million would be needed for that work. And then any of the work in coordination with Loudon Water specifically to address our project is estimated at $1.3 million from Loudon Water to deal with that design work.

[01:31:09] Now, the $2.7 and the $1.3 is the $4 million that you see in the item. Now, we're also wanting to bring forward what we think the total construction would be if this interconnected system would actually go through. So we're estimating it at $51 million currently.

[01:31:25] Now, of course, this is what is usually referred to as a level four estimate. So that's negative 30 plus 30 on that $51 million. But what we're bringing forth is we're not just bringing forth what it would cost just for the supplies to go into this.

[01:31:41] We have the 20% contingency, which is put on all Loudoun Water utility projects, and construction management that would include anything from Loudoun Water to inspectors that are needed for the inspection process during construction. Total project would be $60 million. And these are the staff recommendations.

[01:32:00] What we're suggesting is an endorsement of interconnected water and wastewater systems between the Village of Peonion Springs and Waterford. We'd like to create a new CIP titled Village of Peonion Springs and Waterford Interconnected Community Water and Wastewater Systems. Move available funds from the existing Waterford CIP project to the new project.

[01:32:21] Close the existing CIP projects for the Village of Waterford and Peonian Springs, since we'll have the new project. Allocate $4 million from the CIP Water and Wastewater Program Fund to support easements, land use approvals, and existing upgrades to the treatment plant. That $4 million are existing funds that sit in the Water and Wastewater CIP Fund.

[01:32:42] And then the goal would be to return to the board with a construction funding strategy. Thank you. Okay. Well, we did receive a notice from Supervisor Kirshner I was just looking at during the meeting here that he is supportive of moving forward.

[01:33:01] I know we also have received some concerns, I think, from the Waterford Foundation, from others. Do you have a response to those? So, yes, sir. We actually, the Waterford Foundation and the Waterford Community Association actually support this. It's a newly created group called the Waterford Preservation Group.

[01:33:17] I'm sorry. Yes. Thank you for correcting that. That's okay. Great. So I just wanted to make that distinction. And we are working with them right now, the Waterford Preservation Group, as Supervisor Kirshner indicated in his email as well. I think it's very important to note that some of the questions that the Waterford Preservation Group is asking for actually require us to move forward to be able to define the information that they are asking us to provide so moving forward in this in this request would actually allow us to answer some of those questions some of those questions we've asked we've dealt with

[01:33:52] before with them and we'll continue to work with them on those issues so i would say that loud and water and their consultants are um very very involved in the design and feasibility of this project and i they are very confident professionals in that area okay um i'm just going to go ahead ahead and go right to motion go ahead okay all right uh i move the finance government operations economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors direct staff to create a new project entitled villages of peonium springs and water waterford interconnected community water and wastewater systems and close the village of waterford communal water system in the village

[01:34:29] of peonium springs wastewater modernization projects and move the remaining balance of 1 million 289 200 from the village of waterford communal waste system project to the new interconnected project i further move that the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors endorse the continued design of interconnected water and wastewater systems including fire flow between the villages of peonian springs and waterford and appropriate four million from the water wastewater program for the further support land to further support land acquisition land use approvals and costs associated with upgrading the existing waterford wastewater treatment plan to accept peonian springs wastewater

[01:35:07] flow second second by supervisor umstead um i i'll just simply say i know we've had quite a few discussions about this over the years i think we've been moving strategically in this direction and this kind of codifies and moves forward the direction that the board has asked for so thank you to all the work that's taking place supervisor umstead uh i have no questions i i want to thank you ernie and your team for briefing me at at uh at great extent on this and answering all my questions at that point so thank i'm happy to support could you just excuse me i said supervisor

[01:35:44] no i was just calling you to speak it's supervisor briskman wow and you did it that's funny whoo um sure handle does that sometimes too and not necessarily that particular one yeah yeah yeah but it's like when you have something yes i hear you okay so supervisor brisbane thank you the uh you said the waterford foundation and one other group supports it yes ma'am the uh waterford citizens association is that the proper term wc yes oh okay that that's really good to hear thank you and then did you say that the final price is 60

[01:36:21] million did i hear that so that's a opinion of probable cost at this point and that we are not asking the board or the committee to endorse the final project right because we have to there's a great deal of um of design and planning that has to be done to be able to bring that back to you with confidence. Okay. Yes. Okay. But, but do you, I actually don't know, do you look for opportunities for, for grants and stuff like that to, to do these sorts of things? We absolutely do.

[01:36:47] In fact, you leveraged the ARPA for, for part of this as well. So we are continually looking for, for those opportunities. And they're, the, our rural villages are, are unique in that they're towns, but towns have structures to deal with the state Hillsborough, for example, where they have, um, you know, a much smaller, um, residency than, than Waterford does, but they were able to leverage, um, resources working with the County to be able to redo their wastewater and water systems. Um, so our, our rural villages are very unique in that regard and they're unincorporated.

[01:37:19] And so these kinds of systems, um, are, are much needed in many of these areas. No, I agree, but I would imagine maybe because Waterford's so historical, we might be able to actually tap into some funds. Okay. Thank you. okay any other discussion on the motion all in favor say aye aye uh anyone opposed motion carries five zero we will go ahead and take our four four zero one yes four zero one chair randall absent

[01:37:52] uh we will go ahead and take a break thank you okay we will resume our meeting with item number

[02:06:10] 11 space strategy updates about the government center here and our courts complex aaron welcome

[02:06:19] Down there. Thank you, sir. You could have stayed here. It's okay. It's nice to see you from the front instead of the side. All right. All right. So this evening we have a update to your space strategy. This is specifically, as the chair said, focused on the Leesburg government complex and the courts complex. So we're talking specifically about downtown. So to start off, I just want to remind the board about your current adopted space strategy.

[02:06:51] um so the board has had some very consistent direction since 2019 your first adoption of your current space strategy was in 2017 since 2019 you have been fairly consistent on a couple of themes a couple of major themes to staff that we have been using as our guiding principles as we look for space and we look at expanding and those are looking at owned versus leased spaces wherever it's possible and practical continuing to co-locate the county administrative functions

[02:07:27] which are are basically the functions that are in this building right now minus development services co-locating those with the board of supervisors and then additionally looking to find you district office space in your districts and then also continuing the distributed services model So you've given us direction to develop service centers, generally in our major geographic areas, and we use a planning horizon of 2030 right now to look at those areas and to look at the space needs that we have, to also look at the growth in staff.

[02:08:04] On the next slide, this map illustrates the general location of the service centers and the area in which the service centers are kind of meant to cover. What is depicted on this map, I know you can't see the legend very well, but each of these areas and the circle that are around them depicts basically a 15-minute drive time, so the catchment area that those service centers would catch.

[02:08:30] And our goal, the board's goal, was to locate services over time in strategic areas of the county so that you could be as close to the residents who need the services as possible. as you know currently our most built out service center apart from central loudon which is that kind of teal color is the eastern loudon service center that you have on ridgetop circle we actually have two different spaces on ridgetop circle and then we have some other leases in that area as well research place so we are mainly delivering human services from this location but we're also

[02:09:09] delivering some taxpayer services the commissioner of revenue and the treasurer have very successful satellite locations that actually get more traffic than the leesburg locations and then you've got your human services being delivered from the rich top circle location i will note that that was the first service center apart from leesburg that we started building out we've already essentially outgrown our space there and are continually looking for opportunities to find more leases in that area.

[02:09:42] The other thing I will point out here, a couple more things, in the Dulles South area, as you know, we recently purchased property at the board's direction for a future southern service center. So that property we refer to as the Glasscock property, it is right next to Stone Springs hospitals, very centrally located, will be a great area to serve that community along Route 50.

[02:10:08] And then the Western Service Center, you currently have a Western Service Center identified in your CIP that is a reuse of the old animal shelter facility. What staff has learned as we've been working towards a Western Service Center concept is that's probably not the best location for your Western Service Center. So one of the things related to a discussion you had this evening was about Percival and the Percival Library. One of the things that staff is exploring, which we think could be a better Western Service Center location, may be the current Percival Library once a new

[02:10:46] library is built. Percival is a good kind of central location for Western Loudoun residents and makes a lot of sense so that's something that we'll continue to explore. This is our general direction to build out in these areas so this evening we're focused on the Leesburg area which is our central service center. Some of the notable things that have happened over the last couple of years in pursuit of the board's space plan and your direction to us this is not an exhaustive list but these are some of the big ones. You've given us direction to keep the human services

[02:11:23] Service Center in Leesburg focused on the Shenandoah building. We deliver a lot of services from that building every day. It's very walkable. It's central. The town likes where it is. It's just a very successful service center. You authorized a massive whole building renovation for that facility. That is in design. The Eastern Loudoun Service Center, as I said, we continue to expand and build it out we've partnered with some other agencies to come in there we have our fqhc that that delivers service from there we have a pharmacy that complements the county services

[02:12:02] that are in that building and then again as i said core and treasurer moved to that location and expanded as well and it's been very successful we also completed the general district courts complex which is phase three across the street here in town and i'll talk a little bit more about that and what we learned through that project and then we also have in design courts phase four which is the renovation of the rest of the existing courthouse complex to include the valley bank building that is approved in in design and then the government building number one sorry we don't

[02:12:38] have a better name for that but on the government support center site which i will also go into a little more detail about that is in design and funded in the cip as well to accommodate our future growth some of the current challenges and why we are here talking to you tonight the new district courthouse so so all of our current challenges in downtown leesburg right now really center on the courts and the needs of the courts one of the things that we've learned through phase three of the district courthouse and then planning for phase four which is the

[02:13:14] renovation of the rest of the courts complex is that we are out of space right now today we do not have enough space at the courts complex for all the things that really ideally should be there when we moved into the new general district court building in the decade that it took to go from concept to having a building we were not able to move all of the functions into that building that it was planned for so we're already out of space there the phase four renovation will not really net us a lot of space in order to net some additional courtrooms in that building potentially

[02:13:52] we're looking at relocating functions out of the building or out of phase three and kind of just working with what we have. As you know, opportunities in downtown Leesburg for expansion of the courts complex are really not there. The town also has not been favorable to any kind of footprint expansion of the current courthouse. And so we're really, the pressure that exists for the courts complex and this building are really coming primarily from the court's needs. We have currently been using, for the last several years, a planning horizon of 2030.

