Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Finance/Government Operations and Economic Development Committee, Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Place: Board Room, First Floor, Government Center, 1 Harrison Street SE, Leesburg, Virginia
Length: 6h 20m (video)
Official meeting video (county, Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/player/clip/7843
Agenda (Granicus): https://loudoun.granicus.com/AgendaViewer.php?view_id=73&clip_id=7843

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 2026-10-20. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:12:48] I will now call the order of the December Finance, Government, Operations, and Economic Development Committee meeting. 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. Please see the clerk to request one. We have six items proposed for consent this evening, and they are number six, Award Authority Increase Information Technology Products and Software Services.

[00:13:11] Item number seven, Award Authority Increase Information Technology Consulting and Technical Services. Item number 8, FY25 Mid-Year FTE Authority for the Department of Mental Health, Substance Abuse, and Developmental Services. Item number 9, Fiscal Impact Committee 2024 Annual Report.

[00:13:28] Item number 10, Loudoun County Board of Equalization 2024 Annual Report. And item number 11, Utilization of Federal and State Asset Forfeiture Funds for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office. I'll move approval of the consent agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Supervisor Umstead. Any discussion on the consent agenda? Supervisor Brisbane.

[00:13:46] Thank you. I just wanted to draw our attention to number nine because the county did put out a really good statement today about everything about the Fiscal Impact Committee and what it does and what it, for lack of a better word, impacts. And it was really very, very educational and so I would encourage folks to read that and colleagues maybe put it out there for the public because it was it was very informative and very interesting thank you okay any discussion any of

[00:14:21] the consent agenda items seeing none all in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed motion carries five zero we do have a couple members of the board who have joined us this evening who are not members of the committee and they will of course be welcome to participate in the discussions but cannot make motions and vote on the motions all right we'll move to our information items our first is our monthly Department of Economic Development reports with Mr. Reiser. Good evening, everyone. Happy holidays. Same to you. Just a couple of quick updates tonight. Newly posted jobs in Loudoun

[00:14:55] County for November, 3,135 active open jobs in Loudoun County, 17,000. Nationally, 227,000 jobs were added in November, which was slightly above the expectations. October, the most recent month for local unemployment data, the rate 2.6 for Loudoun, 2.9 for Virginia, and 4.1 for the U.S.

[00:15:18] The BLS jobs report in December showed 4.2 for the U.S. The most recent consumer price index showed prices in October were up 2.6 percent compared to a year ago. This is up slightly from 2.4 in September and 2.5 in August, but otherwise it is the lowest it's been in almost four years.

[00:15:38] The next monthly CPI report released tomorrow. November 6th, the Fed lowered the Fed funds rate by 0.25. With the continued low inflation, we do expect that they will consider another rate decrease on December 17th and 18th.

[00:15:56] And as we reach halfway point of this fiscal year, we're in a very strong position. 59 wins, almost 2,000 jobs, and just over $6 billion in investment. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you very much, Mr. Reiser. Great news. Any questions on the monthly report? Seeing none, we do have a long agenda tonight, so I think that's stunting our discussion a little bit, but keep out doing what you're doing, my friend. All right. Okay.

[00:16:30] Number two, update on passport acceptance program at the Rust Library. And we have our friends from Lennon County Public Libraries here. Good evening. Good evening, supervisors. So I'm here. I'm Chang Liu, library services director and with me this evening just pull that mic a little closer to you oh mike van kempen the deputy director of the library system with me this evening in the audience we have the manager of the passport service at ross library katie kalio she is a force the force

[00:17:10] behind the efficient operations at ross library's passport service and so we're very grateful that she has been providing the leadership for this program. So I believe that we started this program based on the request from the Board of Supervisors and we were able with the support from the Board of Supervisors providing library services three positions, we were able to start the program on September 29, 2018.

[00:17:41] And then we were supposed to come back in the fall of 2020, so two years after initial uh kick off the program to provide an update to to you for you on this program but then because of the pandemic we asked for a postponement of that report so last time we were here was september 13th 2022 at that time we had not been able to have a full year of offering this service again

[00:18:15] due to the pandemic, but I'm happy to report, so in September 2022, we were asked to come back in the fall of 2024 to give another update, so that's why we are here. I'm happy to report in IFY 2023 and IFY 2024, we have been able to offer this program for the entirety of the year, 12 months of the year, and we have achieved the fullest of self-sufficient revenue model

[00:18:48] in FY2023. Our revenue was 30% more than the expenditure, and in FY2024, our revenue was 46% over the expenditure. So our recommendation at this time is to continue keeping this program at the Ross Library. It's a very robust program. It's very busy. However, we don't recommend expanding this program to other locations because we would need additional staff, additional space, and we may not be able to achieve a self-sustaining model if

[00:19:26] we expand it to other locations. So that's where we are, and we're ready to answer any questions you might have. Thank you very much. I will start with questions. So fantastic news on the self-sufficiency and the recovery but let me challenge a little bit the notion that we shouldn't expand it at all because i certainly think that could be something that could be a resource request to you if if more resources were needed are we doing any tracking for where the clients are actually coming from yes we have been tracking their zip codes and i have the information

[00:20:00] here most of the applicants come from the leesburg zip codes then the second ones or the third one leesburg had two zip codes ashburn area um it's the second largest group of applicants and then after that is percival then after there is the gum spring area south riding aldi and chantilly and then round hill sterling so people even people from west virginia or maryland so it's but most of the people come from Loudoun County and from Leesburg, Ashburn, Percival, South Riding,

[00:20:39] and Sterling. So if you do a search in the 20152 zip code, which is South Riding, and you attempt to make an appointment for a passport currently, the Rust Library shows up on the second page of the list of potential facilities because there are many that are closer, although I wouldn't say any of them are close. They're all in Fairfax County or in Prince William County before you get to the Leesburg one. So I guess my thought here is, is there any way to make this a mobile product using, you know, some sort of facility or something that could circulate

[00:21:18] or is there space potentially in any other facility? And if not, should that be something that we plan for in the future with a potential new facility yeah um katie our program manager has already been thinking about doing more pop-up we call it pop-up passport issuance acceptance in other locations i believe that before the pandemic we did that in several locations and they were overwhelmingly popular and we like to do that again yes okay well that's good news well i would really like to engage a little further with the library board on

[00:21:56] you know any other potential locations such as bramilton or gum spring where i think there is a huge demand for this service i understand there could be issues with staff and space but you know if it's possible to you know at least try some pop-ups and see how they do and then let that inform some future planning around this now that we've kind of figured out what the volume is needed to make it self-sufficient, we can kind of plan a little better.

[00:22:23] And I know it's a staff intensive thing, so but that could be a discussion for us in terms of whether we're willing to fund that. So those are my two cents. Let me go this way, Mr. Saints. Thank you. Thank you for the update. So currently right now, correct me if you're wrong, in order to for this program at Russet, it's first come, first serve? Correct. Is there any thoughts of going to a model, well, either walk-in or a combination of both walk-in and doing appointment or doing appointments only? Sure. We tried that during the pandemic only because we wanted to know how many people were coming. That was not very efficient just because

[00:23:02] people make reservations, but they don't show up. But meanwhile, other people who actually need to come in ASAP don't see any openings, open slots. So that's why we are very confident the walk-in model is the most efficient model, allowing us to serve as many people as possible, and also distinguishes us from many of the other passport acceptance agencies where reservations are required.

[00:23:29] So we have received great feedback from the public. Usually they don't have to wait very long. We have a system, like, you know, we check -- people check in, like in a doctor's office. People check in, and then we take them. have a triage station where they look at their, someone look at their material to make sure it's complete before they go to see a passport acceptance agent. So that makes sure everything goes smoothly. All right, so two questions here, piggyback off of that one, so it sounds like you're more in favor of just keeping status quo. How long is the service time or

[00:24:04] wait time? And then secondly to Supervisor Letourneau's question earlier, yeah, I think looking at doing a mobile or pop-in services to the other location might be something to look at if you're not in favor of setting up another location say at Brambleton or at Gum Springs where there possibly might be some space available we just have to do some you know some small renovations so I'll definitely think look into doing more pop-ups possibly we are definitely interested in doing more mobile service okay thank you well you didn't answer question how what's do we have a wait time or because yeah thank you for the

[00:24:43] question because it's walking service and the staff even though we received three staff members one full-time and two part-time staff members in order to implement this initiative we took way took a step further we trained all the Ross library staff were eligible you have to be a US citizen all the eligible Ross library staff members are trained to be able to accept passport as As a result, we can -- if we see a lot of people lining up -- it's just good customer service.

[00:25:14] We're used to doing that. So if we see a lot of people lining up, we would open another station. So as a result, we very, very rarely turn people away. We try to accommodate all the people who are there. And we tell them if we know, like, they walk in at 4:00 and we're open until 7:00, but if we see a lot of people, we also say, hey, you really don't need to stand here for three hours because we're full for the rest of the day just come back another day so usually people are they don't complain they walk they come back another day and they they are accommodated another so it sounds like you don't know how long

[00:25:52] people wait or how long the service time is is for for customers so you look at maybe if we can do some analysis to see how long a service is because we can have that data I think that's very very important usually it's within minutes like 15 minutes or so because it takes about 15 minutes to process a passport application usually and then so we we have people lined up as I said if we see a lot of people waiting we'll just have more staff members doing that thank you

[00:26:27] supervisor Brisbane thank you I'll echo what the chair said about possibly looking into doing this at other locations I would think that if the pop up program was very successful and popular during covid that that indicates a demand similar to what you're getting at rust um my question is uh how much space is needed because you said space constraints are part of the reason why you wouldn't recommend it at other locations but i think rust is one of our smallest libraries no rust is one of oh it's one of the biggest ones

[00:27:05] oh okay okay um so at rust library they have a tree we call it the tree after the reception desk where people you know put their name down and they show all the materials I've provided they have brought and the staff make sure that everything is complete and correct and then we have a dedicated room used to be a small conference room now it has been changed into a passport acceptance room because there's a lot of privacy information personal information involved and also a lot of times people come with children infants toddlers and we want to make sure they're in a contained

[00:27:40] environment so we have the front desk and then we have a small meeting room for this purpose then we also bought semi-profit private furniture um that's we call it that's how we the second station so if we're really busy we open another passport desk okay that's a semi as i said a semi it's special office furniture but with a roof okay and also it needs um camera because we provide photo passport photo taking okay so we need cameras we need a point of sale system to collect

[00:28:16] the money so um so i'm getting a picture um so for example we are getting ready to renovate cascades library so maybe this is something that we should consider when we're designing that library to make sure that we have enough space to do something like this um at another location but i do understand that that that is a lot of space so okay thank you thank you chair handle i remember the very first meeting that supervisor that mr hamstreet and i

[00:28:53] had on this issue we had in his office and he talked about the passport program being in the library and how exciting it sounded and it was and it was and you guys have done a great job and the fact that like in the middle of doing passports we're going to a pandemic like you know so no one can move or go anywhere. And then once you have a full year to do it, it's already revenue neutral shows and just tells how well your staff has done. And so I wanted to say first thank you to the staff. Thank you to Katie. You guys, you've done a great job in the middle of a global pandemic. The fact that any passports were being passed around are being approved

[00:29:32] was pretty amazing. So congratulations. What would you think about this? So this is like the, really the first year you see what's going on and you see where the zip codes are coming from. And I actually think if we did something else, it probably should be in Brambleton, the Brambleton libraries where that makes sense to me. But Mr. Laterno's question was a great question. From where are people coming? And then also I think we look at the population of people here in Loudoun County, people from Loudoun County come from all over the place, and so that's something to look at as well.

[00:30:05] What would you think about if you, I know you're coming back to us right now every, you know, year or two and talking to us, what if you, would you feel too much pressure to come back in six months or so and give us an update and then see where we're at at that time?

[00:30:20] Because, you know, I actually wouldn't mind doing something in this budget, but it sounds like we just don't know enough, because it's only been one year that it's been the full year if it's if it stabilizes out if you see it stabilizing that we may not need anything else if it starts to get even more people coming in and we start tracking those zip codes more then you may decide side better but one year it's not a lot of information to have so what if what would you think and just some thoughts for the board if you came back in six months and see if we can see a trend now that we have a year behind us and we know we're watching

[00:30:55] for that might be something that i would see i think i think pop-up sounds you know i mean this stuff is labor intensive and it's and it's and it's a lot for your staff for staff to manage um and before we kind of just dive into that i'd like to see what it looks like outside of just one year um but i also think that especially for your staff i would want to see what they felt about that because when they're doing it, it may not be as obvious what should be done.

[00:31:26] So that's my thought, is to get a couple more updates, even if you did it in writing. That would be fine a little faster so we know where we should be moving next. But I do want to thank you, thank your staff, thank the library board, because this is really great work.

[00:31:42] Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Okay, so I think there is a strong desire to continue the conversation, and maybe you can take that back to the library board and let them know that the Board of Supervisors is definitely interested in looking at expansion. Maybe we start with the mobile, but, you know, look at how we could accomplish something.

[00:32:02] And then, you know, if it's feasible or possible, we could, you know, it may be on us to fund it if it is. And you may need more staff for it, but that at least is our decision to make if we wanted to. May I just add one more thing?

[00:32:17] Yes. State Department only allows us to issue new passports, not renewals, so some of you might have that question before, but we do not do any renewals, these are all new passports. Yeah, and they've recently changed the rules to allow for these renewals to be done online, which is probably good for some of the other passport acceptance facilities because it's taking some of those people out of that queue.

[00:32:43] But it does not affect us because we were never allowed to do it. yeah okay any other discussion thank you very much have a good evening thank you very much all right next up is a metro rail financial update so i think we're going to tag team a little bit on this one because i've been telling you all about the new subsidy that metro has and i also told you that our bill was going to be going up and so now you can see that

[00:33:20] in the item so i think staff has some slides for us and then i was just going to have a little bit more conversation about that subsidy and kind of how this is working with with metro but good evening chair letourneau and members of the committee we do have a few brief slides to just give you a very very brief summary of the item this is the annual update that staff provides on the performance of the metro rail tax districts as well as the county's obligations to amada for

[00:33:53] the Metro Rail service. In terms of the Metro Rail tax districts, the district continues to outperform the original estimates that were established when the county opted into the project. The assessed values as of January 2024 were just under $16.5 billion compared to an estimate of $6.6 billion at the time of opting into the project. The district revenues are also tracking above budget. In FY24, total revenues were $27.6 million compared to a budgeted

[00:34:29] amount of $17.3. Overall, the revenues generated from that district have been more than sufficient to cover the debt service for the construction of the Silver Line as well as the debt service on the Metro Rail parking garages. In terms of the operating subsidy payments, as Supervisor As Letourneau just noted, those are expected to continue to increase.

[00:34:58] There has been a newly established restructured operating subsidy allocation formula that the WMATA board adopted. The county uses its gas tax reserves and future gas tax revenues to cover that operating subsidy.

[00:35:13] As of now, that revenue is sufficient to cover the operating subsidy. In several years, it is expected to be insufficient to cover that. However, staff does intend to supplement that with NVTA 30% funding, as well as revenues from the Metro Real Tax District.

[00:35:35] And before I turn it over to the restructured piece, the capital subsidy also is covered with NVTA 30% funding. That subsidy is expected to increase year over year. However, sufficient revenues exist through NVTA 30 to sufficiently cover that obligation.

[00:35:52] And Supervisor LeTurneau, that's really the high-level overview of the item, and I'm happy to turn it over to you if you'd like to discuss the operating subsidy. Yeah, and so that's great news once again on the metro rail tax districts and how well those are performed.

[00:36:08] And I do think it's an underappreciated data point that we have never had to take a dime of general fund money or general tax money to fund the construction of metro, which is pretty remarkable. So on the operating subsidy payments, I've been telling you all about this, and I did tell you that Loudon's number was going to go up. It's driven by a few things.

[00:36:33] There is one important change, though, that I think is positive for us, which is that within the Virginia subsidy, one of the changes we made is we took out the airport allocations, both national and Dulles, from the local jurisdiction by which those stations reside.

[00:36:54] Under the previous formula, all the subsidy formula section that was related to ridership per locality, those stations counted. So Arlington was paying extra subsidy for all the DCA ridership, which is one of our highest traffic stations, and now Loudoun was paying for the Dulles Airport station.

[00:37:17] The logic, of course, was that most of those riders are not actually from the jurisdiction that the airports are located in. They're frequently visitors who are going, you know, from the airport to other places or they're actually workers.

[00:37:33] But in that case, they're taking Metro from another place to get to the airport and likely not residents. So, that was a component of the restructured subsidy. And that change actually did bring down the percentage increase we would have seen. The increase is really driven by the cost, actual costs associated with the stations themselves, the track that we have, the operating costs of running rail over a fairly significant amount of track, even though we don't have, you know, it doesn't go far into the county, but there's still several stations.

[00:38:07] And then also the population track on this, a component of the formula subsidy is overall population. I actually pushed to take that out of the formula.

[00:38:22] One of my colleagues from a different jurisdiction pushed to take out ridership from the formula and only use population. So we realized that we would have had an impasse and the art of compromise dictated that in order for this to move forward, we needed to both compromise on that point.

[00:38:41] And so population is in there, but now there's some other things in there that are much more logical. And then the biggest change that was made to the subsidy that doesn't affect Loudoun is that bus becomes essentially pay-as-you-go. Each jurisdiction now pays for the routes that are in their jurisdiction.

[00:38:58] There's not shared costs. We weren't paying the bus subsidy anyway, but that was a very big deal for the other jurisdictions. So if anybody has any questions, I just felt because the number was going up this year and you can see that in the item, we should take a moment and reflect and acknowledge on that see what the staff plan is to address it it wasn't a surprise when it happened mr hempstree and i have been talking about it for quite some time so um you know i think we can handle it but it's just the reality of the new subsidy any questions or comments chair random

[00:39:33] yeah thank you um interesting interesting oh that was quite helpful let's go back to slide number three and mr jimson this might be something for you when you talk about the NVTA 30% funds. Aren't we already using NVTA funds? We do use NVTA 30%. So we're saying if there's an increase, we're going to use more of the NVTA 30% funds. You lost me right there.

[00:39:58] Are we assuming that NVTA's 30% funds are going to get greater? So right now the NVTA 30% funds are covering our capital subsidy and our gasoline tax is covering the operating subsidy. We are expecting that the gas tax funds will not be sufficient long-term to cover the operating subsidy, so we expect that we may supplement that with MBTA 30%, but we also have the ability to use Metro tax district revenue to also cover payments to a lot. You would use the full 30%? No, it would not deplete our balances, if

[00:40:35] that's your question. Okay, okay, that would, okay, good, thank you. Supervisor Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is it possible to get an easy-to-read chart showing the exact amount of the increase without the annual 3% cap, I believe?

[00:41:00] I'm looking through the presentation. I am having trouble finding the exact sum by which our obligation is going up. Do we have that in a table? On page nine of the item, table three, that first line, the operating subsidy payment, that is the full projection on how that operating subsidy is expected to increase year over year.

[00:41:33] Okay, so my page nine in the presentation doesn't show that. You're talking about the staff report. In the staff report. In the staff report, okay. All right. So we're going up $29 million more than we anticipated in the next fiscal year?

[00:41:57] That's the total. That's the total. Yeah, I think what she's asking for, do we have one that shows the current? Current obligation, and then the add-on. What are we currently paying in the subsidy, operating subsidy?

[00:42:13] We can certainly provide you a table, but. Well, that would be, would that be the FY25? Yeah. Yeah, that's the, okay, so we're currently paying $29.4, and it would go up to $36.7. All right. yeah but the problem is honestly like that's dependent on the next budget so metro hasn't passed you know obviously a 26 budget yet so when we talk about how much it's going up we're just using the same assumptions that are baked into the 25 budget just as an apples to apples but it could change based on service delivery or you know and then we're going to be doing updated ridership

[00:42:53] surveys and things like that so it could change depending on what's actually in the budget and then what some of the inputs are as we go forward but apples to apples it's 15 percent all right okay and that's just for the upcoming fiscal year and then we anticipate it going up again and again and again well not that amount so this is a one-time adjustment of that much and then the subsidy will likely go up 3% because we did suspend the 3% cap,

[00:43:29] but we're anticipating for FY26 to still try to stay within the 3% cap that we're asking jurisdictions for. Okay, because I remember hearing figures around $50 million, $25 million more than we had anticipated having to pay, And that was over a year ago when the fiscal cliff looked like it was going to be $700 million or so.

[00:44:02] But right now, if I were asked by a constituent or if I were putting this in my newsletter, would I be correct saying it's going up about $7.3 million more than we had anticipated last year?

[00:44:21] This is, yeah, so these are the best estimates we have at this point. So, you know, this is all we have for now. So we're comfortable with this based on what we know at this point. And you, and this is just operated costs, this is not debt service, which you've indicated is more than covered right now by the tax districts.

[00:44:46] Yes. Every, all of our obligations, debt service for the construction of the silver line, our operating subsidy to WMAD as well as our capital subsidy to WMAD are all sufficiently covered we have enough funding to cover all three of those things all right so we've got debt service we've got operating costs and we've got capital costs right correct all right the the tax districts are paying only for debt service correct all right and so the increase in the subsidy the the seven

[00:45:24] million dollar increase in the subsidy is to cover increase in capital costs and operational costs? Just operational. And what about capital costs? Capital is shown on page 10 of your item in table 5. Our operating, or excuse me, our capital subsidy we cover with NVTA 30% funding and that is also sufficiently covered with that funding. All right, but that means we don't have NVTA 30 to cover other projects in the county that we might have wanted to cover we do still

[00:46:03] have balances of NVTA 30 percent that can be used for projects all right but not as much as we would have had if we weren't having to use it for Metro the board's policy has always allocated NVTA 30 percent to the capital subsidy so the additional funding that we have been able to allocate to other projects has been from revenue that we haven't had to plan to allocate to our capital subsidy. So what we are saying is these are expected increases. It's larger than maybe

[00:46:39] we planned for last year, but there are sufficient amounts of revenue available in the various sources the board has directed to go toward both our operating subsidy as well as our capital subsidy and debt service. Okay. In the staff report, it indicated that a number of data centers were inside the tax district that we're using to help pay for this.

[00:47:06] Yes, that's accurate. I don't recall whether you were able to break out the amount of tax revenue from the data centers in that tax district relative to other uses. We can look to see if that information is available we don't have that information right now okay i'd appreciate it if we could get that thank you that's all and just for order of magnitude so the fy25 capital subsidy payment was 5.9 million and then the state has a has a covers a share of that which is one not of

[00:47:43] that on top of that which is 1.9 million and similarly the the subsidy the operating subsidy that we're talking about there is also a state um allocation that is being applied beyond that as well um so that's yeah the the bigger risk in the future is is probably more the capital budget and that's been the a lot of the focus of the dmv moves discussion because the most you might remember there was 500 million dollars of dedicated funding in 2018 that the

[00:48:18] state essentially committed to by roughly 2030 all of that funding will be going simply to debt service because metro has pushed out billions of dollars worth of projects as was intended to get back to state of good repair so now that money's been spent and now you have to pay the debt service on it which is going to occupy most of the 500 million The 2018 money was not indexed, so obviously that money does not buy as much as it used to.

[00:48:53] And then PREA, which is the federal capital source, which is $150 million, has been $150 million for well more than a decade, probably two decades. So neither of those were indexed. So that, when you hear about this fiscal cliff at Metro, it's largely driven by the rising cost of capital infrastructure and the fact nothing was indexed.

[00:49:16] And so now to even maintain state of good repair, you need more money. And then there's some larger systems components, such as the signaling system, which is original to the system, that need to be replaced in the 15- and 20-year horizon. And it's very expensive to do that, and we're still working out the exact strategy and how much to use and whether we go to full automation and all those kind of issues.

[00:49:38] But either way, it's going to be expensive. So when you hear about that cliff, that's really, it's mostly, we've been able to reduce the operating subsidy gap down from that $700 million to, you know, less than $100 million now, mostly through increased ridership and revenue and management actions to reduce costs.

[00:49:56] So we still have some issue there, but the capital is a big one. All right, any other, Mr. Turner? Thank you, Mr. Chair. God, with this new system, every time you touch the outside margin, you go right back to square one and you've got to reload the whole thing here.

[00:50:15] Sorry. On page four of the item, it caught my eye. The green line is the budgeted property tax revenues. And it caught my eye that we would budget flatline from 2022 to 2023 and then suddenly exponentially jump it from roughly just over $15 million budgeted property tax revenue to over $36 million in budgeted tax revenue.

[00:50:41] Then I note up in the note to the figure that actual property, that 70% of the district comprises data centers. Can you explain what you mean when you say 70% of the tax district comprises data centers?

[00:51:00] That means of the increase in property value, 70% of that increase in value was due to data center property increase in value? 70% of the property that's in the district is data center. 70% of the owned property within the Metro Rail district is data center property.

[00:51:22] Yes. Well, excuse me. It says actual property values have exceeded initial estimates, largely due to the growth of data centers, which in tax year 24 comprise 70% of the district. So I believe that's the growth in the data centers.

[00:51:37] Okay. So then back to that chart, we actually budgeted from 23 to 25 that exponential increase in tax revenues. We perceived the data centers going to be responsible for a substantial increase in tax revenue.

[00:51:54] Is that what that green line represents? I guess what caught my eye is we're budgeting $36 million in 2025, and it looks like we're on track to hit that with the blue line. I'm just curious what underlying mechanism was at work there to cause that rapid increase.

[00:52:10] So this is actually just comparing the original model projections of assessed value and expected revenues compared to what's actually occurring. So we're just showing that we are overperforming in the district compared to what was assumed. Okay. And I think I noted somewhere in the verbiage that we would consider possibly using that excess revenue for, I think, was termed debt defeasance, which is basically paying off our debt early, I assume, was what we were talking about.

