County Board - Regular Meeting

Just got word that the board members are en route, but they are going to be taking some time to get some lunch so that they can then start the meeting at 1.45. Appreciate y'all's patience, for sure. Sure, no, that's no problem. If you have any questions, I'm here to assist. Those of you who are online who are joining the CPI work session today, I just want to let you know that the board members are going to be a little delayed in getting started. The start time is anticipated 1.45. Thank you for your patience. All right. Just an update. I do apologize again. We're looking at 150 or latest at 155 to get started.

Good afternoon. We are, staff knows, but perhaps others in the room may not, we are on our second work session on the capital improvement plan. We, the board, all attended services for Corporal Barry Faust who passed away. And we will take a brief moment of silence just to remember and to honor his 35 plus years of service to Arlington County Police Department. Thank you. Thank you. We will continue to work to pay respect to an extraordinary public servant. And we'll do so over time. This afternoon, the work session is going to be led by Vice Chair Maureen Coffey. Over to you.

Great, thank you. And I will not delay, and I will just hand it straight over to our staff.

Thank you Madam Vice Chair. We're going to start today with parks, and I did want to make one note before we go through the slides here. You don't have to look at them right now, but slides 11 through 13 are denoted as parks maintenance capital, but I did want to be very focused. We talked about this in our opening presentation. Almost the entire CIP for parks is actually maintenance. with one exception, which is the boathouse, which we will talk about. So we made a point of saying that we're not doing new facilities for the most part. Boathouse is the one exception, but everything else will be either replacing equipment in a park, refurbishing a park, redoing something, re-envisioning, The re is in front of everything. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Eric Beach, who will walk us through the material.

Great. Thank you. Good afternoon. As Mark mentioned, I'm Eric Beach for the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Park Development Division Chief. Before I get started, just want to thank a couple of people. Mr. Schwartz, Director Jane Rudolph, Tim McIntosh, Robert Capper, Brittany Canney, and John Marlin from DPR are here and may be called upon for assistance. So I'm just thanking them, introducing them now for their help with the CIP. When we begin to talk about the CIP and DPR, we look at establishing that with a set of guiding principles, sort of the pillars of how we lay out our 10-year request for investments. We look at continuation of existing projects. These are projects that either work has begun on or have been in previous CIPs and looking at commitments to our partners in the community like developers, community, and APS and others. We also, and probably key, as Mr. Schwartz mentioned, the CIP is based on keeping our inventory of assets in a state of good repair. And then we begin to look at adherence to our other board adopted documents, such as the public spaces master plan, forestry and natural resources plan, and other things that help us guide our plan. We also look at the equity of distribution of our projects and see how we are working to deal with need and location. And I will spend a few minutes later on the presentation. I'm just going to call it out now. There are a couple of major near term projects that are in Boathouse, Christian City Parks and Public Spaces, Drew Park and Gateway Park are some of the products we'll be talking about. I always start out, and I think we've shared this with the board previously, but understanding how our 10-year plan was built and the $286 million 10-year request is the breadth of what we're managing. We manage 147 parks, almost 1,000 acres. We have things like 82 playgrounds. 55 rectangular fields, 48 picnic shelters, many restrooms, and thousands of picnic benches, grills, other kind of trash recycling equipment that all has to be inventoried, assessed, and maintained. How do we do this? We use a variety of approaches, but we focus on four main ways to do that. We have an asset tool. This asset tool is about every five years, we go out into the parks and we assess every single piece of equipment in the park. It is assigned a value on zero to 100 that's associated with its physical condition and its remaining useful life. And then when you take a park, you take all those little things, and they add up to a score for an individual park. We'll talk more about this later, but that is generally seen on a score of 0 to 100. For our program synthetic fields, we look at a 10-year rotation on those for a replacement. It's mainly based on the warranty. We have about an eight-year warranty. So several years after the warranty and the use of play, we know we're getting into the ballpark. We also do a safety assessment every year. It's called the G-Max Impact. And I've talked about this, sometimes gets chuckles, but this is the heavy object that's dropped from a certain height to look at attenuation and the safety of the synthetic turf. And so that basically represents impact of a body hitting that turf. We have a pavement condition index for our trails. This is, we actually take a piece of equipment. It has lasers and cameras. We drive them over the trails. It measures everything from cracks and riffles and deterioration of that pavement. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. And bridges, we actually hire outside engineers to come in, assess all our pedestrian bridges and our low water forts to be able to manage that program. Just a little bit of a summary from the last couple years, and over the last five years we've invested 62, almost 63 million dollars into our maintenance capital program. We've renovated or replaced 38 parks in 10 years, invested almost a little over 18 million in our synthetic fields, about six million into our bridge and trail program, repaved about seven and a half miles of trails in the last five years, and replaced multiple bridges and low water fords or done in place repairs. Talk a little bit about our asset tool. We start this assessment with that condition score, the physical condition score I talked about. And that is all of our equipment and parks rolled up into a score. on a set from zero to 100. Several years ago, we began to look at introducing an equity factor. We look at every census tract in the county for its ethnic diversity, household density, number of children, and average income. Those are put into a formula, and each neighborhood is assigned a score from zero to 100. Those two scores are put together. 100 would be, excuse me, zero would be a neighborhood with the most need. Those scores are put together, and that combines to understand what our assessment tool is. I do want to make a note here. We have started this about three years ago, and the county has evolved. It has matured in the way it's looking at its lenses and currently is using the community vulnerability index map. Our factors and the factors used there are slightly different. For example, we use household density. Education is being used in that one. So we are looking at updating and matching those lenses to reflect what is being used in other county planning and efforts across the county. But at the end, the idea is that the neighborhood with the greatest need that have parks in the poorest condition are the priority for our investment. Once we have that investment, we are going out and doing master plan and design work with the community, and here's where we're looking to engage people that may not always typically show up, that may not be involved, and so we're looking at tools such as meeting them at different times or places that the users are at. This slide is very, very hard to read. Acknowledge that. I'm going to use it more for a concept, if you will. This is all 147 of our parks. These are the combined score. So there's two columns of white. The left-hand column is the physical condition of the park. The middle column is where its score is on the equity lens. And that combined number gives a score of 0 to 200, where 0 would be the priority for our work. I think the thing to note is that if we take the right-hand column and the bottom 25, 30 projects there, we have either addressed almost all of those or have begun work on those projects in some capacity. So really, where we are working right now is the top of the right-hand column and the bottom of the middle column. So that is our range. We are moving up in the ranking because we've been making progress on those communities and parks that have the most need. The slide before you here is pulling out the products that we have in our CIP. You can see it has the park condition score, the equity factor, and the combined score. I think the thing to note here is that you may see a park that has a greater condition, but it has an equity factor that is more in the priority number. And so the values, the 142 to 49, are in that range that we believe we're currently working in, because parks below that have been addressed, and the parks above that are not necessarily in need yet. Overall, looking at our CIP, we have the $286 million 10-year ask. That is divided into five programs. And again, I want to be just, this is a tool for the way we put our buckets together, but it's not reflective of one thing only being maintenance or re, as Mark mentioned earlier. We have our parks master plan category, parks maintenance capital, synthetic field program, land acquisition, and trail and bridge modernization program. The funding sources for that program, you can see on the right, and I think you noticed 69% of that is county bond funding. But I think the other thing that we work very hard for is that about $23 million or so of that is funding from outside sources. So these are things like developer contributions at almost $14 million. We have other funding that comes through our partnerships with Arlington Public Schools, Marymount, things like this, and we have a $1.8 million federal EEL mark that I'll talk a little bit more about. Briefly, over the last two years or since the last time we talked, we've done a couple things. We've built a new park at Arlington Junction Park. We renovated the Walter Reed Pickleball Courts. We've made progress on our field replacement, our running track at Greenbrier, and those seven and a half miles of trails that I mentioned earlier. Okay, this is, we're moving now to the first request of the 10-year CIP. This is in our parks maintenance capital category. The first one you see is in 2027 for $350,000 for parks capital life cycle assessment. This is that assessment that's done every five years where we bring in external help to go out and look at every single piece of equipment in our parks. That is rolled up into a database that we can use to manage this work. This is a very large effort, but this is something that we do every five years. We have equipment at DPR facilities. In 27 and 28, it is funded at just over $100,000. These are our treadmills, our bikes, our other things that are inside our community centers. Our DPR feasibility studies and implementation is $206,000 in FY28. The best way I can explain this is there are many occasions in the development of the county, for example, site plans, work that APS might do where something becomes approved and then there is an adjacent park. So we have connections or a new use or a new pressure. This is a line of money that allows us to address those fluidly so that way we can come out and do planning work or studies about what is being moved to the parks sort of responsibility from that work that is been adopted or has been put in place by others. Our pooled park projects, this is something that you may have recalled over the last several years we've started to develop. This year, this is a funding request for $750,000 for FY27. This is to update existing restrooms, and what I mean by that, these are restrooms that have good bones. They have good structure, they have a good roof, We need to get inside and replace sinks and toilets and tiles and things like this in order to be able to extend the life cycle of those restrooms. The ones I can say right now, we are planning to get to, and if we can extend it with the funds available, we will. Blumont Park, LeBaron Park, Barcroft Park, Hayes Park. And so there are more that we may be able to get to depending on how each of those renovations goes. Douglas Park phase two is our second phase of Douglas Park. We have already had and funded and began a process to renovate phase one, which is a natural sign. That is the shade structures and the trails and the natural components of that park. Phase two will replace the playground, stormwater management, ADA, and others. And this is a request for FY28 of 2.4 million. However, 1.85 of that is the federal earmark that I spoke about earlier. Coming up to our next park maintenance capital projects, the first is Glebe Road Park. It is for design money of $865,000 for FY28. This is to get in and replace the courts. For folks that may be familiar with that park, it is a steep park and it's multi-leveled. There are steps and concrete that are cracked and the ADA needs to be addressed, as well as we had a playground that was located in the floodplain that had to be removed, and so this is to get in and begin the work there. Gunston Park restroom, there's a request for a million dollars for FY28 to replace the restroom at Gunston Park. I'm gonna take an extra breath on this one. I've had a lot of conversations with commissions at this particular restroom. I think what we should talk about here is that this is a full replacement. This one is too small to have ADA turning radiuses inside. It was built as being a temporary, restroom when the Gunson bubble was first built, it is in very, very poor shape. One of the things that we are doing, we have begun to use prefabricated restrooms to reduce the cost of our restrooms. For example, Lacey Woods, the Bluemont Tennis Court Project is having one. These are prefabricated off site. There's no architecture fees associated with them. they're shipped and assembled here. That reduces our cost in order to do that way. If we were to build this from scratch, bring an architect and build it from scratch, this would probably be a $1.5 million restaurant replacement. The other thing I want to mention about unattended public facilities is that there are simply some different costs. When you get into unattended public facilities, I can give you an example. If you were doing a renovation at home or even in a building that has public staff in it, the sink that you might attach to the wall has two half-inch bolts that you can attach to that. Probably cost you $10 at Home Depot. in our parks, people tend to jump on, climb on, and even take a sledgehammer or two occasionally for our sinks. And so in the public restroom, we use a double thick iron or steel cross bracing. It's probably $1,000 worth of material. But if you don't, you are replacing the sinks continuously over the years and it becomes an operating burden. So just a little additional information on that. Okay, moving to our parks master plan category. This is where we really get into reorganizing and re-fixing, if you will, some of our larger parks in the system. Gateway Park is the first one. This is a $29.6 million request for FY27. County Board adopted a master plan for this in 2019. We also have some good news. We've just signed our LOI with the Arlington Boathouse Foundation for them to raise up to $2 million as part of the project. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm mixing up things. Thank you, Jane. So I'll come back to that. Save that good news in a moment. So Gateway, we adopted the master plan in 2019, 2024. Right. 2019 is the other one. 2024. So the other good news for Gateway Park, which was in my notes here, we will be bringing a design master plan contract, a design contract and a construction management risk contract anticipated for the June. board adoption, and so that project is progressing. Of this funding, about $18 million of that is generated from private development as well and site plan contributions. Drew Park is a continuation as a request for construction money, NFY 27 and NFY 28. We have completed two community engagements. We will have a third and plan to bring a plan to the board for adoption in the fall. This price that you see here will include a two bay restroom in addition to the elements that we have been discussing through our concepts with the community. Metro Market Square. is a project that is at the corner of Crystal Drive and 18th Street in Crystal City. This is where the East Metro access has currently been built. This is a private location that we have a public easement for, and this is $4.2 million to develop at FY28. We have had one engagement with the community on this one already and are planning very shortly to go back without their second engagement. Penrose Square. Penrose Square is a project that is existing, and the full master plan has always anticipated adjacent property being coordinated into Penrose Square and expanded. The development that's adjacent to it, that is basically between the CVS, and this is the parking lot between CVS and the park itself, was approved by the County Board, I believe, this year. meaning that development will be online or sort of open to the public in 2029. So our funding has moved Penrose Square up to do design in FY28 and construction in FY30. That is to bracket the opening of that facility so that way we can do our design work first and then start construction once the property is turned over to us. Arlington Boathouse, I was giving you a preview earlier. We have three lines in the CIP on the Arlington Boathouse. We have construction of the lower site in FY28 and 29. It's about $15 million. That is where our good news is that we have just signed the LOI with the Arlington Boathouse Foundation for their interest in raising money for that project. And then there's $13 million in FY34 for the development of the upper site. Okay, we're gonna move to our synthetic turf program. Following our 10-year plan, we have two fields that are up for renovation, and this is Longbridge Field 1 and Longbridge Field number 4. In 27, Longbridge Field 1 is $1.2 million, and that is a 50-50 cost share with Marymount University. Longbridge Field 4 is a $1 million replacement, and that is purely the county's responsibility. The other two fields that would be next up in rotation in FY28 are the Gunson Rectangle field, one of our most highly used and played on fields, as well as the Gunson Diamond field. If you note, this is time to be done with restroom renovation in FY28, so that way we can lower the impact to the users and also try to package that together to see if we can gain cost savings. All right, now moving to what's considered out-year projects in the CIP. So these are getting into our long-term planning and strategic investment. The first is Quincy Park. This is a $38 million budget line for planning, design, and construction over 30 through 34. This will renovate the athletic fields, deal with circulation, ADA, the tennis courts, and begin to look at solutions to the parking and the parking, SITUATION AT THE LIBRARY. SHORT BRIDGE PARK IS A $5.6 MILLION CONSTRUCTION LINE IN FY31. THIS WAS BASED ON A PLAN THAT WAS ADOPTED BY THE COUNTY BOARD IN 2019, AND THIS WOULD DEVELOP THE PARK THAT IS AT THE CORNER OF ROUTE 1 AND GLEBE ROAD ALONG FOUR MILE RUN. Cordell Sector Plan is a $1.2 million project line. This is actually money that is in hand from contributions from the site plan community. This is to update and address landscaping and connections around the parking lot and areas at the Bozeman Government Center. Shirlington Park is the result of the Four Mile Run Valley Master Plan that was adopted several years ago. This is $6.5 million for planning, design, and construction, FY32 through FY33. This will address the park that is across from the Shirlington Dog Run and the Butts Four Mile Run. Fairfax Drive Public Spaces is a line we have seen before in the CIP. This is $13.9 million for planning, design, and construction to honor the adoption of the Clarendon Sector Plan update that was approved by the board previously. This would develop a new public space between St. Charles Church and Northside Social. We have several small properties in there, Triangle Park and an operations building that would connect this area and create division in that plan. Crystal City Parks and Public Space. One of the things that you'll notice about this line, this is a very fluid line from CIP to CIP. Currently we are proposing a million dollars in FY33 as a placeholder for planning and design and construction in 35 for a placeholder for construction of that for potential public spaces that could be acquired by the county or provided for by private development. I think one of the things that we have to understand about Crystal City is that the county owns very little parkland in Crystal City. We rely based on private development to provide space for us in which a public easement is placed on, similar to Metro Market Square, Met Park, and so our development is beholden to timelines that the developer and shifts in the market, as well as the condition that those properties are turned over to us. Many times they have easements and restraints that we have to deal with on those properties that have to be figured out. What I might leave is really going deep into my DPR hat, if you will. I think if the future of parks in this line are to be solidified, it really needs to become a priority from the county, the board, and the community to be creative in identifying and finding those spaces so we can follow through with that development. Okay, Langston Boulevard public space. Langston Boulevard public space is a similar line to Crystal City. This is an earmark for $2 million in FY34 to follow onto several spaces that were identified in the Langston Boulevard plan that was approved. These are, again, part of private development that would become county property, and this is up for us to be able to develop that space when that is identified. Virginia Highlands Nearby Public Spaces are three parks, actually. It's Virginia Highlands Park. It is a park at 20th Street and South Ives, and a parcel that we acquired at the former Dominion Substation. The idea is to plan all these three together comprehensively, similar to what we're doing with the three urban park, which is Maury, Housell Milliken, and Gumball, so that we are looking and using our faces efficiently and wisely and not duplicating efforts. This is a master plan money in FY34. 34, excuse me, and then the design money and FY 36 to follow through with the planning work there. We have the park at 26 Old Dominion. This is $4.8 million for planning, design, and construction to follow along the greater community work that was done around the land and areas incorporated around the Salt Dome in North Arlington. Barcroft Park is the only line, it is not a new park, and this flows into our renovating what we have to extend their life sign, but this is a new line, new to the CIP. This is $4.1 million to renovate Barcroft Park. This is not a rearrangement or addition of things to Barcroft. This is simply replacing natural grass, irrigation, bullpens, cracked concrete, and deteriorating features there. But that park is about 25 years old and will be almost over 30 when its turn comes up. Okay, moving, we have programs within programs. These are our sort of mini programs in our master plan category. We have our emerging uses program, which is the program that allows us to be fluid and react quickly to new and emerging pressures or hotspots with the community. This is how previously we were able to fund the renovation of Walter Reed. as well as the striping of those courts there. This is a every-other-year request for a total of $4.5 million for the 10-year CIP. This will allow us potentially to get into things that may be a result of our natural trail study or things that may be adjusted or changed based on some of the work we're doing with the Public Spaces Master Plan and the level of service. I think the point behind this program is generally if we have something new identified and maybe a hard thing for the community to deal with, we put it in the CIP, it goes year 10, we do planning design and build it, and 13 years later we've dealt with the issue we have right now. So this is a way for us to get in and try to react a little bit more proactively. The Natural Resiliency and Habitat Restoration Program is a change for us. Previously, this was a natural resiliency program. This is where it was funded every other year. And we address things like stormwater erosion. We address stream break restoration, flood resiliency, and biophilia. And for this CIP, we are expanding this program to include habitat restoration, which is an evasive management and mitigation program. and then restoration of that property once those invasives are taken away from there. So this has been changed to funding on an every year basis for a total of $6.9 million for the 10-year CIP. The idea is that we'll be able to address invasives on all of our natural lands that are within county parks and then several additional properties that we maintain that are outside, that are county-owned but not necessarily within the park system. The Park Sports Court and Parking Lot Program This is a little bit of funding every other year to deal with, it's sort of right in the name, Park Sports and Parking Lot. But we have been noticing that the ability to take out and replace the asphalt, paint the courts, repave our parking lots is really moving from an operational to a CIP because of the cost of those projects. And this is a way for us to be able to planfully address in a way where we know we have to repair over on a year-to-year basis. Our three major programs that we have are our trail and pedestrian bridge work. This is a request to fund at $15.3 million on an every other year, not $15 million every other year, funded every other year for a total of $15.3 million over the 10-year CIP. Synthetic turf replacements are funded every other year for a total of $19 million. And our land acquisition is a refreshing of this pot to be able to acquire and expand our public space system and address some of the needs that we have.