[02:14:32] When we started looking beyond 2030, we kind of had some big concerns about growth, not only for the courts, but for the general government as well. One of the things that, one of the outlets that we have is that general government office building that we're building on the support center site.

[02:14:51] That will take a little bit of pressure in the next three or four years off of this building, but it really doesn't solve our problems. And so staff started looking at this and said, we need to be thinking past 2030 right now. As you all know, the horizon of the CIP is six years.

[02:15:09] If you want to affect something in the next decade, you really need to be planning for it now. All right, and then continuing on current challenges, we looked further into do we have something we can do with the courts complex? According to Virginia Code, the circuit court location is the county seat.

[02:15:29] The circuit court could be moved, but it requires basically a vote, a referendum vote of the residents to be able to move that location. That's very complicated. The other thing that we looked at is do all of the different courts have to be located together?

[02:15:48] They don't have to be, but it is complicated to separate the courts. there's a process you have to go through. Also, the courts are pretty integrally tied to each other, as well as their support functions, like the clerk of the circuit court, things of that nature. So it's very complicated to separate the courts. Downtown Leesburg is the home of Loudoun County's court system. And so we quickly kind of said, that's probably not a good path to go down. And as I said, creating more space for the courts complex, if we're looking at keeping

[02:16:24] it all together, we're currently kind of hunting for space on a pretty continual basis. And in downtown Leesburg, we don't find large amounts of space that are available for purchase or lease. So it's very challenging to try to keep everything co-located. Just to kind of highlight this, What you see on the screen here is actually part of an exercise that was done several years ago when we were planning, beginning the early planning for the phase four of the quartz complex renovation.

[02:16:59] We had page architects look at who was in the building and what were their required square footages, what are the adjacencies, meaning, you know, which offices, which groups are dependent on each other. And if you look at this, we went back and revisited this and said, well, how much space could we net in the courthouse complex if we were to remove functions that don't technically have to be there?

[02:17:23] And you can see on the right-hand side of the screen, the things that are in red are those things that staff said, okay, if we had to, we could maybe figure out how to move these things. How much square footage would we get? You can see that it is not a lot of square footage.

[02:17:42] A lot of these things just really need to be co-located together. And if we're looking for 30,000 square feet to move them out of those buildings but keep them in downtown Leesburg, that's going to be really hard to find. Just anecdotally, to kind of highlight that challenge, recently the largest amount of contiguous square footage other than the Wolf Furniture Store that we all know was vacant is 15,000 square feet.

[02:18:11] and it's not in downtown proper. So we're really looking at things coming on the market that are 2,000, 5,000 square feet. We've seen an 8,000-square-foot suite. That doesn't do a lot for us when we're trying to concentrate staff so that they can be the most efficient and effective and so they can be as close to the courts complex as possible.

[02:18:37] So looking at all these challenges, what staff determined we needed to do is we needed to rethink a couple of the main tenets of the space strategy. And in order to do that, we engaged JLL, who's a leader in space planning across, really, the world.

[02:18:56] And we asked them to do a couple things for us. We asked them to look at our current space strategy and give us some kind of high-level ideas about that space strategy, what could be done, and then do some analysis of those high-level possible solutions.

[02:19:12] they relate to downtown and they reviewed three options I do want to stress that the options that you're going to see tonight are not the solution they're general directions that we could go in staff really wants to start this conversation thoughtfully with the board so that we can make sure that we have a good long-term plan for our space needs not only for the courts complex but for general government as well so what you're going to see are some high level options ways we could go staff would need to go back based on the on the finance committee and the board's intentions

[02:19:50] and develop the solutions that would actually deliver the space or send us down a certain path so you probably have about the next year if you needed it to really think about these options and give us some direction and perhaps work with staff on more of what these would look like.

[02:20:10] So we're not asking you to pick something and put it in the CIP tonight, but these are pretty impactful decisions, so we want to make sure we give them the time that they need. Looking at the options we evaluated, option number one, and just to remind everybody, we focused on the courts complex being where our space pressure was coming from. So option number one, we looked at relocating the core government functions, and that would be the functions that are in this building minus the development services. So we're talking about the board of supervisors and your staff and your

[02:20:45] meeting space. We're talking about human resources, county administration, county attorney, budget, public affairs, finance and procurement. Those are the core government functions. We'd be taking the core government functions to the government support center site, and I will show you that on the next slide, the government support center site, and then we would look to transition this building into a court's annex. Over time, transition this completely to court space. Option number two

[02:21:18] would be to relocate the same functions, but relocate to a different site. And we would suggest that we may want to look at Eastern Loudoun, somewhere east of Leesburg, and then again, convert this building to support the courts complex.

[02:21:35] And then option number three, I will kind of call this the status quo option. If we want to keep the core government functions in Leesburg in this building, we would need to look at how do we go down to just those functions in this building, bring in some courts overflow, potentially maximize the space, and then begin or continue really looking for space in downtown Leesburg to try to put together a solution that will serve us over time.

[02:22:04] To go into a little bit of detail on these options, option number one is, as I said, moving core government services to the government support center site. So on the left, this is a high-level overview of the government support center site. The government support center site is a parcel that includes, you see Crosstrail Boulevard, which is kind of meandering in the middle of that. To the north is where we currently have located the adult detention center, the

[02:22:35] homeless services center, the JDC, our shops and warehouses, things of that nature. Below that, on the other side of Crossrail is Bowlin Park. So that's the general area you're looking at.

[02:22:50] On the right is a zoom in where that red circle is. This is vacant property that we own on the government support center site that's currently undeveloped just to orient you the building that is if you're looking on the on the left hand picture with the red circle the building that is right there below the red circle is the newly constructed animal shelter just to orient you to where we are so cross trails where's the jail the jail the jail is there you go if you can see the

[02:23:23] precursor. Yeah, right there on cross trail. So this is acreage that again, the county owns that has been planned for some time to have government buildings on it, office buildings. We have approved site plans that are, I think about a decade old at this point for up to 425,000 square feet of general purpose office for government use. Building number one, so if we can go to the next

[02:23:57] slide, you can see here just a depiction of the way that that 425,000 square feet would eventually lay out. So building number one and the little piece between one and two, that is currently in the CIP. It's funded and it's in design. That building is slated to house our development services planning and zoning building and development environmental health mapping would all move to this building and that would be in roughly the 2030 time frame when that building

[02:24:32] will be completed and ready to be occupied over time the other three buildings would come online as needed to be determined tenants. But the goal here from prior boards was to have a location where we could consolidate basically all of the, at least the administrative functions of all of our departments. They could potentially be co-located. So option number one, what that does for us is if the board is interested in keeping the core government functions co-located with the eventual place where all of those other administrative functions would be, you could do that on this

[02:25:12] site. This site, it's important to note that whether the core government functions go here or not, this site will get developed over time for office space. We are just growing at that rate and we'll have those needs. This was always envisioned to be built out to its maximum capacity. It can even accommodate a fifth building if we wanted to weigh in the future. Some of the considerations for this option, as I said, this site is owned by the county. We wouldn't have to look for a site or

[02:25:47] purchase a site. It is outside of the corporate limits of Leesburg, but it does generally keep the governance hub near Leesburg. As I said, it would continue to co-locate the governance hub, the central government services with other departments, development services will be there first. This could co-locate with that, and then you could bring in other administrative functions of government. These additional buildings, we would say if you want to go down this path, it's probably adding two buildings out of the remaining three to the CIP. These are not

[02:26:23] contemplated at this point. So in order to have something that could be occupied in maybe the 2031-2032 timeframe, we would have to have design and construction probably for one building and maybe design for the other coming up pretty quickly. As I said, we're not asking you to add this to the CIP right now, but if you wanted to go down that road, we would want to talk to you in the FY27 budget development about adding some of these buildings to the CIP. So it's something to consider option number two is moving the governance hub the core government services

[02:27:03] again moving them but moving them somewhere else one of the things that we looked at is okay if moving out of downtown leesburg is something we might want to look at do we want to actually go somewhere else maybe even further east so this would involve as i said moving those things transitioning this building to a court's annex, and then looking for an option that would allow us to locate a building somewhere else. There are a lot of ways that we could do this. Some of the

[02:27:38] just basic ways would be, of course, for us to go out and purchase land and construct a building, self-perform. Another way would be to partner with a developer who perhaps has land and entitlements, but maybe doesn't have any reason to build their office right now because they don't have tenants.

[02:27:58] Another way would be to purchase and renovate an existing office building. And there are office buildings available in Eastern Latin, so that would be something that we could think about. These two maps depict some things that we looked at when JLA was considering this.

[02:28:18] So on the left, that depicts where our concentration of population is. On the right, it shows the areas that have been the fastest growing areas. So you can see that where 1 Harrison Street is, that's marked in yellow.

[02:28:37] The government support site is marked in green, so that was option number one. If we wanted to look at something else, staff would suggest that maybe we start from the government support center site and look east as you can see there's a concentration of population and growth in that area we've also marked on this map the transit related things in that area so bus stops the metro just to kind of highlight that there's a lot of access for residents to interact with the board in government

[02:29:10] the further east we go some option two considerations again a potential site or a partnership or a building, we would have to work on that. We'd have to locate something. The newly established Office of Real Property Asset Management and Planning, we're starting to keep our finger on the pulse of the commercial market in Loudoun, mostly because right now we have to really be able to identify opportunities for lease and purchase for county needs. So we do think that

[02:29:45] there are opportunities that we could pursue. There's a potential for quicker delivery of a facility if we go this route than if we were to program and plan and build a building ourself. The development community can often mobilize and construct quicker than we can. We have to go through public procurement processes. We have a lot of public processes. There's a potential that we could maybe move quicker, especially if we find a partner that has land and is perhaps ready to go.