[00:52:41] That is an option. It's an option. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Anything else on this item? We will move on to item four, which are the results of the FY24 audit and year-end financial condition.

[00:53:39] All right. Good evening, Chair Letourneau and committee members. We're here tonight to present to you the results of the fiscal year 2024 audit and the year-end financial conditions. Here with me to my left is Mr. Rob Churchman, the relationship partner from Cherry Beckert, our audit firm. And of course, as you know, to my right is Ms. Elaine Crawford, our assistant director and controller within the Department of Finance and Procurement.

[00:54:04] Before mr. Churchman will present to you the results of the audit as required by Virginia code in just a few minutes But before I turn over the presentation to him, I just like to go over a few highlights So the county ended fiscal year 2024 in strong financial condition the county received another unmodified opinion also known as a clean opinion On the government-wide basis, which includes the Loudoun County Public Schools Board and the Economic Development authority component units the county ended fiscal year 2024 with a positive net position of 3.4

[00:54:44] billion dollars which represents an increase of 506.9 million or seven point seventeen point seven percent increase over last year fiscal year 2023 financial position the county's general fund revenues exceeded its revised budget by 8.7 percent or two hundred and four two hundred and fourteen point eight million and expenditures were lower than revised budget by three point four percent or ninety point one million for comparison last year fiscal year two thousand twenty three revenues were

[00:55:20] higher than revised budget by six point nine percent or one hundred and fifty seven point four million and expenditures were lower than revised budget by 2.4 percent or 57.9 million the funding progress of the county's other post-employment benefits retiree health care program increased slightly from 20 from fiscal year 2023 by 84 to fiscal year 2024 to 85.3 percent the impact on this funding ratio from the october 2024

[00:55:57] board approval of changes to the retiree contribution amounts will be seen in the fiscal 2025 valuation the funding progress of the volunteer fire and rescue length of service awards program or low sap remained consistent at 84.2 percent the county's fiscal policy requires that we maintain a reserve equal to no less than 10 percent of the county and the local county public schools general fund operating revenues 33.3 million was added to the reserve

[00:56:29] in fiscal year 2024 for a total of 317.5 million which complies with the fiscal policy the county's 2024 fiscal year 2024 unassigned fund balance is 250.3 million and is available for appropriation by the board so that concludes my comments and now we will go through with the presentation good evening my name is rob churchman i'm the relationship partner for services to to Loudoun County and our team from Cherry Beckert has completed our audit I see a lot of familiar

[00:57:06] faces either myself or my colleagues have reported to you in the past these communications are required by the audit standard regardless of what type of entity you are so there can be some communications in here that are going to be not relevant to you but I have to tell you that positively so you don't just think I just forgot something and skipped over something I know you have a full agenda I looked at it online already frankly to see where I was first but also to see what else was going on. I'll be quick. It looks like a lot, but it's not a lot, but I'll be quick.

[00:57:33] Next slide, please. I'm not going to go over the table of contents. The standards require me to let you know the core members of our team. Malov is our engagement partner. I am the relationship partner on every one of our jobs. We have a second reviewer, our quality review partner. That was Dan. Again, all consistent members from prior years. Stephen Shield was our manager, city manager, and Sam and Alvin are our other key staff. We have more people, but I don't want to make the slide any more than one page, you're already saying, Robert already has too many slides. This is what you want to see.

[00:58:01] Basically, we have audited your financial statements for the fiscal year ended 24, and we found, as we mentioned here, a clean opinion, unmodified. The old word was unqualified or qualified. Unmodified, which means it's an A-plus report card you get. I didn't get those in school very much, but that's what you got for your audit this year for whether or not the statements are presented fairly in all material respects, and of course, it's generally accepted accounting principles.

[00:58:26] Also, we noted no instances of noncompliance for government auditing standards and so forth. I should have stated also at the very beginning, this slide deck is used, as it is right now on your website, as a tool that somebody who's not here could read it. We try to make it as useful as possible so that there's no confusion as to what we're talking about.

[00:58:43] So you might say, Rob, you should never put sentences on a PowerPoint. That'll drive people crazy. Well, we try to make this tool useful for people that aren't here. Thank you, Elaine. We put this in every one of our slide decks because there is not fully known throughout people that don't do this for a living, what do we call internal controls and how do we phrase what they are and how they are being used, whether they are effective or not effective and so forth.

[00:59:10] This is purely a definition out of the standards, and it basically tells the reader that there are three levels of internal control matters. There could be a deficiency, which is something that's very simple. There could be a significant deficiency, which is not material to the statements, but something we thought you should know about. And there could be a material weakness, which is something where a control structure just doesn't work.

[00:59:28] There's something broken in the control structure. That didn't happen here. But I put this slide deck, I put this in our slide deck so people, again, using this report, can see what was discussed and have some background knowledge on what is in throughout the entire slide deck because they do interrelate with each other. Next slide, please. Here, more down in more detail, two definitions.

[00:59:48] We call MW or SDs. We did know one area we thought was a significant deficiency. that and again that is if you look up there it's not material to the overall presentation the financial statements it would not affect the user's um interpretation of the data numbers in the financial statements but it's something those charges of governance like yourself would want to know uh was noted during our testing and that really related to next slide please related to the fact that there were some arbitrage liabilities that needed to be recorded in the financial statements and so management management brought that to our attention we agreed said yes i think

[01:00:20] I think you should record that this year in your financial statements in order to make them mirror up, for lack of a better auditing term, with GAAP, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and they did report that. So I'm just making you aware that that adjustment was made during the year to the 630-24 numbers for the fiscal year end.

[01:00:37] In every financial statement, there could be a possibility where there could be, again, an adjustment that's made either to the trial balance for the current year or something that should have been in the prior financial statements, but it wasn't material, so it's been fixed in the current year.

[01:00:52] Going back to what I just talked on the previous slide, again, management did make an increase to the arbitrage liability in the current year financial statements, and we agreed with that, correcting that and getting that number up to where it should be per the arbitrage calculation. And then on the next slide, we had management identified, and we agreed with them, that there was a couple adjustments that are not material to the overall financial statements, but they needed to be in there at the end of the fiscal year.

[01:01:19] These are things that, in a perfect world, would have been recorded in a prior year, but they don't impact the overall beginning balances for your fund balance and net position and so forth. So management decided to record it in the current year. We agreed with them that they were not immaterial to the overall presentation of the current year results, but they needed to be in there so that at the end of 6-30-24, those liabilities and related matters were in the financial statements going forward.

[01:01:43] These next couple of slides I call my Partridge family slides. I do see some people in the audience that would remember the Partridge family. That's only because of the funny feathers up there, but there are key areas where the standards require us to talk to you about topic areas. The first one here is related parties.

[01:01:59] I'm sorry, talking about where your significant policies are in your financial statements. We call it the SOSAP, Summary of Significance Accounting Policies. It's in your footnote one, just to make you aware that there are, that's where you lay out all of your key, how you accrue for things, how you accrue for revenue, how you accrue for liabilities, what your capitalization threshold is for your fixed assets and so forth.

[01:02:19] We're required to let you know if there's any changes in those policies, material changes in those policies from year over year. We did not note any. We didn't make you aware in our slide deck here and also in your financial statements that generally some of the accounting principles had a new pronouncement that was applicable this year, but it didn't have any impact on your financial statements.

[01:02:34] It was applicable for when there was maybe a change in reporting entity, and it was trying to make all the entities across the U.S., if they had a change, they're making sure that they are consistently showing it across all entities. so everybody's showing you the same way instead of having everybody show it differently again it didn't impact your financial interest but i'm required to make you aware that there was a change in generally something kind of principles there are more changes coming forward on the very last slide i won't spend much time on that because i know you have a full agenda next slide please related parties uh i'm required to let you know we look at your related parties to make sure they make sense to us make sure they haven't changed dramatically from every year make sure they have a business purpose for what the county is trying to do um i i make this example and i i scared the

[01:03:13] heck out of one of my clients last time i said well you know if if by chance you guys were getting into bitcoins, I probably would probably say that's a related party that I'd probably need to tell you about or probably disclose about, but that didn't happen. But I did scare, when I said the three letters FTX, I did scare a couple of supervisors about a month ago.

[01:03:30] But there were transactions you're into that wouldn't make a sense for what you're trying to do, change dramatically from year over year and so forth. I'd be required to make sure that those are disclosed properly in the financial statements before I gave my opinion on the overall presentation that did not happen here but I'm required I can't this this is one perfect area where I can't just gloss over and say Rob just forgot to talk about it no I have to tell you positively affirm that we're not aware of any related parties that aren't properly disclosed also significant transactions significant and unusual transactions right along the same lines related parties if an entity was getting into something I have several clients down in central

[01:04:08] Virginia that are they're contemplating putting in a sports arena so that would as you can imagine could be an unusual significant transaction for the entity they're in their earlier stages they haven't gotten far enough on long but at some point if they do go far down that road they would have to disclose to the reader the transactions what's happening who's it with how's it going to impact overall uh accounting and reporting going forward and so forth we didn't note anything here that is not already recorded already reflecting your financial statement that we thought needed to be either added for the first time or needed to be enhanced based on prior year and prior your presentation is brought forward to the current year. Again, positive from our standpoint

[01:04:45] of our audit opinion. Estimates. Every financial statement you have, especially ones that are several hundred pages long, it's going to have some kind of estimate in it. You can't have every financial number tied to a bank deposit, an invoice, a signed contract that has a defined time when all the money is going to come in and happen. So your big ones are listed here.

[01:05:08] They're the same ones you have across all your peers. Pensions and OPEB obviously are big ones, And those are 30 years out in the future, discounted back, say here's what your liability is right now, we think, actual or science-wise. But we look at all your estimates because it doesn't – my experience, it doesn't really happen much in governments.

[01:05:27] I've been doing this for 35 years, but we all read the papers, and it happens in corporate America. And, again, these are standard requirements for disclosure. People will play with their estimates to get to what they need to get to, their bottom line, their stock compensation, their tax exposure.

[01:05:44] And so we are required to look at estimates, make sure they're consistent, comparable year over year, that you're not saying you're getting 12% on investment return when everybody else in the world is getting six. Maybe you are because you bought Apple when it was first opened, but no, that would probably be something as an estimate that's not consistent with reality.

[01:06:01] So I found nothing in our testing that says that your estimates weren't consistently from year to year. They were consistently calculated. They make sense in comparison to your peers and so forth. Again, I have to positively affirm that to you each year. And then one last final statement on my last Partridge family feather.

[01:06:22] Your statements are neutral, they're consistent, they're clear, they are presented in accordance with General Accepted Accounting Principles, but the standards require me to make a positive statement to you on that matter. Not even my wife, my wife has a pretty good idea of what I do as an audit, but the word audit doesn't usually have the same definition across a wide group.

[01:06:46] If you did a focus group, they wouldn't know what an audit really was, per se. They have their own perceptions. We are hired to do an audit of your financial statements. That means we have standards that we have to go by and steps we have to perform. There can be times when we have to assist a client with non-audit work.

[01:07:03] We call that non-attest, which means we're not giving an opinion on it, but we're helping you with something. The item we have up there is related to the one item, the main item is related to the fact that the federal government requires you and every other entity that gets federal funding to put all of your federal expenditures into a database up at the Fed, and both sides of us have to go in there and say yes those numbers agree to the financial statements and therefore I have to click on a button saying yes I agree and so does the county and then it all goes up to the feds and then they use it as a big database to analyze expenditure trends and so forth. Because it's not an audit I have to tell you that I did a non-audit service for you but it

[01:07:42] was a service that was part of our contract our engagement letter and required by the feds so really a non-event. The most important part on this slide though is because if I did non-attest services that were not appropriate and in some way either by appearance or in reality impaired my independence in essence made me part of your team made me part of your management structure then i would not be independent and those pieces of paper we give you as a firm would be useless and the the use of those in in an act for and for somebody to use that whether it be capital markets or citizens so forth would be useless because you can't rely on what i was saying that didn't

[01:08:19] happen here, but I always have to make sure that you understand that we are taking steps every year throughout the entire process to make sure that nobody in our firm, in our office, any, if we have some kind of subcontractor for some reason, maybe an actuarial firm that had to give us a fair value for land or something. I had a client recently where they had, I had to bring in an appraiser that nobody, transactions or relationships that we're aware of have any impact on our independence, but I have to positively affirm that to you each year. You can't, you just can't assume that unless I tell you that each year in this presentation. Now, these next two slides look kind of ominous. They have some words that are like difficulties, disagreements. The next slide has

[01:08:58] fraud. These are section areas that are required that I need to affirm to you. We had no difficulties encountered in dealing with management and getting the information. I have some clients where that slide is its own slide, where it is trouble getting information from them. We had no disagreements with management, know how to present something, report something, and so forth. We had no outside consultations. Again, if I had to go out to an outside person outside of our firm or outside of My team, like I mentioned earlier, I had to have a fair value specialist come in and tell me the value of this land that the state donated to my client.

[01:09:27] I had to tell you about that. Nothing like that happened here. And also the management representation is something most people don't realize happens. But the standards require that you give me a letter each year representing to me certain things. They're very boring. If you have trouble sleeping, you can keep a copy by your bedside.

[01:09:44] They'll knock you right out. They are so boilerplate across all firms that they're basically dictated by these standards. But there are things like, they're your financial statements. That document you have, they're your statements. They're not ours. Again, going back to our independence. That you've told us about any kind of legal matters we need to know about that would help us understand whether or not there's a disclosure that needs to be made or so forth.

[01:10:04] And things like that. Very straightforward things. If a client ever said, Rob, I can't represent this to you because I don't feel comfortable, I don't think I have all the information, or it's not true representation, I'd have to think, well, is there something I need to know, and therefore my opinion may need to be modified.

[01:10:20] Did not happen here, but I'm making you aware that management has provided me the required representation letter with no requested changes at all. Next slide. Oh, there we go. If there was ever a case, it hasn't happened to me in governments, but there are cases in my commercial colleagues where there has been the shopping of the opinion is the term in our industry.

[01:10:40] The client doesn't like what we're going to tell them our opinion is going to be. So they go to firm B, firm C, firm D until they get the answer they want. And that does happen. I'm sad to say it has happened in the accounting industry, auditing industry. Nothing like that happened here, but I'm required to make you aware of that.

[01:10:56] They also want me to tell you, oddly enough, they don't think you know that we talk throughout the year. Other findings and issues. We talk throughout the year about matters that come up, whether they be related specifically to Loudoun County, the industry. Maybe Elaine's gone to a conference and saw a great topic and wanted to say, hey, Rob, how does this impact us?

[01:11:15] Let's get together and talk. All those conversations are related to our business relationship. They are proper, and they have no impact on whether or not you keep us as your auditor. But I'm required to make you aware of that. And the last two items here, fraud, illegal acts, and going concern.

[01:11:30] We're not required to look for fraud. We're required to keep our minds open. We found nothing that gave us any fear or concern that there was any kind of fraudulent activities going out through the county. But we're not required to let you know that. We do take steps to look for that. And the going concern is really not applicable to you. It has happened throughout the government industry.

[01:11:47] but if you were to go out i'm pretty confident you're going to stay in business for the next 12 months you know i just it's not a leap of faith we have we've had discussions we've looked at your your projections and and what you just talked about earlier about all the money coming in from metro and so forth you're going to stay in business uh there are entities where that's not true uh you know some of these startup entities that are flourishing all over the you look at the wall street journal every day there's somebody who's going under for um evs batteries or something like that so if i if i ever came across a concern of this you wouldn't be hearing about here first You would have heard it well before this, but I had no reason to think that you were not going to continue for the next 12 months.

[01:12:24] But I have to positively affirm that to you. These next slides, I'm just letting you know, there are things in your audit opinion that I provide to you where we detail out exactly what we do. We give you an opinion on this. We read, because your report you have up there has several sections in it.

[01:12:43] There's a term in the back, the statistical section, showing 10-year trends and so forth. There is the introductory letter up front from the county administrator talking about what happened during the year, the projects and the initiatives in place and so forth. Those particular two pieces, we don't give any opinion on.

[01:12:59] We're not required to. But our opinion tells the reader that. It says, listen, we looked at it. We're not required to give an opinion on it. But we do – these are the steps we're required under the auto standards to do. So I just put these in a slide deck because, hey, I'll be honest. If I was looking at – if I didn't do this for a living and I saw a three- or four-page opinion, I'd probably look at the first page and say, oh, there's what I want to see.

[01:13:20] Oh, forget about the rest of the stuff. The rest of the stuff doesn't tell me anything about the financial statement numbers. And so let's put this in here so readers will know, especially those using this PowerPoint, that there are varying levels of assurance that are required by us under the audit standards. And we detail that out in these particular sections that are taken out of our audit opinion.

[01:13:40] And this was the third section of it, talking about the statistical and introductory. Those are my required communications. This last slide, I actually have one client who, this is his favorite slide. Well, except for the opinion, of course. But he's a real Gatsby geek, and he loves hearing about what's going on up in Connecticut, about what changes are going to be coming down the pike for future financial statements.

[01:13:59] I'm just letting you know that there are some changes. They are justifying themselves every year by putting on new guidance and new requirements under generally accepted accounting principles. These are coming in the future. 101 for next year's compensated abscess. We will work with management. Once both sides have analyzed the particular cases of the county, we'll work with management to put a plan in place to make sure that this gets implemented properly and completely in accordance with General Accepted Accounting Principles.

[01:14:24] But there are other ones coming down in the future. The 103 is somewhat contentious. They're changing how we've done things for 20 years in certain areas. But that's it. That's several years down the pike. But just making you aware that things are constantly churning, and Ms. Crawford's group and so forth, they're always having new things to combat with each year from a General Accepted Accounting Principles perspective.

[01:14:42] So those are my, hopefully, I never started the three o'clock. I never started the three-minute clock. I meant to start that, trying to keep me contained. Those are our required communications. And, of course, that last piece was not required, but I'd like to make you aware, since you're in charge of evidence. So we could have done that in three minutes? I don't know.

[01:14:58] I don't think I did. Well, maybe I did. I don't know. So the good news is, after all that, though, that the ultimate here is it was a clean audit. Yes, sir. And there's no cause for concern. Take it home, put it on your refrigerator with a magnet. We like that very much. Any questions from members of the committee here?

[01:15:16] Chair Randall. Yeah, very quickly. First, it's hard to make an audit sound interesting. Congratulations. Good job. Mr. Govan, I want to take you back to what you said almost first. You mentioned that as part of our audit, there is at least a mention of LCPS and the EDA.

[01:15:36] And talk a little bit more about that because we always hear people talk about it like LCPS needs to get an audit and all that as if there's nothing done there. But because we fund them, part of what happens in this audit is there is some look at LCPS and EDA, which does a lot of work for financial reasons and such in the county.

[01:15:59] Both of those entities are looked at as part of this audit. Can you just talk about that a little bit more? It's almost like to put that to bed, that people think that that's never done. That's just not true. Could you talk about that just a little bit more? Sure. So from a big picture, all entities, the county's funds, the EDA and LCPS are audited.

[01:16:21] A separate audit as you -- so Mr. Churchman briefed you for the county. There's also a separate EDA audit and then there's also a separate LCPS audit as well. When those audits are completed for the other components, then we take that information, of course, and then we include as component units into the counties.

[01:16:41] Will those entities, LCPS and EDA, have a separate briefing, or will you send something over to them or -- I mean, there was no problem. They were a clear audit as well, but what happens with that?

[01:16:57] So just like what you saw, Mr. Churchman, the same would happen to the EDA board. I've sat in an audit by their audit firm to the EDA board, and then, of course, LCPS would have the same as well. It's a regulatory or it's a standard that the audit firm, you know, provides their assessment, their presentation of the audit to the governing body or the component.

[01:17:22] Okay, well, that's, you know, you hear that a lot of the time that, you know, this needs to be, have a, it's not even the word auditor, it's another word that's often used, but there's believes that it doesn't happen and and it's just absolutely not true so um i appreciate that very much i appreciate all of it listen a plus triple triple a bond rating um we're we're doing just fine so thank you all very much all right thank you very much good to see you all right um i know that dinner is ready um question but yes yes question oh of course yeah thank you um this is

[01:17:58] probably for Elaine or George, but on page seven of the staff report, it talks about the delays and underspending in ARPA funding. I'm going to assume that the delays and underspending in ARPA funding for this last year will be made up in the next year. Will that have any kind of negative implications for our audit next year? So that input is basically, so to start a big

[01:18:38] picture, as you may be aware for ARPA, we have a requirement to obligate all funds by 2020, December 31st, 2024, which we will meet. And so that input goes there. The delays as far as that is we still have two years from 2024 to 2026 to execute meaning expand and disperse those funds that are obligated so at our first glance uh you know there may be some underspending but as we work with the departments and offices that were allocated those funds and obligated those funds we'll be making sure that there's measures in place to you know you know track the invoicing

[01:19:17] that's coming and making sure that the payments are made and so great thank you all right thank you very much all right we're going to try to just get one more item done here which i don't think it's going to take a particularly long time which is item 12 design endorsement general government office building do you think it will no that's going to take a while okay good evening chair

[01:19:56] letourneau members of the committee and board along with me tonight nancy point of course and don breedice assistant director of facilities and megan mccarthy program manager for facilities design we are here to seek the board's endorsement of the major design elements for the general government office building phase one project we have prepared a presentation would you like just to run through that presentation tonight i mean i don't i don't know that we need the full presentation okay i can uh hit the very highlights hit the highlights absolutely all

[01:20:30] right next slide all right a little bit about a background on this a special exception was was approved in 2015 to incorporate the animal services facility and also 425,000 square feet of office space in the space strategy the development services hub would move from this building over there including B&D planning and zoning Omaji and the health department excellent the phase one funded is within this capital improvement program 125,000 square foot office building one main

[01:21:07] lobby entry and the site work for a majority of the future phases the ultimate condition is as i mentioned 425 000 square feet which we've currently master planned into four total buildings and the associated infrastructure with those buildings we do have an engineering architect engineering contract awarded to hga in january 23 and the design has progressed to the 95 construction documents which recently completed as shown here the site developed with building access off of

[01:21:41] adoption drive next to the animal services off of kincade we have the main drive aisle through there as long as as well as uh storm water management and the associated parking with phase one adequate parking there this slide shows the ultimate build-out condition with all four buildings the full parking allotment and uh the the realigned uh main entryway there um as a reminder um go back as a reminder this site was noted in the recent space strategy that was presented last month in the finance committee in november uh that is potentially uh the the phase two and three

[01:22:20] buildings were one of the options proposed for the relocation of the county's central governance hub and core government so that would be one of those the adjacent building uh to the phase one project and one of the other buildings potentially as as that option and okay here's a that's the rendering of the phase one building with the main lobby area on the left and the public spaces to the left the remainder of the office is offices and it's a three-story steel structure cloud with precast concrete and curtain wall facade and I'll note that the final color and material selections

[01:22:57] have not occurred so what is represented here is an approximate look that the architect is proposing next slide is the kind of opposite view with the center there being that main lobby but this is all four buildings and what that could potentially look like if all four buildings were the same and symmetrically laid out there's some flexibility there we are only committing to this one building at this time the rest of the uh 300 000 square feet could be uh arranged however uh the the need allowed but this is showing four buildings uh equal size and uh with the central lobby and

[01:23:35] symmetrically around that main main point uh this next slide shows the main lobby of the building as viewed from the entryway lobby will have a security screening with an information desk you can kind of see that to the right um there's some seating in there for for the public and uh communicating stairway as you see there up to the second floor uh public spaces on the second floor next slide this is the first floor plan a little tough to see but what I'll note is the

[01:24:09] area in the back left is the one-stop shop area and that is a proposed one place where staff can interface with the public so the public would come in any any of the departments of the building would have staff down there. There's transaction windows that anything could happen in that one space. So really rather than traveling to the various floors of the building the public can stay in one location and the staff from the departments would meet them there. Limits the public in the other areas of the building but also provides the easiest experience for the public as

[01:24:47] well. And the remainder of the first floor is comprised of offices, workstations, and back of house support areas and none of that would be accessible to the public. Next slide is the second floor of no that stairways come up in that on the left section and the areas in blue are conference rooms that could be used for meetings with the public but also could be used by staff throughout the building uh to to hold uh meetings there and uh public would only be allowed in that one area not into the the remainder of the building and lastly here's the third floor plan which the full

[01:25:22] floor is uh not open to public and it would just be offices and uh planning and zoning health department workstations as well. So that completes our presentation and we'd be happy to answer any questions you may have for us. Yeah thanks. So is it less expensive to build lower like three-story buildings wider than it is to build taller buildings with less of a footprint potentially?

[01:25:49] So in my experience I believe there's probably a limit right around four but once you start getting above a certain height, the cost becomes less beneficial, but a lot of factors go into that, so it's not necessarily a one-size answer.

[01:26:06] Okay. Questions to Brother Brisbane. Sorry. Excuse me. Can you go to Chair Randall first? Yes, please. Yeah, let's go to Chair Randall first. It is a lot of money, I know, but no.

[01:26:23] Chair Randall. So, very quickly, I realize that this is a very high-level schematic drawing, and there's lots of plans to be done and I realize that right now we're talking really about phase one and not the whole master plan like I get all that having said that and you did answer the question I had before about you know whether these illustratives are true or whether or not they're just you know it's not really the materials we'll use I got that there's a lot of surface parking even in phase one there's a lot of surface parking is was that done purposely so that later on something else could be planned. Surface parking can be very much an interim use. I know in one

[01:27:00] county that I never talk about because we're so much better than them, they took some of their surface parking at their government building and they made attainable housing on that lot. Is there a reason that there's this much surface parking and no parking garage instead? And if so, is that reason because we want to use that, it's an interim use right Now we want to use it later on as something else.

[01:27:26] Yeah, the parking in certainly Phase 1, and Megan, if you can go back to some of those slides, just sort of visual. Flight 6. The amount for Phase 1 that we have parking, it is over-parked, but only by a certain, it is 20, 25 spaces, so it's not a crazy amount of additional space.

