Baldwin County Wastewater Utility Technical Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

Alright, 8.30.

If everyone would stand, please. I will lead us in an invocation, and then Commissioner Gruber will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. If you'll bow your heads with me, please. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we just thank you for this day, Lord. We thank you for Baldwin County, Lord. We thank you for this great place that we call home in our paradise. And Lord, we just ask you, Lord, to be with us today as we lay out the vision and the plans for the future of this county. Lord, we know that sometimes when there seems like there's no way, you're a way maker, Lord, and we just ask you to embolden us with the faith that you will help us see this through. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Please join me for a pledge.

with liberty and justice for all. Okay, thank you. I want to welcome everyone to the... July 14th Road and Bridge meeting. I'm Commissioner Underwood. I'm the chair of the Road and Bridge division this year. I'm sitting here with Commissioner Ball, who's the chairman of the commission, and then Commissioner Gruber, who is our finance chair. Commissioner McKenzie is away on vacation, and sometimes I wish I could be on vacation, but maybe that'll happen one day. The first item on our agenda today is the adoption of the January 15th, 2026 road and bridge meeting minutes. Do I have a motion?

So moved. Second.

I have a motion and a second. Are there any discussion? If not, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Okay. First of all, I just want to say thank you to all of those who have showed up today. Your time is valuable. This is something that we have been working on for quite some time, and to see it actually come and manifest into an actual vision and a plan, we're excited to unveil this to you. We've had several little sessions of people who have called and asked questions, and some of you may have seen some snippets of what we're looking at, but we hope that you'll be excited as to what we are about to show you about Baldwin County. As you know, we have four items on our agenda here. We have the Baldwin County Master Plan, a 10-year roadway connectivity priority plan, a 10-year intersection improvement plan, and our 30Q program funding update and future funding partnerships. So those are really the items for discussion from new business that we're bringing forth to you. I'm going to go ahead and... turn this meeting over to our county engineer, Frank Lundy.

Thank you, Commissioner. So we're going to kind of break these six items up just a little bit, as you just laid out. So for our Baltimore County Master Plan, Mr. Jay Dixon, planning director, is going to present this document. I want to just give a little bit of context before we jump into it. Several months ago, the county commission authorized The one that's in place has been in place for a few years now, and there are some areas that definitely need to be updated, and Jay has done a fantastic job of taking comments and items of concern and really folded it into a really, really good document that we're excited about. Once Jay is through, Assistant County Engineer Mark Ackerman is going to talk about our connectivity plan and our intersection improvement plan. And then lastly, County Administrator Roger Riddleman is going to talk about our financial aspects of these plans. So with that, Jay.

all righty thank you frank so good morning appreciate everybody coming nice to see a full room here um so uh as frank mentioned we we've been working over the last uh year or so to update our comprehensive master plan uh and our future land use plan uh for the county so uh we'll go through a few things here but the first i just want to really talk about what is the role of the master plan because this is often you know kind of confused and and and misinterpreted but the master plan really what it is it's a policy document it's not regulatory um you know it serves as a strategic guide for the unincorporated areas of balling county um it's really clear like the master plan is it's not a zoning ordinance it's not subdivision regulations it's not you know a budget capital improvement program or anything any kind of regulatory document at all but what it does is it does help influence those things as they are developed. So as we develop updates to the zoning and subdivision regulations or detailed plans such as the transportation plan or sector plans or natural resource plan, it acts as the policy guideline to help develop those. But it also helps through kind of community education you know to kind of help understand where you know where what smart growth looks like where do we want to see it happen where where investors should really focus their efforts where we have infrastructure available to support growth and things like that and then finally it really helps us with our framework when we start partnering with state and federal agencies to see how we want to continue our community growth within the county um so What you're gonna see today is kind of the first four chapters of what will eventually be an overall comprehensive plan. The state law does allow us to kind of adopt these things in pieces. You don't have to do everything at one time. So the overall kind of table of contents, we have the executive summary, our principles, goals, and recommendations, our future land use plan, our transportation plan. Those four things are what we'll talk a lot about today. But in the future, we can continue to expand upon this to add a natural resource plan, a county facilities plan, implementation plan, and sector plans. A sector plan, for anyone who doesn't know what that is, is basically a mini master plan for