[02:30:18] We may also find that this would be less costly. So JLL, you'll see as one of the attachments to your packet, they did some high-level analysis, financial analysis, and they do think that it is very likely that with a development partner, they could potentially reduce our costs as well.

[02:30:40] And then for option three, which is the status quo, as I said, we would just continue to manage our growth and manage our needs kind of on a just-in-time kind of basis. That's essentially what we're doing right now.

[02:30:57] We're at the point where we are constantly looking for space in downtown. We have several renovation and refresh projects going at any one point in time in this building and in lease space that we have in downtown for various different offices.

[02:31:13] And we're kind of having to move them in and out. We have offices in downtown that have multiple locations because they can't fit in one space. We would continue to do that. We could continue to do that. The real question with this is the long-term viability of that solution.

[02:31:32] So what we would look at with option three is, again, taking everything but the essential core government pieces out of this building, infilling as much as we could with appropriate court services. Some of the services that are in the courthouse right now are not appropriate to be in a less secure building or not in the building with the court. So we would have to make sure that we kind of matched offices and functions that could be located with non-court related programs

[02:32:04] as well and we would just i think be on the hunt for space and it would be as i said more of a just in time delivery for our space we could do a lot less long-term planning with this some other considerations i i went through some of these this would likely require some dislocation of some things that are in the two courthouses right now out so if you remember back on one of my earlier slides we talked about some functions that if we had to we could locate somewhere else those would

[02:32:44] likely have to be relocated um maybe not in the in the first couple five years but we would be looking at relocating them um not too long from from now and then the the real estate market in downtown leesburg as i said it's very limited it's also very costly and we would we would kind of be, we would kind of be at the whims of the real estate market in downtown Leesburg.

[02:33:16] So those are our three options. Some caveats to the analysis that I want to just mention. We looked at both qualitative and quantitative factors. This isn't a purely scientific analysis. We had to make a lot of assumptions. JLL had to make a lot of assumptions. We had to do growth projections just looking at what our history has been for growth how many positions the board has added how much space we have needed so it's not an exact science the evaluation also looked at current market conditions so those are changing constantly what we have on the ground today may

[02:33:53] not be what we have in five years so that's just something to consider again this is attended to suggest general direction and to get the conversation started with the board and then And we would need to then, based on the board's input, go and kind of solution these things.

[02:34:14] Some of the ways that we looked at these three options were to do kind of set a set of criteria with JLL's help, weighted criteria. So you can see, I won't go through all of these, but you can see in the packet if you had time to look at the attachments, that all of the options have some weighted factors.

[02:34:33] So we looked at the costs, the costs over time, we looked at how close these options would be to residents and to employees, we looked at agency disruption, how can we minimize the disruption in movements, timing, those considerations.

[02:34:50] And all of these options were weighted against each other. So if we look at the options generally weighted against each other, the thing that I will mention here is they are marked red, yellow, green. is good, bad, or worse. These are just how the scoring came out relative to each other, which options were better than the other options. So another thing to note, the yellow option and the green option, the numbers are very close. And we would say as staff that either one of those

[02:35:28] two options is doable, workable, and provides us long-term growth opportunities. It's really, what is the what's the preference of the board what's the way that we want to deliver services where do we want to be so the only option that staff would really caution the committee and the board about would be option number three we do think that that is not a long-term viable solution for us and we if we go down that road for some period of time we may be back here having this

[02:35:59] conversation. Our recommendations are that you think about what we've told you, and if and when you're ready, you start to give us some guidance on which general direction you feel most comfortable with. Again, we would say option one or two would both be viable options that we could pursue and look at some more. We need a little bit of that direction so we can start to actually figure out what are some things we could do to affect one of these so that's really all we have um we're happy

[02:36:33] to take your questions thank you uh aaron um and appreciate this discussion so my feeling and we'll see what everybody thinks but what i would like to do out of tonight is maybe eliminate option three and then advance options one and two for further discussion i'm intrigued by the possibility best possibility that a government building could help spur development in an area that we're trying

[02:37:08] to spur developments as part of some type of agreement or joint development with someone out there who's doing commercial development and it's part of a larger office complex obviously geography does come into play here i think personally i wouldn't want it stray too far from the general direction of ashburn i wouldn't want to go further east or south for this type of facility but i think you know if you look at the ashburn metro station for instance there's potential opportunities there and then we also have the sickle in sight as as our kind of fall

[02:37:45] back where we already have space and we know we can build something um but i think you know at this juncture given what you've described on timeline there's probably there's no reason to preclude any of those options um for me i think that the government center that we're in right now would make the most sense as a quartz building expansion of the quartz building and that kind of handles enough you know obviously it takes care of those needs it it continues to provide activity for downtown leesburg so you know i do think when we i was part of the board that previously had the discussion on what to do here and at that time there was concern that if we

[02:38:22] moved the government this building the government center that it would hurt the local economy in leesburg because we'd be removing all these employees from well we wouldn't be doing that you know there's all those employees they'd just be different employees but there would still be significant activity happening in this building which would help the local economy and then we've also gotten pressure on the other side from the town that doesn't necessarily like it when the county is purchasing commercial space that becomes tax exempt um so this kind of you know sidesteps that sort of neutral as far as leesburg's concerned and then gives us options so if i were

[02:39:00] to make a motion tonight if you want one it would probably be to move both of those one and two forward for further discussion and analysis that's where i am but i'm sure others have opinions too Yes. Thank you so much for the presentation. It's clear that staff has been very thoughtful.

[02:39:19] I would agree with eliminating option number three. I would lean a little bit more toward option number two, definitely exploring option number two. I think we have a good opportunity to lead by example, perhaps, in placing our offices near Metro.

[02:39:40] Um, and so that, that would be, and I do agree with the, with the, um, the population analysis and it does, I mean, if you're looking at growth and population, it does send us south, um, in, in, in a good measure. Um, and, uh, I absolutely agree that, um, a partnership might be great. I mean, Ravonna comes to mind. I know they're planning some office space. I don't know if they they probably don't have tenants yet but i know they're planning office space and i think when i was looking at the size of the buildings they're thinking about i got a little bit nervous

[02:40:17] about you know actually being able to especially now being able to fill those buildings with with corporations um so again i think that we could you know have a good partnership where we lead by example but also perhaps provide some stability to to that sort of a um development and i i would think that perhaps they'd be very interested in that type of a partnership as well so i would lean toward option number two with number one as a backup but i feel like number

[02:40:49] one will always be a backup um you know if we can't find a deal or a partnership or land at a more reasonable price if we need land then then we we have a fallback um which i think would be okay um option number one i think during the briefing my concerns about option number one are um public transportation and then also access to other sorts of services around that area i don't feel like there's you know i don't think that would be very from an employee standpoint

[02:41:25] i don't know that that would be a really attractive area to to be going to work now maybe stuff will come up around it maybe we could put stuff in the bottom of the buildings as we build them but um it just doesn't give potential employees as much opportunity to you know go out in the community get lunch maybe have a gym nearby those sorts of things so so yes i i like the direction of two a little bit better definitely think one and two are head over heels better than three and i i would focus on number two with number one as a backup thank you uh thank you

[02:42:00] you mr. chair I agree with a lot of what's been said I would probably drop option three and send forward options one and two on option so my main concern will be cost so on option I think it's two which would move the center closer

[02:42:29] to the the center of population can we actually put it near Metro staff believes that there are potential opportunities for that we've had anecdotal conversations with you know other entities that are in and around Metro and it does seem like there could be some opportunities that we could explore the other thing just to keep in mind is that the board owns property

[02:43:04] around metro now it's not property that we could build a massive office building on but there may also be some partnerships there so if this is something the board is interested in and metro is one of the things that you're drawn to then that's the kind of feedback that staff would need to go out and really say okay how could we how could we cultivate something that would maybe produce space for us in near a metro station or in the surrounding area?

[02:43:36] So I think if we can't get it built near metro, for me, that eliminates some of the attractiveness of moving it south and east.

[02:43:54] But if we could get a government center built near metro, then I think, for me, that would bump up that option if the cost is going to be cheaper than going forward with with option number one um i'm pretty um ambivalent on one versus two and so cost is my primary concern second is whether it's accessible to metro okay let me go ahead and make a motion then we can have more

[02:44:31] discussion um if i'm if i'm wanting to advance um one and two which is what my motion is going to be then should i skip the part of the motion that directs the county administrator to include projective costs and timing in a cip budget for consideration or prioritization or do you still want that in there i don't i think what you could do so is your intention to have us do some exploring and come back to committee maybe or come back to the board come back to committee Okay, then I think you could probably drop that last part and return to the committee with options.

[02:45:10] All right. So I move the Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend that the Board of Supervisors direct staff to pursue options one and two as outlined in the November 12, 2024 Finance Committee action item and return to the committee with additional information. Yep, motion is made and seconded by Supervisor Brisbane.

[02:45:32] By way of opening, so I think the reason to locate around Metro for me is maybe less about Metro itself, although that would potentially be a bonus for employees, but more about trying to jumpstart developments around Metro stations.

[02:45:50] So I'm more interested in, you know, the type of scenario in which the county as an anchor would help spur some additional development and generate tax revenue, which I think could then close the gap that Supervisor Upstead was referencing between potential cost differential.