[01:27:43] I'm not asking if it's over-parked. I'm asking can we do the same thing in a parking garage versus a surface parking, thus saving space and maybe using some of that space for, something else in the future? Potentially. Certainly a garage was going to cost more than the surface parking lot. Obviously that's the cheaper of the options and we did not contemplate a parking garage in this scenario. There is a chance for the space to the site to hold a fifth building. If that's the case we would have to get a special exception because we would be above the

[01:28:20] 450,000 square feet but we'd have to have a parking garage as well so all of that could be incorporated into future phases as necessary, that we could limit surface parking at a parking garage, even for phase two, per se. That's all an option. Yeah, for a lot of reasons, environmental being one of them, because that's a lot of asphalt, so environmental being one of them, but also, I mean, again, surface parking could often be interim use, and so later on, if, you know, and I mean 20 years after it's built, you know, whatever,

[01:28:52] You can, you know, you might say, we want to do something X, and then you can do a parking garage, and the surface parking goes away. You know, I realize that a parking garage is more, and I'm not saying incorporate that now, but I would want to, I guess, whomever is here in the future, just keep that option open.

[01:29:13] This is a lot of surface parking, and I almost always think where you can do parking garages and then use all that land for more open space, for public park, for attainable housing, for whatever else is a better use than that much surface parking.

[01:29:33] That's all. Thank you. Supervisor Bisper. Thank you. Sorry about that. Kind of dovetailing off what Chair Randall was saying, This is asking for an endorsement of the major design elements.

[01:29:49] So are we going to get another bite at the apple on some other design elements? For example, I have questions about things like, can we put solar on top of the building? Can we put solar over the parking? How are we heating and air conditioning?

[01:30:07] Is there a chance we can use this as a district energy pilot or geothermal? Have we thought, is it too early to start talking about those things? So we have incorporated geothermal into the design. Okay. The number of wells to, it's a partial geothermal system, the number of wells required for the building, I think that whole parking area, Megan, correct me if I'm wrong, is a lot of the wells are in that parking area to the side of the building.

[01:30:36] To do the full building would be a lot more of the wells, so that's why it's a partial hybrid system. Okay. And we have routed, correct me if I'm wrong again, Megan, but the solar panels for the the roof we have infrastructure to go up there so they could be added at a later date okay budget-wise they were not included in this and same with the canopy over the parking areas that could all be added later but not considered for this because of cost it was just an added cost to covered parking over the surface lot for solar panels so at what point would

[01:31:11] the board be able to direct that we do that the solar panels over the parking and on the roof I guess a part of recommendations made it was I mean it's certainly a budget increase but Mr. McClellan so if I could if you if you want us to start incorporating that into phase one we would need to know that now we're at nearly 100 percent design so we will we will be constructing what you see here the other alternative is since this is a campus that's

[01:31:49] to be filled out over time you as staff said with something over the parking you could wait for more of the parking to be in place you're looking at what phase one looks like right now right right most of the parking that you see is staff related parking just because of the number of departments that will be in the original the first phase of the building there's only a couple of departments yeah but if you want us to start adding that as a as an element now we would need to know that in

[01:32:23] this cip process so that we can we can plan for that for phase one um i mean i'm hesitant to make a motion tonight to add it because we don't know what the cost analysis is and we also don't know what the um viability would be for you know selling any of the extra energy back onto the grid So I'm very interested, but I think would it be possible for staff to come back with some numbers during the CIP process, maybe?

[01:33:03] If that's the committee's desire, we can certainly do that. I don't know. We would have to confer on what it would take to how long it would take us to actually do that. You're interested in what it does to the project budget, but then also what level of energy we think could be recouped from that type of installation?

[01:33:26] Yes, in Phase 1 and also in the subsequent phases. Okay. I mean, we can do it without objection unless the chair thinks we need a motion. We could ask staff to do it with that. Not to ask. I think that's fine to ask the information.

[01:33:44] Okay. So are you clear? So I think that's the consensus of the committee to have that information come back. So we can do that. I think we would we would need to think about whether you want this to be an addition to the project coming back or whether you want to include this right now as and likely delay the project a little bit.

[01:34:14] I don't want to delay the project. I don't want to delay the project, but I do want some analysis as to how we might add those elements and then how it might work with the rest of the of the campus. Okay. So I would say that because this is an action item that is going to the board, it would probably be best if that was added to the motion for staff to explore adding solar.

[01:34:52] Are we exploring adding the solar on the roof at this time also? Or are we just talking about the parking lots and the roofs of the buildings? the whole campus though the campus yeah not necessarily just this building okay right which means not necessarily as included in phase one which may be too late to do but future okay so i can we could add i could add when you make the motion i could add a friendly to direct staff to research the viability of solar on the parking lots and on the tops of the buildings i think that works okay all right um and then i just want to address something you know the loud now had an

[01:35:31] editorial about our discussions about moving um potentially eventually out of this building and and somewhere else i just want to clarify this building is not meant to move county administration when this building's ready that's not the purpose of this building correct correct yeah this is only for the developmental services yeah the main lobby could be used as a co-lobby for any other additional buildings but right right okay and also we still will be having a lot more

[01:36:05] discussion about where um that might happen um and also the idea is not to empty or vacate this building and you know necessarily move hundreds of employees out of leesburg because this building will be occupied eventually is my understanding from staff's analysis so i just wanted to make that clarification thank you okay you could you do it in the motion or do you need okay let's do that then but i'll have mr turner ask this question but oh no mr sayings ask your question

[01:36:43] well thank you all right um kind of piggybacking off of the supervisor brisbane because i don't think we got a strict um like the answer um district energy do we look at district energy for the complete campus, not just phase one, but overall?

[01:37:01] We are coordinating with DGS to find appropriate facilities for district energy. Unfortunately, this design was so far advanced by the time that topic came up. Phase one was not considered. But there is an opportunity for the later buildings to be part of a district energy project.

[01:37:17] It really does deal with the equipment we select for the building, and because we're at 95% engineering, it's not appropriate. Okay, that makes sense, thank you. Thank you. make sure you know it's on on uh the forefront of everybody's minds okay good thank you okay mr turner um that was the question i was going to ask but now i'm a little confused so district energy to me is waste energy reuse for county property correct is this is the in um slide number five of 13 is that space where it says attachment one is that slated to be a data center

[01:37:50] page five of 13. there's an empty field there it says attachment one right in the middle of it for some reason i saw crosstales and i thought there was a data center discussion going on about that property so that is uh actually if you go to uh slide one i believe we'll have this on it as

[01:38:25] well uh that is part of boland park area so it's a part of this campus that is not that is county property that is not uh for any other developer i believe further to the south maybe uh based on my recollection but i don't know for sure exactly what the the use of that property thank you yeah so if the board will recall there there is a planned data center development that is in the in the area to on on that slide or on your item where it says attachment one to the left there where you

[01:38:58] see the red lines at the intersection of cross trail and um sickle and that is that is a data going to be a data center that's what i thought if that's the case then there is some waste energy reuse opportunity there just to stick in the back of your mind that would be an ideal waste energy use opportunity thank you all right i'm going to go ahead and make a motion i move the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the board of supervisors endorse the proposed major design elements of the general government office building phase one project and authorize staff to proceed with the completion of the final design documents

[01:39:33] which is made seconded by supervisor umstead um by way of uh opening so uh thank you for all the work on this so I mean we're seeing this at this point but as you kind of indicated this has been a multi-year process that started quite some time ago um to get to a 95 hundred percent design takes many years um so I do think we need to move forward with this as as it's been proposed at this point we have a significant staff need and we need to get that moving to get those folks in there I I also think um you know especially when it comes to the the garage parking discussion the

[01:40:10] amount of money it's going to take to build a garage at least for phase one we could honestly we would do better by putting that money into affordable housing than we would spending the money on a garage to save space on this campus at this point and there's that whole opportunity cost associated with us i mean really would add significant money to the projects we can certainly look into some of these other ideas for the remainder of the campus and eventually potentially retrofit in here but i wouldn't want to slow anything down at this point um surprise brisman friendly amendments thank you um my friendly amendment would be to direct staff to research

[01:40:48] the viability of solar installations on top of the buildings and the parking areas of the campus and return to the finance committee with a cost benefit analysis of such project okay i will accept that and she does as well chair randall yeah just for clarification i wasn't i was i was i literally said, this could be 10, 20 years in the future, literally, but I do want us to keep in mind that surface parking could always be something else later on, so that's why I'm not making obviously no motions and friendly amendments. This is just a thought. I think, though, well,

[01:41:24] first, let me echo my colleague, Mr. Letourneau, in thanking the staff for a lot of work. I don't know if Mr. Brown's around or not, but all the staff for all the work you have done with this, because it is amazing and it's very, very needed. I think what you're hearing just kind of collectively is that this body is very concerned about what we can do environmentally in the county.

[01:41:50] And when you look at our environmental energy strategy, one of the five pillars that we put in place was government by example. In other words, we were saying that we're not going to, you know, we don't feel like we can ask private businesses, you know, data centers, retail to do any of these types of things that the government wasn't, that we were not going to be willing to do.

[01:42:13] Whether it's solar, whether it's how many EV charging stations we have, whatever it might be, going forward, we're very interested in being the example and incorporating all of these things into our designs.

[01:42:31] We're very focused on how long environmentally these buildings will last. So as Ms. Bricksman said, it's not just, you know, what's the offset if you can sell some of the power back and those types of questions. So I think just to, you know, and I'm not saying anyone hasn't thought about that, but we really want to lean into the environmental stewardship of what we do in the county and how we build in the county.

[01:42:59] So I think that might be what you're hearing right now. I certainly hope you're also hearing, though, the appreciation and how much has been done already because it is, one, needed, and two, significant, and three, I'm almost sad that these are not the actual illustratives because these are beautiful, beautiful buildings that you're putting together.

[01:43:19] My only sadness is in 20 years or 10 years or whenever this has been, I probably won't be here anymore, so I won't have the luxury of being able to be in that building. but just in the future to just lean in environmentally as much as is reasonable.

[01:43:38] Thank you so much. Okay, one quick thing I forgot to say because what's going to happen, I guarantee it, is one of our fine publications will publish the illustratives of these buildings, and there will be a whole bunch of comments about how these buildings are really nice looking and how the county shouldn't be wasting money and this and that.

[01:43:59] So what I'm going to say ahead of time is when you are driving a car, let's say you have a 2005 Chevy Lumina, you don't go out and buy another 2005 Chevy Lumina 20 years later when it's time to build a new car. You build the next generation, you buy the next generation of car so that it's going to last you for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and so on.

[01:44:20] I went through a very similar thing because Metro, we moved our headquarters. We were in this unbelievably badly conditioned building in downtown Washington. It had a little spiral staircase like you would see in a cruise ship connecting the boardroom to the administrator, the GM's offices.

[01:44:38] It was unbelievable. And then we moved, and we moved into a state-of-the-art building, and there were some snide comments about it, but that building's going to last for 30 or 40 years, and then in 30 or 40 years, people are going to talk about how it's outdated. But the point is, like, you can't just build to a lower standard.

[01:44:54] You want to have a good working environment for your people, and you want something that's going to last, that's going to incorporate technology and things like that for the next generation of the workforce. So I hope it is a well-designed, attractive building with good quality materials so that it does last.

[01:45:10] And, you know, it shouldn't be a bargain basement, you know, let's just throw up the cheapest building humanly possible because that won't serve us well for what our mission is supposed to be. So I wanted to just get that out there ahead of time because I know what's coming. Okay, all in favor of the motion, say aye.

[01:45:28] Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries 5-0, and we will take a break. Thank you.

[02:14:22] Okay, we were going to resume our meeting.

[02:17:36] We're actually going to do item 13 so that our transit folks don't have to stay here all night with us on budget development and fund balance. So that is the feasibility commuter bus service into Loudoun County. good evening so uh good evening uh uh committee chair letourneau can you hear me uh mr brown we okay yes you're you're very very small on our screen right now so there you go okay all right well thank you thank you very much for the opportunity to present this evening i apologize

[02:18:12] for not being there in person but uh i did not want to share my cold with you all so i'm uh i'm isolated in the house um so this evening uh the item that we're presenting to you tonight is designed to provide the committee with an overview of the findings of the feasibility study on commuter bus service into Loudoun that was presented to the board on October 16th, 2024, and the board sent it back down to the committee for further discussion. As you know well, the challenges of our workforce and the availability of existing commuter buses after the reduction of underperforming commuter routes out of the county, those two things promulgated consideration of the potential

[02:18:52] for commuter services coming into Loudoun County. This evening's item does contain the same information presented to the entire board on October 16th. However, we have further refined the staff recommendations for discussion in addition to providing the study's original recommendations.

[02:19:10] At the chair's discretion, Gladys is here this evening in front of you, and she's ready to deliver the whole presentation, or we can highlight the revised staff recommendations, whatever your plan is. Why don't we just skip to the revised staff recommendations? Yes, sir.

[02:19:25] So, Scott, if you could go to slide 21 and present. Perfect. So, on the slide, on the left side box, is what the study recommended, which was two routes, one from Dale City and one from Warrington, those two routes.

[02:19:47] And you'll see the price point for that, $1.935 million, which would be a net, assuming we received about $200,000 in revenue of $1.7 million approximately. There was discussion during the board's meeting on October 16th to give some consideration to the Frederick route.

[02:20:08] There's a lot of unknowns on that because of the congestion and the traffic. There may be some viability there. People may be willing to give up the traffic time and actually turn it into productivity time if they were on a commuter bus. So we have presented that. what you see there on that slide is the study's recommendation of four routes, 4 a.m., 4 p.m., daily routes at a cost of about $740,000 a year, net 723, because initially the consultant did not

[02:20:42] anticipate a large fair revenue from that. So, Scott, if you'll shift to slide 22. Staff made a few modifications on this, and essentially what we looked at was reducing the number of routes used for these, Dale City and Wilmington.

[02:21:01] We reduced it down to three routes in the morning, three routes in the evening versus four, and we also reduced the Frederick route down to two in the morning and two in the evening. This does reduce the cost, the overall cost of a pilot study should the board desire to pursue the pilot study.

[02:21:20] That would be our recommendation. There are some considerations that we believe the board should look at when having this discussion, which includes first mile, last mile challenges, and obviously the local tax funding impacts, the lack of commuter options if the last bus is missed, and the question about the $8.25 fare, which is considerably lower than the existing current commuter bus rates.

[02:21:52] Those considerations are on slide 16. We can go to that if you would like to, or we can stay right here on the slide. So that's a quick overview of staff's revisions, and we'll stand by for any questions. Okay. So I think we'll do kind of questions.

[02:22:08] Just to kind of tell everybody where my head's at, I would probably prefer to do Dale City in Frederick, Maryland, and not necessarily do Warrington. My sort of thought process there is that we're sort of testing the data a little bit and picking one that's the top projection.

[02:22:30] I'm picking one that's towards the bottom. But the Route 15 corridor is going to have significant construction happening, already has a lot of congestion. So I think that that was the factor that wasn't really captured in the study. I'm a little bit agnostic.

[02:22:48] If folks want to do Warrington 2, to me, that's a fairly easy commute to Loudoun. And I think, again, we're kind of missing that paint quotient. So maybe we'll kind of see where the consensus is here. But if you have questions or comments, Chair Randall.

[02:23:04] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a tough item for me. I read it and I have all kind of questions. I'll try to go very quickly. On the staff report, on page 3, second to the last paragraph, The 22 state of the commute survey reports for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region that reveals the drive-in alone and teleworking accounted for nearly 90% of commute days in 2022, a significant increase from just 10% in 2019.

[02:23:31] Since the last SOC report in 2019, commuters drive-in have risen from 64% to 78.4%, and telework increased as well. How much of that do we think was, because that's still not that far outside of COVID-2022, are those numbers still, do you think, very, is that paragraph still valid?

[02:23:54] Do you still think that is true today? And I ask that because the, well, let me just ask that question first. That's the first question. How valid is that paragraph, even two years later, knowing all that happened at the end of COVID? The next question is, NVTA recently, very recently, did a report on commuter trends within Nova and even outside of Nova to Maryland, I mean, to D.C., and their commuter trends were very different than the ones we have here.

[02:24:21] And so I remember we did this last time. I asked you all, could you reach out to NVTA and grab their commuter trends and kind of compare them what we have here? Was that done? Because the commuter trends are pretty different, and I don't understand how two very solid organizations and bodies can have such different commuter trends looking at the same time period.

[02:24:42] So did anyone reach out to NVTA and get those computer trends and look at that? My third question is, that price outside of Dale City is $825. If we're trying to get people in here who may not just may not want to get in their car, but may have maybe sitting at lower income levels, is 825 realistic to think that people would get in the bus for 825 if their AMI is, say, 50% AMI?

[02:25:10] Is that a realistic thing to think? I don't quite understand the chart on page six of, I'm sorry, and I looked at it like four times. I'm not sure what I'm looking at here. Can somebody explain that chart to me a little bit?

[02:25:25] And then on page 9, number 8, on page 9, are you assuming the cost on that? So nearly all employees surveyed respondents drive a loan to work, less than 1% use public or bus or rail, less than 2% carpool.

[02:25:42] However, most of these drivers would indicate that they would be interested in commuting by transit if commuter bus services met their needs. In that question, met their needs, did you also assume what they might be paying for the transit services?

[02:25:57] So meeting my needs is one thing. Affording it might be, I mean, meeting my needs might be this bus leaves at this time and goes to this place, and that meets the need of where I want to go. That doesn't mean I can afford to get on that bus, though. So in that question, did you assume the cost of the transit when you asked that question?

[02:26:17] That's all I have. Thank you. Okay. Yes, Supervisor Randall, thank you for those questions. I'm going to probably go a little bit out of order and let me know if I missed any. I may ask you to repeat some of those because I think it was like six questions or so. My apologies. No, it's great.

[02:26:33] at the item. So I will share that the employer and employee survey that we conducted provided some really great insight as to what would be a viable price point for fares. So what we saw were folks are coming into the office at minimum three days a week. So they're not coming in five days a week. So it's safe to assume the remaining two days allow those folks, if viable for their type of employment are probably teleworking. So based on the survey results is showing that

[02:27:09] for those who could drive themselves to work, it costs them about 200 bucks a month. So that equates to about an 825 fare. That's where the 825 fare came from. Okay. That's where we came from that. I think you also had asked about driving alone and teleworking. There's still a good percentage obviously of sov travel happening now more post pandemic now that was that's what that's why i was asking was that yes expired no the sov travels up uh last numbers i saw from

[02:27:43] wamata were probably upper 90s um so okay there's a lot of people driving in um there's still a good number of folks who are teleworking as you know um there was a recent call from we've probably you've probably heard from the news some folks from the private sector like i don't have to name them but a lot of folks are coming back to the office right and the government's going to be doing that soon too federal government that's that's what we're hearing yeah so um so hopefully that answers probably three of your six questions and then you had referred to what page was it

[02:28:20] again well i asked about the mvta report because when we when we were here last time i i did ask someone could you reach out to mvta and get their commuter trends because because what we have and they have are very different and i don't know which one they could both maybe you looked at different things i just don't realize that but the commuter trends are so different from these two i just i'm just wondering how that happened yeah i i will be honest i think that was missed looking at those uh specific commuter trends and we'd be more than happy to do that still um but you're You're right. I mean, it is a different demographic or region from, you know, some of that and just looking.

[02:28:55] No, the MPTA demographic and region is pretty close to the same one that we're looking at. That's why it caught my eye that they were different. I misspoke. But if you look at them later, that's fine. Okay. Wonderful. And then on page nine, number eight, are you assuming cost to that question?

[02:29:13] Was cost part of that equation? Which question was it? Which number specifically? Majority drive to work, alone to work, it's page 9 of the item number 8, starting with majority drive alone to work. That question is just strictly SOV question.

[02:29:38] We didn't really factor in cost associated with that. The cost, as I had highlighted earlier, the $200 per month was a separate question. That seems, well, it doesn't say what most is. It said most who drive alone indicate they would be interested in commuting or transit.

[02:29:56] it doesn't say what most is. I think a lot of people like to believe that they're going to get on the bus or get on transit or get in the carpool, right? I don't know that that's always what they're going to do, though. Yeah, I mean, you're going to get some folks who either have tried transit in the past and like it and maybe have incorporated it into their daily commute, and then you have folks who do, you know, drive alone to work and they enjoy that,

[02:30:24] And then that population of folks, and we touched on this a little bit about the marketing piece, is who is a challenge to kind of get them to try to change their commute. So, Mr. Chairman, if I could just ask one follow-up. Is it possible, and maybe not because we're done with this survey now, to ask that question.

[02:30:45] If you say, you know, would you be interested in taking a transit, would you say if it costs, and then give them a cost, versus would you just be interested and take, would you be willing to take a transit with no cost attached to it? Yeah, as part of our outreach effort, when we go back out, a survey effort would be part of that.

[02:31:01] And we can certainly think through some really useful questions as we start to think through a little bit more about what folks would really pay for fares. And then also some of the stops perhaps that we had proposed, whether they still make sense to a lot of folks would actually potentially be utilizing the service so there's potential there okay all right thank you mr chairman for giving that much space and thank you all i appreciate it sure and i would say too this this is proposed as a pilot so we can maybe get some of these real time oh it was the table on page six because i don't know oh yeah she was asking that's the origin and destination

[02:31:40] i know it but when you read it i understand what it says like the words right but then i So the origin and destination zip codes, what the study did is they looked at where folks were commuting from, and we're finding, for example, at that zip code, the total amount of trips from that zip code is 13% of commuter trips.

[02:32:07] And then the total amount of trips going to that zip code is? Yes. So what that shows is when you see the match there of 13 and 13%, which is great, because what that shows is that that's actually a commuter trip potentially it's most likely a commuter trip somebody leaving um their home in belmont ashburn right and then coming coming back to belmont ashburn so we're we're associating those trips as commuter type trips so that's not somebody leaving ashburn belmont going to work and then that's going to work in ashburn coming back home

[02:32:41] not going to shopping trip for example. So they're going straight to work in they're leaving Ashburn Belmont going and then they're going to work in Ashburn Belmont. So no that would be they're leaving Ashburn Belmont going someplace and then coming back to Ashburn Belmont. Where else would they go? They're coming home. Right. Okay. I'm sorry. Oh yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah I think the data there is just that's how they determined in their surveys what were commuter trips versus

[02:33:17] other survey answers so if a hundred people answered it that's that was the connection there thank you okay okay thank you so on the on this slide that we're looking at here the net cost for running the pilot to Frederick would be 300 we estimate 367 000 annually yes uh the net costs for the the estimated fiscal year 2026

[02:33:54] expenditures for the frederick route with 391 520. no the net though after we get the fees back makes it 367 that's correct right under the if it would if the fares are twelve dollars if the fares are are $12 right okay and then the to do the other two the net cost is 1.1 1.146 so um I guess so you've said that people aren't necessarily going to be saving money by doing this like it's going

[02:34:28] to be a wash um they may be saving some time by doing this no they're not saving time he's shaking his head isn't there a 66 express lane in there somewhere on one of the routes that the bus could use uh let me jump in on this one so the the issue there is if you're driving your single occupancy vehicle you're going from point a to point b directly in a bus you're going from point a to point c and then having to get to point b okay thank you for clarifying that um i would like

[02:35:02] to listen I'm supportive I'm just a little bit worried and I think that we might increase ridership if people could actually maybe save some money um and and what we're gaining in fees really isn't that much so I just I'm not quite sure how to accomplish that like maybe test that um I don't think I'm willing to replace Warrington with Frederick because of because of the ridership numbers i would be interested in adding frederick as a pilot perhaps but i mean we've got 49 and 53

[02:35:38] in year one from dale city and warrenton and eight people estimated from frederick and by the end of year three we would have a total of 300 cars off the road in the first two routes and only a total of 24 cars off the road potentially with the frederick route um and i i might be interested in maybe having one of the routes be not free but at least would have them save money just to kind of test the concept of and i don't know maybe maybe commuters don't think about that but to me

[02:36:14] i would like to test the idea of having the the fee maybe be a little bit lower to see if we if ridership goes up maybe we do that in year two or year three or something but um as i said i'll support dale city and warrenton potentially add frederick um but i i wouldn't replace one thank you mr saints well thank you um so two questions so our current pricing how much do we charge now for the the commuter bus from loudon into into the city currently the rates are eleven dollars

[02:36:50] per trip 11 per trip and then these you're asking for eight to eight to nine dollars A-25 was the recommendation for the study to start that fair at A-25. Okay. I was going to suggest maybe making the pricing the same, but if the one to D.C. is 11, then it makes sense to go a little bit lower for these, so I'm comfortable with the pricing.

[02:37:15] Now, in regards to do we do Warrington, Dale City, or Frederick, I kind of actually will lean to what Mr. Letourneau mentioned earlier. I think Warrington has an easier commute for folks who are driving back and forth from Warrington to Loudon than those To Dale City. So I would actually be in favor of doing Dale City route and a Frederick route And then again, this is pilot so we can test it out see how it goes and then we can come back And I guess I don't know if refresh my memory if we do have a

[02:37:53] You know say if we move forward is there a time frame for it to get it started and come back and give us an update and then i'll just point out for uh frederick that you know there's just a again an accident today on the on the road uh there um so when that's obviously there's accidents all the time on various roads but we know uh 15 definitely has its uh fair share when compared to uh to others so i think if we can get some folks off out of their vehicles and into a bus um that'll help

[02:38:31] things and actually yeah the the crash that I just mentioned was a fatal crash unfortunately that happened off of you know Fort Evans Northeast and for a spring drive there in Leesburg so that again that's in that close proximity to that that 15 corridor there so yeah so so yeah to answer the question or oh you didn't answer question so when is the review period say if we were to move forward do you guys have a timeline to come back to give us updates so as part of the the cost as you see there there's the marketing and outreach in

[02:39:03] Title VI. So we'd anticipate starting this project in fiscal year 26. Marketing and outreach would be the first steps and also the Title VI analysis for the effort. So FY26, to answer your question. All right. Thank you. Supervisor Takray. Thank you. So last time when we had this presented, I was very supportive of adding West Virginia. And I'm wondering why that wasn't

[02:39:36] considered. One of the top origin locations among the employers surveyed, 57% were from West Virginia, above Prince William, above Frederick County, Maryland. So I'm kind of wondering why West Virginia wasn't considered as a pilot. So the study recommendations were for, Scott, if you turn to one of the slides, I think it's slide that lists all the different routes.