certain small areas of the county. So there's areas that are seeing you know, different growth challenges or anything specific for certain areas, we can kind of do a more focused master plan in certain areas. And those can be added later. But a little bit of an overview of our planning schedule. So as Frank mentioned, we started this last summer with our existing conditions and discovery phase. Winter and spring, we went through our growth analysis and scenario planning. Here we are now summer 26, working on our draft master plan. That's what we're delivering today. And ideally, this would look at sometime later this fall for an adoption by the county commission. But a little summary of our existing conditions and discovery phase. Most everybody knows a lot of these facts, but I'll go through them real quick. Obviously, we've been rapidly growing for quite some time. The last two census periods, we've grown 30% population each census period. So what that means is about 100,000 new residents since the year 2000. So a lot of the comments that we get on a pretty regular basis is concerns about our increased traffic congestion, higher cost of living, increased flooding risk, overcrowding of schools, loss of our farmland and natural areas, inadequate utilities, and then potential loss of our rural landscape. And part of this, what we've kind of affirmed is what makes Baldwin County such an excellent place to live is our quality of life, our natural environment, our scenic beauty, our rural small-town atmosphere, and our strong education institutions. So those things, obviously, are why people love to move here and are continuing to move here, which is great. We just need to make sure that we do it in a way that kind of protects those things as we continue to grow. But one thing through our data analysis is that we hear a lot about urban sprawl occurring. And the fact is, over the last 20 years, it's absolutely been going on in Baldwin County. So what that means is, since 2000, our census-designated urbanized areas have grown by about 60%. So the square mileage of urbanized areas is rapidly expanding. But in that same time period, our density of our urbanized areas has gone down. It was about, it grows about 1.1 dwelling units per acre. In 2000, it went all the way down to .87 at one point, I think in the 2010 census, and it's crept back up a little bit. So what that means is, you know, the definition of sprawl is that the urbanized area is getting bigger, but it's getting less dense. So we want to kind of try to do a little course correction on that and try to guide things in the right area so that doesn't continue to happen. But the statement that really kind of frames up what we're trying to achieve with the master plan is that future growth in Baldwin County should better balance development with preservation of quality of life, farmland, rural character, and natural areas. So some of the trends we've seen, our developed space, which, you know, developed open space and other developed areas has increased by about 40%. Our forest area and agricultural lands have decreased by about 20%. Our population has basically doubled, which we just talked about. Our jobs have basically doubled. And our transportation, you know, our ADT, you know, cars, average daily traffic has more than doubled. So with that, we went through our little summary of our growth analysis and scenario planning. So what we looked at is three different scenarios. Scenario one would be the focus growth scenario, which is our kind of preferred scenario. Scenario two is maximize infill, which would say like the cities would need to absorb pretty much all of the new growth in the county. And scenario three is our current trend, which we just talked about is not really an ideal thing to do. So we've discussed a lot about our growth, but there's some things that are really static. They're not negotiable. The fact is, We've been growing since 1980 and we're gonna continue to grow. So what that means by 2050, we have to have another 87,000 dwelling units. That's not single family houses, that could be apartments or anything and that's countywide, including the cities. So what we have to acknowledge is that we have to absorb that somewhere. And so what we're trying to figure out and try to guide is how do we absorb that in a smart way. But under all three scenarios, the fact is the cities don't, they lack sufficient land available to absorb all that. We cannot rely on the cities to absorb everything. So, you know, a couple things that have been happening, you've had for the last 20 years, we've had a trend of requiring larger residential lots near city boundaries, which could, one, it hinders future growth of those cities, but also it kind of pushes that density away from the cities where we kind of would ideally, from a regional perspective, like to see most of that growth happen. So ideally what would happen is that residential densities in those fringe areas would match the densities of whatever community they're surrounding. So everything we talk about in the SMASH plan is about guiding the character and keeping the character of these different communities throughout the county consistent. So we don't want to drastically change density of any city or anything like that, but we do want to see things kind of grow and match that character and that density as they grow. So a little summary of the impacts of each scenario. Scenario three, our current trend, if we continue on our current trend, by 2050 we'll have another 68% expansion of urbanized area. So what that means is there's another 104 square miles of census designated urbanized area. But what that does, that keeps the density, kind of what it is right now, about 1.06. And for reference, our cities, most of our cities are somewhere