[02:46:06] I probably wouldn't be comfortable going as far east as a Ravana. I think that's just, you know, it still needs to be something that's central for people that are going to come in here and speak, and that's probably a little not central. but I definitely think that the Ashburn metro station and arguably Loudon Gateway but especially Ashburn is is pretty central and you know easy to get kind of in all directions it does sort of shift a little bit south certainly but you know it's close to where the core is with we've purposely put good access on every side of it and there's a whole lot of approved you know office space and

[02:46:44] mixed-use development that hasn't been built on each side of that station so I think that would you know give staff some direction to go kind of look at look into that what the feasibility would be the cost would be and then as others you know supervisor briskman has said the government support center site is there and we know that that's an option so you know we're not going to be in a bad negotiating position and that we have to go there but I think that's the place to start so that's what i'll be looking for um supervisor briskman thank you um the the part of the motion that was left out um what was staff's intention with that part of the motion so our intention

[02:47:23] with that is if you were ready to tell us to go forward with one of those options especially if it was going to be option number one where we would want to start putting the costs of those buildings that we would know we would need to bring online that we'd need to start putting those in the CIP. Now, again, just to reiterate a point that was made earlier and that Chair Letourneau has made, you're not under any pressure right this moment to do that. So that action can still be done. When you're ready to give us specific direction, when we've explored those

[02:47:58] options, that can still be done. I think that this time next year, we need to seriously be considering how to put some things in the cip so that you know we are we don't run out of time okay thank you thanks for the clarification i'm happy to support okay other discussion on the motion seeing none all in favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries 401 with chair randall lapsen okay thank you very much i believe we're going to item 13 which is proposed changes to

[02:48:32] Chapter 2.6 of the employee handbook, employee status, definition section of HR policy handbook.

[02:48:50] All right. Good evening. Good evening. So thank you for having us here. It's been some time since this was last in front of the board, so we have some slides to go through the item as well as provide a review of the recommendations from staff. So again, the purpose of the item here is to propose revisions to the employment status definitions found in Chapter 2 and the definition section of the HR Policy Handbook. We know that the current definition of temporary employment

[02:49:26] captures a broad range of assignments, and as a result, staff have had concerns around some temporary employees who remain active and working year after year on an ongoing basis. However, these employees do not receive the protections and rights of regular employees who also work indefinitely. To provide some background on this topic, again, the current definition of temporary employees as I mentioned is broad and allows temporary employees to work for a fixed period generally not to exceed two years and to work sporadically on an as-needed basis. As a result temporary employment consists of a wide array of assignments to meet different staffing needs and are subject to varying rules

[02:50:06] around the length of employment and as you can see here on as of October 1 the county had 5,507 temporary employees to meet those staffing needs throughout the County. So the current temporary employment definition does create some key issues. First, temporary employees can work up to two years, and the current definition provides for unspecified exceptions, which can result in longer or ongoing employment. Second, including the term sporadic work also results in temporary employees working on an indefinite period of time. Again, this is a concern because these employees do not receive the same rights and protections afforded to regular

[02:50:43] employees, including grievance rights and annual salary adjustments. And the last key issue is that current definitions make it difficult to carve out collective bargaining eligibility for some temporary employees but not others so again as you know the board adopted the collective bargaining ordinance in december 2021 at that time there were discussions and concerns around how to include some temporary employees the ordinance was adopted and status quo was set but with an exception for temporary employees so that staff could take some time and develop recommendations for updating the

[02:51:19] definition. The current broad definition again creates uncertainty about how to include or exclude employees in certain temporary assignments and having all temporary employees grouped together presents challenges for parsing out that subset of employees that is working on an indefinite basis. There are a couple temporary assignments of primary concern and that are those employees working in extended program support and substitute pool assignments. Extended program support includes temporary employees who may work most of the year or across multiple seasons, and examples of those roles include seasonal maintenance workers

[02:51:55] and facility attendance with PRCS, assistant registrars with election and voter registration, and couriers working with DGS and library services. Substitute pool assignments include those employees working on an as-needed basis to meet day-to-day staffing requirements or filling in for full-time roles. Examples of those include CASA substitutes with PRCS and residential counselor subs for MHSADS.

[02:52:21] Again, these are the groups of employees that we typically see working on an indefinite basis without those rights and protections of regular employees. Given these challenges are concerns, staff have developed proposed revisions to the employment status definitions in the HR Policy Handbook.

[02:52:40] Staff is recommending updating temporary employees to be defined as an employee hired to work for a limited period of time. The updated definition includes a limit on the maximum length of employment to be one year, and provides the county administrator authority to extend to a maximum of two years.

[02:52:57] And the proposed definition also eliminates the reference to sporadic work to prevent employees who are working indefinitely from being included as temporary employees. Those extended program support and substitute pool employees that have been falling under this scenario would be moved to a new regular status, which will be covered here shortly on an upcoming slide.

[02:53:14] The proposed temporary employee definition also includes exceptions to the maximum length of employment for roles exclusively meeting a seasonal need, such as summer camp positions, or limited by predetermined end dates such as grant-funded roles.

[02:53:31] Finally, the updated definition clarifies that those employees remaining categorized as temporary would not be eligible for collective bargaining. With these changes, staff also recommends revisions to the definitions for regular and probationary employees.

[02:53:48] The proposed definitions would define those employees as those that are hired for an indefinite period, and probationary employees would also be those hired for an indefinite period of time but are currently serving the required probation period. And proposed definition also clarifies that regular and probationary employees are eligible for collective bargaining unless excluded by ordinance based on the employee's position in the organization.

[02:54:14] The updated employee definitions will result in a new subcategory of regular employee. Currently, there are three subcategories of regular employees, as you see on the slide here, full-time, part-time benefits eligible, and part-time benefits ineligible. Under the proposed definitions, approximately 1,300 temporary employees in those extended program support and substitute pool assignments will be converted to regular employees.

[02:54:38] And to accommodate that conversion, staff would establish a new regular employee subcategory of part-time intermittent. The new part-time intermittent category will help extend the rights and protections of regular employees to those extended program support and substitute pool assignments while still accommodating the flexible setup of those roles to meet the wide array of staffing needs across the county.

[02:55:03] Part-time intermittent roles will be those that do not have a predetermined authorized work schedule and no hours guaranteed. These roles will be capped at 29 hours per week, and weekly work hours will still be determined on an as-needed basis by departments. As a result, these roles will be eligible for collective bargaining, as well as grievance rights and annual pay adjustments.

[02:55:25] And since the work schedules are limited and determined as needed, they will not be eligible for leave, VRS retirement, or group health benefits, but they will be eligible for deferred compensation plan. Updating the employee status definitions will provide a couple benefits.

[02:55:43] The revised definitions will help the county more clearly distinguish between temporary, regular, and probationary employees. Additionally, the updated definitions will address concerns around temporary employees who are working indefinitely without the rights and protections afforded to regular employees. In converting these employees to regular employees, they'll now be eligible again for grievance rights, They will be eligible for collective bargaining rights, and they will be eligible for annual salary adjustments.

[02:56:10] So to summarize the recommendations, again, for temporary employees, staff is recommending updated definition language to do a couple things. Reduce the maximum length of temporary employment from two years to one year. Remove language related to working sporadically on an as-needed basis.

[02:56:27] And to clarify that temporary employees are not eligible for collective bargaining. For regular and probationary employees, staff recommends updating the definition language to clarify that these employees are hired to work for an indefinite period of time and to clarify that these employees are eligible for collective bargaining unless otherwise excluded by the ordinance.

[02:56:49] Staff also proposes adding language to Chapter 2 of the HR Handbook to clarify the authority of the accounting administrator to establish policies and procedures for governing employment statuses. And finally, staff is recommending that the definition updates take effect July 1, 2025, to be effective for the fiscal year 2026.

[02:57:08] This will provide time for the county administrator and the Department of Human Resources to create the appropriate administrative procedures, notify the affected employees, and update Oracle system to implement the proposed changes. And with that, happy to take any questions. Okay. I can go to a motion, or if you have questions, you can ask questions in the motion.

[02:57:28] Okay. I'll go ahead and make the motion, then, which says I move the Finance, Government, Operations, Economic Development Committee, recommend the Board of Supervisors approve the recommended changes to the HR Policy Handbook, Chapter 2, Sections 2. 0A, 2. 6, and the Definitions Section to take effect July 1, 2025, as outlined in Attachments 1 and 3 to the November 12, 2024 Finance Committee Action Item.

[02:57:50] Second. Motion is made, seconded by Supervisor Sainz. I don't have an opening. Supervisor Sainz. Thank you for the presentation and the update. Just a quick question. Obviously some of this is in regards to the language in the collective bargaining and how we had language, deferring language in the handbooks. We're kind of getting everything aligned. When will we, or if, have we, and if we have not, when will we possibly speak with the union regarding the changes to make sure they have a review of it?

[02:58:26] Our plan was to see if the item cleared finance and with what changes to the motion or with the motion as written. And then once we would know that it was going to the Board of Supervisors, we would make both unions aware of what we were proposing.

[02:58:42] Thank you. Supervisor Brisbane. Thank you. There's some language that, I don't know if it's official or if it was just said, but it's something to the effect of the new temporary employee definition folks are now eligible to be part of the collective bargaining unit unless otherwise stated in the ordinance or disallowed by the ordinance.

[02:59:12] So is there anything in the ordinance right now that would disallow them from being part of the bargaining unit? So just point of clarification, that language is that the new regular intermittent employee category employees would be eligible for collective bargaining unless otherwise excluded by the ordinance. And some of those exclusions include things like confidential employees, supervisors.