A little bit of expansion on those programs.

The trail and bridge program schedule, or I should say, the sheet that you see here, we have four bridges currently in construction for FY27. We have two in design. We have a low water fort in each design and construction. And then in 28, we have about six more that are in some various form of repair. We look at those bridge inspections every six to eight years, and we look at our trail pavement condition assessment every four to five years. What I would expand with the trail pavement condition is that currently we have a condition index of 86, excuse me, 81. Our goal is to pave several miles of trail until we're at 86. For context, the scale is 100 to zero to 100. The first three categories are poor, serious, and failed. We have no trails in those categories. We are solidly in the good and excellent, and we are trying to be really in a solid good place in our long-term vision for the trail system. The 10-year CIP replacement synthetic turf schedule you can see before you. The thing I would think I'd probably point out here is you can see the Longbridge fields are in 27, the Gunson fields are in 28, and this is just a very laid out plan so there's no surprises. When we come back, we'll see what's in 28 and then 29 and 30, and this is our plan for that replacement schedule. Park Lands Land Acquisition Program. The Public Spaces Master Plan has a goal of acquiring 30 acres over 10 years. To date, we have been able to acquire since 2019 15 acres outright, and we have about nine and a half acres of public easements that we were able to acquire through partnerships. This puts us at a 24 and a half acres out of our 30 with four years left to go on the clock, if you will. Briefly, the map, folks can take a look at it later in more depth, but this is where all those acquisitions have taken place. The red represent outright ownership and the orange represent our easements. As I kind of begin to wrap up here, our program summary, you can see our five programs. This is our $286,076,010 year request. We have $40.4 million of work in FY27, and you can see how that is distributed on a yearly basis over those five programs. Moving to a little bit of detail on the funding sources, you can see again, this is a year-by-year breakdown until we get to our total. I think what I might want to leave you with on this one is that we have a very robust program. Much of it is funded by the county and our bonds. However, we do work with our partners, APS, CPHD through the 4.1 process, universities, to bring in those outside funding sources and really try to work through our partnerships. The other thing I would like to note is that prior to submitting our requests to the manager's office, we really do look at utilizing existing program balances. So things like the pool projects in the restrooms, the equipment replacement, feasibility studies, and the first year of the course program are all existing balances and are not requests for new funding for those line items. A little bit of a high-level summary I just mentioned, but we had the $286 million program in the next 10 years. 34.9 will be requested in the 26 bond referenda. We talked a little bit about the fluidity of the development market and private development on our CIP, particularly Crystal City. We talked about the construction of the boathouse to meet the 2029 shovel in the ground deadline for the National Park Service. We talked about meeting commitments to the community at Drew Park, to the development community, Gateway Park and others. And then we would like to continue our programs that we have started over the last several years with emerging uses, national resiliency and habitat restoration and the park sports courts and parking lot program. We have also talked about reinvesting in the land acquisition program. And I've got to hold on and extend this a little bit longer because I think we should talk about the public spaces master plan and refresh and the impact that may have to future CIPs. We have briefly talked about this during the operating budget. The refresh of the public spaces master plan was paid for, or excuse me, was funded in 2025 PAYGO. We are updating the appendices for this document, so land acquisition, level of service, policies such as restroom, park lighting, design standards, and we anticipated that process to take 12 to 18 months. Currently, we've completed our first round of community engagement in the fall of 2025. We've posted the results of our statistically valid survey, and we've just kicked off our second round of engagement. We had an open house last Wednesday. We had over 75 participants. Mr. Caritones attended, thank you for your participation. And we are moving now to complete that engagement in the next several weeks. We'll be sharing the survey results, and that is where we really begin to look at how that works with our level of service. The level of service, as you know, recommends a number of amenities for particular needs, and the level of service will guide where the most need is and where we have the least service, and that will potentially impact future CIPs and some of the decisions that we make there, because we want to focus our investment to where we serve the correct users in the correct program. So with that Thank you, and I am concludes my presentation and available to answer any questions

Thank you very much. And for my colleagues, I will remind us we started late. We still have time for questions. But I also want to reiterate, we can always send follow-up questions. And questions should be in the form of a question. So any light? I don't see anyone's lights on yet. So we could just keep going. Mr. DeFerranti.