[02:40:10] slide 11. Yes, we're just going to turn really quick to slide 11. So the Dale City and Warrington routes had the lowest average cost per unlinked passenger trip due to like a combination of their operating costs and the projected annual riders, which is why the study recommended those two routes. But they also proposed the Martinsburg route, to your point, Supervisor Takroni, as something worth exploring um because there was some uh insight that the region would you know if

[02:40:49] we went with that route that it would meet an acute uh need identified in the surveys so that was called out as a recommendation for the study yeah thank you and i think one um question i had earlier was about including loudum county public schools in the survey because there are largest singular single employer in loudon and i do believe a lot of the teachers and staff a lot of them are coming from west virginia in my opinion but i know that wasn't included in our survey

[02:41:23] correct that is correct we had some difficulty with that outreach effort and i think that ernie had touched on that the last time we presented to you in october right right um okay so i think the ridership would be higher if you included louden county public schools for west virginia i'm in agreement with us chair letourneau that warrington i would i would think that would be a lower priority over dale city um i do think west virginia you know is an opportunity i would agree

[02:42:00] to include them i it sounds like we're just going to do the pilot and we're going to pick two or three, and add maybe depending on the success of the pilot, correct? Exactly. That was our thought for a pilot. You try it for a year or two, and you'll be able to adjust as needed, especially if we don't hit those target ridership numbers. And then we'll be able to assess after that time period whether it's a route that we'd like to consider to be a permanent installation. Okay, so you guys didn't project costs in future years then, right? We're just

[02:42:35] going to start with the pilot and then project as we go correct we just showed the cost for fiscal year 26 i believe okay okay and just to clarify that we don't have costs beyond that by 26 because the current contract uh has not been negotiated yet okay thank you okay well we may this moment may require multiple motions or iterations to get to get us there i'm going to start with sort of what I kind of put on the table with Supervisor Sains, and then we'll see where it ends up.

[02:43:11] So I'll move the Finance, Government, Operations, Economic Development Committee, recommend the Board of Supervisors, direct staff, plan and implement a commuter bus pilot program from Dale City, Virginia, with three morning and afternoon trips per day, and Frederick, Maryland, with two morning and afternoon trips per day, to set an initial fare at $8.25 and reevaluate fares after the first year of operations, pursue grant funding opportunities, and explore partnership opportunities for recommended routes, and include operating, marketing, outreach, Title VI service, and fare equity analysis costs for each proposed commuter bus pilot

[02:43:49] route into the FY 2026 budget, which was made and seconded by Supervisor Sainz. So I'm starting here, and so, I mean, part of this is, this is, like, this is a pilot. So I really kind of want to test those numbers because the analysis is telling us that Dale City is going to do really well and Frederick's not, and that's intuitively not really what I think is going to happen, but we kind of need to sort of baseline here and see what actually happens, and then that will inform us, I think, when we do want to potentially add routes to places like West Virginia and otherwise.

[02:44:27] But I do think it's important to add Frederick because we hear horror stories all day long from residents about what that commute is like how long it takes the frequency of accidents those kind of things and then we're about to make it worse for them in the short term because we are because we are doing uh fruit 15 construction which is going to be ramping up in the coming years and will only make that commute worse at least in the short term so i think that will act is an extra incentive that wasn't really considered in the in the analysis because that's sort of an

[02:45:04] X factor which which is out there so and I'd like to try to start establishing that route and getting people you know knowledgeable about that I think my one issue on the LCPS stuff is just that most of the staff is school-based so they're all over the place so I imagine that would be hard from a last mile kind of standpoint how do you get those folks to you know their final points even though I know they do frequently come from out of state.

[02:45:29] So anyway, that's my initial proposal here. I did not include Warrington in this because I just think it's a pilot and I want to see kind of how these do. And I think the Warrington commute is not a really difficult one here for single vehicles. And I think it's gonna be harder to get people out of their cars for that.

[02:45:47] And so I'd rather just kind of save the money and spend it on these two and then we'll know kind of from there what to do. So that's my proposal. But, as I said, we may need changes along the way here. Supervisor Umstead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm probably going to be a no on all of this.

[02:46:05] I just, I look at the county expenditures being so much greater than the revenue from this. And I think this is something that if the private sector companies want this, That's something they could cooperate with each other and provide van pools or other means of getting their employees there.

[02:46:31] But I'm not sold on the idea of the taxpayers paying this much more in expenses to subsidize this. So it's a good, really good study.

[02:46:46] It was really helpful information. But I think I'm a no. Thank you. Thank you. Is the effort ongoing to get LCPS folks to respond? It is not.

[02:47:04] We had a survey window period, and we made multiple attempts to try to coordinate and get that participation. And I think Ernie had touched on that before. So that survey period was open for several weeks, and we just had to close it and finish our analysis for this.

[02:47:23] So, was it the case that they weren't cooperating and distributing it to their employees? Is that what the case was? - We were just having difficulty working with them to get it distributed. - Distributed, okay. - Exactly. - Okay, okay, great.

[02:47:40] We might want to talk about that in joint committee. I, okay, since they're pilots, I'll support the motion. I'd rather see Warrington. I do think that, I think the work, the staff's work was very thorough.

[02:48:00] I really appreciate all the work and the creative ideas to do this. I'll support the motion because I do want to support a pilot of this nature in the county. Thank you. Chair Randall. Yeah, this one's hard for me.

[02:48:16] I mean, Mr. Chairman, you make very good points about Route 15, and I understand what you said when you said we're going to make it worse for them, but we're going to make it worse for them because so many people come over here from that area, from Frederick, to have jobs here. So I guess in that way, they made it worse for us in some ways, I guess.

[02:48:37] Especially Frederick is hard because it feels like we should be asking them to pony up some of this money. I mean, yes, these are people who are working in Loudoun, and thus they are constituents because they're working here, but they're living in Maryland and paying their taxes there, you know, except for self-taxing and taking their money back there.

[02:48:57] So it just seems like, you know, there should be some shared cost here, and that's given me heartache that we're going to basically send money into another, not just another county, but another state. That's tough for me. I'm very much in support of Dell City.

[02:49:14] However, Mr. Chairman, I do understand what you're saying when you say we have to do a comparison, and the comparison would be Dell City from Frederick. understand why you're saying that and I also know that that route 15 traffic is not just congested it's dangerous the accidents are often some of the most fatal accidents you'll see and so it's a it's a balance and and you know I don't know I don't know that there's a there's a cost you put on lives lost for when you have those 15 accidents which is obviously why we're why we're going to

[02:49:51] to why we're working on Route 15 right now. So it does not feel particularly good to send money into another state, and especially since they're not offering to help at all. But I always say that, you know, one of the things I lead with is safety.

[02:50:08] And if it can decrease the congestion, and as well as looking at the congestion, maybe we can look at the accidents and the fatality rates. if it can definitely decrease the serious injury fatality rates, then it would have been worth it.

[02:50:26] And so I am a, you know, 51-49 yes, because I do want to also see what safety improvements and how much safer it might make the commute, which is, for me, more important than congestion.

[02:50:43] I will also say when you drive down Route 15 and you look at the cars, everyone's in a car by themselves. I mean, there is no one car pulling at all. And I'm always thinking, for all the complaints and stuff, no one's even, I mean, everyone's in a car alone. And so for that reason, I also wouldn't want to approve this.

[02:51:02] But the safety alone and the fatality and serious injuries on that road, I think, will get me there. So I will be a yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay. Well, 51-49 is practically a landslide these days, I hear.

[02:51:20] I hear. so um mr turner did you want to comment on the motion just very briefly we've mentioned a couple of times why people are carpool anymore in a post-covid world i can understand that completely nobody wants to climb into a car for 40 minutes with five other people in a post-covid world so that makes perfect sense to me um and the other issue to me that is an interesting variables i i i appreciate superintendent um such comments about cost versus revenue but i really do think if we can demonstrate that this service would reduce congestion on the roads that's a huge

[02:51:57] huge benefit for our commuters so that's that's worth the cost if we can afford it thank you okay thank you for all the comments uh all in favor the motion say aye aye opposed motion carries four one thank you very much thank you for the work looking forward to seeing how all this pans out and we'll have you back to give us some results okay uh so that brings us back to item number five which are uses of fy 24 general fund balance the main events reason why we have some visitors tonight all that kind of stuff

[02:52:37] so we have a this is our annual fund balance item we have quite frankly more than we usually have available to us i think there's going to be a bit of a presentation and then i think lots of discussion about the uses of fun balance good evening if i could take a moment and introduce mike franks he is our new assistant director for the operating budget he's been here for about a month so this is his first board meeting so i'm sure did you tell him that every meeting we spent 250 million dollars of extra money yes he came to aladdin for a reason okay

[02:53:11] all right mike where did you come from mike sorry charleston county south carolina charleston county south carolina awesome excellent great welcome to loud thank you all right um supervisor letourneau as you shared, we are here to share staff's recommendations for the allocation of FY 2024 unassigned fund balance. As you mentioned, we do have more than typical of unassigned fund balance available for allocation this year. That is a result of some conservative

[02:53:47] budgeting that we had shared with the board over the last few years as staff continue to evaluate the implications of House Bill 791 and other ways of budgeting personal property tax from data centers.

[02:54:04] I'm happy to answer any questions about staff's recommendations. Sorry, I thought you were going to go longer. I can if you'd like. That seemed very brief for the amount of money that we have.

[02:54:20] They're waiting for us to start throwing the motions around. Yeah, I guess. Well, what I thought we could do here is maybe just start with the chart that's on, that's table one, and I don't know if we have this, hopefully we can display, which has the suggested uses, now these are things that the board has sort of given some prior indication of, or are things that are policies such as fiscal reserve, do you want to, why don't we just start with that one, go through that list, and then I think we'll we may have some additions to it we may have some subtractions to it

[02:54:57] and then we'll move the table this table as a whole forward so as we're pulling I uh the table up onto the screen I will just start from the top so our first recommendation is that the board allocate 60 million dollars to one-time purposes in the FY 26 budget this is a typical action the the board has taken to send fund balance to the next budget process. The one-time funding needs occur, of course, in the CIP, the Capital Asset Preservation Program, as well as the debt service fund. The next set of recommendations would add funding to your various reserves.

[02:55:37] The first is your fiscal reserve, which is by fiscal policy needs to be funded at 10% of LCPS as well as county revenues. The second item on the list is contribution to the board's Revenue Stabilization Fund. That fund was created about a year ago as you continue to evaluate how to mitigate our dependence on data center revenue. So you have allocated $55 million toward that fund. Your fiscal policy also says that reserve should be set at 10% of data center real and personal property taxes. And so that would bring your total

[02:56:15] up to $80 million. The target is about $100 million at this point, but increasing as that revenue increases. And the final item in this category is contribution to the OPEB trust. The board has made changes to retiree health care over the last few months that have decreased the funded liability in that trust. And we would recommend replenishing that funded liability up this policy level of 70 percent over the next few years. The next section here is addressing the school board's request for fund balance in recognition that the school board did return

[02:56:53] about 9.2 million dollars at year end. They are asking for some of that well for that revenue back so the items here include one-time needs in FY25 as well as a press box capital project for the the capital projects fund. In addition, later on in the item, you'll see that staff also recommends addressing $47 million of the school board's request with appropriating existing appropriations availability for three capital projects that are currently active and about to go to construction.

[02:57:30] So we're not recommending the use of fund balance for that purpose because we have a more efficient recommendation for you in the item. The next set of uses include contributions to various capital improvement program projects. The first is an identity access management project, which is related to cybersecurity. The next item here is sidewalk and trails program, $37.5 million to dedicate, or allocate, excuse me, to six sidewalk segments that were between FY24 CIP

[02:58:07] and FY25 CIP, either delayed or removed from the CIP erroneously. And staff had, that has been brought to staff's attention. And this $37.5 million would bring those segments back into FY25 and put them back relatively onto the schedule that they had been following in FY24.

[02:58:31] This would fully fund those previously planned sidewalk and trails projects without jumping ahead of any other prioritized projects in your program. The next item here is a request from the town of Leesburg to partner on a planning study for the construction of the interchange projects at south king street route 15 and route 7 bypass this would be a 50 50 split of the cost for a planning study the town of leesburg has also requested the county's partnership in the overall construction

[02:59:06] project but right now this item on your fund balance list would just be to partner with the town of leesburg on the planning study itself the next item on your list is the replenishment of the county's CIP contingency and land acquisition contingency accounts in the CIP.

[02:59:24] This line item serves as a balancer for the rest of the fund balance item should you have other ideas for the use of fund balance we'd recommend those be funded out of that line item. But of course we also recommend the board replenish that CIP contingency year over year. The next item is then also replenishing the LCPS contingency and bringing that funding level up to $50 million.

[02:59:50] Right now the board has set that contingency at $25 million. And we do believe that is a recommendation that the board could consider. And the last section here is items that either were directed by the board to the fund balance process or asked by individual board offices to appear on the fund balance list.

[03:00:11] The first is the acceleration of planning money for the Cascades Library and Senior Center complex project. That was a motion, I believe, that was passed during the FY25 budget deliberations to send that million dollars to the fund balance process. The next item is short-term, mid-term improvements for the Belmont Ridge Corridor Safety Study, which the board discussed in 2023.

[03:00:35] The next item is short-term improvements for the Destiny Drive Corridor Study, which the board sent to the fund balance process earlier this year. The next item here is a district discretionary funds which the board discussed potentially creating that while the board hasn't created that program yet staff would recommend should it create that program that the funding source be fund balance which is why it appears on this list. The next item would be pole mounted signs in the village of St. Louis. Sorry I can't ever remember

[03:01:09] that acronym, speed displays, thank you, in the village of St. Louis for traffic calming purposes. This is also related to a board member initiative passed by the board in October. Next, we have micro transit pilot program, which was an item discussed at the transit summit and is appearing on your fund balance list for consideration. Next item would be to replenish the board's existing incentive funds for commercial and rural businesses. Next item is water testing for the Goose Creek and Broad Run. This would fund pilot projects to do water testing through

[03:01:47] the Goose Creek Association and George Mason University would perform those studies or testing. The next item would be $7.4 million contribution to the housing fund. This is representative of the equivalent a half penny of the real property tax rate. During budget deliberations for FY25, the board considered whether or not it would want to increase the contribution to the housing fund out of the tax rate. You chose not to do that, but sent the remaining half penny to the fund balance process. And then finally, the last item here is $600,000 for the creation of a revenue

[03:02:25] stabilization fund for the Comstock parking garage, which is a contractual obligation that the county has and we'd recommend funding that out of fund balance. Okay thank you. So let's start with just questions on things that are currently on this list and then we'll go to motions if there's any to remove anything on this list and then we'll move to additions to this list. So by way of questions the village of St. Louis traffic calming I spoke with Supervisor Crony about this

[03:03:01] earlier so we we voted to initiate traffic calming um the speed display signs are they it sounded like from kind of her description they were outside of potentially the traffic calming process and they're just sort of a recommendation anyway but do we know if vdot and dtci would be an agreement that that's something that we should be doing or would the traffic calming study have a different outcome the traffic calming study could have different outcome but we are not clear because the traffic study hasn't been completed yet

[03:03:37] so would we typically when we put these kind of speed display signs up would we do it prior like without a traffic calming study i'm not clear we might need to consult dtci and while we take other questions okay um the uh okay yeah we'll just wait for nancy we would do a study to determine whether they would be warranted and we'd work with vdot

[03:04:14] over implementing implementing them so we wouldn't typically just we wouldn't just put them up there we would study that so then should we not be funding this item now until we get the study back this funding could serve as funding available pending the results of that study okay pending the result but and if there's additional things that mr hamstring if i may just yeah if the funding was not allocated through the fund balance process i would just note staff's recommendation would be to send this to capital contingency so the amount would be available in contingency which

[03:04:52] is the likely funding source that we would recommend should the traffic study come back and say that they should be implemented and there would be sufficient contingency to cover it obviously yes the 144 would go to contingency okay all right so that may be an outcome here just to kind of preserve process um let's go to other questions chair and thank you um mr chairman So something you said about the Leesburg bypass money kind of struck a little bit of a chord

[03:05:26] in that you said that they're doing a matching amount for this $2 million, and then they would come back and ask to partner with us or do a matching amount for construction. My question is, you know, has there been a discussion with the town?

[03:05:47] before you make a decision to come back to us to do a matching amount for construction, there's all these other sources of revenue out there. There's NVTA, there's SmartScale, there's all these sources of revenue out there. And so I don't know that I have a lot of heartache about this amount of money, but I do have a lot of heartache with the, and then we're going to come back and ask you to help us fund the construction.

[03:06:07] That's a bit of an issue. And so it's almost like if that is assumed, If it's assumed that this $2 million will also mean that the next step is to come back and ask us to help with construction, then I just assume they know that the $2 million versus somebody having a discussion with them.

[03:06:26] And I'll be willing to have one with the mayor that talks or walks them through how to access possible other sources of money. And maybe they'll get them and maybe they won't. But the idea that that's already been put on the table that we're going to get it from us is something that I have a bit of heartache with.

[03:06:45] I will also remind, well, for those of you who don't know, the district discretionary funds, the motion I have in front of me will decrease that amount because it's a motion that involves money going to the invasive species removal that takes the district discretionary funds away.

[03:07:09] So it would be plus 2.5 million in the end. So just to know that that's coming. And if I heard you right, Mr. Hemstreet, and maybe I didn't, you're saying there's one of two ways to do St. Louis.

[03:07:26] We can do this or we can send it to CIP contingency. Is that what you said, Mr. Hemstreet? Is that what you said for the St. Louis money? What I said is that if the board chooses not to fund this because it is taking this project item out of sequence with the study, the funds would be returned to CIP contingency because that's where it would go.

[03:07:52] Similar to how there's two other items above this that are funded which deal with 659 or improvements on 659 as well as Destiny Drive. The board, sometimes depending on the funded amount, can decide to send it to a fund balance process like this one or to the CIP.

[03:08:14] So Belmont Ridge Road, that quarter study, could have been funded through one of the contingencies as opposed to Destiny Drive, could have been funded through the use of contingency as opposed to sending to fund balance. So if it goes to CIP contingency, where in the... So when the study comes back, the study will make recommended improvements.

[03:08:33] The poll signs could be one of those. There is a concern by staff, I was trying to find an earlier email, but there is a concern by staff from DTCI as to whether or not the speed limit on the road would allow for this type of mitigative measure. So it could be that the study will require a lowering of the speed limit before this type of mitigative measure could be used, but that's something that the study needs to go through and provide advice to the board and recommendations to the board on.

[03:09:01] So the funding would be in contingency, that's a long way of answering your question, but So the funding would be available in contingency if it is decided not to set it aside. If it's in available contingency when the study comes back, it wouldn't slow it down. It would be because it would still come back when the study was back.

[03:09:18] Correct, because we still need to do a study in order to get the permit to place the poll signs. So either way it would be the same. It would put it in order in a process, as you just said, but it wouldn't change the timeline. Correct. Okay. All right.

[03:09:33] Thank you. Okay, and when you do make this, I'm going to ask that you make them as separate motions, because I already have a request to split it, so let's just handle them separately. But we'll finish up on questions on all of these first. Supervisor Bressman. So we'll just stick with St. Louis for just a moment.

[03:09:53] I don't know where Nancy went, but it's my understanding that this project is not one of those traditional traffic-calming studies that came from an HOA. so you don't need a community vote like you do in some of those other traffic calming.

[03:10:15] Because in my, go ahead. Yeah, I don't have a good answer for you on that. I believe you're correct. Oh, okay. But I can't give you a definitive answer on that right now. The reason I bring that up is because I've done a couple of these traffic calming initiatives, as you well know, a couple times already in my district.

[03:10:33] And I think about 80 percent of the recommendations that come down, the community votes against it. So you don't even end up getting to do three out of the four recommendations that the engineers come up with, unfortunately, when you're dealing with HOAs.

[03:10:51] So I agree and I kind of agree with preserving the process on this. And I don't think it's going to slow anything down for St. Louis. I know we all support St. Louis and trying to get some stuff done out there for them. I'm really happy to hear about the TOT.

[03:11:11] I think that that will also be approved in this item and that we're going to be going for the international wine competition. So that's awesome. The timing on the housing, two things on the housing trust fund, the half penny. My first question is, excuse me, we are now going to have that in our base budget, correct?

[03:11:32] Yes, the full penny is in the FY26 guidance you approved last week. So we don't need to really have any more votes about having a full cent of committed revenue to the housing trust fund after this. That is what was in your guidance last week. Thank you. Okay. And then on all fund balance, what is the timing?

[03:11:51] so say we approve the fund balance tonight at which point in time do the entities get the funds so this will go to the board's first meeting in january and then um depending on who the funds will go to we might need to establish agreements or mous but the funding will be available for staff to distribute after your vote after the vote oh okay okay i was wrong then i thought that wasn't going to be until july um at first i don't know why i had that in my head that fund balance wouldn't be distributed until the end of the fiscal year so so this is 25 this is balance from fy

[03:12:29] 25 yeah oh 24 sorry yeah yeah okay um and uh i think that those were um yeah and i i agree with chair randall on having heartburn about the two million um for the for the intersection uh study that's being requested from leesburg um i would like to see a little bit of due diligence on trying to find some other grants um for that uh but i i have a little bit of heartburn for it as well

[03:13:04] um i sorry she didn't really have i have heartburn though oh i thought you said you had heartburn i'm sorry i apologize i thought that was giving you a little bit of heartache um i think uh mr hemstreet has a comment mr hamstreet i i just is there does the committee want a response to the question that chair randall posed around communication with the town if not then we don't have to provide it chair randall would you like an answer to your question i would very much like an answer to my question my heartburn wasn't about the two million my heartburn was the

[03:13:42] assumption or even the question that we will then partner with them later without them having talked about other sources of income that they could possibly get gotcha um i'm i'm finished with questions sorry about that okay well before we go to mr sayings mr hamstring would you like to answer sharing those questions i can answer now or whatever the committee just answer it so this this interchange at king street and uh the bypass as well as the one on the north side Battlefield Parkway and Route 15, and then the main one along the bypass that is between

[03:14:18] Fort Evans Road and Edwards Ferry Road have all been slated by the town as potential projects to apply for NBTA 70 funds. And so one of the issues about NBTA 70 is in order for the town to access those funds, which they can apply for, it needs to come out of the county's portion of those funding because the town is considered part of the county.

[03:14:44] And so in order to have enough information to be able to apply to NVTA for the NVTA funding, they need to do the preliminary interchange. I don't have to defer to DTCI to get the current name of it, but it used to be called the Interchange Justification Report.

[03:15:03] There's a new name for it now. Interchange Access Report. Interchange Access Report. however the cost of that is about four million dollars the town has requested that we partner with them on that which puts them in a position to apply for funding from nvta as well as the state and other entities so at this point they are not requesting louding county local tax funds or any any of our debt capacity what they need is the is the study to apply for nvta 70 and state and then federal funding and they are asking for our partnership on the initial study

[03:15:40] okay okay supervisor saints well thank you that actually gets to kind of my question because i was going to ask have they leesburg the town of leesburg saw uh funding from mvta smart scale etc before the before coming to us to us or their weight this is the first step and then they're going to follow through and do all the do all those other steps so it sounds like coming to us and they're going to do all those other things correct they need the initial study in order to apply all right thank you the the intersection they are interested in in

[03:16:18] planning for is although it is not part of the the counties and V dots widening of the bypass from Clarks Gap into the the Greenway it is adjacent to that and And so if there were a backup at that off ramp, it would potentially negatively impact the flow on the bypass.

[03:16:51] But it is a separate project. The town in conversations with county staff has agreed to drop one of its really big price requests, which was for, at this point, assistance on a 300, probably a 300 million dollar project of a new interchange at Edwards Ferry Road going down to Fort Evans Road along the Route 15 bypass.

[03:17:26] So they are trying to not go for the moon, but ask for some assistance for smaller projects that could immediately improve traffic flow in the area.

[03:17:47] Okay. Supervisor DeCroening. Thank you. I just want to let people know, so my BMI for St. Louis was a speed management study in the village of St. Louis.

[03:18:02] While St. Louis road easily met the volume and speed criteria, it did not qualify for traffic calming as opposed to its speed limit is 35 miles per hour. But the speed on St. Louis Road, the observed speed is 12 miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

[03:18:24] So people are speeding through this village of St. Louis. The reason for the pole-mounted speed display signs was to provide some relief and some safety.

[03:18:39] That's what the community desired during the small area plan. We heard from the community, in fact, a letter was sent to Supervisor Buffington asking for safety along that road because it bisects the village of St. Louis, goes right through the middle of it.

[03:18:58] So this is for St. Louis Road, the speed pole-mounted speed display signs. I'm going to get that right now. But I understand there's going to be a study, and I think it would be fine to go into contingency because the study isn't done yet.

[03:19:14] But I want to make sure that it doesn't slow things down because Chair Randall and I have been trying to take care of the village of St. Louis. You know, we're still working on the small area plan, and I want to make sure that we provide, you know, some safety and relief to the community because they've been asking for that for a long time.