around the 1.2 to 1.4 gross units per acre. That's about the density of most of our cities. They all vary a little bit. Obviously, the beach cities are a little more dense than some of the other cities. So scenario two, to maximize infill, that would basically say, hey, we're not going to Really, we're not gonna encourage any future urbanized expansion, but to do that, the kind of average density of cities would need to go up to almost two units an acre, which like I said, is pretty drastically different than the character of the cities right now. So that's really not a very feasible option either. So our preferred scenario, which is focused growth, it kind of balances urbanized growth, but also maintains the character of some of these areas. And so what that means is it doesn't allow some expansion of the urbanized area But it keeps that urbanized density about 1.3 dwelling units acre Like I said, which is you know pretty close to what we're the character of our cities are right now So the principles and goals established with a master plan we have several categories first is land use And the document, the full document has a full description of all these things, but I won't go through the full descriptions today. But basically what we want to do with land use is a future land use plan that allows for growth while balancing the preservation of natural and agricultural heritage of Baldwin County You can see the goals there that kind of what I just mentioned with the growth analysis. On the transportation side, we want to create a safe, efficient transportation system that supports regional connectivity. Mark will go over that a lot today. Economic development. know we're still working through a lot of those details of those goals but in general what we want to do is continue our growth and prosperity of the bottom county economy you know we've got a very vibrant robust and diverse uh economy in baldwin county now probably more diverse than it ever has been and so we want to continue on that path But at the same time, we want to preserve our farmland and rural character. So that's really key is when we talk about guiding growth is making sure growth is occurring in the right areas and preservation is occurring in the right areas so we can kind of keep that quality of life balanced the way we want to. natural resources we want to conserve protect and restore Baldwin County's natural habitats and ecologically significant areas and then finally utilities and infrastructure have fiscally responsible public services utilities and infrastructure at location that efficiently serve the housing and development needs in Baldwin County so utilities and infrastructure is probably probably the primary you know guiding factor of growth in the county you know it's going to it's going to happen where infrastructure is available for to support that that kind of growth but also where utilities infrastructure or not those are primaries for preservation because it's just not ready for growth yet and we should kind of really pay very close attention to that so real quick i want to go through a couple of just just again make it kind of clear the difference between the future land use map and zoning because i know that's gotten really confused in the past But again, the Future Land Use Plan and Map, it's a policy guide. It helps us plan, helps us with our decision-making processes, but it's not regulatory. Zoning, on the other hand, is a regulatory tool that defines current legal uses for each piece, each parcel within the county, well, each zone parcel within the county. But again, it's not regulatory. It does broadly identify types of land uses that are anticipated throughout the county and their preferred locations. And it's not, you'll see in the maps in a little bit, it's not a rigid map. This is not taking every parcel and designating it for a specific future land use. This is talking about large areas and characters of large areas and kind of how we want to see those areas continue to grow or maintain what they have. But it's not intended in no way. It's meant to take each parcel and designate it a future land use like a zoning map does. So, most people are well aware of this, but, you know, in Alabama, the county commission has very limited ability to enact and enforce zoning. You know, we have some local laws that have enabled that. But, you know, so what that creates is with the future land use plan, it has two different ways it's kind of utilized. In unzoned areas that have not voted to come under zoning laws, it really doesn't apply for anything for land use. But what it does do is it provides us kind of some anticipated growth and things that kind of help us with our infrastructure planning and our transportation planning. And also, similar to what's happened up in Stockton right now, when a new district votes to come under zoning laws, the future land use map can help guide how that initial zoning map is developed. But really, in unzoned areas, what it's used for is kind of limited, but it does have some very relevant uses in unzoned areas. In zoned areas, however, it really becomes more relevant as we're evaluating development plans and rezoning applications. There's two different approaches. Basically, one approach is we kind of use it as a guide as we develop our zoning ordinance and our subdivision regulation updates and things like that. The master plan can help guide how those things are developed and what's included in them. But the other strategy that's most commonly used is when rezoning applications come before the county commission, staff uses the future land use plan and future land use map to kind of help guide how consistent is it with our long-range planning for the county. But the other thing is that the future land use plan is not