I do have one question. The others I think can wait. The question is regarding Penrose and the stages that we have and sort of what's happening there. There's always a question of whether we can It takes capacity to prepare a project to be worked on. And this is, across the CIP, this is currently my top priority of anything, but I just wanted to understand, in particular part, because we've had many lines in the water, but to my knowledge, fewer projects on the Pike that have gone forward, you know, other than our huge investment in the Pike, the street itself. So do we have... work that we need to do, is there any possibility for moving some of the investment forward, keeping in mind the no new projects admonition from the manager?

So I think the way we have looked at Penrose Square and where it is funded in the CIP is based on, well, primarily a big factor is the parking lot that the second half of the Penrose Square would extend into, per the master plan that was adopted a while ago, is not owned by the county. It is owned by the development that's adjacent to that, that holds the CVS. So we need the developer to turn over that property before we can get in and do work there that is part of the approval there's and I don't know exactly where that was to happen but usually it's that first CEO or something like this that the property then an easement is placed or in this case fee simple will be given to the county so we have we have placed it that we've looked through they are beginning construction in January they're expecting a two-year from the developer expecting a two-year construction period so that will conclude somewhere in 2029 Our proposal allows us to get in and begin design work probably halfway through their development. We'll need to adjust on things that they're doing and complete that design work and then fund the construction once that property is turned over to us. We have in the past talked about can we start construction before they finish. I would anticipate they will probably, we are not going to be able to go that direction because that space would be used for lay down for their construction project and so that is not going to be an option for us in this case. And so we will, we have prepped this CIP to be able to make the funding available to do the design work and the construction around the timeline of that delivery of that project.

I think that means my top priority is at a dead end in the case that I cannot, I mean, I cannot envision, can we accelerate design? That's one thing. But I cannot envision how we could acquire the property and have them not use it for construction. This seems very salient as I think to the west, further west on the pike and the APS. Wondering if you can provide any context.

My only response to that sometimes we don't love to unsequence design from construction just because we want to ensure that the participation and everything we're doing happens. And then we don't love doing things like having a sign that it sits for three or four years that actually often can often leave the community a little cold. And then we often have to go back if there's changes that we have to make or we learn something during the process. So the timing we did here was so that we could also be a little bit fluid in that like we can go into design and then move into construction.

I think the rest is offline. Thanks.

Great. Mr. Spain.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I heard you loud and clear. Eric, first I just want to commend you. When you started the presentation, you talked a little bit about where we were, where we are, and where we're going to go in the next two years. That's something I'm acutely attentive to in these presentations, so thank you. I also want to thank DPR We look at slide 14. There's been a lot of, and I have received a lot of information and contact from folks around the Green Valley area as it relates to Drew Park. So I commend you on staying laser focused in that area. I have one question and there's a follow-up that we could do sidebar reference, Langston Boulevard area. But as we look at these plans in the CIP, is there anything that stands out as it relates to improvement accessibility, ADA type compliance? I really appreciate what you're doing with equitable access at the beginning. Anything stands out? This question is coming really from the Disabilities Commission because they are asking me to stay on top of it, but anything stands out over the next, within the CIP that's pointed that we can talk to?

What I may offer is kind of a little bit of a holistic approach about that. Almost all of our capital maintenance projects are here, are recommended or have been in the past because they have ADA needs to be addressed in the parking, in the projects. It's a major driver when we make determinations for renovation. Glee Road Park, for example, is a big example of that one. All of our projects that we are proposing are in work somewhere. We're proposing funding. ADA and universal access, the extent we can do it, is a key driver of the way we look at things. Gateway Park, for example, that was a key master plan that was designed around universal access in Gateway Park. So that would be a big change from what you might see out there now. But I think I'd like to kind of leave the thought that it's an underlying principle that we are attacking all our projects with.

Thank you.

Oh, and so one of the other things that Mrs. Rudolph just mentioned, we have also adjusted most of our projects in here to address PROAG. Now, because she said that, I'm not going to remember what that stands for, but these are changes in the ADA accessibility requirements for curbside management. And so a lot of our projects now we used to deal with from the inside of the curb in on our projects. Now we are looking at PROAG that are addressing where that connects to other accessible points. So that's the crosswalk, that's the other side of the street. And so it is something, and I appreciate the reminder, that is baked into all of the new projects that are going forward, and it's an important part of what we're doing as well.

And sidebar, at a time of convenience, probably beyond CIP, we can carve out some time to talk about Langston Boulevard, the corridor, there's a concern about a lot of the facilities in the corridor, planning in the future, so if we can find some time, more especially, you know, Lee Center, I mean, I know we're pushing that out a little bit, but we'd love to find some time to talk more about that, okay? Thank you, Madam Vice Chair.

Great, thank you. Ms. Cunningham?

Yeah, I'll pick up on that same conversation. I think for both Langston Boulevard and National Landing, there are, we know we have gaps and we need to do some strategic planning. And so I don't see here how all the pieces fit together, but I think both of those have been increasingly urgent for a bit. And it would make sense, I think, for the Quincy Project, maybe even Gleep Road, and the Langston Placeholder and Lee Center to kind of be part of an overall strategy that might have an earlier start to the engagement and might touch on libraries as well. And then for Crystal City, Pentagon City, Virginia Highlands has fallen out of the 10-year time period, which is hard to square with what you were saying about Crystal City. We're lagging a little bit behind.

So I'd like to address the Virginia Highlands. I think there was a little bit of confusion in the community conversation right now about Virginia Highlands. I think when the CIP was initially announced, presented to the juice of the board there was sort of a list of sample projects it was not an inclusive list of all the projects in the cip virginia hounds was simply not listed there we actually have additional money in the cip compared to the last cip we are looking at doing beginning our master plan work in fy 34 Then added the design money to follow on that master plan on FY 36 It's slide 19 if you need a reference And so the way the logic of a CIP moves next CIP We would expect to see the construction funding on those last years of that CIP got it So it's actually is it actually accelerated from the last CIP or it's the same year That's why I was the same year for an FY 34. I

Great, and then the other is almost a question, so I hope I'll get away with this one, but overall, when you look at, I think it's page B3, about kind of where we're spending capital dollars across the county, Parks is down, 7.3% since our last CIP. And I think we had a similar set of conversations in our operating budget. We are spending on public safety and technology and other areas in growing amounts, which is taking away from our core services and potentially our core assets. So I'd like a little bit of a kind of overall of how that's changed over time. and where it's going, because it doesn't feel great. Even though you guys are miracle workers and all that, it doesn't feel great. Great.

And we'll pick up for follow-up.

I think it's an offline follow-up, but if you want to say anything.

Well, I think we're good for follow-up. Okay. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. I have a, you, there's a lot in this presentation and I really appreciate the completeness of that, to be honest. It has to be, but it is well organized and it gave me a lot of things to think about. One thing that I wanted to ask you is because, and it is relevant to the rest of the cost discussion, et cetera, but generally. So, for example, when I saw the amount of money budgeted for Penrose Square, I was kind of startled because I didn't believe that it is adequate. I thought that it would be far more expensive, especially knowing a little bit how much it cost in the first phase. How do we incorporate in our thinking here cost optimization? How do we try to figure out ways to reduce the per units? I fully understand that a restroom that is anti-vandalic, et cetera, is a very expensive restroom. You delivered some recently, like in Alcova Heights, you budgeted for the Drew Park in the very beginning. So it's not shocking to me that they're so expensive, but it's still a shocking amount of money. So how do we react to that? Do we find, I mean, do we try to do less bespoke stuff? Do we have guidance to make our master planning more, you know, to streamline it in a way that we... deliver things that we know that they work and they are a good value for the money and have longevity and vice versa?

I think we look at, obviously, the costs of these projects in a variety of ways. We're always taking a look at what our price numbers are for past work and where things are going in the industry. We are looking at tools on a large level. We have been looking at using Contract contracts are established already like a writer contract to be able to bring down prices as opposed to having To go out and bid or purchase that because it tends to reduce cost there And so we look at there's sort of a set of tools. This is for example the prefab structures that we're looking at now for Shade in in restrooms and storage buildings Those are much less because you take out architecture costs and some of the other delivery engineering costs And so you take to reduce it from there As we approach our master planning and our design, we do tend to try to look at using materials that are durable. Part of our work is not only just providing something good to the community, we have to provide it good to our colleagues in our operations department, and they generally would like durable, long-lasting materials. Those tend not to be your fancier materials. Using products that are off the shelf, so some of our parks, for example, you may have seen the recent park at Arlington Junction. Those look like kind of fancy benches. Those are off the shelf products. They are not custom. They're not anything special that essentially the same price. And so we try to be creative to try to bring in cost control through what we're doing. But we're always evaluating different ways to try to manage that the materials we're using. And it's not just necessarily on the initial cost. Our plantings need to be drought resistant or appropriate, so it reduces the cost of maintaining landscape beds over time and things like this. And so we try to look at the whole impact of the project in different ways. We can try to keep that in line. One of the things you may have noticed over the years are playgrounds. We have kind of worked back on our playgrounds to become very more context with the neighborhood and fun and adventurous, but not spectacular, if you will. And some some jurisdictions may kind of look to to do. And so we're trying to scale that to what is right for our budget and what's right for the community.

I would also just add, this has been only in the past few years, we've moved into that pooled project elements of our CIP as well, which we hadn't used to do. So in order to have cost savings, the last CIP, we did a pooled project where across the county, we just replaced a safety surface. So I would say years ago, we might come in and always do a maintenance capital project that took on the whole park. Instead, we now are trying to look at elements and try to replace them across the system so that the whole park can have a much longer longevity. But then the safety service, or in this one, you'll see we're doing restroom repairs. So instead of having to come back and maybe sitting and letting the restroom further deteriorate, we are trying to extend the life of a lot of our investments that we may have made in the past 10, 15 years by just doing these smaller elements. But we're saving money by doing it across the system. So we are trying to find ways in which that we are spending less, but actually getting more out of our projects.

Right. Thank you. Thank you for that. I really am first after the bank for the buck and then after the buck itself. So, and I've seen in, you know, repeating elements in newer barks, new deliveries like the latest one in Crystal City where one can really see that what is successful is repeated and it's a good thing. The second thing that I want to ask you, because this is an important part of me, one of the the emergent needs in the last few years, and it's a very serious one, is the need to retrofit a lot of parks with shade and protection from direct insulation, especially playgrounds. We have periodic peaks of requests about that, and it really depends of how hot a summer is, et cetera. So I have the impression that it has been a little bit difficult to deal with this demand, with these retrofits, which I understand, but I want to figure out what is the way forward on this.

So I think the shade around our facilities, particularly playgrounds and other things like this, is always a conversation. It's always a conversation. We go out and work with the community. They're in our master plans, our design program, our design processes. And so we look to when we can include shade in those locations. It has to be balanced to the budget for all the menus that we're trying to replace. They tend to be expensive, and they necessarily a shade structure doesn't provide a lot of shade, but key locations are shade. It's also balanced with us for planting trees to try to provide that shade. However, those don't instantly give you shade. It takes several years for those trees to grow up. So there's a balance of that there. There is some opportunity, I think, in some of these other programs to look at shade structures like the pool projects might be an opportunity to look at bringing a package of shade structures to playgrounds and other locations that may most need it. So I think there's some opportunity through our future proposals for managing a system to kind of address that issue.