[02:59:36] We don't have too many of those folks that are excluded within that group because of the nature of the work that they do. But if they fall within those exclusions, we would obviously not extend collective bargaining rights to them gotcha okay thank you other discussion on the motion seeing none all in favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries 401 with chair randall absinth thank you very much okay uh moving right along next up is we're moving to our fy26 budget development process and we have the easy the warm-up one before the big one which is budget

[03:00:15] guidance the warm-up one of course is is Ernie coming up here telling us about the International Facility Management Association staffing gap mitigation plan. There's no motion. I can't go right to a motion because there is no motion. I do appreciate the title of this one though it rolls right off the tongue. It's a very easy very easy one. I did do it right. Yeah. The computer does not like my

[03:00:52] presentations I can tell you that. Okay so again Chair Letourneau, members of the board thank you again for allowing me to come back up here this is a budget development item and we've been working with the office of management budget to truly trying to look at some of the gaps that we have in our facilities maintenance and management programs now as you may recall we performed a organizational assessment last year and one of the areas that the consultant looked at closely was workload analysis on our staff and while there was recognized that there was a heavy workload on all our staff they really

[03:01:27] honed in on the staff workloads for our facilities teams and just to give you an example they highlighted that they requested that we look into this and with a particular focus on the amount of un-budgeted overtime that our facilities teams were dealing with and just as a an example that they referenced was right now we have in 150% increase in actuals from fiscal year 19 budget to 24 and it goes in sometimes hundred thousand dollar increments above the the budgeted amount so it's it's it's pretty heavy load on on that that staffing because of the amount of overtime that they are having to do to

[03:02:04] make the mission whole so now we get to go to the second slide the IFMA if you'd like me to spell it or say it out the whole time we'd glad to do so but if you get that we're good thank you great great in 2022 they those are last benchmarking report now would I would just reflect back that many years ago ago, about five, four years ago, the board started using this standard to allocate how many facilities personnel we needed as we increased our square footage.

[03:02:37] So it was one facility personnel for 45,000 square feet. That last benchmarking in 2022 reaffirmed that and it includes the whole spectrum, whether it's division managers, division managers, crew chiefs, so on and so forth. So it covers the full spectrum of the staffing needs.

[03:02:56] Our current FY25 authorized staffing level is 72 and this is the breakdown for our facility staff and what we call our capital asset preservation program staff. These are the ones that do the overhauls and replacements of the large HVAC systems, things of that nature.

[03:03:12] So this is where we are at 72 personnel. If you look at the amount of staff that we're supposed to have in accordance with the IFMA it's about 110, if we make an assumption, of the 5 million square feet of managed and maintained facilities.

[03:03:35] So we're at about a 40-person deficit. Don't hold me to the exact math because it varies because it's on a sliding scale. So we'll go to the next slide. This just kind of gives you a feel for the square footage. Actuals in 2024, we don't have the projected in 2025 because there's a little bit of movement of shift of when some of those facilities will be coming online.

[03:03:56] Bottom line, at the end of 2025, beginning of 2026 or mid-26, we're anticipating to hit that 5 million mark. So we're just over 4.5 million now, but you've seen that steady increase of our square footage increase. If you go to the next slide, these two squiggly lines here are our current staffing progression, which we have improved, and this board has been very, very committed to ensuring that we have the staff when those demands present themselves so but that blue line is where we are now and the IFMA recommended for the amount of square footage that we currently manage now and historically we've been below that

[03:04:34] number so you'll see that's a significant Delta there now how we have done that how we've still closed the gap is an an extensive amount of overtime for our staff which sounds great until they're burnt out and just can't do it anymore because they are spending all their time at work and not spending any time at home.

[03:04:52] The cash is good, but the work-life balance is not. And that workload and burnout was a key factor in the organizational assessment. So we looked more closely at this, and we recognized that you can't just fix this problem overnight, but having a plan that is maybe measurable and manageable on several fronts, one, financially manageable, two, manageable for us internally to be able to recruit and onboard the staff, but also to be able to manage the surge when it comes to retention

[03:05:29] and being able to train, qualify, and manage those new folks. So if you look at approximately 40 personnel shortfall, over a five-year time frame, which is what we're looking at trying to close the gap at, it's about seven to eight staff members for the facility in the cap programs per year i would tell you that's about all we can manage in that area anyway to onboard them but it gets us down the path with a five-year plan to to make us whole you you all know this well the the one thing that is not going to change one of the few things that is not going to change when we hit equalization or stabilization in loudon county

[03:06:06] whenever that may be is the requirement to maintain the greatest capital investment that this county has ever made which is our facilities. So ensuring that we have the resources to maintain them to the the quality that the community demands and that this board expects we need to ensure that we're properly projecting and being strategic in our staffing models to keep us in that in that space.

[03:06:29] So this is what we're proposing at a high level and we are would like to be able to request the initial uh seven positions in the fiscal year 26 budget uh to specifically address uh that gap so if the board is amenable to that we would spread that out over a five-year period to incrementally close that gap with the hope that by the time we hit fiscal year 30 2030 we would have closed that gap sufficiently and the work life balance for our staff and the amount of of unbudgeted

[03:07:03] overtime would be significantly reduced so i believe that is really the high level of of our presentation and i will make myself available for any questions here we go thank you for getting right to the point um so i guess my question is so whenever we have these kind of presentations not specific to you but we hear about there being a lot of overtime and then we hear potentially that we're not i don't know i'm going to ask you this but perhaps we aren't always up to where we should be on preventive maintenance but there never seems to be an offset on the cost of new

[03:07:41] positions so i would think that if we're hiring more people and we can reduce overtime then some of the money we're spending on overtime could go toward the stat the new positions so is there any offset so we can do some of that analysis um to get more definitive where we actually see more of the well so it's where you could see more of the offset is uh outsourced services okay okay Because we're in such a rapid growth of delivery of a product into our maintained space, it's a really significant moving target because we're still in this catch-up game.

[03:08:19] So we're still having to invest heavily into other contracted services to close that gap. So it would be very difficult and potentially misleading application of those savings because they're going to be consumed by the increase of square footage to be maintained.

[03:08:36] It's, that is where you'll see the savings, but it may be eclipsed by the volume of work. So, if it's, theoretically, if it stabilizes, you will see when we stop putting new property onto the portfolio, you would then start seeing that happen, where you'd see a drastic reduction in the contracted services and potentially the overhead or the overtime, and it would be more balanced with the existing staff.

[03:09:06] I'm going to add one more thing to that, Supervisor Oterno. We are working very intensely on developing a proposal for an apprenticeship program that's approved by the state. We were hoping to have it ready for this fiscal year's allocation, but we're just not there.

[03:09:25] It is amazing. The partnerships we've seen are phenomenal, but that is going to be an investment. But what we're realizing is we're just not able to get the qualified people in the door ready to go. And apprenticeships seem to be the solution. So that's not going to be a 26 budget ask.

[03:09:44] So we just want to throw that out there. That's one of the other areas. That's good to know. No, that's great. I mean, I think we're going to see this more and more. We're going to have trouble finding qualified people across the board. And the other board that I'm on at Metro, we have this discussion all the time. It is a huge problem.

[03:09:59] The entire transit industry, not enough workers. So we're looking at ways we're creating a metro university to try to address this. So are we currently deferring preventive maintenance that we think we should otherwise be doing? Or are we simply just outsourcing it?

[03:10:15] We're not. That is a preeminent component of what I believe is good stewardship. And I'm very thankful that Mr. Hemstreet has the same view and make sure that we hold to that. But deferred maintenance is not something we should ever be looking at when we have the financial.

[03:10:32] No, I'm just asking if we are doing it because we're short. We're not. So in cases that we don't have enough personnel, that's when you're talking about we do a lot of outsourcing. Between overtime and outsourcing, that's how we close that gap. Yes, sir. All right. Supervisor Brisbane. Thank you, and thank you for this. So we just had a conversation about your department being reorganized and different naming.

[03:10:57] And I think also in that item, it was proposed for some new resources or staff. So just so I can get my head around, so what's the total? Because we're talking about seven here, and then how many was it in the last one?

[03:11:13] So 25, I think it was six additional staff. Michelle says four, so it's four for the reorganization. Oh, four for the reorganization. Okay, so we're looking at 11 in FY26 that will be requested.

[03:11:32] Well, there's going to be a lot more. Actually, there's going to be a total of 20 positions, theoretically, but for different things. This seven is for the gap mitigation, which was identified as a problem in the organizational assessment. And then those other ones are specifically structural changes in the organization to ensure that we are sustainable and able to focus on the strategic forecasting for the department.

[03:11:58] Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. okay any other questions nope and there's no motion correct no motion all right well thank you thank you i'm ready you see the same all right next we have item number 14 fiscal year 2026 budget development uh budget guidance all right i'm pulling double duty of um getting my

[03:12:35] presentation up and preparing for the presentation so if you just give me one moment i want to bring

[03:12:39] up part of the so everybody had a briefing right on fiscal guidance okay i apologize about that

[03:13:42] we are here to present the fy 2526 budget guidance item since july the finance committee has gotten briefings on what mr brown just just gave an example of which is service level issue papers that we've brought before the committee, but this evening is the first discussion and recommended motions for the Finance Committee to consider for budget guidance. This item follows the traditional format of budget guidance, but also follows up on the discussion that occurred at the

[03:14:20] October Finance Committee related to personal property tax relief. Next slide. So the discussion overview today i will give a high level overview of our outlook on revenues as well as expenditures and then provide the information and guidance discussions around personal property tax relief and we can go through then any of the additional scenarios that are included in the item as attachments 2 through 12. next slide so the revenue outlook overall next slide please is

[03:14:53] extremely positive for FY26. We're continuing to forecast strong growth in both residential and commercial real property. Residential assessment growth is forecasted to be about 5% for both tax years, 25 and 26, which is a little above average that we've seen pre-pandemic.

[03:15:16] And then the commercial assessment growth continues to be a very bright spot in our real property portfolio. We're forecasting assessment growth of 18 percent for the first half of the fiscal year and 14 percent for the second half. The year-over-year growth at the current tax rate, which is 86.5 cents, is forecasted to be over 150 million net new local tax funding dollars, which puts the value of a penny of the real property tax rate at 16.5 million dollars compared to the value of a penny during last year's budget was 14.8 so very good

[03:15:53] growth there which means that of course the estimated equalized rate is about 82 cents again the current tax rate is 86 and a half cents and then the estimated homeowners equalized rate is estimated right now to be 84 and a half cents on the personal property side we're continuing to seeing strong growth for computer equipment, which is about 79% of our personal property portfolio, as well as vehicles, which is 20%.

[03:16:23] So the year-over-year growth at the current rates for that portfolio is $117 million new dollars, which puts the value of a half penny, I'm sorry, of a penny for a half a tax year at $1.3 million. And then later in the presentation, we'll go through the additional guidance that staff is seeking regarding personal property tax relief.