static. It should be regularly updated, just like we're doing now. Our last plan was several years ago. And so it's time to update it, especially as fast as Baldwin County is growing. It's not static. We need to update it at least every five years and do a full master plan update every 10 years. So that's how we kind of keep current with growth patterns and growth as it's occurring. I've hit on several of these already, but kind of the benefits of the Future Land Use Plan, it helps us plan for growth, provides that long-term framework. It helps coordinate our public services and infrastructure, like I just mentioned. It really helps with our consistency in decision-making. So when we start looking at different development applications, one of the biggest things we need to do is make sure we're consistent of how we're reviewing things and how we're applying our regulations, and it provides a great guidance for that. it protects the character of Auburn County like I just mentioned and attracts investment it gives gives investors the confidence that the county is prepared for growth and understands where we want to guide growth to be and kind of gives them a little bit of a guideline of where where they should be focusing their efforts and I mentioned earlier about it helps guide our zoning and development regulations so getting into the maps now which is the main part of this Basically we have eight different future land use categories and they're categorized into three categories. So we have preservation areas, so it's priority areas for preservation of rural character. They're low density and they kind of recognize that those community services are probably pretty limited in those areas. Then we have our transitional areas, these are areas that that are kind of transitioning from those rural preservation areas to the growth areas and that's rural neighborhood and highway corridor and the growth areas which would be the urban growth area unincorporated village node and regional economic opportunity area we'll go through these in more detail in a second but i think it's important i know i've said this a couple times already but it's really important to remember that these land use categories are purposely very general. This is not a zoning ordinance, this is, again, giving a general guideline of the character of these areas that we wanna look at. So the first we'll go through is the farmland preservation, and kind of the highlights of that. is these are areas that are really devoted to large working farms where you have hundreds and thousands of acres of contiguous working farms. So we have, throughout Baldwin County, we have tons of areas that are pocket farms or little hobby farms or things like that. And we're not talking about those little isolated areas. We're talking about areas that are very large areas, expanses of true working agricultural land. The priority in this should be preservation through voluntary conservation tools. A lot of these areas don't have utilities, don't have services, they're just not really primed for development anyway, but obviously the goal would be to try to keep as much of these large fences intact as much as possible. Now it doesn't mean that development won't occur in these areas, but what it means is as those little nodes of growth happen, they're condensed, they're compact, and you know large areas are put into conservation as part of those those uh small pockets of development so you know if if there are higher density residential development that that happen in those areas you know we would look for like you know half of the property to be put into some kind of conservation easement or deed restriction that remain allows it to maintain remain being farmed by the the farming family or whoever and that way it continues to have that overall character in those areas But the density in these areas are about 64 dwelling units per square mile. And that's kind of looking at how the census designates things. That's the way they define urban or density in general. So quick math on that. On average, that means it's about one house per 10 acres. Doesn't mean that's 10 acre lots. It just means that on average in these areas, it's very low density. And you only have about one house per 10 acres gross density. Second is rural preservation, which is quite different than farmland preservation. You do see agricultural things happening in the rural preservation areas, but these are usually more isolated, smaller hobby farms and things like that. But it really starts adding in a lot of the timberland, a lot of the rural living and things like that. But again, the priority should be preserving these rural areas so they can maintain their timber operations or farming operations or whatever is going on. But the density, again, is very low, about 128 dwelling units per square mile. Do the math on that. That's on average about one house per five acres. This is another area that really doesn't have utilities available, so it should pretty much rely on on-site water and sewer. Conservation buffer, these are our natural areas for preservation. You know, there's a lot of different things that happen here. You do have a lot of timberland and a lot of kind of rural type things, but also this is where a lot of the floodways, a lot of the wetland areas, you know, all of our naturally sensitive areas along our waterways are kind of preserved through this area. so um again this is you know the priority in this area should be preservation through public acquisition or voluntary conservation tools uh these areas also you know surround a lot of our we have we have are fortunate to have a a lot of property in baldwin county that's already in conservation through public ownership or private conservation easements. And so a lot of these areas work