Thank you. I'm very interested in this as we go. I yield. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Great. Thank you. I'll have a couple email questions. But on the Quincy Park master planning process, I have a similar interest in terms of Ms. Cunningham on the coordination with Central Library because we know that facility is aging, we know that something is gonna have to happen there, and we may not have the ability to address the facility at the same time as the park needs, but it does seem like if we're going to undergo a master plan that it should be comprehensive across the whole parcel, really. And so I wonder how on the park side you all are thinking about that, if you're thinking about that.

So we have. We've thought about that a fair amount as far as how we would approach our master plan. And Quincy Park has been in the CIP for several iterations. And there were some changes in the way our master planning worked. There was some joint planning at one point in time. And then I think there was significant investment at Quincy that this wasn't moving that part of it forward as far as with the library. However, we have aging facilities at Quincy. We have really bad shape on our athletic courts and some other things there that need to be addressed. really do need to move forward on planning. Planning is out in FY3 and it can accommodate any kind of approach we need to with that. We will be looking at that site comprehensively. We may not be studying the library specifically. If that was something that were developed through the other management of assets and facilities with the county, we can bring those together. And so we are going to try to be able to proceed with a plan that is flexible, that can address that kind of work. I also would mention we will be talking to the libraries. They're a major partner on that site when we do our work there. That's not we do it and tell them later about it. They will probably be very involved in that planning work and what is going on in the surrounding park in connections to that building. Because we do have an interest of making a synergistic site and it's a community location, not just a park, not just a library, it's a community opportunity.

Great. I think that's great to hear. And yeah, being in 2030, still a number of conversations to come and at least one more CIP before we get there. And then my last question will be around our park acquisition goal. One, we know that land is only getting more expensive every year in Arlington. We're about five acres away from the 30 acre goal. Is that land identified specifically in the Public Spaces Master Plan or is it really as opportunities arise? And then the other kind of question mark is with our conversations around Crystal City specifically and the challenges investing there, should we be setting aside, and this is kind of a manager question a little bit, setting aside funds for acquisitions specifically in Crystal City because we know that that is going to be a continuing and ongoing challenge?

I can address part one of that question. I think that the land acquisition is, you asked about it being identified. So in the Public Spaces Master Plan, the land acquisition section, we have specific parcels that are identified, not specific parcels, but priority areas that are circled for acquisition, and they generally have adjacent to a park or a key area. There's some natural resource and historic locations. And so those are identified in kind of a specific way. It's a general area for those acquisitions to take place. We also have a set of land acquisition criteria because a lot of it is as opportunity arrives. And so when we adopted that plan, we evaluate opportunities that come to us or options for sale. And then we try to make a recommendation to the board based on this meets XYZ criteria in there. So it's a little bit of a combination of both. There is some specificity in the Public Spaces Management Plan, and then there is a flexibility to address as it can happen. Great.

Mr. Manager?

Yeah, on the second part, I'm going to ask Eric to help me a little bit. We have set aside, the board has approved a number of site plans, and there's been funds set aside, for example, with the Americana project. To go for open space and for parks projects, and we've I think that's how we're funding some of the things But the fact is those projects haven't been realized yet, right? So there's money that's sort of been set aside the the challenge I think in Eric identified it when he was talking what we do and it's absolutely abundantly clear in Center Park. I mean, Eric won't say it, but I will. That's not the ideal space to have a park in some sense, because it's two inches of dirt on top of a garage. What we need is a site. And we've had a number of conversations, and I really want to put a point, a pin in this for the board. When we're having conversations with developers, and this was all discussed in the Crystal City Sector Plan, getting a site that we can actually dig holes in, plant trees. And I'll let Eric elaborate a little bit more on that.

So I think to your first point on the funding that we are able to identify through the site plan process. So for example, Arlington Junction Park was completely funded by the adjacent site development. There were two buildings there that funded that development. There are other locations that have, we have a little bit of money here and there that have been, after the buildings have developed and their requirement for contribution to public space in Crystal City area. But there are some site plans out there that have major contributions until they're realized that contribution is not made per the conditions. So we have a little bit of management and flexibility there. And it is also, to Mark's last point, the land increase facility is a challenge to build on. Metro Market Square is on a garage. It has a fire lane down the middle of it. So we are working very hard to be creative and create a great setting there. Center Park is also on a garage. And so when we do get these spaces, we have to be able to adjust and accommodate sort of the constraints that we have in those locations.

And I would just remind it was long term, but the county invested over $100 million in Long Bridge Park, which is within national landings boundaries. It was a huge investment and one of our largest investments in any one neighborhood. And so while obviously we are looking forward to these development projects across Crystal City, we shouldn't forget that within the last 15 years, we've had some major, major investment down there from county, and that was all county.

Thanks.

Great. Thank you. All right. Looking. I think we're good. Thank you both so much.

Thank you.

We'll have the changeover and invite DTS up. We did. Yeah.

Well, you're in for a treat because we have the Department of Technology Services with us. And I'm going to turn it over to Holly. And remember, when Michelle introduced this part, when we were going through the introduction of the CIP, there was one slide that had a lot of icons and pictures on it. And she said, I don't understand how any of this works, but it's really important. So Holly is now going to clarify that for you and demystify it. So over to you, Holly.

Thank you for that fabulous introduction. And thank you all for your time. Thank you for Board Chair DeFerranti, and thank you for Vice Chair Coffey, and thank you for the rest of the board members. I'm going to move this over here to my page. And I also want to make sure I'm calling out our staff. I want to make sure I'm talking about Gilbert Fasano, our budget manager. Adil Asif, who's played a key role in our CIP. And then for our fabulous team, Laura Slavin, our Chief Operating Officer, David Herlihy, Richard Archambault, Elise Ostigie, Jeff Taylor, and is anybody missing?

I think that's Tracy.