[03:19:34] So I'm fine moving it there as long as we know it's there and can be spent once that study comes back and these pole-mounted speed display signs are requested. That's what the $144,000 is for, for two of them.

[03:19:50] They're $72,000 each. I do want to say that I did receive a request from Windy Hill for affordable housing in the town of Middleburg. They sent in a proposal of $2.5 million.

[03:20:07] They have a one-acre parcel in the town of Middleburg that is shovel-ready to provide six affordable units. And right now it's with housing, our Department of Housing.

[03:20:25] They are evaluating it. And I'm hoping that if it comes back favorably, that the board will consider funding the $2.5 from the $7 million that we just put in for the half penny to the housing fund.

[03:20:41] So I wanted to let people know that that came in, but we haven't studied it yet. It will be looked at by the Department of Housing. And lastly, Nova Parks put in a request to look at making improvements on the historic Goose Creek Stone Arch Bridge close to Upperville.

[03:21:04] It's a 200-year-old bridge that needs some stabilization. But again, we're doing a study right now, a phase one evaluation. And once the study comes back, staff has informed me that we can use contingency funding to do the design and potential improvement of that bridge.

[03:21:29] so again waiting for the study so that's why I didn't put that forward as a fund balance request because it is a little premature until we get that study done but I'm hoping to use contingencies to stabilize that historic bridge which is a huge asset it was built in the early 19th century and served as the bridge for Route 50 and it also was the site of the Battle of Bupperville during the Civil War, so it is a very historic asset and hopefully we can make improvements to it so it will stand for another 200 years.

[03:22:09] Thank you. Okay. So let's deal with motions as it relates to this list. Why don't I just -- I'm going to go ahead and make the St. Louis motion right off the top here since we -- since President Crony just talked about it, which is I move the Finance Government Operations Economic Development Committee amend Table 1 at the December 10, 2024 action item by removing $144,000 for Village of St. Louis traffic coming and increasing the line item land acquisition and county contingencies in the same amount.

[03:22:36] Second. Which is made seconded by Chair Randall. I think we've just discussed this. We're moving this to contingency. It doesn't mean it won't get funded. It'll just be funded through contingency and it'll follow a more regular order and process for that. Any discussion from members of the committee? And most importantly, it won't change the timeline. Yeah. Thank you.

[03:22:55] Any other discussion? All in favor say aye. aye anyone opposed motion carries five zero i do have another one which i'm not sure is going to get a second but i'm going to try um and i can explain why um when i get there which is i move the finance government operation second of the modeling committee and men table one and december 10th action item by removing the two million dollars for town of leesburg south king street route 15 route 7 bypass interchange and increasing the line item land acquisition and county contingencies in the same amounts um okay supervisor briston will second for conversation i I appreciate that. So by way of opening, so the process that the county administrator outlined

[03:23:35] is actually sort of my concern, because in order for this to get funded, it has to come out of the county's allocation, essentially, for NVTA. And I've made this comment several times, and I'm going to continue to make it, which is this is an existing interchange in the town of Leesburg. I drive through it on my way here every time I come here. It is in far better shape than most of the intersections on Route 50, of which we have been trying to build an interchange, especially the one at Loudoun County Parkway, for literally a decade or more.

[03:24:08] And still, when the county administrator presents to us his capital improvement plan coming up next month, I don't believe the whole interchange will be funded within the six-year period because every year it gets moved back because every year the price goes up and we don't have enough new money coming in and is available. So before we undertake a new interchange improvement program. We've got to build the interchanges that we have committed to on our CIP and promised, I think, the residents in the southern part of the county for literally a decade or more. And I'm just not willing to, because what's coming out of the study will be a project. We all know that. And that project, I'm sure, may not be $300 million, but it's still

[03:24:46] going to be expensive, and it's going to be competing with the other projects, so including in the county. So I feel like as the supervisor that's been fighting this for many years, I just have to be protective at this point and not expand. It doesn't mean I would never support this. I'm sure there's some justification for it. But at this point, I just really want to get some interchanges built where we've said we're going to build them. And that's why I would not like to go down this path yet. If CIP comes in and we start getting a funding plan and we start getting through the IAR process and all that stuff, then I would be happy to revisit this like next year

[03:25:23] or something like that, but I'm not there right now. Thank you. Chair Randall. So MBTA money is regional improvements and congestion reduction relative to costs. That's what MBTA is. So it doesn't matter that it comes out of the county contribution because it's regional anyway. It wouldn't be, MBTA is never going to just look at what a town is going to do or what the county is going to do it's a regional body and so depending on how many how many regional cars are moving through there and how they how how we um grade that is is where that money is going to go

[03:25:57] and so so i would never look first of all every you know this it's not like only people in leadsburg move through this intersection everyone moves to this intersection but it actually doesn't matter because that's not how mvta funds work my hesitation and i'm going to say this as gently as possible is like every other regional body those the relationships you build on on your on your commissions committees boards and bodies matters and so when the town of Leithburg has the

[03:26:30] opportunity to serve in the town seat on NVTA and they decline that opportunity time after time after time, they're losing the ability to create those relationships. So, you know, as chair of NVTA, you know, I have fought many times for money in Percival or money in Leesburg because of the population in those areas, and I don't mind doing that. I do mind doing it with no help from the locality itself. It's frustrating for me for that to happen. So I won't support this motion,

[03:27:08] and i'll support the two million dollars but i will i will say leesburg i'm gonna need you in there with me and i'm going to need you to i need you in there with me if we're going to fight for this money because just because we're saying we're going to go to nbta our smart skill doesn't mean it was score high enough to get it that's the first thing it just does it i have no idea what the congestion relief relative the cost will be and so i don't know what the score will be but i know one thing, there are times when if you got two projects that are sitting side by side for that scoring money, those relationships can make a really big difference. And so if

[03:27:47] people can join me in some of those fights, it would be really quite helpful. Thank you. Supervisor Umstead. Hi. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I so sympathize with you and for your rationale. I really do. I completely understand where you're coming from. I do appreciate Chair Randall's comments.

[03:28:12] I will pass those along to the town and hopefully something good will come out of that, but I would ask for my colleague's support for this. Initially, the town had hoped that we would incorporate this project into the bypass and Route 7 bypass widening project out to Clark's Gap.

[03:28:41] And we said no, that we did not want any delays on that project. But this does hook into that project and that project has been planned literally for decades on both the county and the town's comprehensive plans.

[03:29:00] So it certainly, a problem at this intersection could produce a problem for commuter traffic coming from Western Loudoun as well as Leesburg headed down either Route 7 or the Greenway.

[03:29:17] So I would just ask for support, thank you. - Mr. Reza Brisbane. - Thank you, yeah, I'm still kind of on the fence, but here's my question to you, maybe Supervisor Letourneau.

[03:29:33] We have this $2 million, there will be a motion to strike the $4.5 discretionary fund. I guess what I'm curious about is why are you not asking for some kind of funds to accelerate the Loudoun County Parkway and Route 50 interchange?

[03:29:54] Because with that argument that you've been wanting it for a decade, I could see us putting $6.5 million into that project tonight. Well, I don't know if I should ask Nancy to come up. You should really just sit closer. But I think the reason is because it's not shovel-ready.

[03:30:17] There's no action. Well, no, but this is a planning study for the Leesburg thing, so we can go out and plan. But at the moment, if I added funding in, it wouldn't change any kind of timeline or outcome. Is that a correct statement, Mr. Hemstreet?

[03:30:33] That is correct. plus the magnitude of the project is six and a half million dollars is not going to significantly impact that project yeah i'm not to be clear i like i know i'm on your time but i'm not worried so much about the two million i'm worried about what's coming after the two million which is hundreds of million that is money that i think i will need at that point for this so okay well um okay thank you that's that's all i had thank you okay um just yeah by way of closing

[03:31:09] i obviously supervisor um said nothing personal here whatsoever and i appreciate your handling that with with grace as always um and nothing personal against the leesburg folks and the project that they have either i'm just trying to prioritize because i do think sometimes we get very expansive and we add things and we add things and we start programs and projects and then we wonder why we don't get some of them done because we're so red thin so that's my case all in favor the motion say aye aye all opposed i think the motion actually carried three two which way did

[03:31:44] you intend to vote i'm sorry you're most supposed to remove it yes i'm sorry okay let's try another vote on that one all in favor of the motion say aye aye opposed okay the motion fails two three got it all right sorry we're so used to a motion to approve yeah sorry it's the opposite in this case okay um all right so i think now i know there's other motions related specifically to this list um i know chair randall the four and a half million frankly i can make it if you want or if

[03:32:20] you want to yeah yeah so we're just making the four and a half right now yeah no not a problem I don't think this is going to take a whole lot of -- Nope. I move the Finance, Government Operations and Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors remove 4.5 million use of unassigned fund balance for district discretionary funds and create a new line item -- well, just discretionary funds.

[03:32:44] Yep, that's it. Period. Yeah, the only thing on that motion I think you've got to probably add -- Well, that it goes back to the unassigned fund balance. Right. The 4.5 million at this point. back to on the fines take one and go back to unassigned land acquisition and county contingencies that the motion is to remove four and a half million from this table and and increase land acquisition and county contingencies by four and a half million table one motion is made i will second no discussion i don't know discussion i think mr turner would like to address this

[03:33:21] i've got a point of order so we're now going to move this money out of fund balance and move it all 4.5 million in the land acquisition is that what we want to do because that will that lock up the 2.2 million dollars for the invasives program if we now move it into land acquisition good question no because well it could we want to move we want to move 2.5 million into land acquisition there could also be a subsequent motion to move two and a half million from that fund into from land acquisition back into fund balance okay no not fund balance okay if we get if we can go

[03:34:01] straight to invasives out of land acquisition contingency that's that can i do that that's to make sure before that's my motion go ahead mr chair so um the motion that was just made would take the the money from it would remove that that program and put it into the land acquisition account, if a subsequent motion were to reduce that account to create this invasive species, you could do that as part of this discussion, or you could do it right now in the same motion.

[03:34:33] That's wonderful. Okay, that's fine. We just are doing it differently because A, we're meaning this, and B, I think there's different perspectives on that one. So, okay. Any other discussion specifically on the four and a half million? Mr. Turner. Let me just some background on this. So when I proposed -- You did already.

[03:34:49] I don't know how much time went off the first time, but that was probably a minute. All right. So just set it to two minutes. Go ahead. I wouldn't even take that. So when I first did this, there were a lot of small projects, and I got a couple of emails that were worried about transparency, that suddenly each individual supervisor would have their own private slush fund.

[03:35:08] Transparency was never going to be a problem. There was never my intent, and I can't imagine this board ever would have allowed supervisors is just individually start spending money without the board oversight and board approving that expenditure. The reason I'm removing it is I got to thinking about it. I went and talked to Mr. Hemstreet and I said, is this just going to create yet another prioritized pot that we now have to dovetail in with all our existing prioritized pot and essentially just create another bureaucratic layer and another process we have to go through to determine priorities.

[03:35:37] And he said, yes, it would. And I said, I don't wanna do that. That's not gonna accomplish my purpose. And that's why I asked Chair Randall introduce a motion to do away with this to withdraw this BMI.

[03:35:55] Thank you. Okay any closing? Actually I'm sorry may I ask another? Sure yeah we're on the motion so it's just your time to talk on the motion. I think the original motion I believe Supervisor Turner had a BMI on this discretionary fund. Part of the motion I believe was for staff to research it and come back to the board. Does removing this funding also eliminate that work for staff we have oh go ahead i was just going to say we have a secondary motion that would um if the board wanted to make them would direct us to stop working on the program

[03:36:30] okay can i just add that to the motion right now that the the board stops yeah why don't you just can i just say and i further and i further move that the staff stops work work work on investigating a discretionary district you can just read the bottom is it i further with the I recommend the Board of Supervisors and direct staff to take no further action on the establishment of the district discretionary funding program as originally directed with the approval of the item 15 November 7, 2024, Board of Supervisors Business Meeting.

[03:37:02] That's just when I further move to the same motion. Okay. Thank you. And I hadn't even read that second paragraph yet, but thank you. I appreciate it. That's all I had. Okay. No, I don't need to close it. All right. Let me just make a quick. I will support this motion. think maybe sometimes we should just take a take a step back and talk through some of this before we because we could have saved all of this but you know live and learn no closing no no closing it's fine no all in favor the motion say aye aye anyone opposed motion carries five zero okay are

[03:37:37] there any other motions related specifically to items that are in yes this table yes oh on the

[03:37:50] the table already? No, I'm just trying to, yeah, I just wanted to finish, basically is there anybody want to take anything else out of anything that's in this table now? All right, seeing none, then we have some potential additions, Chair Randall. Okay. I move the Finance, Government, Operation, and Connected Development Committee, creating a new line item called invasive pieces, remove a grant program and allocate two million for this purpose and increase the line item. That part is not. No, just. Okay, yeah, for this purpose, yes.

[03:38:17] Yeah, I think your motion would be now to reallocate $2 million from the Land Acquisition and County Contingency Funds to the Invasive Species Removable Grant Program. Okay, motion is made, seconded by Mr. Sainz, opening. Okay, so I realize that there is a study out for this right now.

[03:38:37] I do realize that. The study comes back in May, June, somewhere in that time frame. Two things. One, this will be contingency. So if we do not need it, we won't spend it. It will sit in contingency.

[03:38:54] Secondly, if the study comes back and says we need it, we're going to have to spend it later anyway, but we'll just have to do like a mid-year allocation. So it's easier to just do it now than have to do it mid-year or whenever when the study comes back and says that if that's what we decided to do.

[03:39:10] Thirdly, and very importantly, well, two more things. One, the issue of invasive species is one that impacts, negatively impacts, the entire county. It doesn't just impact the HOAs, it impacts the wineries, it impacts the entire county.

[03:39:26] And it is beginning to cost the county money. And I believe it's going to end up, even very quickly, costing the county much more than $2 million because invasive species brings invasive bugs. And if you talk to Bluemont Vineyard or any other of our wineries right now, the money they're already spending and the things they're even trying to do right now to mitigate the issue with the bugs is huge.

[03:39:54] And this will only get worse if we don't try to get a handle on this right now, which is going to be hard. So this is not an issue of eastern Loudoun County or western Loudoun County. This is an issue of Loudoun County, and it absolutely is an issue of the economy in Loudoun County.

[03:40:10] And fourthly and finally, because it's related to the planting season and the growing season and when bugs hatch, we really cannot wait another year. We don't have time to wait a full another year until the fund balance comes up next year to do this.

[03:40:27] we would have lost a whole other year in all that we're trying to do in removing invasive species and trying to get a hold of the invasive bugs that come with the invasive plants. And so giving it another year means that our wineries will suffer, our HOAs will suffer, and even one more year could easily cost $2 million.

[03:40:52] And finally, I will say that this entire effort has been funded and pushed and talked about by a group of citizen volunteers that have done something that is groundbreaking, amazing, and getting just about national attention.

[03:41:11] It is exactly what we want our citizens to do. And for all the work they've done, now they're coming to us and saying, can you help us help you, and can you help us help the county? this is the right thing to do at the right time it's the right thing to do economically and to not do it would be penny wise and pound foolish so i'm going to say i will i'm asking you to help to support this all right um comments mr sayings uh thank you um yeah i'm comfortable supporting this now the way chair rannell just laid it out um but you know definitely we'll be waiting for

[03:41:49] the full report to come out because my you know i mentioned earlier and gave this information to the consultant when we reached out for commentary to us was i want to make sure this program is equitable between rural loud and suburban urban loudon areas that have hoas and are organized areas that are not that that do not have a hoa and can't uh operate you know collectively in in a hoa capacity to make sure that the money is used and spread out throughout all loudon and the different areas and regions, because we have the Bedford pear tree, the tree of heaven,

[03:42:27] and we have the spotted lantern fly roaming free all over the place. So I'll be anxiously waiting for the report, but if it's not done appropriately, then I might have to do some other things at that time, but I'll support this for right now.

[03:42:45] Supervisor Brisbane. Thank you. so this is creating a new line item in a contingency fund because the chair said this is in contingency so is it creating a new line item in a like a new contingency fund i believe the well i'm sorry i don't want to speak for the chair yes this would be this would go in the contingency fund yes that's not the motion though oh that wasn't the motion oh well that's okay create a new line item crime basis please remove the grant funding and i'll get in the contingency

[03:43:19] fund yes this was meant to be in the contingency but yes it was chair may i miss mcclellan yes so staff the the way we would actually do this would be to create a new project for this purpose this is not this is would no longer be a contingency because it is directed for a specific purpose you are taking it from the line item dedicated to contingency and reallocating it to a new project a very specific project so then if i could add well i'm sorry thank you uh so and it's going to

[03:43:57] be a line item in our operational budget not in the cip yes the way we understand it this is an operational program and do we know we i think we've already allocated some funds to this do we know how it's i think it was like 150 000 do we know how that's going does anybody know how that's going We've allocated $150,000 for six pilot projects.

[03:44:19] Oh, okay. And we can get the update for you. Okay, okay, okay, great. But if the study asks for a million and not two million, then we use the million and then we just save the million for the next year or something like that? When the study comes back, we would make a recommendation on how the board could utilize the funds that you allocate for that purpose.

[03:44:41] Okay, but it's just going into this fund and it's not going to be allocated until after the study comes back. Get the the motion that was or it won't be spent till the till the study comes back. Correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, thank you. Well, that's what I meant by contingency to. Um, Supervisor Takroni. Thank you. Um, so I did not make motions because my projects were still being studied. So I have a question about putting two million dollars into a fund without the study

[03:45:15] being done. I do support removing invasives. I know there's demand. However, I do think we have to get this right. When you remove invasive species, you have to replant, particularly when you're removing invasive species in a riparian buffer. It has an environmental impact, and so you have to replant natives, and I do think this needs to be fully studied of how this would be implemented so we do this right.

[03:45:50] I would never have thought we needed $2 million to do this, so I do question the amount, and I think I would assume that the Timmins group would provide an estimate of the annual amount to address this issue, and I don't think we've received that estimate, right, from the Timmins Group, because the study has not been completed.

[03:46:12] The other concern I have is staff capacity. My understanding is that soil and water, they have not spent the 150 yet, and they do have capacity issues. They're pretty much spending all their time on this project. I did reach out to them.

[03:46:28] I question capacity from B&D and general services because building and development has to get involved regarding the flood, if we try and do this in the floodplain for the engineer studies and then general services would have to be involved for stormwater facilities.

[03:46:45] So it's not that I don't wanna support this, it's that I think 2 million is a lot to put into a fund when we don't have a study yet. And like I said, my project for St. Louis and the project for the Arch, the Goose Creek Arch Bridge, I'm going to wait.

[03:47:06] And once the studies are done, I'll be looking for funds from our contingency. So I wonder if it makes more sense to have this coming out of our contingency once we have the study from the Timmins group done.

[03:47:22] And as I said, I do support the invasives program. I've met with Mr. Littman many times. I've been out to scrape the grape. I know there's an issue, but I think it makes sense to understand kind of what this will take and also get an estimate, you know, understand what it might cost and also staff capacity, understand what staffing will need to implement.

[03:47:48] Thank you. Okay. Supervisor Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Very briefly, Chair Randall said it perfectly, just a couple of supplementary notes. A lot of this has to do with timing. Right now, the $150,000 for the six pilot projects is undergoing, I believe the letters for authorization went out yesterday, and that process is going to take place.

[03:48:16] The next big push for the invasives program, in addition to potentially recruiting additional support and maybe some marketing and some more program stand up because we've got a real momentum going right now, but the next big push for the invasives is June.

[03:48:34] So without this funding, the only option we will have is to delay this until the fiscal 26 budget or next year's fund balance and we will miss that real opportunity in late spring of next year.

[03:48:50] We hope the study will be back by the end of February in time for us to roll it into a line item into the fiscal 26 budget. Even if it's not -- study is not completed, I hope we could get a memo from the group of what a bracket range of a cost of an annual program would be so that we have some information for the fiscal 26 budget discussions.

[03:49:12] So what this does right now is it earmarks money pending a structured program from the Timmons Group and then once that comes back then we have, we can, we have that pot of money that we can tap into immediately implement the program in time for the June push on the program.

[03:49:28] So a lot of this really has to do with timing and I appreciate as Chair Randall said, Mike Littman and all of the members of the HOAs and all of the other support people, 127 people signed the letter that he sent to us yesterday or today. Extraordinary volunteer effort. It's getting national attention and I think this is really important to keep this momentum up. That's why this is so important. Thank you. Okay, so a lot to unpack here. My initial thinking was it made sense to do this if we thought we were going to do it anyway. However, something Supervisor Turner just said I don't necessarily agree with. Why couldn't the board simply allocate fund balance

[03:50:07] when the study comes back to be available immediately out of existing fiscal year fund balance don't we do that all the time we could and i i so i'll just remind the committee that the staff recommendation that came with the item was to go ahead and address any funding for invasives when the study came but comes back in the february march time frame so you could do that as part of your fy26 budget because that'll be in front of you at the at that point in time or

[03:50:42] You could also solve it through current year fund balance, as you have just suggested to Russell. Which, when is, what's the timing on the report from the consulting group? March, I'm looking at Deputy Administrator Jones, who's in charge. We're going to have, like, a new rule that all staff has to sit in the front.

[03:51:01] We have attempted to invite the staff to the table, but they're apparently intimidated by the board. Thank you, Chair. There's a range of four to six months. We have asked Timmons Group to make sure they're closer to the four months versus six.

[03:51:16] And so it should be in the spring is what we use. So that February-March time frame. But I just don't have a good estimate right now because they're in the process of working through developing the program. Okay. Sure. So right now, if the grant fund is created, there's nobody to really receive the grants.

[03:51:37] There's no process by which the grants would be allocated. There's no staff really assigned to it to allocate. So I guess I'm just not under, I'm missing something here because I don't understand why we can't just allocate the funding when the report comes back like we said we were going to and why we have to pre-allocate it now.

[03:51:57] You could, yeah, you could allocate it at the time. That's getting to be more of a rhetorical question. The funding is not going anywhere. So it's the same response. The, if you were to set us, if it is $2 million and you were to set aside that funding now, It is funding that you would not need to address out of your FY26 budget, but to your point, there will be fund balance available.

[03:52:20] Yeah, I mean, we're running well ahead of our budget again. And I think that might address Supervisor DeCrony's concern a little bit, which is it does seem a little ahead of ourselves to be going so far down the road when we don't have the report yet.

[03:52:37] And I don't know that the pilots have been going all that smoothly. I don't want to slow it down. I think it's a good program. So, you know, it's not that I'm not supportive, but she's kind of convincing me that maybe there's a better way to do this. So, okay. Closing, Chair Randall.

[03:52:54] So when was the report originally due in March or April, or is it already late? Yes, that's correct. We thought it would be due earlier, but they got started a little later than expected, and so it's pushing back the timeframe. So the report's already late, and I don't know that I really have a lot of confidence that it will come back when they say it's going to come back.

[03:53:15] I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, and I want to be really respectful to soil and water. I'm not sure what's going on there or what's the miscommunication with soil and water. So if we're going to have to allocate it anyway, and Mr. Crony, I completely respect you so much, and I know you're very committed to the environment, and truthfully, your district is really being impacted by this because your district has a lot of wineries, but I completely disagree with you, completely.

[03:53:48] This is not like a traffic study. This actually has a seasonal deadline that we have no control over. Like when things hatch are not something that we have control over. I know, we know that when, I mean, we know that if you take things out of the floodplain, you have to put something back in the floodplain because it could flood.

[03:54:09] I get that. I know all that. None of that's new to me. But to not have this money ready to go at the moment, not have it set aside already, especially after all the work that volunteers have done, and the fact that, again, this issue, unlike other issues can cost lots of issues because they can be safety issues, but this issue is costing us money.

[03:54:32] Go out and talk to the wineries. It's costing us money. So I am a little shocked, and I completely disagree with you. Respect you. Disagree with you. Mr. Sainz, I think you make such a good point because you all don't have HOAs. Neither does the West, to be honest.

[03:54:49] Western Lamp-Kate doesn't have HOAs. They're just organized. But they don't have HOAs either. But I think that it is important that we will make sure that this is distributed equitably because of what I just said, this does impact the entire county, not just one area.

[03:55:11] And so I am very committed to equitable distribution of this as well. And again, I do, no matter what happens tonight, I really do want to thank the Invasive Species Committee who have worked on this. Like grassroots work from citizens has been absolutely incredible to get us to this point.

[03:55:32] This is not something that the county started or the county did. This was brought to us by citizens. And maybe you all would vote for this. If I just forward you all, all the pictures citizens have sent me of spotted lanternflies, which are a lot. So I almost never say I ask for your support, but I'm saying at this time, I ask for your support for this item.

[03:55:52] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay. I'll in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? I will abstain. Motion carries, 401. Thank you. Other motions? Supervisor Brisbane, I think, had the light on first.

[03:56:11] go ahead we're not going anywhere anyway so I move that the finance government operations and economic development committee recommend the Board of Supervisors reduce line item acquisition and county contingencies by 1.4 million and create a new line item bridge across Beaver Dam run connecting Heron Overlook Park to Loudon water and allocate 1.4 million for this purpose in table 1 in the December 10 2024 action item motions made is there a second

[03:56:49] It's a pale yellow one. Yeah. I move that the Finance, Government, Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors reduce the line item land acquisition and county contingencies by $1.4 million, create a new line item, bridge across Beaver Dam Run, connecting Heron Overlook to Loudon Water, and allocate $1.4 million for this purpose in Table 1 in the December 10, 2024 action item.

[03:57:20] Okay. I'll motion for the, because I'm curious, for the purpose of discussion, I'll motion. Okay, Chair Randall, for the purpose of discussion, seconds. Okay, thank you. I discussed this motion with Supervisor Glass earlier today. This is basically a pedestrian bridge that connects two trails kind of near Kinkora, and there's no way for folks to get from one trail to another unless this pedestrian bridge is built.