[03:16:46] So the tax rate scenarios that you'll see in Table 1 in your item, we have four that are a combination of what staff typically puts in a budget guidance item at this point, as well as some scenarios that incorporate discussions that the Finance Committee has had about personal property tax relief.

[03:17:06] So table one includes an equalized tax rate scenario, which is based upon the equalized rate of 82 and 82 cents. And then the personal property tax rate that is in that scenario is the rate for tax year 26 that will maintain the current ratio of real property to other local taxes of 53.1%.

[03:17:32] That's a very precise number. However, that is the ratio upon which the FY25 budget is based. And so absent any other guidance to make progress on that ratio, staff has formulated scenarios that would keep that ratio in balance at 53.1%.

[03:17:52] The second scenario for you in table one is called the homeowners equalized rate. is based on the real property tax rate of 84.5 cents and then the personal property tax rate necessary for tax year 26 that would again keep your ratio at 53.1. This is staff's recommendation in the packet. The reason being is this represents 9% LTF growth, which is consistent with how the board has chosen to grow the budget over the past decade or so. Next slide. And the other two

[03:18:29] scenarios in table one are based upon the current real property tax rate of 86 and a half cents with variations on the personal property tax rate. So current RP lower PP is 86 and a half cents of the real property tax rate, but lowering the personal property tax rate in tax year 26, making progress on your ratio. So it actually makes additional progress on 53.1. And then the current rate keeps, of course, the real property tax rate and the current personal property tax

[03:19:04] rate for both tax years. So for just ease, we've identified just two scenarios to put on the tables here, consistent with the homeowners equalized rate and then a comparison to the current rate.

[03:19:20] So you can kind of see the differences of what each tax rate combination would produce as far as new local tax funding. So of course the homeowners equalized rate that I said before represents approximately a nine percent growth in LTF. The current scenario is a little bit stronger on revenue generation of 11 percent but again is a real property tax rate that is higher than the equalized rate. The homeowners equalized scenario incorporates 14 cents of

[03:19:53] personal property tax relief in the second half of the fiscal year. That's an important detail to keep in mind because as we go into the personal property tax relief section of the presentation we'll talk about relief beyond that 401 tax value for tax year 26. For the expenditure side we've prepared our outlook in the order of least to most discretionary the the board has typically prioritized increases necessary to fund the capital budget the cap budget as well as debt service

[03:20:32] we've forecasted that need of approximately 40 million additional dollars to go to those three funds additionally we've incorporated the discussion that the board had during the fy25 budget development process which is to increase the contribution to the housing fund from a half penny to a full penny value of the real property tax rate and so 9.1 represents that increase in both the value of a penny and then moving from a half penny to a full penny and then on the county side we are estimating base personnel dollar additional funding necessary in the amount of

[03:21:11] 24 million dollars that amount is a bit higher than typical based on the changes that the board has made to OPEB over the last month that is an increase of about 12 million dollars annually that's incorporated into that base budget and then the county-based operating is additional funding for utilities lease payments and other contractual services and then finally county new compensation is based upon the merit and step and grade increases that the board typically considers. Of course, we are currently in negotiations with SEIU on that labor contract

[03:21:50] and we have a ratified IFF agreement that have been incorporated into both of those, I'm sorry, into that estimate. The next two lines represent a sum of $40 million of new county resource requests that would align to the opening of new facilities, as well as other board priorities and other departmental priorities that you've heard about. And that totals $40 million, but just for ease of understanding, we've broken them down between new facilities and other. And then finally, we've made an estimate for the amount of new funding

[03:22:25] requested by Loudoun County Public Schools. At this point, the school division has not issued a fiscal outlook memo yet, but we've been in discussions with the school division and in communication with them, and they have advised that this number is a good estimate and we'll, I believe, be hearing from them more formally with their fiscal outlook in the next month.

[03:22:49] So the overall general fund based on those two revenue scenarios and the expenditure outlook is as follows. So you'll read the top line first, new local tax funding in those two scenarios, and then, of course, we net out the increase to CIP and housing to get a net new local tax funding to be split between Loudoun County Public Schools and the county.

[03:23:14] The board's funding policy says that we plan for 60% of net new LTF would go to LCPS, 40% for the county. And so that shows how that split would break down and then the estimated gap at this point.

[03:23:32] I will say that this is the revenue forecasts that do not benefit from the Commissioner of Revenue's assessments that they are going through right now. And so throughout the fall, we will get more and more data from the commissioner's office to inform our revenue outlook.

[03:23:49] And that outlook is likely to get a bit better as we go through the fall. These are preliminary revenue estimates coming from the Office of Management and Budget. Next slide. So shifting a bit to follow up on the discussion that occurred in October, we have some major guidance requested of the finance committee to assist in formulating budget guidance for the county administrator. And so we left the discussion in October with three questions that we'd like to bring back to the finance committee for discussion. And I'll go through

[03:24:25] those three areas. And then at the end of the presentation, I can go into more depth into the various tax rate scenarios that the Finance Committee requested as part of this item. Again, those are attachments 2 through 12. I know that we have briefed all the board members, so if going scenario by scenario is not something that you'd like to do tonight, we can also not do that. But I'd like to just discuss the three points of guidance that are still outstanding with the committee. The first is that last month, the committee discussed lowering the personal property

[03:25:00] tax rate on vehicles in potentially a limited way effective tax year 25. Just recall that tax year 25 is part of fiscal 25, and so any change to the tax rate in 25, and tax year 25 will affect this fiscal year, affecting year of fund balance. So lowering the rate on vehicles for tax year 25 from 415 to 410, for example, has a $1.4 million impact in FY25. We're just looking for some committee guidance on whether or not that is still something that you would like staff to continue to work on and plan for, for FY25 and FY26. I can pause here

[03:25:40] and go through all three questions. I think we were talking about that. We were also talking about the license fee itself. Correct. Is that one of your other guidance points? Yes. Then just go ahead and go through all of them. Okay, next slide. So in addition, you've also discussed larger reductions in the personal property tax revenue which would be accomplished through a lowered rate or a new relief program we're concentrating on the lowered rate until the board gets the authority from the state to pursue a relief program and so we believe staff believes the finance committee generally expressed that if significant relief should be considered it should be considered for as part of the 26 budget deliberations which means it would be effective

[03:26:19] for tax year 26, or the second half of FY26. So we just would like confirmation of that guidance going forward, and just a reminder that the recommended budget guidance scenario already incorporates 14 cents of relief for all personal property taxpayers in tax year 26.

[03:26:40] Next slide. And then finally, this final question is related to the vehicle license fee. The committee discussed reducing that fee from $25 potentially all the way to $0, but the timing of that reduction was still being discussed.

[03:27:03] So all of the tax rate scenarios and budget scenarios you have in your item incorporate a reduction of that fee in tax year 26. So would affect FY 26 and not be earlier to affect tax year 25 or FY 25.

[03:27:19] So the timing of all of those scenarios would have an effective date of tax year 26. So those are the three areas of further discussion, and we'd be happy to facilitate that discussion for you. Okay, why don't we start with this last one, because I think we had the most discussion about it at the committee, and there was sort of a split in terms of when we would do it.

[03:27:43] So there's a $9 million impact to eliminating the vehicle license fee. 8 million. million okay a million dollar impact to eliminate the vehicle license fee we are now you know we have we have our first quarter financials we're running to the positive during this current fiscal year staff recommends waiting until tax year 26 to make any changes however when I sort of had some discussion I also heard that we're running significantly ahead of budget enough where we

[03:28:20] most certainly would have ample fund balance to be able to cover the nine million if we did it in tax year 25. Is that a fair statement, accurate statement, or can staff otherwise address that? That is an accurate statement. And of course, nine million or $8 million less of fund balance would just reduce the options you have to use fund balance to forward to the next budget process or to replenish CIP contingency, et cetera, which is typically what you've done with fund balance.

[03:28:51] Okay. So why don't we try to settle this issue first? I did speak with Chair Randall this evening. She prefers eliminating the fee in this current tax year and tax year 25. And I did say that I would communicate that. I think I would favor that as well. I think it allows us to get a sort of a win under our belts in this tax year.

[03:29:16] What we heard at the last meeting was discussion that we really hadn't had before about the difficulties that the treasurer's office actually has collecting this fee and the fact that this is putting some people in a bad situation who otherwise don't have tax bills at all but have to pay the fee and end up getting late because they forget about it and so on.

[03:29:39] So, and then we also heard very clearly that the fee is not being used in any way to actually collect or enforce. So, personally, I would probably favor eliminating this fee in 25. Maybe we just go down on that point.

[03:29:55] 25. 25. Okay, I'm 25. Chair Randall is 25, although she's not here, so she doesn't have a vote. All right, so explain again how we would cover if we were to do it in 25. The first quarter report, which was item two this evening, identifies over-recovery of revenue.