Tracy, and Tracy Jewell, who is not able to be here. Going through the count in my head when I'm talking about all of them, I always think the magnificent seven plus one helps me remember if I remember sending in an email or doing a communication that I don't have already and I can remember everybody. So with that, I wanna kick off. I wanna say thank you also to DMF and all the conversations that we've had as well. We're gonna go through a couple of quick things. We are going to go over an overview of what drove the guardrails for our decisions. We're gonna talk about the accomplishments of what we did since the last CIP, and we're going to share you a picture of the assets that we just alluded to from the county manager, and then we're gonna talk about what we're proposing for the next 10-year CIP. So with that, diving into the four guiding principles that we use related to our CIP. One is the acknowledgement that we need to sustain the backbone of what we do. We are, as Mark said, and you hopefully have made my message clear, we are, to me, a glue that keeps the ability to deliver services to the county. You don't see a lot of it, you can't touch a lot of it, but it is really, really important. So we need to make sure we're sustaining those business systems, the enterprise and departmental. We also think about what do we already have? What do we already have and how do we use that? What are applications that we can reuse? What do we do with the existing infrastructure? We are also thinking about, as we're talking about the CIP, what is the impact to operating costs? And we'll talk a little bit more about kind of the CapEx to OpEx. But we are also always thinking about how we can reduce costs. knowing that the rising cost of technology is out of our control in some cases, but are there things that we could do to tweak and refine? And then finally, always present is making sure we have the reliability of service and thinking about it from a security side. How are we protecting what we have? So with that, we're going to focus on four major groups, state of good repair, keeping our fiber and infrastructure resilient, refreshing and upgrading and adapting applications and systems, and investing in constituent-facing systems aligned with our digital strategy, a small piece that I think is also very important. So next slide. So first, let's talk about our capital program accomplishments since the last CIP. I actually spent some time watching Jeff have the honor of presenting the 10-year CIP in the last cycle. And I'm proud to say that what he talked about, we actually did. And he did a fabulous job, so it's a high watermark for me. First, talk about the network modernization. So since then, we've created the network edge replacement. So hub sites, not to get a little bit too technical, but there are 10 hub sites across the county. They are critical to keeping everything working in the network infrastructure. In 2025, we replaced five hub switches. In 2026, we replaced the other five hub switches and two core routers. We also upgraded these sites to single-mode fiber, which allows the use of an installation of a 10G up... a 10G uplink that increases speed and capacity for within our network. Our PC replacement, to date in this past year, we've deployed 806 devices, which is 64% of our scheduled refreshes. With that said, you've heard me talk in the last budget presentation, the price of devices going up. We've actually placed an order for all of the devices that we can with the money that we have available. I want to point out that we have a plan to actually replace 1,100 devices. Because of the cost, we're only going to be able to purchase 1,000. That has an impact in a lot of different areas you'll hear me talk about as well. With Connect Arlington, we've been able to underground the aerial fiber within Abingdon Elementary. We've upgraded seven community sites. Last year, we completed the installation of the ART bus operation and maintenance facility, as well as integration of the Virginia State Police radio systems with our county radio system. All critical projects to make sure that we have communication capabilities. Within internal communication capabilities, we completed our telephone refreshment, moving to a cloud-based system. This was huge. 4,300 handsets, now down to 731. Seems like a lot, but there are reasons why some of them are there. There are conference rooms. There are different types of shared devices. And there's a couple on the hand. on the edges that we're trying to figure out and make sure that we're reducing those. That's an 83% reduction. So being able to move to this product also allows us to have better access to individual phone lines. So you can access your team's phone through your computer or through your cell phone, so you're more flexible of where you're located. I also want to highlight something related to sustainability. Our old analog phone system from a power cost us $30,000 a year to power that. That's roughly 30 homes that we were able to now not have to use or use that money to power them. We also refreshed 28 non-Bosman conference centers. From an application and a systems perspective, we finished our land records refresh a year ago. Working with the Treasurer and Commissioner of Revenue, we implemented 26 new payment types, 24 payment types this year and two the previous year, allowing AED, DES, CPHD, and to name many others that are able to have a variety of different payment types, including Venmo, Apple, Google, and not just credit card. We completed our eGov migration, which those are a number of specific applications to delivering county business, things like the county property search, moving them to a platform as a service. So those are intended for things that we have custom built. And then we also completed the ERMS migration to the cloud, which is infrastructure as a service. So that's a product that is a software application that we've moved to another location. And then finally, we completed our data center relocation. Huge project for us. We call it phase one because you'll hear more about a phase two. What we moved is from a 2,800 square foot footprint to a 200 square foot footprint. Now, we don't have the data of exactly what the power usage was in the building, but if you can think we have another data center, we'll talk about that data center compared to the data center that we are now in the cloud. We are using 15% of that power, the trades. So having the reduced footprint is a huge benefit for us at the county. Next slide. So when you look at our 10-year plan, you see it's over 13 different programs. We're asking for $124 million. That's within inflation of labor and software over the 10 years. It is an increase from the 10-year CIP two years ago of $14 million. The reason for that is primarily within two programs, the network device modernization, the network program and the workforce device modernization. The increase in those programs went from 25 to 36 and 30 to 36, respectively. Both of it was primarily due to the cost of equipment. This is something that's not in our control. And you heard me talk earlier about the cost of the devices. So that is something that we have to work with. That is also why, when you look at this 10-year CIP, just realistically, this is not a 10-year CIP. We do our best. We do a really good job of planning. But some of these costs are not out of our control. And some of them are really, really being driven by things that are happening that is at a rate, you always hear technology's changing at a rate of change, that some of these costs are going up astronomically for us. I know that's across the board in a lot of different areas, but I know we feel it in technology. The gist of it, though, is most of what you see here is what we need to keep the county running. These are not flashy projects. There's a handful of things that I believe will be beneficial for the community and things that we've heard about that are of interest, but this is the basic core of what I think we need to get done. Next slide. A slightly different view of the funding. You can see the significant amount is related to network equipment and workforce device modernization. It's roughly 50% of what our ask is over the 10-year CIP. When you think about the type of funding, we have bond funding specifically for data center projects and Connect Arlington because that's the longer-term projects. The shorter-term financing is used for assets up to 10 years, so much of our network equipment falls into that category. And pay-as-you-go is the three to five year, and that's for most of our workforce device modernization is an example of that. Next slide. So when we talk about our asset inventory, we're not going to go over this, but this is, yes, as Mark said, this is the importance of how we make everything work. I want to call out a couple of things. On this slide, you see useful life. There's also something end of life. That is something that we keep in mind when we think about our planning. There are points where there are certain types of, whether it's network devices, laptops, that it's going to get to end of life. It will not accept security patches. And so that's been built into our plan. So as we get crunched on security, budget and time, that's an issue for us because there are certain things we will not be able to provide the security that you need without moving forward. I also want to highlight our workforce device. As we work through, and I already talked about what the costs are, that is something that if we don't keep on top of that, if we get behind because of a limited budget or as costs go up, that's an issue for us in being able to provide that supportability. both in delivering services as well as our work. If you're trying to fix things that are broken, you're spending more time doing something that probably isn't the best use of our time. I also want to give you maybe a little bit more in the weeds, but just to give you an example once again related to our funding. So you see related to our enterprise servers, there's something called hosts. There's 13 of them. They're actually grouped together. These are the virtualized servers. So they run a lot of the applications that we are hosting. What's important is that they are in groups. So there is a group of five, there's two groups of three, and there's a group of two. They have to be replaced together. So we have it spread out so that we can replace them appropriately. Once again, if we are crunched on budget, well, then that has an implication. Well, if we were trying to replace five, but we don't have enough money for five, that's a problem for us. And then finally, I just want to highlight our applications to keep our technology debt as low as we possibly can. keeping our applications current, upgraded, and taking advantage of enhancements is important to us. And making sure that for those applications that we do not manage, that are departmental managed, we also need to make sure that they are aligned with the network cloud and data security standards that we have. Next slide. So let's get into the projects. We're first gonna talk about the state of good repair and focus on the proposed hardware refreshment. So the first one is our workforce device modernization. Of that, we have 3,700 laptops and 1,000 desktops that we plan with a four-year cycle for the desktops and a five-year cycle for the laptops. So in order to keep pace, that's a 950 laptop replacement and 200 desktops a year. You heard me talk about last year, we weren't able to get to that number, partially because of the budget issue. From our network equipment and power systems, this is the connectivity tissue for the entire county schools. It includes wireless access points, power supply, hubs, and security perimeters. So when you think about security, a lot of our security is actually operational, but there is a piece of it that is within here. We also have our server hardware and data storage. You heard me talk about the hubs. That fits into this program. And then finally, we have our audio-visual replacement. This is actually somewhere where we were able to reduce the cost pretty significantly from our ask two years ago. Two years ago, we had an ask of $6.6 million. Now we're only asking for $1.6 million. We're using metrics and the most used conference room based on what is the criteria. We are able to focus on the eight most used conference rooms and make sure that that information or that those systems are kept up to date and supportable. Because remember, they still are as everyone is working in different places. If we're doing presentations like this, keeping that system up and running is really important. Next slide. So our next grouping of projects is around infrastructure and resilience. So there's two main focuses. One is our data center consolidation. So we talked about our phase one. We have another data center in South Arlington. And we'd like to get out of the data center business. And we don't really mean that, but it means we don't necessarily have to have the footprint that we have here. We did not have the metrics from the Bosman, but I know that we would be able to get the metrics. And this is something, as we look at moving forward, what is the best move and what is the best fit for the county will be reviewed. The next piece is related to Connect Arlington. There's two main areas of where we're looking for Connect Arlington. One is replenishing the fiber. So as fiber breaks, there's construction projects happening all over the county. Things happen. We need to have that fiber so we can quickly replace it and keep everything up and running. With that said, we are up and running because of the redundancy. One of the areas that we're going to talk about in the next slide is our next grouping is thank you, schools and county facilities where we're looking to try to, whether it is undergrounding new links or building new links, we are looking at eight schools and nine counties. So the schools are in light blue and the counties are in dark blue all across the county for Connect Arlington Fiber for the next 10 years. Go to the next slide. Our next grouping is around our applications and system refreshment. So first, this is actually, to me, it's an interesting slide because you could see the variety of the types of applications that we have and what they look like from the support back end. So our first one, our revenue collection system, ASIN-CAP, it was recently upgraded, but it's on a five-year upgrade cycle. So it was upgraded in 2025, so that puts us at two upgrade cycles within this CIP. PRISM is a different model. It is a software as a service model, so for our human resources and financial systems. So this one, it has releases. There isn't an upgrade. There's regular releases. It's up to us to decide when we want to implement, and that's what the CIP money is for, is when we choose to implement the releases. There are a handful of things that we don't have a choice, but for some of them to be able to implement. Things like AI, things like enhancements within the system are things that we are interested in and I know will benefit the staff. Our technical debt, our ERMS, our records management system, was implemented in 2004. It's on a seven-year upgrade cycle. Within the CIP ask, we do have a study to look at it and say, is this the best? I mean, this was implemented so long time ago. Are there browser-based options that would be a better fit for us? And what does that mean? Our ERMS system is integrated in so many things that we do. We know this is a big look. So we have also included the upgrade that we would need for ERMS. No matter whether we look at it or not, in 2031, we have an upgrade included. e-gov applications, those were moved to platform as a service. So a platform is something that somebody is running for us. We need to upgrade it at some point. That is scheduled for 2031. And finally, our newest program is our telephone system. That is on a refreshment cycle of every five years. So we would look to, in 2029, being able to... Well, actually, every five years after 2029, there are some additional functionality capabilities that we're interested in that would focus on increased reporting capabilities, better overall support and customer experience for the staff as well as individuals who are calling in. Go to the next slide. So there are two constituent-facing projects that we're interested in, both aligning with the digital strategy of making things easier. I think some of what we saw in the engagement related to a CIP. One is the constituent single sign-on, which has been an ask we've had for quite a while, and I think we continue to have, and I hope we can make it through this time. Although we have it scheduled for 2031, I think just try to manage with the other projects and other financial needs within the county. But this is a big deal because it gives us not only the easy access for customers for enterprise payment solutions and CAP, but also opens the door for bringing on other systems, both within the county and potentially within schools, and making it easier for constituents to remember one password and make it all secure for them. And then finally our constituent digital services. So I know you are all familiar with AVA. This dollar amount is specifically for focusing on how do we make sure as we're rolling out our next focus of AVA, we know what the costs are. This is why it's a CIP ask. Because when you think about the digital services, it's all consumption-based. Before we build something into the operating budget, we need to know what exactly that's going to be and what do we get. So that's why it's in the CIP. So our focus for this area within AVA 3.0 is a couple of different areas. One is focusing on AIVR. AIVR. which is automated... Sorry, I can't speak. Interactive voice response. So basically, you're calling and you're talking to an AI bot who can respond to you and give you what you need, allowing our... customer contact centers to be able to respond to more complex calls. The other area that we're interested in is related to that expanding that chat experience. So right now you're chatting with Ava. We'd like to be able to transition that so you can talk to a a live agent on chat. And if you need more, you can transfer that to actually be able to talk to a live agent in person. So being able to hand off where you need and how you need to. Finally, we're interested in trying to expand document search. I feel like that's been very, very successful, the amount of views and access. And if we can get access to more information and help with that transparency, I think that's an important area for us to invest in. talked a little bit about this, and you heard about this before, and something that has been happening in the industry for quite a while. It's the thinking about moving from called CapEx to OpEx, or one-time purchase, to the ongoing subscriptions. So 2004, you bought an application. basically put it on some servers and it stayed there. You decided when you wanted to upgrade and move. Things are so much more integrated now. We also have seen the industry move towards more of a subscription base. So sometimes it isn't just us deciding, it's where the industry is going. So it's not just applications. our network services, our security services are all moving to software as a service. That's great, because then that allows us to keep things moving and it's not the upgrade, but it also removes the pressure from capital and puts the pressure on operating. We've worked with DMF, we're continuing to work with DMF, and how does that work for us? Because it doesn't necessarily mean that costs go down. Let me just be very clear about that. It's just kind of moving the bucket of where it's paid for. So what you heard is our four priorities. So focusing first on the state of good repair. This includes workforce devices, network equipment, audio-visual equipment, and things that support daily operations. We're investing in our infrastructure resilience, including a sustainable data center strategy and stronger, more resilient fiber backbone. Third, we're continuing to modernize our applications and systems so we avoid technical debt and keep the county services reliable, secure, and efficient. Fourth, we're making a targeted investment to support the county's digital strategy and respond to customer needs of making services simpler and easier for constituents to use. Across that all, we're balancing the rising costs of technology, labor, subscription costs, focusing on long-term sustainability, security, and responsible adoption of emerging technologies. With that said, thank you for your time.

I'm going to wrap up the last couple slides with some projects that cut across a number of other departments. For example, HR, the circuit court, DHS. You can see where these projects, how they line up. Most of these projects are refreshments of existing systems. So it's just a cycle that Holly was just talking about in terms of refreshments. So the next slide after this gives a little more detail around some of the various projects. The first one in the upper left is upgrading a 30-year-old pension system. I think would be important to a lot of those that are retired and maybe retiring in the future from Arlington. Land record system, similarly, it's a refreshment. The real estate assessment system, this is the second tranche of funding. The real estate assessment office is currently going through its replacement, so this is funding the next second year. And then you can see some of the other examples here with DHS. court records and poll books. And then finally on the last slide, you'll see two projects that are labeled with DMF. The first is a new request. This is streamlining the ACFER process that accounting goes through. They have an ACFER that has many embedded spreadsheets in that document, which you're familiar with. So it's revamping that product. And then a proposal for an enterprise grants management system, which really isn't a DMF project. This would touch every department that manages grants, DHS most heavily. So it's something we included in the out year 28-29 of the CIP. So with that, I think that wraps up all the technology projects and turn it back over to the board for any questions.

Thank you very much. We will await lights turning on, but Mr. DeFerranti is fast.

I have one question, and it is concerning. I'm trying to piece together page in the book, page that's on data center consolidation, D11, which shows operations costs for data centers going from 175 over the course of the full term to 450. That makes sense to me that it would increase based on what you described of we're putting a lot more into data center and reducing costs. producing our onsite stuff, going to the cloud, I could envision that working. And I'm trying to put that together with your slide on this. Can you just give a little context? Is that because operations costs sounds like operations budget, but it is in the CIP? So does someone have a sense, or you can get back to me, on why we're going up that much Is it because we're doing a lot more in that category that's there? FY29, if you go third cell from the bottom under is 175, and it goes up to 450. And is that, should we be wringing our hands about the state of the cost of energy in the world, or do you know, or can you get back to me? It's flexible.

It's highlighting the anticipated operating costs of us doing this work and putting this information up to the cloud. It's just highlighting. It's not actually included in the CIP totals. It's just highlighting that there will be operating costs associated with this work.

So does that mean we're... It's the right thing to do, but we're taking pressure off overall costs on capital, and it's going to result in some increase in our annual operating budgets. Sorry.

We have a lot of phone-a-friend today.

Jeff Taylor, DTS, obviously. So the operating costs there, as Mr. Stevenson said, are not part of the CIP budget. It's an anticipated cost. And that is for things like co-location space for us to continue to put systems in a larger data center or cloud consumption costs. So pay as you go rather than the capital costs. So basically, we're saving money by not paying for electricity at a facility in South Arlington, but we're paying to lease some space in a big data center, say, out in Ashburn or Ohio or somewhere.