[03:57:50] If Supervisor Glass wants to explain a little bit further in my time, I'm happy to let her do that. If that's okay, Chair. You can also speak on her own time too. Oh, she can speak later. Okay. She can speak on her own. Anyway, because it's trails and it's a pedestrian bridge and it improves connectivity, I was happy to make the motion for Supervisor Glass.

[03:58:09] Thank you. Okay. Other members of the committee. Mr. Sainz. Thank you. I guess via Ms. Glass or staff if they have information on this, where do we get the dollar amount, is there, has there been a study done, do we know that's enough, do we know there's a bridge needed, et cetera, so yeah, if somebody can give me a little bit more detail and context on this please.

[03:58:43] Yes, so we've received the amount from staff about this, and we actually had – Oh, Steve, yeah, Mr. Torpy's here. Thank you, Mr. Torpy. Yes, so this is an identified crossing that is going to need a pedestrian as a part of the Linear Parks and Trails system.

[03:59:01] We have another project at another park that is very similar, and that's what the pricing is being used from because it's an existing program that we have going right now. So it's the same contractor that provided this type of pricing for this particular one.

[03:59:19] Now, is this trail a very active trail, somewhat active, like, you know, it was... So the trail is, since we opened Heron Overlook Park, it is very heavily used. The issue is, because of Beaver Dam Run, we're not able to connect over to Loudon Water.

[03:59:38] So what you have is trail systems that go to a particular point, they have to turn around and backtrack. So with this connection over Beaver Dam Run, you essentially connect a five-mile loop right there in Kinkora to Gloucester Parkway, back up Loudoun Water, which we have the easements and trails in place into Heron Overlook.

[04:00:02] Okay, before my time runs out, do we know or are we aware of any proffers in the amount of possibly $2 million from Peterson that was allocated for, possibly for this project? We can research that, but we don't have that information right now.

[04:00:22] Is there any way we can find that out tonight before we take this vote? I mean, we just, this will go to the board in January. Okay. We can do the research then. We just got the motion. We've just been working on it today. Okay. If we can please do that homework and see.

[04:00:39] There might be an application, I think, from, my memory serves me, from 2019 where peterson was the applicant i believe that proffered um um two million dollars i believe it's the look up the ashburn chase commonwealth uh development i believe thank you um yeah so i'm little is this is this an existing project no it's just a part of the trail system it's not an existing project but it is part of the broad run stream valley corridor trail system

[04:01:15] okay but in the cip where is this right now no it's not a cip project currently not currently a cip project that's correct so it hasn't even entered the cip yet that's correct yeah i'm sorry i i mean listen i don't know that it matters to me too much what it is like we just from a process standpoint we can't just out of nowhere jump something for the entire project unless like our hair was on fire and the world was ending which we kind of had to do with the crisis stabilization fun but that was a little different this is i don't think something that's in that category plus i do think there's possibility there is profits already on this that we just haven't explored yet

[04:01:53] so i don't think i'm supportive um i do remember mr st thank you for reminding i do remember but i'm going to assume miss miss glass i'm going to assume your office would have checked on that already before you brought this motion yes yes so you know that there's no proffers available there are no proffers for this bridge and that's why um that's why we're asking to do it Part of it is on private land, the Kinkora.

[04:02:19] So there are like three sections, Kinkora, then there's county land that we're using, and then there's the Loudon Water. So what we're trying to do is that would be about 200 acres of land that would be connecting the trails.

[04:02:37] So in general, Mr. Turpin, Mr. Hemstreet, so if this is part of the Linear Parks and Trails program, every part of the Linear Parks and Trails program that we do is a separate CIP item that we bring separately, because, you know, we've made a commitment to do Linear Parks and Trails overall.

[04:02:57] So is every connection we make go into the CIP at six years? Because Mr. DeTerno asked a valid question, and I certainly, especially as a district supervisor, I certainly understand why he's asking that question. But is it different when we've already said yes to the linear parks and trails program, and we're always going to, if we're connecting, we're connecting.

[04:03:19] So tell me how that works. So, for example, down at the Heron Overlook Park, we installed and have already opened trails on the park property along the Broad Run, which was done as a part of the LPAT program itself that's already funded.

[04:03:39] It's the staff that goes out, the volunteers go out, we put that on the ground. There are certain things, though, like stream crossings, that we don't have the funding in place for something like that. So we either come back and ask for additional funding, or we put it into a CIP similar to the signature LPAT project, which is a very large project.

[04:04:01] Ms. Toby, I'm going to stop you only because I have my time, so I understand what you're saying. Is it impossible to know what in the LPAT program needs to come? Because did we put this in the CIP?

[04:04:17] It's six years. It goes to the end of the process. It's six years out for this to, you know. Is it possible to know everything that's left out there for us that we may need money for, even an estimate? Because it seems if we're going to try to do the LPAT program, to do it like this, it's kind of piecemeal, and everything goes into the six-year funding program, we're going to be forever before we actually complete the Linear Park Central program if we do it like this.

[04:04:43] Chair Randall, I would just add that funding for that program begins, it's planned to begin in the FY27 budget, CIP, and then ramps up according to the LPAT plan that the board has endorsed. and so there's just not funding available for that program at this point okay okay thank you yeah okay other discussion i think um you made the motion so you would get the close

[04:05:13] let's try my microphone first um so you know obviously i i hope the motion passes but i did recommend to supervisor glass that if it doesn't pass that we put it in the future years list in the cip when we discuss cip i from discussions with staff a project of this size even if it is put in the future years i think can get picked up and get done pretty quickly and also it's a project that since it would be in the cip in future development supervisors could direct funding

[04:05:52] to accelerate that project like we've done in the past right so if it's in the future years and then you have a project come into your district and you want the developer to make, you know, you negotiate with the developer. I want to be very careful about what I say about proffers because I'm going to get the evil eye. So anyway, but my point is if it doesn't pass, I don't think it's a lost cause. I think, and I don't think it would necessarily have to be in the very back end of the six years. Connectivity is definitely one of the highest priorities for me and I think for this board for those sorts of passive recreation opportunities in the county

[04:06:29] and I appreciate you and supervisor glass working on this and bringing the motion thank you okay all in favor the motion say I opposed no motion fails one four okay additional additional motions if there are any they don't have to be any? Supervisor Umstead. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chair. Supervisor Kirshner asked that I make the

[04:07:06] following motion, which I am going to do for purposes of discussion. I move that the Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors Reduce the line item land acquisition and county contingencies by $280,000.

[04:07:26] Create a new line item town vehicle license fee revenue replacement grant program and allocate $280,000 for this purpose in Table 1 in the December 10, 2024 action item.

[04:07:41] I further move that the Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors direct staff to operate the town vehicle license fee revenue replacement grant program with the following principles. Grant funding is available to towns that one, levied a vehicle license fee in tax year 2024. Two, project to collect less than $250,000 dollars in total vehicle license fee revenue in fy 2025 and three reduce the vehicle license fee

[04:08:18] to zero dollars in tax year 2025. Motion is made by Supervisor Umstead. Is there a second? I'll second it. Seconded by Chair Randall. Opening Supervisor Umstead. All right let me to be fair to supervisor kirschner because i don't support this motion but but and i told him that but to be fair to him um i will try to to uh relay what what his his thoughts are does sound like there are people who actually do support it so you can always let them do it well if there's someone who

[04:08:57] does support whatever you want okay all right um the towns as you know uh cult coalition of out in town sent a letter signed by all seven mayors to the board to request that we either not remove the county's vehicle license fee or that we make that we respect the fact that if we did so the town councils throughout the county

[04:09:35] would be under political pressure to do the same and that the implications of them doing the same and removing their own vehicle license fees which seemed to be uniformly twenty five dollars would result in significant reduced revenue to the towns and so they requested that we either delay in the elimination of our

[04:10:08] own fee at the county level or make them whole. This amount that Supervisor Kirshner requested would theoretically make whole six six of the seven although I don't think Hillsborough has it, but five, certainly, of the seven towns.

[04:10:30] So that is Supervisor Kirshner's position. Thank you. We didn't get to hear your position, though. Maybe in your closing you could argue against your motion. Chair Randall. So through the chair, the supervisor from Leesburg just made a motion that doesn't include Leesburg because that 280 doesn't give Leesburg any relief at all.

[04:10:59] It takes Leesburg completely out of it. And I'm wondering, has the town of Leesburg, the mayor and the town council been made aware that a motion was just made to assist all the other towns, with the exception of Leesburg, since Leesburg was one of the towns that I believe, I believe, maybe I'm wrong, signed the Colt letter.

[04:11:19] I think Hillsborough didn't because Hillsborough doesn't have this fee. But you don't see the name, the word Leesburg anywhere in here. And if I didn't know that Leesburg wasn't included in this, I wouldn't know Leesburg wasn't included in this. And I'm just wondering, you know, how Leesburg is feeling about that, to be quite honest.

[04:11:37] You know, I feel two ways about this. You know, as elected officials, these are hard decisions. They're hard decisions. If you want to reduce fees, then reduce fees. And if you don't or you can't because you need that in your budget, then that's a decision you have to make as well.

[04:11:53] I don't, you know, I don't know that we need to, you know, disrespect the town officials by assuming that they need us to jump in to save them from their own decisions. I don't think that's something that we need to do.

[04:12:09] Mr. Kirshner did call me on this. You know, we talked. These are my constituents as well. I will say this. If this passes, you know, the discussions from some of the towns that we might hear about, you know, the county being spending too much or not making hard decisions.

[04:12:27] I don't think I want to hear those discussions anymore from anybody in any town because I think that would be not really an appropriate discussion to have after we would do this. So because I gave my word to Mr. Kirshner, I will support this.

[04:12:44] But, one, again, I'm surprised, you know, that we're talking about this in the absence of Leesburg altogether. And two, you know, I think that it's maybe for the towns, I would say these are the hard decisions we make, and I'm going to respect in the future your right to make these decisions and not assume you want us to help you out.

[04:13:06] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay, Supervisor Brisbane. Thank you. Just a couple questions on the motion. What's to say that Leesburg wouldn't meet all three of these criteria if they applied for the grant?

[04:13:24] i guess so it's do we have a guarantee that leesburg is not going to apply for the grant do we need to specify that this is not for leesburg in the motion because i understand we're trying to it doesn't say that in here as chair randall said and it's only 280 000 they could take it all if they get their application in um and then uh also i just want to ensure i i can support the 280 000 for one year one year so that they can prepare for the following year if they

[04:14:03] choose to do all three criteria all three of those criteria the following year i don't see in the motion where it says this is just for one year is that covered because we're talking about tax years and fiscal years in the motion or do we need to explicitly say this is not going to be part of our base budget and this is for one year do we need to add that to the motion do we need to add take this isn't for leesburg and do we need to add that this is for one year to the motion so the second condition of the proposal says that um that the towns project to collect

[04:14:39] less than 250 000 in fy25 leesburg is over that okay so that would eliminate them okay And then secondly, fund balance is a one-time allocation, so there would not be funding for an ongoing program based on what you're doing with this motion.

[04:14:57] Okay, unless we explicitly, because with that. Unless you provide additional funding in FY26. Well, what we did with the half cent was the motion said, then it becomes part of the base budget, right? But we're not saying that in this motion, so this will not become part of the base budget.

[04:15:14] This will just be for one year. I understand you saying. correct okay okay thank you just wanted to confirm those thank you supervisor to crime thank you so yeah i support supervisor kirschner the reimbursement will give our smaller towns relief in the upcoming fiscal year and allow them to adjust their budgets in future years to cover lost revenue should the towns decide to remove these fees in the future the administrative burden on the treasurer's office will be reduced. So, the treasurer does collect for the towns,

[04:15:53] and we're not talking, you know, for the smaller towns. It's a small amount of revenue, but it will help them. Like, it's 14,000 to Hamilton, 53 to Lovitzville, 17,000 to Middleburg, Percival 181, in Round Hills, $16,000. So it does provide relief that they were anticipating. Am I correct on that, Megan, or did I not do that right? That is consistent with the Colt letter. Okay.

[04:16:24] So yeah, it does provide some relief. So it's for our smaller towns, and I do think it was unexpected, you know, this loss. And I just want to clarify, what you read is the amount of revenue I believe that those towns collected in FY23, the creation of the passage of this motion would create a program for the towns to apply. This wouldn't be an automatic. Right. But it gives them that opportunity. Correct. Yeah. To recoup their loss of revenue. So I do support Supervisor Kirshner because they are smaller. And I think

[04:17:02] the reason for not including leesburg is because they will receive future data center revenue they have that opportunity whereas the smaller towns in western loudon do not so thank you yeah i think i just don't like the phraseology on this that that somebody's losing something because there's no loss here unless a town were to choose to not collect the fee anymore just because the county is not collecting the fee before anymore does not mean that the towns have to stop collecting the fee. Just like the county does a lot of things that the towns don't have to follow, may choose

[04:17:41] to, may not choose to, I don't really understand the logic why this particular thing has suddenly created a need for us to obviate or pay out the town fees on just because we decided to do this for the county um i mean i certainly understand why this could be difficult for some of the towns to do but they have their own tax rates so it's not like things are the same anyway if you live in the town you know things are different when you live in the town there's additional fees that you have to pay it's different taxes you have to pay because you live in the town and people make

[04:18:18] that choice too and and i think many of them honestly are happy about it but about living in town and the services they get but so i don't i just don't see the equivalency here it's not that this is a lot of money i just it just the logic is is escaping me on it so i i don't think i can support it okay supervisor umstead would you like me right all right um my reasons for voting against this um and it i the motion i read was the motion that supervisor kirschner prepared

[04:18:54] and the motion he prepared did not include the town of leesburg towns have the right to impose a meals tax the town of leesburg does impose a meals tax we don't impose a meals tax in the county none of the towns are at risk of losing any funding if the county eliminates the vehicle license fee um if it were the case that our elimination of the fee denied the towns that

[04:19:30] amount of money then i would have a very different view of this motion and i would happily support it but our action in eliminating the fee as chair letourneau said has absolutely no impact on the towns politics is not always easy in fact it's often very difficult and we have to make difficult decisions and town councils and mayors have to make difficult decisions and sometimes those decisions are to lower taxes and perhaps

[04:20:07] not provide as many services as some folks want other times it's to provide services and increase taxes neither one of those decisions is generally easy and I think the towns do themselves a disservice I think you've got a lot of really good mayors and town councils in this county and I think they are more than capable of deciding whether or not they should assess a $25 vehicle license

[04:20:40] fee so I I don't think that the county should fill in the gaps whenever we decide to lower fee eliminate a fee or lower taxes and the towns are concerned about political pressure to do the same you're up here to withstand political pressure if it goes against what you think is the best thing for your constituents, thank you. Mr. May I have a point of clarification? Yes, Chair Endell. So, Ms. Umstead, you just said that you read the motion like that because that's the way Mr. Kirshner wrote it.

[04:21:16] Are you saying that it's the Leesburg Chair, you did not know that he was not going to include Leesburg in there? I mean, the Leesburg Supervisor, you did not know he was going to include Leesburg in there? This is, this motion was completely new to you and you didn't know that Leesburg wouldn't be included, not included in this?

[04:21:34] Based on my conversation with Supervisor Kirshner, I thought that Leesburg would be included. We talked about two different options. If you include Leesburg, the amount of funding, I think, increases by over $900,000.

[04:21:50] So you thought that they would be included in this. That was your discussion. When I saw this motion, I was somewhat surprised. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I'll, in favor of the motion, say aye.

[04:22:06] Opposed. No. Motion fails, 1-4. I am going to say it's not going to do me any good because most other members aren't here, but this item is going to the full board. So I do think perhaps in some cases, especially if a supervisor can't be at the meeting, it may be better just to wait until the full board and try to amend it there so we don't end up in a situation where supervisors are having to make motions they don't support.

[04:22:32] May I change my vote to abstain for now? Okay. Chair Randall will change to abstain. So the motion will be, will fail one, three, one, I guess. Yeah.

[04:22:48] Okay. Okay. So that leaves us just with any other additional motions. Great. That leaves us with the final motion. I do have a question for staff. I make the final motion. There is a dollar amount listed appropriate.

[04:23:06] In this case, 129.757540 for FY25 uses. That amount, is that difference now because of the changes that were made in the motion or in the motions that were up here tonight? No. That's the same?

[04:23:21] Yes. All right. So, and it is my intention to take a quick break after this before we move on with the rest of the meeting. But one last motion. I move that the Board of Finance, Government Operations, Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors approve the uses of unassigned general fund balance as described in Table 1 on the December 10, 2024 action item and amended by the committee.

[04:23:42] Appropriate $129,757,540 for FY25 uses. Okay, I get it. Direct staff to include up to $60 million for one-time purposes in the FY26 proposed budget and direct $30 million to the fiscal reserve, $25 million to the Revenue Stabilization Fund, and $5 million to the other Post-Employment Benefits Trust.

[04:24:01] I further move the Finance Government Operations Economic Development Committee. Recommend the Board of Supervisors appropriate $115,000 of restricted transit occupancy tax fund balance to provide to visit Loudoun for the purposes described in the December 10th, 2024 action item. And I further move the Finance, Government Operations, and Economic Development Committee recommend the Board of Supervisors appropriate $47.7 million of general obligation bond financing for Loudoun County Public Schools capital projects for the purposes described in the December 10th, 2024 action item.

[04:24:32] Seconded by Supervisor Umstead. So I appreciate everybody hanging in there for this discussion. We didn't spend really any time talking about the LCPS funding here. I do think it's worth noting that the board is funding this very sizable request from LCPS.

[04:24:50] It has been a show of good faith from the school board that they have returned funds to the county, surplus funds, and so I'm willing to consider and appropriate when able funding back for specific purposes. That has not always been the practice of the school system. At times they have spent down all of their money and just chosen to appropriate funding instead of coming through the the county for that purpose for the surplus so it's worth noting that it's also worth noting and i think worth a big thank you to staff for the work that they've done to shore up and close the

[04:25:25] gaps on the school capital funding projects a very significant gap existed that we're closing tonight to be able to complete these school projects. So I hope that our friends in Ashburn are aware of the effort that went into this and the collaboration that existed between the county and the school system.

[04:25:47] It's something that hopefully we'll continue to carry forward. And thank you to all the staff that worked on this entire item. Any other comments on the motion? Seeing none, everyone say aye.

[04:26:03] Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion carries 5-0. Let's go ahead and just take a five-minute or so break.

[04:43:08] Let's close this out. We've got a few items left. I know it's late. It's been a long night. It's not even that late. It just feels like it. Okay. Item, you know, it's really dark. All of our friends left.

[04:43:24] All of our friends left. So item 15, the real work of the finance committee here. They just came because they wanted money. now we're doing oversight um fy 26 budget development items item actually it's 14 that's first which is bus stop improvements and bus shelter and then we're going to have intersections and sidewalk and trails then domestic and sexual violence services and finally the crisis receiving and stabilization center good evening good evening chair uh letourneau before we get started i just

[04:44:01] wanted to introduce a new face to you all here today. On my left is our new Assistant Director of Transportation, Ms. Heather Dietz. She recently joined DTCI replacing Mr. Jim Zeller. Ms. Dietz has 27 years of experience in the industry with much of that time serving local jurisdictions on the east and west coasts with the implementation of capital improvement programs. So we're very lucky to have her she earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a master's in public administration from virginia tech she maintains a professional engineer license in virginia and

[04:44:37] other certifications and we're very glad to have her with us welcome glad to have you all right with that i'm going to turn this over to mark all right so i do have a presentation and do need a

[04:44:57] need a little help to get it started here. Thank you. All right. Good evening, committee members. And as Chair Letourneau mentioned, there are three items that we're going to be presenting. And what I wanted to do is give some general comments before we get started

[04:45:33] to go through some general comments that apply to all three of the items, just so that we are looking in the right place as we go forward in these. And that is these items were developed in response to needs within the county where prior to the programs being in place, these issues were dealt with kind of on an ad hoc basis, where if there was a need for an intersection improvement, it was done generally through a BMI, or there

[04:46:07] was a missing link in a sidewalk that an HOA had requested to be done, it was done as a BMI. And so in the 2000, between 2017, 2019, all three of these programs came into play in order to address those issues. And it provided a methodology and a process in which these projects are prioritized and in which they're implemented. And so in the last three to four

[04:46:41] For years DTCI has taken these projects or these programs basically from inception and has started going through the development process on them and going through in some cases getting through the construction process on a few of the projects.

[04:46:58] And we have -- as we've been going through this process there has been a lot of things that have come to light and that we have working to optimize how we implement the projects.

[04:47:13] The one thing that is very apparent in all that we do on these projects is they are all located within the right of way which means we have to work through VDOT and work through VDOT processes on implementing these projects and that's what we've been really working on is to try to optimize how we work through the established processes with VDOT and working with their guidelines.

[04:47:38] As we go through the programs, we can mention some areas where we've been able to do some optimization with them to help these projects move along a little bit quicker and more efficiently. One of the other items that has also come to light is as we go through land acquisition on these projects, the way we do land acquisition is pretty much established by the Code of Virginia.

[04:48:04] And there are no shortcuts to the code and we have to work through the process according to the way the code writes. So what a lot we're going to go through is just how we've been navigating through those processes to try to improve how we're doing on these projects or these programs but also you know what opportunities that we have moving forward to to make the best use of the funding as well as working through those processes so in all three of the items I'm going to just give a little bit of background we'll go through what has been encountered and accomplished and then

[04:48:43] some sort of what is anticipated to occur as we move along in the future on these. So I'm going to start with the bus stop improvements in the bus shelter program. This initially came to the board as part of the June 2018 transit summit. At that time, we had noted that there were 339 bus stops in the inventory, and the transition plan back then envisioned that the bus stops that were not in ADA compliance would be upgraded on a programmatic

[04:49:20] basis in phases with the idea that we'd be able to use GIS information, some standard drawings from VDOT, and be able to do these on sort of a mass-produced basis, along with the idea that we would attempt to get all the bus stop landing pads within VDOT right away so VDOT would maintain everything.

[04:49:46] As we've been moving forward with this, we first started out by developing the actual way, the actual program for developing them. Funding initially came in play in January of 2019 and in FY 2020 in July of 2019.

[04:50:12] Up till this point, the processes that we had in place were how do you develop a road project? And if we were to follow that same process for 277 bus stops, it'd be decades. So the first thing we had to do is sit down with VDOTs and sit down with the towns that control their own right away and say, how can we do this to make it a little bit more efficient and realistic given the magnitude of the number of stops that we were dealing with?

[04:50:43] And the bulk of them being in the VDOT right away. VDOT was very receptive to that because they also don't want to have to manage 200-and-some-odd permits and 200-and-some-odd construction projects. So we were able to work out with them a programmatic permit.

[04:51:00] Basically, we have one permit with VDOT to do all of the bus stops. Now, there is a process we have to go through. We have to inventory and give them a list every time we send in a package, and then they have to check all those. but it's much less of the administrative burden that we would on a normal project.

[04:51:17] So that was quite helpful. Then as we moved forward, the next issue that we came upon is that how are these maintained? Normally, any infrastructure in the VDOT right-of-way, VDOT will maintain.

[04:51:36] Now, they will not maintain bus shelters. We understand that because that's part of the transit system. That's not part of the highway system. But at the same time, they will not maintain bus stop landing pads, even if they are in the right-of-way, which caused us to work with general services that also have to put together an agreement with VDOT on how these bus stop landing pads will be maintained.

[04:52:02] So, again, that's a little bit more of an administrative process that we didn't anticipate when we started, but that has been worked out. And I think we have a good understanding of how that's going to go forward. But what that means is the county is responsible for maintaining all bus stops and bus shelters within our system.

[04:52:23] So based on that, we then moved forward to develop our land acquisition strategy and how we would acquire land for this.

[04:52:44] What came out of this process is it became obvious as we started going through and discussing trying to acquire this land in right-of-way that that would generally not work with homeowner associations because their governing documents generally require a supermajority of the residents to approve any kind of land acquisition, and that is not very feasible or possible.

[04:53:04] And so we shifted our strategy to trying to obtain easements as opposed to right away because that only needs to have the board, the HOA board's approval, and that was a much easier process. And frankly, we didn't want to have to come back to the board, the county board, to have hundreds of condemnation cases to just get a bus stop in.

[04:53:29] So going through that, we adjusted the land acquisition strategy, which then means we have to go through and if we're doing easements, we have to have plats for all the easements.

[04:53:45] So we do have to follow a very stringent land acquisition strategy, again, as outlined in the Code of Virginia. The RPAMP group that is working on the land acquisition, they are using consultants to help augment staff on this.