[03:30:18] And so staff would recommend that you would cover it with over-recovery of other revenues in FY25. And so then we would have that discussion more during fund balance time or separate? No, you would need to make that decision shortly so that the treasurer's office could make that fee reduction effective for tax year 25 that would not be a decision if you want to have it effective in tax year 25 you'd be able to wait till next year to make i would say 26

[03:30:53] okay supervisor i know that we don't know for sure but what is our projected fund fund balance i believe item two uh says 150 million 150 million dollars i'm sorry my computer is dead so i can't bring that is the 150 million after we contribute to the things that we like to the cip no it is just revenues minus expenditures at this point it would be addition to fund balance so that would be the amount that you would be able to

[03:31:30] choose what would staff recommend we take out for cip usually 40 or 50 million right maybe 60 million that's correct okay so then that brings us down to 100 and then we want to refund we want to replenish our contingency funds which is usually how much um between 20 to 50 million dollars okay 20 to 20 to 50 million so then that brings us down to potentially 50 million of fund balance and then you would contribute to your fiscal reserve and your revenue stabilization and then how much would that be i think that would be pretty close to the end of that'd be the end of

[03:32:04] it. Okay. I would say 26. So just to call everybody's attention, page two of item two has the numbers. So compared to when we adopted the budget, we adopted general property tax of 2.19 billion. Our revised forecast is actually 2.3 billion already. So we're running 109 million ahead of what we forecast when we did the budget in July. So, I mean, our fund balance that we're

[03:32:37] prepared to discuss soon, which was the previous year's fund balance, how much is that total we're looking at? It's about $250 million. Okay. So, okay, I'm sorry if I'm, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'm a little bit confused then. The $150 million you said a minute ago is for 25 you're projecting. Right, so fiscal year 25. That's correct. And what Mr. Letourneau is talking about is our fund balance that we have yet to allocate from fiscal 24 that's correct and so the chart

[03:33:16] here is is fy 25 so if i if i may go ahead mr i'm sure thank you so what just to make this really simple protected fund balance is about 159 million protected fund balance projected projected at the end of fiscal 25 so when we get to june 30th 2025 we're projecting to have 159 million in over recovery or over recovery revenue under expenditure of expenditures whatever so 159 million dollars

[03:33:55] left over if you make the decision to to reduce the license fee to zero that collection would be about 150 million so instead of having 159 million you'd have 150 million that is correct so and you would make that decision before you would get to the end of the fiscal year because you would need to if you make the decision here we bring this to the november 19th meeting as long as the the full board dfi votes full board concurs then we would come back i think on december 3rd

[03:34:32] with um a proposed ordinance change to move the uh vehicle license fee to zero and then you would implement that your first meeting in january or whatever the timing is and you would then and that happens at the same time that we confirm the personal property tax for the second half no that happens totally different this would happen in fy in tax year 25 so this would happen we would it happens now so the discussion you're having now is tax year 25 right so that would reduce your

[03:35:07] fund balance for the end of 25 because it's money you would not collect you would make that decision on december done make the decision on the ordinance to send it to public hearing in december and you would make that decision okay i guess i'm fine with 25. all right 25. well i'm not trying to pressure anybody but we can send it to the full board and you know it will go anyway i know but i mean if you if you both vote no it will still go to the full board and then the little board can decide if you want it so okay so then i'm going to make a motion on 25 then based on just this item and we can dispense of this and get on to the other discussion so i'll move the

[03:35:47] finance government development committee recommend the board of supervisors throughout the county administrator um to bring forward a reduction of the vehicle license fee to zero in tax year 2025. okay motion is made second by supervisor umstead i think at this point we've discussed it i guess my larger point was we're running enough ahead of budget where we will have a very significant surplus and we can i think easily afford to reduce by eight million the um the the money

[03:36:22] that we're collecting in order to reduce this fee and then not put everybody we heard about through the pro through the the rigmarole of collecting it in this tax year any other discussion on that motion okay all in favor say aye aye anyone oppose motion carries 401 with chair randall absent yeah i guess it does um so moving moving backwards then we have the the 26th question and i know supervisor sayings has a concept there which which i'm in agreement with but just going to your first

[03:36:59] thing for a minute which was lowering personal property tax vehicles on a limited way in 25. i would argue we just did that with that previous motion and that was more impactful than some small change from 415 to 410. so i would personally not put anything further on the table on this slide and just kind of end that discussion since we are eliminating the fee is everybody an agreement there okay all right so that just leaves us with with 26. um well i think honestly your your motion

[03:37:36] your second part of your motion it's just fine still because it's all dealing with 26 yeah but is there more you wanted to tell us because i think we're ready to pick a scenario honestly i did just want to say that there was one typo in attachment 12 the ltf growth that was shown there said eight it should be ten percent that's the only additional attachment 12. in attachment 12.

[03:37:58] in the last scenario um for you i definitely didn't um attachment 12 with supervisor to cronies request which increases the general rate to 420 and reduces the vehicle rate to 410 okay all right so mr. Sainz would you like to make that motion then so help so you just skip the further skip the first okay and just okay we just move that second part of my second second okay all right I move that the finance government operations economic development committee recommend the

[03:38:33] board the board supervisor direct the county administrator to prepare the fiscal year 2026 proposed budget consistent with revenues and expenditures found in attachment four second okay okay motion is made and seconded um by me made by mr saints opening mr saints thank you all right motion um let's see if maintains our correct me wrong why don't we just pause for a second not on your clock since we just referenced attachment four and most people wouldn't have any idea what we're talking about so can we go ahead is it possible for staff to put attachment four on the screen so that people know what we're talking about not that there's a huge crowd here

[03:39:13] watching us but they're riveted but attachment four is the scenario in which the general personal property tax rate stays at 415 vehicles goes to 348 and we're using the homeowners equalized tax rate as the base property rate correct yes that's right yep that's the intent go ahead mr say yes thank you all right um so as it was being the motion maintains the 415 tax rate for general

[03:39:45] vehicle personal property uh for the for 26 would go to 348 um i believe this would help you know decrease the the rate we have a decreased rate we have significant impact on it would help our in residence um let's see here i believe this uh scenario also allows the board to appropriately consider revenue for a fiscal year 26 budget process but ultimately the goal is to have the rate higher for for let's just put it put it out there data centers and then residents would have

[03:40:20] a lower lower rate for their for their personal property that's the in the spirit of the idea of the motion supervisor briskman thank you um and thank you staff for for working and it's been it's been a long road to be able to separate these two rates um and so i really appreciate all the on it I just want to clarify the the deficit in this scenario it the staff recommended scenario 2 and the deficits for the deficit for LCPS and scenario 2 we're projecting this is not necessarily you know set in stone the projection in

[03:40:58] scenario 2 of the LCPS gap is 29 million the projection for the deficit in in attachment 4 is 30 million so it's only a million dollar increase in the potential gap before LCPS and then the county gap what good looks like it goes from 21 to 22 million so and again it's a it's a 1 million dollar I it's a lot smaller than I thought it would be in changing the changing the car tax rate significantly lower because staff's recommendation for the car tax was in

[03:41:35] scenario two or dollars and a penny for the general and vehicle rate okay so we're dropping it then do the math from 401 to 348 50 50 53 cents yeah i'm actually really surprised that it's it doesn't create more of a gap but after reviewing what the gaps would be i'm comfortable with supervisor sane's um supervisor sane's proposal unless there's something i'm missing i think the

[03:42:08] only area where where staff would just offer that overall your tax policy and the work that we've done on data center revenue and mitigating the risk around that is that what lowering the rate on data centers while that revenue line item is still experiencing significant amounts of growth will help our over-dependence on that revenue, and so staff will need to continue to recommend lowering that rate.

[03:42:42] Sorry, it's keeping it at 415 then for both halves? Correct. So what is our percentage then of revenue from the personal property tax? It's still at 53.1.

[03:42:58] Oh, we're still at 53, okay. Yes. Okay. but your goal is to make progress on that ratio we want it to be going up to 55 56 but but we're better than we were last tech last budget year right because last budget year we only came in at like 51 if i remember the fy25 budget was approved with a 53.1 oh it's 53 so you're staying the same okay yeah okay okay all right thank you supervisor upstep i'm i'm happy to support this i

[03:43:28] I appreciate staff's recommendation to lower the rate on data centers, but I think that this gets us to a place where we can adequately lower, hopefully adequately lower the taxes that homeowners are paying, or at least equalize it, and then lower the vehicle tax rate.

[03:43:56] So I'm happy to support this. Yeah. So fiscal guidance is obviously the very first step in the process. It is far from where the budget necessarily will end up. But I think we're starting in a place where we're attempting to go to a homeowner's equalized tax rate, which is always a positive.

[03:44:15] And then if there's one thing that we hear consistently from residents, it's frustration that they think they aren't seeing a benefit from all the data center revenue. Now, when you really get into the numbers, we know that our tax rate would be much, much higher, like some of our neighbors, if we didn't have data center revenue.

[03:44:38] That said, I think if we are able to lower the vehicle personal property tax rate by 50 cents, really almost exclusively because of so much revenue coming in from the other personal property tax line item, that really illustrates the point and provides tangible relief to people in a way that I think will be better understood and help kind of resonate.

[03:45:00] So I think for that reason alone, I think it's important to do it. And then, you know, we're still in a high-cost environment. I think, you know, this tax, personal property tax, is the most unpopular thing. I think people, you know, we get far more complaints about this than we do even the real property tax, probably because it's not held in escrow for anybody.

[03:45:24] It's something that hits you twice a year that you kind of know that it's coming, but you kind of forget about it and then the bill is always more than you think it's going to be just because it is um nobody's fault it just is so i think you know making progress on that is important um and you know we'll see what the legislature does with our proposal to try to change the way we do this a little bit but um but i think this is a very good starting point for budget mr sanes closing thank you i'll actually just question because you know when we talk about equalized rate and i guess this is the beginning of our process because most of the time i do not vote for the equalized rate or the board has not been voting for the equalized rate so would staff

[03:46:02] recommend we leave as is at the 0.845 or would you want me to make a change to the 0.865 which is not the equalized rate no the motion that passed is sufficient staff doesn't have any concerns okay so would that change anything during our budget negotiate our talks because again some of us vote for the equalized rate some of us don't vote for or is it two different things so what's important

[03:46:31] about these revenue or these proposals is you do not have a revenue problem right so if you can just scroll down a little bit all of these scenarios are based off of a nine percent growth rate okay so if you increase the real property tax rate back to the current rate this becomes a 10% growth rate. And so part of it is in discussion with the board, you're at a place where you need to really think about how much you want to grow the budget any given year.