Got it. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Great. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you. Thank you so much for the comprehensive reporting here and the presentation. I have one, it's kind of a framing discussion. I consider that we are in front of significant change in the scaffolding and the type of infrastructure that we build. This is not always material infrastructure, it's also software infrastructure, right? And some conversations I had with you before said, well, we need to prioritize structuring our data in a way that is workable with the new infrastructure. And this I don't consider as an operational cost because it's something that you do one, I mean, you know, once or is in a prerequisite for getting to work, right? So I want to understand in what I see here, where is this kind of work embedded and whether it is reflected in the CAP or is it an operational cost?

Those are built into operational costs. And the work that we do related to that is within our operational costs. But that is where, because there is a data aspect to the constituent digital services that I spoke about, understanding how that cost is going to impact the operations is why we have it in our CIP. But most of the work that happens around us defining the governance, helping to work with the other departments around what we're doing with our data. That all comes out of our operation. We're not asking for anything as part of that.

So my next question is about the cyber security part of the CIP. So I understand what the cyber security part of an operational part, I mean I think I understand that, but I try my very best to understand as comprehensively as I can. The question is, I have, I've always had the impression that cybersecurity is a software and an architecture discussion, and it's not so much a capital discussion, but apparently it is also a capital discussion.

It is, our firewalls are part of our cybersecurity, but most of our, especially right now, most of our cybersecurity is within operational occasionally. And I think in the past, we've had to come and ask for additional resources for something that's out of our control. As the cybersecurity landscape changes, things happen that we don't plan on. But for the most part, most of it is in our operational environment.

Okay, finally one, there is a dot next to the Pentagon here in slide nine, as a county facility that we need to connect to, to connect Arlington. I thought they have a direct connection to God and.

Is that right, Longbridge? I think that's Longbridge.

Yeah, then it's a little bit off Longbridge, it's okay. Okay, thank you.

So what, so it's, so if we fail the international, so that is right over the Pentagon, yes. That is actually a fiber run that goes around the Pentagon, up 110, and it's repairs and fixing hand holes in the road in Route 110.

Okay. Thank you. I think Connect Ireland is for me a stunningly complex and interesting project that we are, you know, giving a new lease of life because there is a lot of investment in this year's currently and immediately coming years. I want to discuss a little bit online what we connect with that, not only schools and county facilities, but what else, because apparently everything will need to be somehow attached to these fiber rings. Thank you.

Ms. Cunningham?

I have two questions. One is sort of at the macro level. We talked a lot last year and this year on operating budget about the shift from capitalized to operating costs, although capital costs that remain seem to be jacking up, as you said, due to tariffs and other things. It's probably a question for the manager and Mr. Stevenson if he's still here, but When does that, of course he's still here, what was I thinking? When might that change our debt ratio calculations, right, which were computed in a time when all those costs were capital and now operating has to carry more? Are we thinking about that, adjusting that, because at some point we would be taking on more debt and having more operating costs?

So Jeff, I'm gonna ask you to come up here. I don't know if Jeff did his homework a little bit of this. I asked everybody to go back and look at the CIP from 10 years ago, what it was we were gonna invest in. Our capital expenditures, we may be investing in a more finite set of things, but they've become a lot more expensive. And also there's been such a shift in the technology landscape But I don't know, Jeff, if you took a look back and if you have any thoughts on that, because we could talk about that.

Absolutely. We've been tracking how much we're spending, how much we're asking over the last, say, decade. And for our 2018 to 2027 CIP, This year we expected, had an ask of $200,000 for the network budget and it's 10 times that. It's about 2 million this year. So those are the unforeseen expenses and cost increases and just, you know, the difference in budgeting out 10 years on a technology that we really, you know, don't necessarily know what's coming.

Is that, I think, the example you were... Yeah, and so the challenge with that, and I think you pick it as we're doing more on the operating side, I think that, and Holly's been very nice to me, but given how un-nice I was in the budget to DTS, there's been a lot more pressure on the operating side. I think that's really the answer. The pressure hasn't gone away on the capital side.

We should have a longer off-camera conversation, probably. But it seems like that's a bit of a train wreck. So if capital costs are going up 10x in 10 years, and we're also adding operating costs because things are moving to software as a service, At some point, the problem we've been having with parks and libraries getting less funding becomes more intense. And so we may need to model that out. I appreciate you looking back 10 years, because that's the question I was going to ask. But we may need to change some of our ratios and be more conservative.

You know, I'll have to give that some more thought. I would just say that what you stated is a symptom of the fact that we're spending a lot more of our money maintaining the types of capabilities we have. And I know that Holly has a list of things. I don't know why I looked at David on that automatically. Things that we want to do that we can't because there's no room for it. It's getting crowded out.

And I also want, listening to some of the systems, I mean, more things are technology, right? The AK, for example, that used to be spreadsheets, right? But the capabilities of what technology provides will get a better result, and that means you can look at more information faster. That comes with a cost, right? At some point, you would need to decide, okay, well, what are we not going to take advantage of? And I think that's a loss for us if we were to do that.

Great, so longer conversation, I think. The second is just in, I see most of our big applications appear to be being capitalized, and is there anything that is a permit Arlington type item that should be capitalized but isn't?

Let me say, we are interested in trying, because understanding that we have more flexibility in some ways with our capital, that is something that we are looking at. Are there ways that we could take different pieces of projects and appropriately capitalize them? It's something that we do discuss and look at.

OK, great. And then last question is, page 14 in the PowerPoint had a couple of specific projects that have moved around in time. Is that it? It's much smaller on the screen than on my page. In particular, I can't tell if that's the right one. Yeah, it is. In particular, these aren't huge dollar amounts. So I'm curious, is the DHS customer service and case management, grants management and financial statement builder, is there any value to considering pulling those forward? Because each of those seem likely to have significant staff savings and or customer satisfaction savings.

Yeah, on the DHS one, that's just its refreshment cycle. So moving that forward, financial statement builder could be moved up since it's a new application. Similarly with pension system, but we'd almost need lead time to get ready to implement a bigger pension system upgrade that we wouldn't be ready until 2018.

So the DHS one, I thought that got moved out, but it's actually, it's more that it's just the refresh cycle.

They're replacing it right now, and this is the refresh in the out years.

Okay, great, thank you, that's it.

All right, Mr. Spain.

Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. I'll be brief. One, thank you for your presentation. And Holly, I would love to speak later about slide seven. You know, the workforce device modernization where we're spending, we're talking about a $36.4 million. And we have numbers there around 3,700 laptops, 1,000 desktops, around looks like it's four years and five years respectively. I'd love to talk about something I did out in corporate where you can find some additional cost savings after we have to turn them in. I'm not sure what we do with laptops. That's a whole other story, but maybe something we can do with the employees. There's an incentive kind of thing I'd love to discuss to cut some money there. Lastly, I don't know if the clerk can pull up page number D36.

I don't have the full packet that you have in front of you. I only have the presentations. I wonder if staff should be able to present that.

So I'll ask my question because it's falling within the information technology and it's dealing with public safety firing range.

I think that's on the next.

That should be within the public safety.

Probably the public safety stuff. Okay. Maybe I got it mixed up here. It's a couple pages after.

You're just ahead of your time.

Hold on a second. It's right after voter, because you do have voter registration electronic poll books. That's within your scope, right? They're all rolled together. I'm sorry. Madam Chair, that's it for now.

Great, thank you. I think, oh.

I did want to respond to your, I do recognize that the large cost of our workforce device modernization, I think I want to say two things. One is that two years ago, we actually had looked at the, you know, is it cheaper to lease versus our model. At that time, we found out that it wasn't. But things are changing, and the costs from two years ago are skyrocketing, and that is something we're actually evaluating. Are there other options as we look? The other piece that we have recently rolled out is the bring your own device, right, and being able to keep the technology safe within our space so that you can't take a document. And that also allows us to be able to potentially change some of the models of what we do.

All right. Let's talk.

Excellent. I think my only question is really thinking at the macro level and just knowing what we know about technology, the economy at large, the international pressures that we're seeing. Have we updated our inflation measures for what we predict going forward? And should we consider, at least at this moment in time, taking a more conservative cost modeling approach on technology? Because it's hard for me to imagine it gets better. It's pretty easy for me to imagine it gets worse. And so I wonder if we should be building that in at this stage.

We now we do build in. I mean, there is this is a three percent inflation that goes over time. But I also said that this is where it is very, very hard for us. I mean, who would have thought two years ago of the increases that we've had right now? Absolutely. And it's very hard to predict that. And so this is where that shorter period is. We've got a plan and then continually assessing that. and thinking about how we can do things differently. It's constantly what we're doing. In terms of the longer, I don't know that we're ever gonna get to the ability, honestly, to really lay out for you a 10-year capital plan in the technology space. I think it's going to be really hard for us to do that.

Yeah. I guess I just wonder about, you know, if we're using 3% now, should we use 4% or 4.5% for the next, you know, three to five years? Because who knows?

Who knows, right? And I think that's the... So let's look at what we've got in the closer years and know that that's a pretty accurate picture. And...

If I could add on that, because I think Ms. Cunningham asked a similar question. You know, we have focused about our debt service growth year over year and setting it somewhere around $4 million. I will tell you that given the kinds of things we've seen, even since we were thinking about the CIP with the cost of electricity, for example, which I know isn't necessarily a capital expense, but what it does is it feeds into how these systems run. 3% is probably too low, But we have, this is a plan, okay? But we have flex in there as we go out into the later years to make adjustments. And so I would be reluctant to put it at a higher number, but I think that's the reason why Jeff went back and looked at that stuff. I think we need to be doing more analytical work looking at, okay, 10 years ago, we didn't even know what AI was. And so now we have this component, and the growth in that is probably a lot higher. We need to be able to model that. So it's a fair question. I just don't know how to answer that right now, other than to say we're going to look at it more.

I appreciate that. And I wonder if one way of getting there is looking at over the last 10 years, how far off 3% growth have we been? And is there kind of a rolling historic average that we could use to factor forward? That's a good suggestion. Yeah. That's all I've got. And thank you very much. Thank you very much. And we'll invite public safety up to the table now.

being an athlete to get us on point. We're doing all right.

We're not going to finish by four, but we're not going to finish. All right, they have brought you to the table all by yourself, so just a remark.