[04:54:01] so they are working on this diligently and we're making a lot of progress that all being said now that we have established what the bus stop easement requirements are how we have to acquire land and and how i think i hit the wrong way sorry about that um you know we essentially had two different types of of scenarios one is bus stops that are entirely within the right-of-way which was the

[04:54:35] minority but we had you know 50 odd sum that were in that category and then the rest there are some level of uh private land acquisition that needed to take place so the good news is where things were within the right-of-way it's it was actually quite easy to get through the process uh because we did not have to acquire land and we were able to get like the first 45 of the bus stops installed by spring of 2022 and i just want to give you some examples of what those look like as you can see in these bus stops there is already a sidewalk in place and all that we had to do is

[04:55:14] put in a eight by five landing pad and that is that is the requirement so you know the the exhibit on the or the photo on the left side you know it kind of looks a little strange that there is a little bit of sidewalk or a little bit of bus stop landing behind the sidewalk but that is to meet the requirement that it's an eight by five pad so that was those were fairly easy to install and now we're moving forward with the rest of the program so as of right now we are as you can see

[04:55:50] in the table. We are working on designs and plats for 68. We're in town and VDOT review on 17. The bulk of the projects are, the bus stops are in land acquisition. 58 have been constructed and four will be addressed by other CIP projects. You know, so we're trying to build in some efficiencies where we all have a, in the cases I can think of, it's intersection project that we're doing that has a bus stop next to it so we're going to do it all

[04:56:22] as one project um so given that we anticipate being complete with the bus stop improvements in 2025 although i will say i suspect there will be a few outliers if um we have run into a few situations where uh after we've gone through and tried to acquire land it has become obvious for the need to move some bus stops because of where they're located so there may be a few that we're going to have to work through that are go beyond that phase that that timeline but that's where we

[04:56:55] are could we just pause there for a second so we have had discussions about recalibrating our transit program we just funded the micro transit pilot projects where you know we eliminated some commuter bus routes do how are we now integrating that into this program because i don't know the we're going to end up with that many bus stops? So we have been working closely with transit services on this and I'll fast forward. We've also been talking about the bus shelters and the fact

[04:57:29] that some of these bus stops are also going to now be targeted for shelters. And, and so, you know, we've been working with them to prioritize those stops that are going to be in the system long term. You know, there are some stops that are pretty obvious that they're going to be long-term stops. And so like for the bus shelters, we are specifically targeting those. So we're not spending a lot of time and effort for a stop that might not be in the system for long-term. So we are working very closely with them and we, you know, continually are checking to make sure that

[04:58:06] this is, you know, a viable stop. Now, that being said, the ADA transition plan is a regulatory plan to get us in compliance so that is kind of our highest priority that we have made a commitment to get these into compliance so as long as they're in the system we need to be moving forward to make sure they meet ada requirements and i i just want to give another example of of another scenario that we're working through and that is this particular bus stop you can see has no path and there's no sidewalk there so these are a little bit the ones that take a

[04:58:41] little bit longer because we have to develop both the sidewalk and the bus stop landing pad and in this case we actually have to do a crossing here of the road so we can and then another curbing appears so we have an accessible pathway but um you know that's that's an example of of what's moving forward on these moving on um in 2022 the silver line opened so we added transit services

[04:59:15] added additional uh lines to their system which required us to develop new bus stops at these new lines and new bus stop locations so there's an additional 135 bus stop landing pads that we're working on right now and and this table gives you the status of those you can see that 32 have already been done and there are 26 that are about to go into construction so we're making good progress on this and we will continue to move forward on it moving on to the

[04:59:53] bus shelter program this was introduced in the fy 2024 cip we've been working with transit services to identify what type of bus shelter as well as working on a method to prioritize bus shelter locations unlike some of the more populous jurisdictions we can't necessarily use ridership data because we do not have a large number of bus stops that have 30 40 50 riders per day in the morning in the afternoon they're a little bit more even so we had to come

[05:00:33] up with some other metrics in order to prioritize the bus stop locations as you're all aware in the october meeting uh general services presented to to the committee our proposed shelter that we're going to be using after researching a lot of different aspects that would serve the transit system best and and this brasco eclipse bus shelter was is what we're going to be used to implement um we are now at a point where we are going to start that implementation process early 2025 we are meeting with them in the next week or so to kick off that

[05:01:13] process for the actual development of the bus shelter locations just more information originally when this transition plan was put together the estimated cost per stop was eighty three hundred dollars given the amount a large amount of survey work we have to do in order to have recorded plats and needs for these we're finding that the bus stops are now averaging about $28,000 per bus stop to get them upgraded to ADA standards so that's just so you

[05:01:48] understand the level of what we're doing and sort of to address what you had just said Supervisor Letourneau in discussions with DGS they do have paratransit options available for those areas that are still in the implementation process if there is a need for any citizens in those areas that is an option they can use right now and yes we are working with them to try to coordinate how and what stops and shelters we're going to do in order to make sure that one we're meeting our ADA compliance requirement but also trying

[05:02:27] to seek efficiencies by if we see a bus stop that's also going to need shelter We're going to try to work with our PAMP to make sure we're only going to property owners once if we can. In some cases, that's already happened, and we'll have to work through those specific scenarios.

[05:02:44] And that's our update on the bus stop and bus shelters, and we're open to any questions you may have. Thank you. Questions? Thank you. I noticed an item on the bus shelters.

[05:03:01] It didn't say how many need to be built. There wasn't like a chart like there was with the first two. So if it was 20 shelters per year over three years, are you saying there's 60 bus shelters that need to be built? So the funding came into place in 2024, FY 2024.

[05:03:20] We developed the system or developed the shelters as well as the prioritization process. And now in 25, we're ready to start implementation. So this is so we are on the design year right now.

[05:03:36] Then we're going to go to land acquisition following fiscal year and then construction the following fiscal year. Now, every fiscal year, so we are going to start with 20 this year. In FY26, then we'll get the next 20 that we'll begin design on as we're in land acquisition for the first 20.

[05:03:56] And then in FY27, we'll bring in another 20 as the first 20 are in construction, the second 20 are in land acquisition. and so it's it's sort of a rolling um process 20 come in every year so i guess my question is are there 60 that need to be built total how many bus shelters need to be built total in the entire county right now based on the number of bus stops that we have it's there's over 300 so so it's a prioritization process to determine where is the need now at at some point okay so

[05:04:36] So when you say it's a three-year process, that's just a three-year process for the first 20. Correct. So it's not a three-year process to finish all 300. Correct. It's a reoccurring, it gets funded year to year.

[05:04:53] Okay. And we start 20 at a time. And we had some discussion at the Transit Summit about doubling that. Are we not going to be able to do that, do 40? If I could just get back to kind of the first question about the implementation rate.

[05:05:19] Mark mentioned that there are some 200 and some bus stops, 277 bus stops. I would not consider that there would be a bus shelter needed at every single stop. And so we will be working with the transit group and with the board to identify at what point it would make sense to kind of make a decision to kind of slow down or stop the program after it's been implemented.

[05:05:47] And so we'll work with, it'll be a few years as we start through the implementation phase. So transit, they'll need to identify how far they want to go with shelter locations. Why, when we're doing the ADA compliance, are we not doing the bus shelter at the same time?

[05:06:10] Because we're like already there. I guess my question is, could we not combine some of this because there's probably a continued number of ADA compliance we need to do.

[05:06:26] Why can't we just do the bus shelter while we're there? So we will take into consideration both at the same time. But what I would say is that our first priority is to obtain ADA compliance.

[05:06:45] So let me say this kind of in reverse, and that is we're not going to delay bringing a bus stop into ADA compliance waiting for the bus shelter process to catch up to it. What we'll do is we will get the bus stop into compliance in a way that we can build upon that when the bus shelter plans have gone through the process, are reviewed, approved, and then we can construct it so that we're not undoing anything that we did in order to meet that minimum ADA compliance.

[05:07:25] And when you say we have to do land acquisition for the bus shelter, is that usually from VDOT or could it be from various entities? It's going to be from private entities. It would be from private property. Anything in the right-of-way, we can work with VDOT under permit.

[05:07:42] We don't need to obtain the land from them. But anything on a private piece of property, we'll need to acquire that from the property. Okay, okay. And in the case of the one that you showed, the stick in the grass with no trail on either end, formerly Sterling District, why couldn't we just, what's this thing working? Why couldn't we just move that bus stop across the street? That's a, that's a good question. And so no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I have an

[05:08:18] answer. So there is a bus, there is a bus stop across the street. This is, this is a two-way route. Now in this particular instance, and, and we check this with transit services. So in this instance, this shopping center, which you probably know which one this is. Yeah, I know where that is is is the destination and and so for for individuals coming they you know that are heading towards us in that this photo they would get off where this existing sidewalk is right here there

[05:08:52] is a bus stop right here and then utilize this facility and on the return trip what we would do is we just we'd build a crossing here a curb ramp and then bring the bus pad right here for the reverse trip on the bus routes it's two-way buses on this okay if we wanted to i my staff reminded me it was at the it was at the retreat not the transit summit where we talked about doubling the bus shelter program are we still looking at that and what would what would be required more staff

[05:09:29] more money to do like 40 a year instead of 20? So I think, you know, in working with transit services, obviously you all know that there's several initiatives that are being considered on the transit system. Yeah. And so working through that process, again, going through the prioritization, we want to ensure that the initial bus shelters that we install are going to be at

[05:10:00] long-term facilities, long-term bus stops, so I don't think the doubling, we need to work through the priorities of which ones are going to be in place, and so it's not as much resource as it is ensuring that we understand how the transit system is going to progress in these coming years.

[05:10:24] Okay. Is it safe to say, can I just ask one more question? Is it safe to say that new bus stops will have shelters moving forward and will be ADA compliant moving forward? I would say new bus stops that are built will be ADA compliant. They may or may not have shelters, and that, again, is going to be a function of working with transit services because I know transit services often says that when you put in a new bus stop, You're making, in some respects, an educated guess that you're going to have the ridership there for it.

[05:11:01] But in some cases, some of those bus stops don't end up having the ridership that's projected. And so you tend to want to give them a few years to determine if it's sort of a keeper before you make a large investment in it. Okay. Thank you.

[05:11:16] Okay. Chair Randall. So in my first term, Mr. Letourneau and Mr. Saines and Mr. Myers, you all may remember this. I had a whole total meltdown up here because all the bus stops didn't have curb cuts in my first term.

[05:11:38] Are you telling me that right now we have bus stops that are not ADA compliant and don't have curb cuts right now? Correct. We set money aside for that in my first term.

[05:11:56] We set money aside to have all the bus stops become ADA compliant and definitely have curb cuts in my first term. I don't even, I'm going to stop talking right now, because in my first term, we had this discussion about all the bus stops having curb cuts right away.

[05:12:23] We set money aside for that. Then, that was years ago, how do our bus stops not have curb cuts? People in wheelchairs can't get up on the curb without curb cuts. What do they do? Are they literally just in the streets? What are we saying right now?

[05:12:42] If I may, Chair Randall, right now, if somebody is in need of an accessible way to access the transit system, they use paratransit. All the bus stops need to have curb cuts.

[05:13:00] This is not even a discussion we should be having right now. And that is correct. It is a federal law that we need to comply with, and that is what this plan is about. But we started talking about this years ago. Yeah, I don't know about that, but I hear what you're saying. Somebody go back and look at it. I don't know, we don't call ourselves a compassionate county if we can't help people in wheelchairs get around, whether they want to use paratransfer at that moment or not.

[05:13:21] It's not really the point. Understood. And I can assure you that Loudoun County does now have a plan and is implementing the plan to get those curb cuts in place. And what Mark has just presented is... No, that's not good enough.

[05:13:37] We start talking about this years ago. Years ago. and i need somebody to go back and check years ago i had this discussion yeah we will go back and get that history for you okay i think that's why don't we move on to the next one uh for for tonight on this um but we'll have some follow-up discussion on it says in the item that

[05:14:08] we appropriated 1.5 million in fy 18 so i assume that was the first yeah um i i do know like in all seriousness this is a challenge it's even a challenge in the washington metro system and the paratransit service ends up serving the function because even with curb cuts it's difficult for some of these folks to get to these spots so i would be very concerned if we weren't meeting the needs through paratransit of some of these folks and and i think we've done better on that but we we had issues there too at one point so but as you said it's it's a federal law so

[05:14:47] needs to happen okay all right i'm going to move on to intersection improvements um so the idea of intersection improvement program was presented to the board in 2017.

[05:15:05] yeah i think we're we could skip these first ones a couple ones i think we probably we all kind of pick up all right yeah so um what i wanted to mention is that uh going through the implementation of the intersection improvement program.

[05:15:24] Any intersection improvement needs to go through the VDOT process and get VDOT concurrence on the improvements. When we go through and made the prioritizations, the rank one, two, three, four, and five, five being the highest priority, one being the lowest, those priority five intersection improvements were based on need, but at the same time that they're prioritized, the actual improvement is not defined.

[05:15:49] So there is a process of planning through what type of improvement needs to be done at the intersection that we go through, and that requires VDOT concurrence. Since the time we've implemented the program, VDOT has significantly changed their standards on how we go through that.

[05:16:07] And what I wanted to mention is that back when we initiated this program, the idea would there be five traffic signals per year and one roundabout per year. Now we have to go through a justification process for any type of traffic signal, and so there's a study period that goes through that, and what we are finding is that in a lot of cases, intersection improvements that need to be done do not obtain VDOT approval for a traffic signal, but some sort of non-traffic signal or non-signalized improvement.

[05:16:47] So this is as a result of action by the Commonwealth Transportation Board. They were very concerned about the proliferation of traffic signals, and so they initiated these alternatives. And so that requires us to now go through looking at alternatives to traffic signals as well as going through signal justification reports.

[05:17:09] And that process takes at least a year and needs to be performed prior to starting the design of the project. So we now have built that into our timeline and our process, and I just want to give the committee sort of an example of what a non-signalized alternative looks like.

[05:17:30] And Supervisor Leopoldo is very familiar with this one. This is the Tall Cedars and Nations was recently constructed. This is a scenario where essentially you're taking out the left turn movements from the side streets onto the major roadway to eliminate those crash potentials.

[05:17:48] And it just means it's all right in, right out, but you can go left in from the main road. So in a lot of cases, those are the type of improvements that we're looking at. Regarding roundabouts, same sort of scenario. Viran has sort of raised the bar with how roundabouts are reviewed and looked at.

[05:18:10] In addition to the ultimate configuration, that's 20 to 25 years in the future, they also want to know what the traffic conditions are at opening day because they want the roundabouts designed for opening day but be expandable to whatever is going to be needed in the future.

[05:18:29] And so that's based on a lot of safety concerns about, you know, this is the Gilbert's Corner roundabout scenario where you make it too big, people go too fast, and you have a lot of side swipes, And so they would prefer to open them as smaller and then expand as traffic desires.

[05:18:49] So that has added the amount of modeling that has to be done to be much more than when the program was initiated. So that, depending on the complexity, is that one to two-year planning phase. So up till now, we have 51 intersections that are in the CIP.

[05:19:10] Of those, 10 are already completed. They've been constructed and are open. As you can see, some have been, are going to be addressed by developers of VDOT, Fiverr and Land Acquisition. We have 19 that are in design, and then we have like 13 that are in the planning phase, that queue, to be ready for FY26 and 27.

[05:19:33] Obviously, you can see the wave is kind of at the design phase, and that is because we had to go through the planning phase. And now that we're in the design phase, we have a number of these projects that are going to be going into land acquisition and construction in the next two years.

[05:19:51] So we're making some good progress on those. There is just sort of listing here for your reference of the intersections that have been completed to build upon that idea of alternate types of intersection improvements of the 29 projects that have been constructed or are currently in development.

[05:20:12] Seven are for new traffic signals, 20 are for non-signalized improvements, and two are for roundabouts. So, given the amount of time that we've had funding appropriated for this program, we are averaging around six intersections per year, about half a roundabout per year, which is roughly what we had initially envisioned for this program.

[05:20:41] Now that we know the VDOT process on implementing these improvements, we build in that one to two years of planning prior to the projects coming into the CIP, and we do have an adequate queue of projects, for example, to bring in an FY26 and 27.

[05:21:02] The next prioritization that's going to come to the board will be next year, and that will establish the priorities for the you know the FY28s and beyond so we're building up the queue and we're getting it set up that we can then move this moving forward and just sort of the information on the type of costs that we're seeing is is for five intersection improvements in one roundabout per year we're seeing that as being about 18 million dollars per year so have we

[05:21:39] actually been accomplishing five intersection improvements in one round about? We've gotten, like I said, we've had 10 constructed, and I would say a lot of those are sort of the low-hanging fruit. We were able to knock those out, and some of the more difficult ones, we did have to go through that planning phase, so those are now all in design, and we're going to be seeing those kick out in the next year and two to go into construction, and some of those go into land acquisition. So the regulation came into effect in 2017 right around the time we were

[05:22:18] starting this. Correct. This is a CTB regulation? Yes. A roundabout analysis? Well, an alternative intersection alternative analysis? Yes. So this is holding us, this has been a problematic thing on multiple levels. It's problematic in the land development process too because we're finding a lot of applications out of compliance with our plan because we're asking applicants to potentially budget for a roundabout when in fact the signal is what's going to be needed and we end up shortcutting that by using our judgment sometimes because it's obvious a roundabout isn't going to be needed. So it sounds to me that we can, you know, bellyache a little bit about that process

[05:22:56] but we should probably try some high level engagements with the CTB. We had almost an entirely new CTB. I just was in front of the CTB in Norfolk at their last meeting. You know, The current governor has just appointed a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of other people rolled off.

[05:23:14] So it's probably worth some level of engagement about the lack of efficiency associated with this process. I understand the concerns about adding too many signals. But the reality is some of these intersections, you know, my middle school kids could tell you we're not going to have a roundabout.

[05:23:29] Like, it's totally nonsensical. So for us to have to go through a process and spend time and do a year's worth analysis is just wasting time and money. And, you know, I think we should try making that case. And we can't be the only jurisdiction that's feeling that way.

[05:23:44] I'm not saying, you know, what I'm asking for is like some sort of waiver when it's an obvious, you know, type of situation that doesn't require a full analysis. So not only that, by doing that, a lot of these cases are safety issues. And so we get cars out there crashing while we're twiddling our thumbs, figuring out if, you know, determining that a roundabout is not going to work.

[05:24:05] Not to mention, if we actually did the roundabout, it would take us five years and, you know, tens of millions of dollars that the state's not going to give us anyway. So, frustrating situation. I think, you know, I think we should try to engage at an administrative level on this topic.

[05:24:21] And perhaps, I don't know, I don't know that it's per se a legislative issue. I'm looking at, you know, Mr. Sainz, legislative. But I think it is something to take up with both FDOT and CTB leadership. You guys up for that?

[05:24:38] Okay. I'm sure Vincent is looking forward to that. Yes, sir. We heard the board and we will make sure we follow up on those issues. Okay. Sure. Supervisor Brisbane. Thank you. I guess my issue with the alternative intersections and as the one that you just showed and the roundabouts is it totally cuts out the ability to have pedestrian connectivity or pedestrians crossing the streets. I mean, one of the main reasons why my community wants that signal at Esther Brook and Cascades is because kids need to cross, kids want to walk to school

[05:25:16] and cross the street there. So maybe that's not VDOT's priority to make sure that we're connecting pedestrian access, but it is our policy that we want to connect it loud and we want people to be able to walk and bike to places. So how do you reconcile that? So when the intersection improvement program was initially or it was initially put into place the focus was on unsignalized intersections but since that time we brought in signalized intersections also

[05:25:53] so so was not shown in these tables is that a lot of these improvements are going to be happening at signalized intersections and and in most cases the improvements are pedestrian improvements okay so so that is happening and you know in some respects some of these programs kind of overlap a little bit because we are doing intersection improvements that are essentially pedestrian improvements right and you know you would think that i mean in some respects that's kind of in line with the sidewalk and trail program but because it's at an intersection

[05:26:31] it's under the intersection improvement program for for example they're they're at um you know one of the plans that is going to be coming up in the coming years is like at the intersection of Route 7 and Countryside, where the plan is to upgrade all of those crossings, put in appropriate ADA ramps and signaling so that there are safe crossings there. And a number of the improvements are those type of improvements. Yeah. But it sounds like VDOT's trying to push us toward unsignalized in a way so yet where there is not a signal yes they're i see they're heavily

[05:27:11] now that being said is is i kind of showed in the table even though they're really pushing hard on that we still have seven out of 29 that are signals that even they realize there are certain okay especially in like in the east part of the county where you just don't have room or land to do these alternatives um even they understand that you have to do a signal there i mean that's really your only alternative okay okay um and then the the esterbrook cascades intersection improvement

[05:27:45] and signal the warrant study indicated a signal is that going to be in the 2025 list or is that something separate from the intersection improvement program because so i know that we are working through the signal justification report on that generally we do not bring a project into the intersection improvement program until that signal justification report is approved just so that we know what we're building and so once once that process is concluded then it will be programmed

[05:28:21] into the intersection improvement program okay thank you all right any other questions or comments on this one let's move on to the next one which is sidewalk and trails this one was pretty demoralizing we're building 1.4 miles of sidewalk and trails per year at a cost of 8.5 million dollars per mile uh yes not blaming you guys for that but so i'm for for sake of time i'm i'm gonna just go through some of the things that we have encountered as we've gone through the development

[05:28:59] And then at the end, we will talk about some ideas that we have to help improve this. And that is, I'm going to give a few examples of, like, the idea is to build the sidewalk for the pedestrians. We get that.

[05:29:16] But as with any improvement in the VDOT right-of-way, once you kind of touch those improvements, you have to upgrade them to current standards. So a lot of the issues that we've been dealing with are actually auxiliary to the sidewalk itself, but we have to address them.

[05:29:40] So, for example, we have to deal where we cannot build something to VDOT standard. We have to work through waivers with them. We have dealt with having to do floodplain studies and alterations, crosswalk warrants, signal modifications. Instead of listing these, let me give you some examples just to get an understanding of the kind of issues that we've come across.

[05:30:04] And then at the end, we'll talk about some ways we can deal with those. So here's a sidewalk improvement on West Church Street in Sterling. There's a definite need for this, no doubt about it. You can see the goat path where everybody's walking. And so as we started this project, the first thing we came upon is that there is a culvert crossing right here, and in order to get the sidewalk in, there's not enough room between the end of the road and the culvert, so we have to expand the culvert in order to put in the sidewalk, which then means we have to do a sub-floodplain study.

[05:30:45] It's right next to a cemetery, so we have to do the cultural resource investigations, make sure we're not impacting the cemetery. There is an existing curb ramp right here that does not meet PROAG requirements, so we have to upgrade this curb ramp, which means we also have to do a receiving curb ramp on the other side, again, to meet the design requirements.

[05:31:10] So we know the need, but at the same time, as we go through the process, we have to address all the issues we encounter, and this is, it's been eye-opening. and uh the other issue is as as we know is utilities um when we do sidewalks we figure you know we're not we're going eight inches into the ground what do we have to worry about utilities well the issue that is we're worried about is not hitting the lines but um in this

[05:31:42] case we we have these two handhold boxes and so if we're going to do a sidewalk or a trail in this way, we've got to get them out of the way because they are not, they do not comply with the pro-ag, which is the ADA requirements in the right-of-way.

[05:32:01] So they need to be moved out of the way. And, you know, at some of these intersections, you have half a dozen, eight, nine, ten of these handhold boxes right at the intersection. And so they get to be quite a problem. One other example that actually was a success story is, this is Potomac View Road adjacent into the Nova Community College and so we're putting in a shared use path parallel to the road.

[05:32:31] In order for this trail to meet VDOT maintenance requirements, we would have to cut down all these trees. We would have to move all these utility poles out of the way at a very high expense. Well, we started talking to Nova Community College and they agreed that that made no sense at all And so we're going to put the trail on the backside of the trees on their property, and they're in agreement with that.

[05:33:00] And since it's state land, we don't have to pay for it. We work on a license agreement with the state, and it's a win-win. And so there are cases where we can actually save money if we do not have VDOT maintain the facilities because we're saving money on major utility costs for relocating utilities.

[05:33:25] And so we, at least up until now, have been dealing with that on a one-on-one basis, working with general services that would have to maintain the facilities. In this particular case, NVCC is willing to take on some of the maintenance, which is a definite plus.

[05:33:44] But the county will have the long-term maintenance responsibility. But comparing those maintenance costs to the upfront cost of moving all the utilities, it's much more cost effective for the county to maintain it. So, you know, those are some of the things that we've been discovering.

[05:34:03] So current status, 15 of the projects are in design phase. We are starting another five this year. And given the fund balance item that just passed, there's another six that are going to be moved up into FY25 to start.

[05:34:23] So that's 11 going to be going in FY25. And then we have the remaining seven of the 33 that are going to be coming up in future years. But, yeah, as you noted, at the pace that we're going at, given the funding, it's averaging out to be about a little bit less than two miles per year.

[05:34:45] And the average project is about 1,900 feet. And so I'm going to just skip to some of our ways of dealing with what we're seeing. I think one of the issues that has come up is that we feel that the current size of the projects is probably too small.

[05:35:08] um there there's every project has a level of administration a level of project management and if we're only doing 2 000 feet at a time and each project you have to have a cut your own po you get to process invoices on it we're getting eaten up by administrative costs so one of the things that we want to study and it's going to take us a little time to go through and review how we would best do this is building larger projects to have a little bit more economy of scale

[05:35:44] on the size of the project. So that could be, like I said, larger portfolio of projects that might be packaging a large number of projects to hand to a consultant, either design bid build or design build. We're looking at the issue that I just mentioned about does it make sense for the county to potentially maintain a lot more of these trails and eliminate some of the upfront costs we've seen it work on case by case we have to see if that's

[05:36:20] makes sense on a broader scale if that's still more of a case by case basis and you know we're also looking at the potential is there any efficiencies in the county self-performing some of this work. You know, right now we're not set up for doing that, but we're going to take at least a look to see if that makes any sense. So I just want to end up by just giving an example of what we mean by packaging projects. So these are five different sidewalk and trail projects that are all

[05:36:58] adjacent to each other, and you can see that I put the priority numbers on there. So priority four project is was that west church street sidewalk priority 10 projects us up here on potomac view road and then we have priorities 19 23 and 33 on cascades parkway um right now those are five different projects now as we've gotten into this program we've identified the fact that we we have projects next to each other so we are working to use the same consultants on adjacent projects so So they have all that background.

[05:37:38] We don't have to go through that process again with them. They have survey data for the bulk of them. So we're not duplicating survey. But, you know, there is still that administration aspect. And if we were to look at trying to bundle projects together, this would just be kind of an example of the type of projects you would have and how they have different priorities.

[05:38:05] And so if we were to bundle projects like that, the one thing that would have to happen is we would be looking at not necessarily doing them in numeric order, but trying to bundle them in sort of some sort of priority order, and that's what we want to take a look at to figure out how we might be able to do that and implement this program a little bit more efficient, and that's what I have.