[03:47:10] And so we've really kind of centered this around where you've been and around what your average growth rate has been over the last several years, which is about 9%. And then we're backing into these other rates based off of that nine percent. Okay. And so that's why we recommended the homeowners equalized rate because that gives a good balance of reducing the tax rate on the real property side, also providing personal property tax relief, and still addressing the main or priority expenditure programs and things of that nature that the board has traditionally asked us

[03:47:48] to fund. Okay. All right. Okay. That explains. Thank you. Okay. Nope. Then I'm fine with the for now I think I'll still reach out to have a another conversation after the fact before comes to the full board but that answers my question for now thank you all right so after Supervisor Saints has debated his own motion I'll I would have made it if you did all in favor the motion say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries 401 with chair Randall absent we have two other additional

[03:48:19] motions on this item i'll recognize vice chair brisbane first do we not uh per the prior discussion about the percival library supervisor umstead was going to make a motion okay um uh thank you uh chair letourneau i move the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors direct staff to perform the research necessary to advise the board of supervisors how to provide the commonwealth's office of the public defender with funding for additional positions and direct staff to prepare FY 2026 resource requests that would fund additional Office of the Public Defender positions

[03:48:59] and increase the existing county supplement to the Office of the Public Defender so that positions would have pay parity with positions within the Commonwealth Office of the Commonwealth's Attorney. This is made seconded by Mr. Sainz. Openings and reservoirs.

[03:49:14] Thank you. I think many of us have met with the Public Defender this year. I think the last time that we plused them up a little bit was my first year in office in 2020, if I remember correctly. They came to speak at the public hearing when we were doing it at LCPS admin offices.

[03:49:35] This request would be a 40% supplement, and it would be about $672,000 as a bottom line. And then staff, in discussing this with staff, they wanted to do a little bit more research as to how viable it is to add positions.

[03:49:59] They need anywhere between three and seven positions to be at parity with the Commonwealth Attorney's Office. They have distributed, at least to the offices that have met with them, really good information on the number of hours that they're working in comparison to what is the caseload and hours worked in comparison to the commonwealth's attorney's office um bottom line for me is a little bit um ideological in that i don't believe that we can be uh providing um equal justice under the law when someone doesn't have equal representation under the law with pay parity and staffing and

[03:50:37] resources i do understand clearly that this is a state office and that the state should be paying their bills. And we can have that conversation. I know it's frustrating, and we can keep having that conversation with the state. And I also, down at VACO, I sit on the finance steering committee, and we are going to be researching actually trying to have a bill that would reclassify public defenders so that they would be in the comp, under the comp board, like some of the other positions in the justice system so there's multiple ways to skin this cat

[03:51:14] but I think in the meantime we really should plus them up again and bring them up to parity and hopefully have their resource requests funded as we go through those debates later on in the budget thank you all right mr. Sains thank you chair and the turn open to staff the office of public defenders of state or state state employees correct so I know we've gone down to the General Assembly a few times and asked for for help to increase their the pay and I think they did that one time out of the the few that we did a few years back but

[03:51:51] here we are again so do we need to look into putting this into our legislative packet again or give us a little bit of guidance or and or you don't answer that tonight if you want to it didn't you want to say perfectly fine to say oh we do that and put that information into the response coming back so i would say let us let me talk to mr freeman and and if that is something that would be advantageous we'll bring it back to

[03:52:22] the board as part of your ledge program yeah all right um okay yeah thank you um okay so i think for me this motion is just too specific um i i would have supported looking at this topic asking staff to do some analysis about it um even doing the research on whether these positions we could even add positions considering that's not a county function um this is going further than that and it's it's assuming the outcome of that and directing you to put it in the budget already

[03:53:01] and i'm not there yet i i couldn't make that decision up front um i think in the final analysis i i believe i did support the additional funding in 2020 or 21 budget i probably would again exactly how much and exactly what the scenario are will depend on the circumstances of the budget but um you know i i am frustrated that we we continuously raise these issues and we don't get anywhere and quite frankly i'm not never been aware of much of a push on this topic from our

[03:53:36] delegation um and you know considering where some of them are coming from on some of these issues you would think that this would be something that they would want to jump on but so if you know i could sit here and probably amend this motion to get to a place i'm gonna i would vote for it but it is not currently there right now this is just too specific and it's i think directing you to do too much so i'm not going to support this tonight but i am going to be interested in what the results are if it passes if it doesn't pass i would probably you know if it gets the full board then i would probably make a an alternate motion asking for some of that research and analysis

[03:54:13] without the direction that's where i am supervisor yeah mr chair could i i get a a clarification um because the first part of this motion as as it was amended um direct staff to perform the research necessary to advise the board. Okay, that's the first part. So that would seem to be in keeping

[03:54:42] with what you are comfortable with. Then we get into, again, perform research for funding additional positions. Then direct staff and direct staff to prepare resource requests that would fund additional positions and increase the existing county supplement so i'm reading this as more more along the lines of what you thought you might be comfortable with than a direct

[03:55:19] than a direction to staff to put it in the budget i does vice chair briskman have any thoughts on that if i'm understanding what you're saying i think maybe and this would bring supervisor Letourneau along, if we strike the part that says, and direct staff to prepare FY26 resource requests that would fund the additional positions, we could strike that part. It would retain the plus up on salaries, and it would retain the research in coming back, but it takes out

[03:55:54] automatically Supervisor Letourneau plussing up the resource positions, which we can make a decision on that based on what staff brings back um yeah i think that if i may in your time i think that that's better the other question i would have is i'm just not entirely sure when we talk about pay parity i don't know like how those positions exactly line up i think their your concept is okay i'm just like i don't know how literal you mean that but um but if we're only talking about like research on that i think we're that's okay you know i'm not talking about research you're not

[03:56:30] okay okay no that's fine um we could we're still in supervisor um this time but maybe we could separate that sentence well what what i'm thinking is we could just maybe so that because i actually don't think even with the 40 percent they are going to be at pay parity necessarily but we could say something to the effect of so that positions would come closer to pay parity or something like that improve uh improve improve pay parity improve parity yeah okay and okay

[03:57:06] don't make any more change well well i'm gonna have to bring it up but chairlaterno um we're in a motion and technically you've already spoken but um yeah okay um sorry trying to keep our rules um you've already spoken okay so it's just the closing for supervisor brisbane i think we have amendments then to this motion though so let's okay you just pause and figure out what we're changing and maybe restate it so so the restated motion would be i move that the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors direct staff

[03:57:39] to perform research necessary to advise the board of supervisors on how to provide the office of the public defender with funding for additional positions and increase the existing supplement with the office of public defenders so that pay so that positions would improve pay parity with positions within the office of the commonwealth's attorney okay restated motion with we'll call the friendly from supervisor umstead okay yes all right so let's go ahead and take your closing thank you so one question that has come up up here staff is um when would you be able to come

[03:58:19] back with that research um do we need to state that in the motion or is the intent to come back in time for us to evaluate this for the budget deliberations and discussion do you mean the budget deliberations on the board's budget guidance for December 3rd, or are you looking for, I think December 3rd would be difficult, but I think we could provide, likely be able to provide that information during the lead up to budget deliberations, if not as part of budget deliberations.

[03:58:55] Okay, and then the other concern was, do we, and you may not be, maybe Ms. McClellan will be the best person to ask if we wanted to put i think that we can put this in our legislative agenda without specifics but do you think that you know without like you know just talking about pay parity and and staffing parity i think we have enough research from the public defender that we can actually put that in our legislative agenda but do you think and john may have to answer this do you think that we would need that research back from our staff to put it in our legislative agenda So while you were discussing, we looked at your legislative agenda.

[03:59:34] You have a current funding priority that states support additional appropriations for adequately funding the judicial and correction system, including public defenders and jail per diems that are the responsibility of the state. So you have that funding priority. Oh, it's a funding priority.

[03:59:51] Yes, this is a funding priority in your current legislative program. So if you feel comfortable with that, staff is already supporting the state looking at these positions, and I think that also includes looking at them in our area, adjusted for our area.

[04:00:10] So if you're wanting to go further than that, I think we would need to talk about it. I think it's okay for now and then maybe in subsequent General Assembly years if we can work we will probably hopefully be working on a reclassification that we can support or bring a bill on but I think that's satisfactory for now. Thank you very much.

[04:00:31] Okay. All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? No one's opposed. Motion carries. 401 with Chair Randall absent. Okay. Supervisor Umstead. Yes. All right. I emailed this out. Aaron was a great help in drafting this language. This is on the library situation.

[04:00:52] I move that the Finance Government Operations Economic Development Committee recommend that the Board of Supervisors direct the county administrator to prioritize the addition of the Western Loudoun Library to the capital improvement program when capacity is available.

[04:01:12] Okay. Much is made. I will second. And just, I just think they made a very good case that for them, it works equally well if we get this project into the CIP, that alleviates their concerns about having Western Loudoun have to go down to Eastern Loudoun, potentially impact services at Eastern Loudoun libraries because there's so many people from the West coming in.

[04:01:45] also provides equal services in Western Loudoun for those from the east who we heard like to go out to Western Loudoun to use the libraries. So that's all I've got. Thank you, Supervisor Umstead. So is the Western Loudoun Rec Center funded within the six-year period? It is, right?

[04:02:05] Yeah. Do you remember where off the top of your head? No. It's relatively soon because I think we sold bonds on it in the last election, right? Or we asked for authorization. So we moved that for it so i mean like i don't know where this can go in the cip i i don't know if prioritize means bump something else out so i'm not sure that was necessarily to president's intention okay just making sure that's where not how staff was interpreting it um but i do think the board is saying we'd like for you to look to see if we can assign it to a year so at least there is even

[04:02:41] if it's out so at least there's some clarity now on what's happening with that i think that's kind of how at least i interpreted the motion and i would support that miss mcclellan that that is that is what i was going to say that's how staff will view it is you're telling us to look at this specifically for inclusion in the cip okay perfect okay thank you and but this would also not prevent possibly adding the 40 000 uh square foot to the western loudon um complex this is telling us to do that okay all right okay any other discussion on the motion seeing none all in favor say aye aye

[04:03:20] opposed none uh motion carries 401 with chair randall absence and i believe that is the last item on our agenda um so nothing further to come before the committee we are adjourned thank you everybody

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