Yeah, so you figure with law enforcement, they have some backup, but I'm sorry. Jeff Bergen is going to make the presentation as he always does on capital, representing all the public safety agencies. So over to you, Jeff.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me here today. My name is Jeff Bergen, and I am the financial officer for the Department of Public Safety, Communications, and Emergency Management. It is my pleasure today to brief you all on our public safety capital. I would like to also thank the county manager and members of DMF for all their support during this process. And thank you to the agency representatives. We have our subject matter experts, our directors, and our financial analysts. who have joined us today. So if you have any specific project questions, I can ask them and they can jump up since we have a lot of room at the table. And I think what's interesting and I always love going after DTS who did a wonderful job is because we have a part of technology, but we also have so much more as well. And I think we're also a little bit unique. We joke that it takes a village because public safety is a little bit different, but we are four agencies presenting one capital program, which I think is pretty unique. and it's unique to the region and it's always been something that we feel is a very important piece when we do our 10-year CIP. We also want to be able to present our common goals and initiatives and priorities. So what we are going to be talking about today are projects that we have looked at as a group, that we have prioritized as a group, and we think represent those common goals. They're represented on the slide here in the business areas and how we prioritize and align our projects. We have six investment areas that we look at across public safety. And I think the important thing that we're always looking at is that this is, as the manager had said, maintenance capital. So it's really about refreshment of our core systems and our core projects. So you're going to see projects come up multiple times throughout the presentation because we're really focused on maintaining those over the useful life. Next slide. When we're looking at our portfolio, it's about $130 million in projects over 10 years. And the manager did ask us to look at what we had done 10 years ago as well. And we were looking at around $75 million and $85 million in the CIP proposed 10 years ago and eight years ago. So we are also seeing that increase as well. Part of that is driven by technology. And another part of that is driven by the fact that we do have response equipment in here as well. We do have infrastructure. So we have a unique blend where it's not just the technology driving things. It's also other areas as well. I also want to point out before we move too far along that our projects are ones where we are managing those projects, not just customers. So we do have facilities. We have fire stations. We have buildings. Those would mostly be handled by DES and the facilities projects. So you're not going to see a lot of those here today. We can answer questions on those. Folks may be able to respond to those but these are mostly ones where we manage the projects. So they're really focused on those areas Some of the other pressures that we have a faced I think when we're looking at our CIP and the changes over the years is also the loss of federal dollars So it's not just that grants went away and that was the funding source but changing in those federal programs we've had whether it's response equipment or other projects that came from post 9-11 money or other response money. We've seen those changes on the operating side with the urban area security initiative funds. So losing some of that has seen an impact on our CIP over the years, as well as the first responder need and project refreshment. As we're going to talk about the changing face of technology, some of that also happens with our response equipment as well. We're having to replace those things earlier than we might have thought before. We also have aging critical infrastructure, regional and state pressures, and mandates that we have to respond to. So those are just kind of the changing nature that we're seeing across our projects. Next slide. When we're looking at those changes and pressures, we also want to be able to point out what are the assets that we're looking at across public safety capital. So we're talking about over 1,800 radios, close to 500 mobile data terminals that are in the field. We are talking about over 800 different breathing cylinders for our breathing apparatus. These are all deployable assets. We are looking at the things that our first responders use on a regular basis. These are our core systems. We're looking at things that have a five to, mostly five to seven year useful life. When we were doing the analysis of our projects, we have close to 40 projects in our portfolio, and about 25 to 30 of them are in that five to seven year useful life. So that's why you see this constant refreshment and staying on top of it. Because of that, we really do lean on our subject matter experts, our public safety IT folks who do a fantastic job to research and review and recommend those life cycles. We want to make sure what we're presenting to you all is not just let's refresh because we're five years. We want to be able to look at that. We want to see if they're in a state of good repair, and we want to look at the emerging technology. We always joke that we don't want to be too early on the adoption of that technology. We want to make sure that it's interoperable and that it works and it's secure. So we're constantly looking at those over the 10-year CIP. And as we always say, priority is the life safety of our responders and the continuity of those assets. Next slide. And I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about our regional collaboration. So we have projects with regional focus, whether it's our call premise equipment, we're working with the city of Alexandria. We also have our public safety firing range. When we're doing things on a regional timeline, it's really working together with those agencies, which could lead to a change of deadlines, could lead to a change of scope. But it is providing us with real interoperability and regional solutions, which are fantastic. We've worked with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments for years, giving us cooperative purchasing, cooperative rates, standards in those areas of equipment. So when we're looking to buy things on here, the things that we have looked at across the region as well. Our next slide is just some of the accomplishments, I think, on the capital front. So again, we have a lot of projects. There are a lot of projects underway. We're always looking to refresh. This is just a handful of some of the ones that we've done in the last one to two years since we last briefed you on the CIP. So I won't go through all of them here, but you're going to also see these come up in the out years as well because we are looking to replace these. I think the biggest one on the list on here is our computer-aided dispatch, which we are just wrapping up as well now and looking at the different connections between all the public safety agencies. It's such a large project that kind of impacts everybody. So that is something huge, and it's been a big project that's going to enhance our system resiliency, improve our disaster recovery capabilities. So it's a major project for our organizations. Next slide. I think we've successfully used this in every single presentation we've given over the last few years. It may be time to update the graphics a little bit, but I think it drives the point home is that it puts in perspective how critical these systems are. So the picture here, what we always like about this is it represents not only large projects, large and small projects and the interplay between them for public safety. whether it is the vehicles in the field that you see on here, whether it is the back-end systems, or whether it's devices or different deployable assets, everything has a core tie-in to our operational response. And these are the systems that we use every day. They're part of the mission. They're part of the goals. So when we see things about prioritization, this kind of puts it in perspective of we have a lot of projects to prioritize. I think we're what we've put forward really does represent the highest level of what we think is critical to public safety. Our next slide, we're looking at some of those major projects. I think when we started this off, we talked about over $130 million in projects, over 30 to 40 projects that we have. This represents seven of them with a price tag of around $85 million. So it goes to show that we've got very large things on here, whether it be the fire vehicle apparatus program, the radio system upgrade program, as well as mobile data computers. But we also have smaller projects that are also critical to what we're trying to do. We also put on here the pressures as well, because I think it is something, as our colleagues in technology services pointed out as well, that whether those pressures are first responder needs, or rising unit costs, or expiring gear, or aging infrastructure, these are all things that we have to consider for these core systems that we're looking to replace. And the next slide. When we're looking at what has changed, it's kind of the ongoing theme where we're really talking about the investments in public safety communications, vehicles, and response equipment. That's been the biggest change from the last CIP. If we had to show this from a CIP 10 years ago, it would be a pretty interesting comparison, one I think we would definitely want to look at. But I think, again, we're seeing those rising costs and some of the more complex things, the complex pieces that feed all of public safety agencies. So we are seeing those drivers of more projects, unit cost increases, inflation. There is a piece, too, about the capex and opex. I think that's probably more on the DTS side, but we've seen it as well on our side. And we're starting to see that where it has benefit is we're seeing less hardware replacement costs. They used to be very hard to budget when we were doing things for CAD, for example, and replacing servers. So we are seeing some of that change a little bit across the board. And next slide. And I wanted to point out in here that while we're seeing about $24 million in changes from the last CIP, working with DMF and the financial magic that they were able to do, really spreading those things out. So we're not looking at a huge spike in one year where we're trying to do $24 million in one year. We've really worked to try to figure out what is the best way we can spread these costs around. what are the best ways that we can meet the program needs, meet the asset needs, stay in a state of good repair, and not expose ourselves to equipment breaking or not being of any use. So kudos to DMF and to PSIT working together on that one. Remember, I said good things. So next slide. And again, the interest, I don't want to walk through every single project, but they are available here. And I think one of the key things you wanted to point out on the next few slides is, again, we really take the investment areas seriously. We try to look at what's the best way we can balance those projects, how they meet the common goals. And then we really look at those replacement years. So when you look at the total cost, that's the cost over the 10-year period of time for replacing. So you have, you know, multiple years of public safety radios or multiple years of call premise equipment, for example. So looking at that one, that's our upgrade of our 911 system and the replacement of consoles and other equipment and hardware in the ECC. And I think it's worth noting, too, that everything we have on here, similar to what technology services said, we do have inflationary costs. We work together with DMF on that. But the technology is what we know of it today. We can't really anticipate passed out, though, that five-year window. So when we're looking at especially the technological solutions, even as it deals with response equipment, it's what we know of that technology today. So when we do our next CIP, there could be a major, not a major change, but just a change in what some of those solutions are. The next slide. I've been mentioning response equipment. I think, again, we're looking at some of these projects being in the near term. So whether it's personal protective equipment, ballistic shields, or bomb team suits and robots, we did talk about that changing nature of federal money. So not being able to have access to some of those post-emergency response dollars has changed. And we're starting to see that creep into operating side, but as well as capital as well. So when we start to see those changes take place or there's a need for first responder equipment, those replacement years get prioritized. They get moved forward because we really need to make sure that we're giving our responders in the field the best tools that we can give them. Next slide is IT applications. Again, a handful of projects on here. You can see just from the total cost that there is a wide range. So if we're looking at something like criminal justice records management system, that's a big project for us in the near term. It's really the backbone of our public safety record keeping, allowing agencies to capture, store, manage incident response data, case inmate data. And we have to ensure that system is up to date. so it's one of the things that we have been working with everyone on prioritizing making sure that we have the the bandwidth to do that and making sure that we have the the financial abilities to do that as well also you'll see on here mobile data computers and infrastructure it's something i know we talked a little bit about during the operating budget in 27 where some of the flexibility and the models of the of of what we're trying to replace um but again what we've put forward here is the technology that we know today next slide So this is our facilities investment area, and as I mentioned in the beginning, you're not going to see the big facility work. That is again managed by other folks. This is kind of where It's the technology in those centers or working together with the stakeholders and the project managers where we need updated equipment or AV. So whether it's the AV in the Emergency Operations Center or alerting in fire stations, this is usually us working together with either Facilities Design or other agencies to see what else is needed in those facilities. That's probably why it's the smaller of all the project areas. And last, but definitely not least, is our vehicles. So yeah, there you go. This is one of our largest investment areas. It's not just our vehicle apparatus, but other things as well. Bomb unit, air truck, command vehicle. This has been a huge success story for the fire department. It's been a great program. It provides us with a stable fleet of vehicles that meets the needs of first responders. I don't know the total number of vehicles in the program. I know fire department knows, but they're replaced about every eight years or so to ensure they're being well maintained and efficient. And they also maximize the buyback potential as well. So I know it's something that fire works on with the auto fund to make sure we're replacing these things in a timely manner. Kind of helps with the precise planning and lead time because I know it's something they have to do in the out years. So that is, I ran it through quick, but that's all of our project areas. Again, I think the overarching theme for us is just kind of the working together across public safety and the prioritizing as a group to ensure we get first responders and systems that are core to our needs refreshed.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Colleagues, we are in control of our own destiny at the moment. I will pass to Mr. Spain to kick us off.

And I'll make sure we end on time. Thank you for your presentation. And excuse me from the last iteration. I'm on track now. When we look at slide number 14, I'm just curious. So the $450,000 that's going to the public safety fire range, basically to take care of the deteriorating ceiling tiles, installation of gutters, going on and on. That's a shared facility with EMWA, right, that we use. Just curious to know what How much does NY put into this? I know we're putting our part into it, but can someone tell me what NY does? Because I know they have a whole lot of money.

Sure. I'll sort of briefly just review for those that are unfamiliar. The Shared Firing Range is an 11 and a half acre facility located on the Dulles Airport property. That supports not just the Arlington County Police Department but also the Sheriff's Department as well as our fire marshals who are required to qualify annually and then also for our new hire training for recruits that come in in all three programs. Cost split is decided based on a memorandum of understanding that we have with them on capital and then also based on the usage. So on the capital side, that was pre-negotiated and determined based upon the size of the agencies. But then based on the usage is how much goes into, for example, the backstop. Right. So that's one of the projects on the 300 yard range the rubber backstop which has to be Remediated because of the lead content of the expended projectiles that that cost is calculated and then split amongst the agencies based on the Usage of it. So essentially it's our our time and the facility and number of people that we have that use it and

Thank you, Dr. Robb. That's good for me. And Madam Chair, just Vice Chair, one final question here. So great presentation. I think this is probably you're going to be speaking for all of these folks here. I don't know. Y'all got them here. They're not at the table. But do you feel that with this CIP that all of your most critical assets, which we're going through a refresh, is being addressed through this level of CIP funding. I would assume so, but we have the leaders here and I want to make sure we're not missing the mark and they can speak for themselves, but we feel like at this point everything's being addressed that needs to be addressed.

Yes, I'll do my best to speak for everyone. I think one of the things that we've done in this 10-year CIP is we did focus on the highest priority items. So given what was available, we were able to prioritize things. Are there things that when we are prioritizing didn't come to the table, there's potential. But I do feel that this $130 million does represent the highest priority, not just that, but of also what we can implement in the near term. So I feel like there may be some other projects that we discuss. There's always more. But I do feel that as a group, we did focus on the high priority items.