[05:38:35] Mr. Sainz has a question. All right, thank you, and thank you for the update, Mark. So, to your point about looking at, that's a good example of maybe bundling some nearby projects that are together, but I'll use, we have Route 7, that's a long stretch of area that we've identified for sidewalk and trails.

[05:38:59] You brought up Nova, that stretch from Route 7, Potomac River Road, and Nova going down, Potomac River Road heading into the Algonquian District to Cascades. That's a long stretch. So there's been some long stretches that we identified already originally, but we still haven't seen any movement.

[05:39:19] So did we just come to the realization of looking at longer stretches recently or, you know, because we've had some long stretches in the pipeline and never moved anything. And then to your point about maybe the county not doing something you're looking at, maybe just giving these to contractors or just go out and just get them done, because we know when we're better or worse, sometimes private entities do a better job, or I shouldn't say better job, but move a lot faster than we do and just contract, hey, here's a stretch of area, go get it done. And we've looked at that. So I think as we've gone through looking at

[05:39:58] over the last year of CIP development, it's, you know, a lot of these concepts have come to mind that, you know, we're just paying a lot of money for not a lot of sidewalk and trails. So there's got to be a better way. And so those are the ideas that we come up with, and we just need to have a little bit of additional study to figure out how to best implement that and provide some recommendations to the board. So the idea would be is we want to go in and look at some options

[05:40:32] and give some concrete guidance on how we can implement some of these ideas in a subsequent um item that we bring to the finance committee so let me ask how much more time are you looking for to to again go back and do some more analysis to figure out you know combine combining some other locations are we talking uh three months six months another year two years i'm thinking like six months that's so that probably is going to turn into another year with to be with all

[05:41:06] respect so are we so do we have any of these are we going to pretty much going to pause everything that might be coming online for for dirt being moved no we're not pausing anything okay because i mean the ones that are in the pipeline that are moving forward are going to continue uh we we have been fortunate in that we've had several of these projects have been awarded smart scale funding so and this is very recently um we've just signed the project agreements this month and so now we have that funding in place and moving forward on them and so obviously given that funding we

[05:41:45] need to continue moving forward on. All right. Hopefully we can get some more results sooner than later, but thank you. Chair Letourneau. Mr. Hepstreet. I can just add a little bit to what Mr. Hoffman is saying. The part of the challenge is that the way that we've kind of interpreted the board's direction on the prioritization of the sidewalk segments very literally, and so what that results with is we have relatively small segments that we're trying to prosecute the work on in many different places across the county because we're trying to honor the strict

[05:42:24] priorization of each of the sidewalk segments in order to do some of what has just been articulated and construct longer sidewalk segments that will require us to then take segments out of order and so we need to work through so the reason why it's going to take us several months to do that is we need to work through what that might look like with several options and then come back to finance and the board to get to get approval quite frankly be able to explain it and then get approval because we are changing the priorization that currently

[05:43:00] exists that the board has adopted and so that's a very different process which will take us a little bit of time to work through there's also different delivery methods that also could come into play so a big piece of what mr hoffman has articulated is right now our direction is to put all of these sidewalks and walkways in the VDOT right-of-way, which then creates a lot of the situations that have been illustrated. So that creates the requirement to relocate utilities, which takes time and there's some expense to that. Changes the requirement on how we construct the

[05:43:39] sidewalk or the walkway because we have to meet ADA requirements with respect to underground utilities and uh hand handholds and or handholds and things like that that are in there if the board is willing for example to take on maintenance responsibilities we could locate the walkways in a slightly different way meet our ada requirements but not necessarily incur the expenses during the capital processes which is cost and time in locating the walkway and and still meet the same requirements but it would mean that the sidewalk of the walkway would be in a little

[05:44:15] bit different place so those are the things that we need to work through and come back to the finance committee and then the board on but that is going to take us time to come through to go back and come back and have that discussion with you so i just wanted to kind of highlight that it's in the item but just to give you a little more perspective on it's it's not a simple fix it's fairly complex in terms of what we have to come back to you with thank you all right thank you um so when we're talking about sidewalks and trails are we also talking about shared use

[05:44:54] paths yes okay um i agree with loosening the interpretation or loosening the policy around putting everything in the vdot right of way i'm sure that will probably come back in your recommendation um when you after you study it i'm sure that will come back um it is a little frustrating because Potomac View Road is an example of where I have said you're doing the southern part of Potomac View Road we have mid and northern parts of Potomac View Road that are desperately needed by Sugar Land and all that and the answer I've always gotten is yeah staff is

[05:45:32] looking at combining projects so I guess I didn't realize that staff was interpreting direction on the um priority that strictly because the answer had been to me yes we will look to combine projects where we can um but i guess the answer is we kind of need it to be more officially in a in a project plan that we're saying yes please do this um and if you can still do it on potomac view that would

[05:46:05] be great because you're there right now and we have you know like probably half a mile to a mile down potomac view where we could actually connect the whole freaking road um so i i i'm glad that you're that you're looking at it in this perspective i think that as far as prioritization i like the idea of this this layout because you're like okay this this sidewalk down here by church is a number four and we know that we want to take some of the highest priorities and then maybe

[05:46:40] branch off the highest priorities so you know maybe you take the top 15 and then you set up 15 projects or something like that just based on one of them being one of the highest i think that makes sense yeah i mean this isn't an actually an easy example because they're all really high priorities yeah they are yeah 33 is not that far down i mean yeah given that there's given how many we have to do. 2,274. Um, yeah, but yeah, I mean, we will, we'll have to look at like, what if there's one that's 25 and the others are 200 and 400. I mean, we just got to see how the

[05:47:18] numbers work out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, I think, I think those, uh, yeah. And I actually am interested in, in, um, the reason I asked about shared use paths is because I'm a little bit concerned when you start talking about taking them in the right of way and then out of the right of way and that sort of thing because to me the shared use path should be something that cyclists can use and when you start doing this then it's not conducive to a cyclist so when we're looking at shared use paths I think that our policy should be that we

[05:47:55] try to make them basically as straight as possible on the shit like the sidewalks it doesn't it it has to be conducive to cycling and the maintenance part I am really concerned about because I was just on Russell Branch to Pacific down toward Wegmans on my bike and that section on the on the west side it's not it's not maintained I couldn't ride my bike on it really and I have a hybrid and there was grass growing up and cracks and bumps and all this going from, I guess, it's NOACs down to those data centers down there to the WNOD.

[05:48:35] So that's, I started thinking about who's maintaining these and how are we holding VDOT accountable to maintain these shared use paths? How are we holding VDOT accountable? Is it just like a complaint-based system? Do they have a cycle whereby they look at all the shared use paths they're supposed to be maintaining to see if they should be repaired or replaced?

[05:48:57] We will talk with VDOT on what their plan is. okay okay all right thank you that that's all i have thank you all right yeah so i think we'd be we're going to be open to whatever changes you all propose just a general suggestion um sometimes these things i mean we've been very protective of that ranking because we didn't want this to turn into like everybody's food fight and pet project that said it goes down smoother if there's something for everybody in what you bring forward just saying so perhaps as you're looking at ways

[05:49:33] to group these things you know grouping grouping having several and around the county might go a little easier so that you know every group of constituents would have some benefit from from this if we're going to start deviating from from the plan which i understand it makes sense why we may need to do that so um but i think we're we're up for we're up for it so all right thank

[05:50:03] you all we have two more items on the agenda both budget developments um they were so we have our department of family services here for the domestic and sexual violence services and then we have mental health substance abuse um on the crisis receiving a stabilization center good evening we have a brief presentation that will just provide an overview of what the department of

[05:50:39] family services is proposing with regard to this service unit and i will turn it over to miss fernandez good evening everyone um sorry it's past my bedtime it is and let me say hold on let me just say to you and everybody i'm very sorry it's been a long meeting difficult meeting we're sorry we're keeping you here so late go ahead thank you for the time i know fernandez director of the department of family services as part of the fy 2026 budget the family department family

[05:51:15] services intends to request resources needed to improve outcomes related to the health and safety in instances of domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual violence, human trafficking, and stalking by providing essential governance and organizational structures as we as well as technological supports through enhanced coordinated community response or CCR. This request seeks to initiate long-term strategic planning goals, facilitate collaboration across not only county departments but community partners and provide appropriate and comprehensive responses across the community so in 2020 in 2004

[05:51:54] loudon county was awarded federal grants from the u.s department of justice's office on violence against women for several domestic uh relate domestic violence related positions to include a part-time domestic abuse response team or dart coordinator uh lounge created a full-time dark coordinator position in the community corrections in 2008 to enhance the coordination of services to survivors in 2016 the county transferred that management of to of the dark coordinator position to laws be an agreement between the county and the non-profit and just to give you a little bit

[05:52:30] the dart coordinator position the responsibilities were to organize schedule facilitate dart meetings and specialized training and to report on grant activities to the to the loudon county steering committee domestic violence steering committee the steering committee's activities though have waned since 2020 due to multiple factors factors that include the covet 19 pandemic multiple staffing issues across county departments and the realization that the from leadership in the health and human services organizations that a broader and more contemporary approach was

[05:53:08] needed to be considered so slide this slide three our plan is to build a more effective response response system yielding healthier and safer communities through prevention and intervention programming critical agreements that honor respective confidentiality and policy requirements across programs and services and make decisions based and informed on data and best practices very important the proposed model will include a sustainable governance structure and replace the current dart model and enhance service delivery individuals and families are experiencing more

[05:53:46] complex trauma and the community's response must become much more multifaceted and based on best practices in addition formal agreements between stakeholders and are essential for a complete and sound infrastructure of care a governing body to set a north star so to speak and provide authority and guidance for the entire system is essential for a coordinated response a robust service delivery system and commitment from essential partners and as stated earlier ensuring the community has access and timely data to enhance decision making and safety planning is essential

[05:54:27] since 2020 lounge response to domestic violence has faced significant challenges for several reasons for example we do not have the coordinating community council which is the governing nexus essential for implementing the national standard ccr also there's a need for comprehensive review and response form for all domestic violence as currently most of these service collaboration focuses on the highest risk domestic violence situations only a review of the current service delivery system reveals fragmentation and lack of governance additionally the county is not equipped Loudoun County is not equipped to determine the prevalence of domestic and sexual violence

[05:55:06] across agencies that do not reach the level of law enforcement intervention. Therefore, it's difficult to determine the prevalence of domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking, and stalking at a systems level, given that there's no formal structure with necessary agreements in place to share, review, and analyze data collected across key stakeholders.

[05:55:27] Stakeholders currently involved in collaborative efforts are mostly county departments with few community partners the absence of key stakeholders is critical or from critical decisions and the lack of a formal agreement or bylaws have led to inadequate and winning member participation less collaboration and dissatisfaction with the community and among staff due to the absence of a governing body's shared vision philosophy and strategic strategy the ccr model is a proven strategy to address domestic and sexual violence that involves organizing leaders key stakeholders

[05:56:02] community partners and those with lived experiences to build a more effective service delivery system yielding healthier and a healthier and safer community while ccrs have been applied for a variety of systems and institutions the models overwhelmingly applied to domestic and sexual violence excuse me and it's to analyze where and how community responses meet survivors actual day-to-day needs, and conversely, where and how those responses are disconnected from their experiences. This CCR model will include sustainable governance structure and replace the

[05:56:39] current DART model. The essential elements that we will be focusing on are cross-training for CCR partners to better understand each individual's critical role and to develop competencies and improve our response, collaboration, and coordination. Community engagement through education and prevention programming to share messages about healthy relationships and against violence to a wider audience, specifically those in the schools and young adults.

[05:57:08] Ongoing communication and coordination across multiple disciplines for rapid response, as well as data sharing across agencies to make sure that we better coordinate. Strategic planning and policymaking focused on analyzing community data and identifying gaps and priorities, developing coordinated policies and interventions and implementing system-wide improvements, and the development of its infrastructure and employment of approaches and models to improve outcomes for preventing and reducing the recurrence of violence. This comprehensive, data-driven, adequately

[05:57:43] staffed, and inclusive CCR will work towards improving supports for persons harmed, prevent the recurrence of harm, promote long-term healing, ensure accountability, and lead to a safer communities dfs proposes implementing the domestic and sexual violence unit over two or three fiscal years to facilitate the creation of a governing body implement prevention strategies improve community outcomes and ensure comprehensive community response based on proven strategies and best practice and to allow for safer families and allow a safer louden county in fy 2026 dfs

[05:58:21] intends to establish the louden county domestic violence and domestic and sexual violence unit with 28 FTEs, which will consist of 12 existing positions in our Family Engagement and Preservation Services Program, and 16 new positions, including program administrator, supervisors, family specialists, counselors, and support positions.

[05:58:42] We will also work to secure a cloud-based data system to understand the true prevalence of domestic and sexual violence, stalking, and human trafficking in our community, allowing us to make informed community decisions moving forward. And in FY 2027, DFS anticipates requesting nine new positions to bolster this unit and to focus on services for those that harm.

[05:59:06] The total estimated cost will be approximately $2.4 million, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have at the moment. So the $2.4 million is the total amount with both fiscal years, or is that just the next fiscal year?

[05:59:21] It's just $26. Just $26. okay so then then nine additional staff and 27. it is not that for 27. sorry that that point that 2.4 is not including 27. that's just for okay um questions i'll go to chair rendel first uh thank you mr chairman um miss fernandez that was that was tough to hear it was brutally honest um i think it was very true and i think we've known this for a long time we've we've we've all kind of talked about around and about this for a long time but I will say for

[05:59:58] there there's a level of bravery it takes for for your position to come in and do that and explain what's not going well and what the plan is to to improve it so a lot of compliments on on although that was a very hard report to hear so many compliments on on your honesty and your plan so thank you a a couple of questions. Not in the presentation, but in the item on page, I think it was page three, there's a list of organizations you're going to pull together and work with. LCPS

[06:00:34] is not on that list. That might be, and you might have overlooked that because -- LCPS. And truthfully, you know, we say LCPS because it's the public system that we have access too, but what we know is that school systems, private, public, parochial, all have a pretty good bead on what's going on sometime and it's really pretty helpful too.

[06:00:59] So not only do we want to -- it's harder to engage private and parochial schools for these issues, but I would encourage us to try to do that as well. I mean, you know, domestic violence, sexual violence, those things do not -- you know, They do not discriminate, and you see these levels everywhere.

[06:01:20] So to talk to all of our school systems, that's the first thing. The second thing is I love that you said to understand the prevalence, because understanding the prevalence could also lead to figuring out what things we could perhaps put in place for prevention, what supports are needed to a family for prevention, because we know that And we know why it went up during COVID.

[06:01:48] We know what happened. And we know why the incidents of domestic violence, I don't know about sexual assault or trafficking, but domestic violence went up during COVID. And some of those things are mitigatable. And so to know the prevalence leads to the prevention.

[06:02:04] So I appreciated that very much. Finally, I will say that when you talk to different organizations that do domestic violence the one thing i think we have missed in loudon county um and with all respect to to our main organization that kind of sees to the to the domestic violence sexual violence you know i you know i i i do think that there's such good intention and they're doing the best they can but the one thing that's missing is a long-term two-year plan and we learn that when talking to

[06:02:39] other organizations that do it you can't you can't get a person out of the situation for six months It takes a longer-term plan, and what we know right now is that that plan is about a two-year look, to be quite honest. It may involve a lot of things, including helping to relocate or something.

[06:02:59] It could involve a lot of things. And so I didn't hear the long-term part of that, but I know that you know that a long-term plan is also needed. And so this has been a long time coming. We've all kind of talked about this for a while.

[06:03:15] i i i know that um mr hemstreet you've been this we've been discussing this and you've been talking about this so um this is going to be hard and it's hard work and it's work that and you know this your staff needs to have their own you know supports just to get through this work but i appreciate that that it's that it's time for us to take this on and i very much appreciate your um your presentation so thank you may i respond just to one thing to clarify rather on that page three i think it makes the i put that there to hone in on the point these are the players at the table now

[06:03:51] so you're seeing a huge gap okay on that's why i don't see lcps there because they're not at the table now and many of our community nonprofits yeah well let's get yeah then that's then that is a huge gap you're right but also as i said to try to talk to the private parochial um yeah absolutely we we i have a whole list already all that all that so thank you very much thank you thank you mr chairman um surprise thank you my one of my questions was about some some of the parties that i didn't see on the list including lcps so i'm glad that chair randall um asked that

[06:04:27] question and and i would also like to say thank you um i you know that this has been a grave concern of of many in the community um and i'm i'm really excited to see this uh come to fruition and um i guess one question is a coordinating community council um is that kind of like another advisory board that would be advising us or would they be advice and then what happens to the family services advisory board would it kind of go together with that how replace it no okay the

[06:05:06] family service advisory board is um in code so that is oh that's right okay okay this really is to focus on a to ensure and ensure is a strong word right but if we get it right we can really start working towards this, is making sure that we as a community decide how we're going to go and respond and provide preventive services much earlier on as a community so

[06:05:39] that those sitting on the Courtney and Community Council are higher level people who have authority to make and suggest policy that all of us in the county are working towards it doesn't matter if your public safety education social services non-profit congregations that we all are deciding how we are going to respond and prevent this from happening in our community and making sure that we take responsibility for this and not the victims and so then it's also holding such

[06:06:16] those that harm accountable as well so it's it's looking at it from a very system systematic perspective and deciding how we as a community not how as we as dfs or not how any single organization or entity will respond to this in our community as we are coming together as a whole to decide for the community with those that have been harmed sitting at the table as well okay okay and so if i could repeat back to you how i see this playing out it would be like the

[06:06:54] commonwealth attorney's office and the lcso and lcps all they would sit around and then sit around not sitting around they're talking they're discussing they're they're coming up with proposals that then they would take back to their individual entities that could help solve the problem as a team right so that that that group would set the policy would set the direction and everybody agrees on what that is whether it's a specific policy or how we will do things as a community and then yes

[06:07:32] okay everybody decides that this is how we're going to do it and our policies must reflect that okay okay um and uh the i mean i'm ready to put those positions in the budget now but when when when are we going to do that like i guess it's coming back to us in budget deliberations where we or is it going to come back in the budget book for the whole guidance is always sort of a preview of the big departmental areas that are going to come up for emphasis in the 20th so when When the departments come back, this will be in the department.

[06:08:10] Okay. It'll be in the proposed budget. It'll be in the proposed budget. Okay. As the supervisor internal said, this provides the finance committee the opportunity to see the proposal in more detail than you're going to get during the March budget sessions.

[06:08:26] Okay. Because each department might get 20 minutes, right? Right. So you have a lot more time to spend just on this or ask questions or make suggestions. You can refine it. I'm wondering, aside from the positions, how is the, this, this coordinating community council itself going to be funded and hosted and those sorts of things?

[06:08:51] Like, do we need some funding to have that council operate? Like, where, where is it getting its operating budget? The operate, it's really, so the, um, the position that will be the liaison to that council will sit with DFS as part of this domestic sexual violence services program and that's the person that's going to be doing the behind the scenes work right so in most you might need coffee really because that's pretty much all it is I need some right now but yeah so they themselves I mean

[06:09:26] from my experience don't need a specific budget now okay then organization goes back and perhaps will need budgeting themselves if that's it but that council is not saying you you must um hire two new positions come with attorney or dfs or non-profit a b c and d it really is more of what's the philosophy how are we moving forward are there overarching policies or guidance that we are going to give those of us in this field um to be able to move forward and how do we work

[06:10:02] together. And also, I mentioned briefly, so data sharing. Now, it's very complicated. Sharing data with regards to domestic and sexual violence is very complicated. There are very tight laws, really, in place, but it can be done especially on an aggregate.

[06:10:23] And then it will help us, again, to determine as we continue to move forward the real prevalence, And that determines programming, staffing within each agency and where the needs specifically are.

[06:10:41] Well, thank you. I'm very supportive and I appreciate your researching and coming up with this solution. Thank you. Thanks. So I don't want to get into a long discussion about it tonight because it's midnight.

[06:10:59] But when looking at the sort of the org chart here, it's easy to understand what a counselor does. There's three of those for year one. It's fairly easy to understand what victim services folks do, and there's four of those. It's harder to understand what three coordinators, three supervisors, and a program administrator do.

[06:11:19] It does seem a little top-heavy in terms of sort of a bureaucratic function. So you can certainly address it a little bit now. But as we get into that budget discussion, I would love to get just more detail on that specific structure and what those functions actually would do.

[06:11:36] So just really high level at this point. One of the reasons why things have not gone as they should is because there's nobody with authority making sure that it goes forward. These are some of those positions that will help with that.

[06:11:54] Excuse me Our program administrator. That's that person that is going to be that liaison with the coordinating council Somebody who is very well versed in this area who is able to work with high-level officials Department directors boards of supervisors, etc. And be able to Manage and move us along as a community Early on, so most of these are, so when I, the data and reporting coordinator, so that's one of the coordinators.

[06:12:30] We need the data, and we need somebody to be the keeper of the data and making sure that the data is coming in from all the different entities. That's not happening now because there's nobody to facilitate and manage and own that. Yeah, you don't have to do all these off the top of your head tonight, but you can definitely maybe just send a follow-up through the budget office or whatever just it's a preview of a coming question so you know and that's normal anytime someone's coming with kind of a new structure I think we want to understand what each of these positions are and so on so but

[06:13:04] thank you very much a very comprehensive very good presentation and maybe some optimism here for how we're how we're moving forward so thank you thank you okay all right one last item which is our crisis stabilization center updates um this was a really good um i think well-prepared item that really started to sort of explain how this facility is going to function you know beyond just the the building of it which we've been very kind of focused on but now how we're going to run

[06:13:41] it so thank you for that as you as you're discussing this facility was added to the cip PA two years ago, the FY26 budget will have the ramp-up operating costs for the facility, and so we were back before the committee to explain a little bit more information about the operations of that facility and the fiscal impact.

[06:14:07] We have a presentation, but we do know that we've been before the board multiple times to discuss this facility, so we're also available to answer questions or we can go through the full presentation if you'd like. I hate to keep you here all night and not have you talk a lot, but I don't know that we need the full president. At least I don't know that I do. I don't know if others do, but I read it all. But certainly questions and anything you want to highlight in particular for our department leaders here. I was just going to, from a fiscal perspective, I think it's worth mentioning that this operations of this facility continue to be the board's

[06:14:44] legislative program um and we're um hopeful that we will be able to um offset some of the cost of operations once the facility is opened with uh state state funding we did just ask for that in our legislative dinner didn't we um which leads to my to my uh to my first question first of all thank you all for all of it and for all that we've been working on for a long time it's time to do this and I appreciate appreciate it very much if when we get I'm going to say when we get state funds is this still a bed of first availability for people who

[06:15:23] live in in the the planning district or the district 2 for for this area as if there's a bit of first availability for anyone in Virginia because it will have state funds attached so the facility will operate for anyone who gets presented and so I thought it's who's in the region who it has not just the region the region or the state though the Commonwealth so I'm gonna say the region but it's anybody who comes to the Loudon facility and you might be from

[06:15:59] within Virginia you could be visiting family members from Maryland it's a health care facility yeah so whoever it's so it's whoever gets in that bed first. And it's not, so I really, or not bed, but it's three functions, right? That chair. So you can access urgent psychiatric care, you can access 23 hour assessment, or you can go to a crisis stabilization bed, which is overnight care.

[06:16:37] That was my next question. You just asked my next, first of all, I thought that's what, what that was, and I, and it has to be that because it's, it's state funds. And so I, I assume that. So thanks for clearing that up. And I, and you just kind of walked into my next question. Of course, you all know that if you, if you're reading any diagnosing manual, the ICD-10, the DSM, whatever, that substance abuse, substance use is under that diagnosis, is a mental health diagnosis. Would this facility be appropriate for someone who does not need a medical detox since it's only 24 hours, or would that just be stabilization and then sending them?

[06:17:04] Would you do a non-medical substance-using detox at this facility? It's a good question, and as you know very well, substance use is a mental health disorder as well.

[06:17:22] There's no separation as far as we're concerned. The facility will have 10 beds where one can stay for up to 10 days, so if someone with a substance use disorder needs more than 24 hours, they can take advantage of the bed.

[06:17:39] Okay. So if someone has an alcohol use disorder and needs, let's just say. Well, maybe not alcohol, because alcohol is probably a medical detox, but I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying, and that's fantastic. And then finally, can you talk to me, if we know yet, can we talk to me about a payment system?

[06:17:58] Is this insurance? Is it a sliding scale? Is it all pro bono? What does the payment system look like for this? So as of right now, Medicaid has established rates for every time there's a person in a 23-hour assessment bed, and that bed, the recliner can turn over more than once in 23 hours.

[06:18:17] I don't know the exact rate, but I think it's somewhere in the range of $1,000 per person in the bed. For the crisis stabilization unit, it's a head in the bed at midnight. They pay you that rate, and I think for the crisis stabilization unit, it's about $800 per night. remember the exact rates. And then the urgent psychiatric care depends on the service that's delivered and what gets coded for what was delivered. We do not yet have Medicare rates for these services, and the commercials have to kind of catch up still. Okay. The commercials have to catch up still. Okay. That makes sense, too. That makes sense as well. Okay.

[06:18:52] We've been talking about this for such a long time. We've been talking about it here. We've been talking about it at Baco. We've been talking about it just everywhere. And these last two items it feels like it feels like it's it's it's just thank you because these are hard things to do with hard populations but we do hard things we do hard things allowed and and so i i really do appreciate this um very much and um that's all i have thank you mr chairman thank you other questions uh no i i think um i mean the plan obviously we're going to be contracting

[06:19:29] services 7.3 million um so we'll we'll be ready we're going to build up we're going to have to fund it so good morning and thank you exactly so it goes all right well with that and with no further business to come before the committee we will see everybody later today

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