And I do want to say that I think one of the interesting things things about being a part of this program is that the public safety leadership sits together on a rim and really puts their ego aside to make decisions that are best for the system as a whole. And sometimes that decision is, okay, we're gonna have to defer X because we need to do Y, and we understand that that is better for the system as a whole. I do want to just point out, and I think, you know, just for the record to be able to support, we all know on the facility side that there are significant needs within the Justice Center, in particular the detention facility. And so I'll let the sheriff sort of talk about those things. But that is a much larger conversation, I think. And that's part of the scope that you all have heard across the facilities conversations that go on. Again, we don't necessarily manage our facilities capital ourselves. That's in conjunction with DES. But I didn't want to miss the opportunity to highlight that for the sheriff because we do talk about that.

I'm satisfied. Thanks.

Great. And I'll go all the way to the end to Mr. Karantonis.

Yes. So thank you, Madam Vice Chair. Quick question. Thank you for the presentation and all the prep materials to that. So I have a lot of... I invested a lot of expectations in CAD in the dispatch, the computer-aided dispatch system, which we basically just started to, so what I don't know is what is the next step for that? So what should we be preparing to invest in the next four years in terms of capabilities? Because I do believe that this is, the key thing on CAD is that scalability of that. And, you know, even in the operating budget, we had a lot of conversation with fire department on how much predictive work we can do and, you know, actually greatly economize on how we deploy assets. So this is what I would like to hear about.

Yeah, good afternoon. Jake Sauer from Emergency Communications. So if you think about the CAD system, think of it as a large aircraft carrier. We just took it from Newport News. We're just doing our sea trials at the moment. We're the first in Virginia and second in the nation to put a CAD system with all three disciplines, police, fire, and medical, into the cloud. The good thing about that is we're working with the vendor to finish designing that CAD system to our best needs. But it sets us up in the future for next generation 911 and public safety. So it makes it much more nimble for us to connect to other public safety platforms that the police and fire departments are using or receive additional data from other platforms that are already hosted in the cloud. It makes it much more nimble for us to connect to those and start receiving that data and also pushing that data out to first responders. So it's set Arlington up, I think, in a much better space than most counties and cities in the nation, actually. They're working to get to where we are.

Thank you. That's insightful and meaningful. One thing that crosses always my mind, kind of the mind of somebody who doesn't know this in depth, is that the better the system is, the more bespoke to our needs it is. the more our delivery of service depends on the system, the more we have to think of redundancies and safety layers. So isn't that an additional component Isn't that a kind of expenditure that we have to plan with?

So no, that is inherent to this new CAD and one of the things that made it very advantageous for us. So our old CAD system was very bespoke to us. It was very old as well. But one of the problems was when that CAD system went down, that was it. We were now on paper and relaying manually information to first responders. This new CAD system is hosted here in Virginia in a secure, sieges law enforcement environment with the federal government. But in fact, next week we do our first test on failover. So if that were to ever go down, we'll failover to another place. This one is going to be Texas, but we have a lot of different failover sites within the nation that we can fail over to. So our first test, well, that will be next week. So that in the future, if something were to happen to the Virginia site or our connection to the CAD, it will automatically fail over and we'll continue to keep running like nothing ever happened.

Thank you. I yield.

Great. Thank you, Ms. Cunningham.

So I'd love to go back to page 8, 9, 10, but kind of talking about the CIP increases since two years ago. Am I reading it correctly that it's basically a 40% increase in two years? It's 85 now. It was 60-ish last time, or am I mangling the math?

I know there was a reference to 40% somewhere, but I'd have to get those numbers back. I know that the 85 million on slide eight, those are just some projects that we picked as big projects.

Oh, I see.

Just to show that like... Then that's probably not the right number, so we'll take that offline. Those are like a 65% of the total. We have some huge projects. We have had some increases, and we can pull those numbers to do a comparison. Great.

It's always dangerous for me doing math on the fly. I apologize. And then on page nine, which helpfully highlighted the difference by category, is there any reason, is the public safety communications particularly high because of the changeover, or are those costs going up faster than usual?

There's one project on there which is our radio system infrastructure. So when we talked about the pressures of aging infrastructure, it's something that we've known about for a few years that we've just been trying to scope over the last few years. So it's not a new project. It's something that we've replaced probably 20 years ago, I think, or so. So that is the change in that it was not in the last CIP. It's here. It is a near-term project, but it just wasn't in the last CIP because we were just trying to get those costs identified. So that's the big jump right there. It really is just that one project driving that.

Great. And then finally, just because we had really good fireworks from the deputy manager on this topic during the operating budget, the computers in the cars that are $8.5 million, if we did not have a state mandate that seems a little silly, how much would we save again?

I can't give you a number, but I can tell you that everybody would love that because they'd get to stop lugging around a 9.5-pound brick. But we are and we have advanced some conversations as part of the new CAD rollout in ways that we can, where positions do not require those, use a tablet, use an iPad, which you know, is a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the monthly support costs. And as a matter of fact, Chief Pavlitz has agreed to try it out and he will be one of our tests. His unit, for example, he has a full size MDT. He uses that when he's out responding to calls, he uses that when he's out in the field, but we believe we have a way to be able to change some of that up. So we're starting that hopefully in the next couple months.

Great. I appreciate that. And I think, you know, the drivers here of more projects also makes me wonder what unfunded mandates may be out there. But I think it's important, particularly in these areas where the costs are ballooning so fast, that we invite Richmond to partner with us to control that cost. Thank you.

We can invite Richmond to a lot of things. We'll see if they show up. Mr. DeFranti.

Thank you. I have one question which is on. e-summons system and in the book talks about $5 fee and a $1.465 million cost. So is this could be for follow-up? Is the, we're collecting the $5 fee and above that the total cost, the total net cost is $1.465 million. Is that?

Yeah, I think we'll have to probably get it for follow-up, but I do know with the eSummons, the way that it's structured, there's an ongoing maintenance cost for the system that what we collect I think helps pay for that, and then every five years there's an update of the system. I believe the base maintenance is around $80,000 to $85,000 a year, and I think that's what's being collected there. helps pay for that. So what's being presented in the 1.5 million is a combination of all of that plus the upgrades. But we will get you a follow up on that.

And I don't know if Richard, yeah Richard I think that's right because we've been collecting this five dollar fee for I think at least probably 10 years now and we put it in a fund so that when we're ready to do the capital upgrades the money is there. The fact that it's showing as a large expense, I think, means it's been collected over a period of time. It doesn't mean that we all of a sudden have to find all the money, but it's showing the expense.

Sure. I think maybe it could be useful just to have a short conversation. We've criminalized poverty for the history of the Commonwealth, and yet if you can afford it and you commit a crime, I think it's not legal, but I think if you can afford it and commit a crime or have a summons, ideally I'd love you to pay for our system. But maybe just a conversation with Richard and you would be helpful if we can, thanks.

Great, and I will wrap us up. You mentioned that the changes in the federal landscape have impacted some of our costs. Are there specific categories or lines within the CIP that would have been federally funded, or is it more of just a pervasive throughout the program?

I think what we're seeing is that we know that federal programs have changed. And when I say programs, meaning like funding programs, right? So things that were available as grant programs in the past have dried up. So it's not to say that this project was definitely funded in the CIP with those monies, but that there are areas that we've been able to look at in the past. We've had UTV replacement, the terrain vehicles that we've used grant funds on in the past. we don't have those grant funds available anymore. They've been phased out over the years. New grant programs emerge for different technologies. I think that's just what we're seeing in the changing landscape is that there's different programs now for different things, things that were purchased many years, 10 years after 9-11, whether it was response equipment, those federal programs aren't there anymore. So unlike the operating budget where we saw grant funds being eliminated and that going away, here we're just starting to see the shift and the philosophical shift too.

Got it. I think that's helpful for us to understand. And then finally, I know this is not the facilities conversation, but I do think given who we have here, especially on the fire stations, I'd love to invite Chief Pavlitz up because I think that is one of the most significant changes within the public safety CIP side is what we're doing on fire stations. And I think I don't know how, I know we have facilities on the 23rd. I don't know how much of a presentation there will be focused on the fire stations in particular. So I'd love to invite you to share a little bit about the thinking behind the change from last CIP to this CIP and how we got there and what we should be worried about.

Two schools of thought. We definitely still have the need on the west end of Columbia Pike. We have an area, geographic area, which is over our four-minute desired travel time. We do have automatic aid coming in from Fairfax Fire and we also have two or three of our stations kind of arriving at the same time on West End of Columbia Pike and South Jefferson or South Carlin Springs Road, but there's a large dense population there. Our need is more EMS focused, so we're looking at alternative ways to provide some of that better coverage. We're looking at mobile integrated health. We are bringing our mobile integrated health provider online in a few weeks. We had a resignation. We're going to bring that back. That was very effective. We're also looking for more mobile EMS, alternative transport options and partnerships and other properties. We're exploring all options and hopefully we'll come back probably in two years We want to do something here and now. We have the ability to dynamically cover with some of our peak time EMS units, but I think we need a little bit more of a permanent solution. So that's a focus. Second focus is modernizing some of our existing fire stations and some of our real busy fire stations, such as our Clarendon Fire Station that is in the facility CIP. And that's what we need to be quick responders, maintain health and safety for our responders, and just a welcoming site that serves the community well.

Great. And so it sounds like you all have done a lot of analysis, but are we worried, especially when we're thinking about the west end of the pike, about what response times look like and our ability to, without a physical station there, respond to that community?

We're watching development. And right now, we do have a large population there. And there's projected to be an increase in that West End of Columbia Pike. So we are tracking that closely. And if we need to, we can, again, more dynamically, not so much in a fixed facility, but maybe we can find some temporaries within a short period of time. And that's where we're going to probably be presenting over the next year or two. We're considering those alternative options of service.

Okay. And then I think lastly, do we think that the west end of the Pike Fire Station is going to come back to us in a future CIP? Is it just beyond the 10-year horizon at this point, or are we kind of... reassessing our focus on a physical location there.

Reassessing and let's see if we can test some of these other deployment options and see if there is an impact over a given year of time, you know, based on that investment over a year. And then we'll come back and, again, evaluate in two years for the next CIP.

Great. Thank you. Thank you.

So if you're all set, thank you for leading us. You kept us way closer on time than I did in the first one. My goodness. For clarity, because you referred to it, Are we coming back to this topic in any future CIP session?

So when we have the facilities presentation, which I think is next week?

It's the 23rd.

Oh, the 23rd. Actually, I appreciate the fact that you called this out because we have hundreds of facilities to talk about, a lot to talk about. So we can and we will be able to answer questions about that subsequently, but if you have questions now for any of the staff here.

I think it's for my part in hopes of keeping it to, she did a better job than I did on timing, is Maureen's questions to get us starting to think about this seem good, but I just wanted to understand if we were going to have the bucket, the chance to come back to it. So we will. And with that, tomorrow we have a school work session. And so I will send materials that are already, those have been sent. And Ms. Cunningham, you want to ask another question? I have one last question.

Is it possible that if we took 10 minutes longer here to talk about fire, that our fire chief wouldn't have to be here on the 23rd? Because if so, I might offer that. Manager.

You know, it's at the board's pleasure, but I bet you I'm going to ask him to be here anyway. Okay.

Then let's wrap. Thank you. With that, we will have schools tomorrow. Thank you for answering the questions and for getting us started. And we will see you. I don't know the exact time off the top of my head for tomorrow afternoon's work session, but it is 3 o'clock. We will see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock. Thanks. We're adjourned. Sorry, 3.30. We're here.