off of those existing conservation areas to continue to expand those natural resource areas. But again, very low density, maximum density of 64 dwelling units per square mile, and then just kind of minimize any kind of small or higher density development that happens in these areas. So moving into the transitional areas. First is our rural neighborhood. This is where we start looking, where it starts transitioning into some of the residential uses. um and kind of developed neighborhoods um the density is still fairly low in in areas that don't have um public water and sewer you know the density is going to remain fairly low 128 to 256 dwelling units per square mile however in the areas that do have the adequate utilities in place, that density could go up to 256 to 640 dwelling units per square mile. And just for reference, so that 640 dwelling units per square mile, that's on average about one dwelling unit per acre. So that's kind of what we're seeing on our fringe cities right now. The second piece is the highway corridor. This is very similar to the neighborhood, but this starts to get into a little bit of a mixed use. These are focused around primary transportation corridors throughout the county. It does have a mix of residential natural habitats and some minor commercial activities. these commercial activities would be kind of focused around major intersections and things like that you'll see the corridors in a second but you know major commercial um uses would not be only you know major commercial would be in the economic opportunity areas or urban growth areas these are kind of more incidental small you know gas stations small convenience stores things like that that would support a lot of the rural areas because what happens on the corridors is basically you you think about the the development happening along the corridor but as soon as you get a half a mile off the corridor it goes back to its rural character you know so it's pretty isolated just just right there along the corridor um so the first uh moving into the growth areas the first would be our urban growth area um so the tool with this is to manage our urban sprawl we want to really encourage these areas to absorb a lot of the future growth uh a lot of these areas when you see the map is really areas that we probably would see logically be annexed into cities at some point in the next 20 years and if it doesn't if it's not annexed into a city it will at least feel like it's part of the city These areas, they really rely on the municipalities for their utility services. Their city's annexation plans should really match up with these urban growth areas. um and then um anyway so the the density you know it goes up to getting up around that 1.3 1.4 dwelling units per acre so 100 1280 to 3840 dwelling units per square mile and the density may may vary depending on where you're at um unincorporated village nodes this is our basically unincorporated communities throughout the the county such as you know uh lillian and Seminole, Perdido, things like that. But again, it's mixed use areas. These act like little cities, even though they're not incorporated, they are their own communities, they have their own identity, and they should kind of continue to grow to match their character. But very, very similar to, you know, kind of what we're seeing in the cities, you know, relatively higher density, but not quite as dense as urban growth areas. You know, you'll have mixed use of some minor commercial and things like that to help support those communities. regional economic opportunity areas these are areas that are strategically focused along the i-10 and i-65 corridors so these are areas of regional significance for job creation and it's really trying to protect some of the large tracts of land and keep them contiguous to allow for those those larger industrial and commercial growths to happen in those areas that work off of our transportation systems Those densities and things vary depending on location and depending on what industry is looking at the area. But in all these kind of growth areas, I pointed out on this one specifically that there can be a holding lane use. So if a lot of these areas are currently being timbered or farmed or whatever, that's fine. They'll continue to be kind of used in that manner temporarily until the right industry comes in and we kind of convert that over to an economic area. So with that, we'll get into the maps. So remember, on each one of the descriptions, the color code at the top of the page kind of correlates with the land use. So in the south part of the county, we'll start kind of Fort Morgan, because it's the easiest. You know, Fort Morgan is already primarily in conservation as it is. And from a future land use standpoint, it's pretty well determined what it's going to be. There's a very, very small area of rural neighborhood where the houses are. We've got two small village center nodes, one by the Beach Club area and then another down by Fort Morgan Marina. Then the gray area on the map, all those are areas that are already incorporated into cities. So as you move up, I'm sorry, Ono Island is already kind of dictated. It's that urbanized area kind of to the southeast there. But moving up, the orange area is Josephine, unincorporated village node. There's a lot of Orange Beach. It has some annexed property in there. But that's a node there. We have a node over at Bon Secours off of County Road 10 and 49. um the brown areas you can see are the highway corridors that follow some of the major transportation corridors uh the pink area you can kind of see there between foley and gulf shores and summerdale that's kind of the rest of that infill that's been happening for the last many years already we kind of see that continuing but basically for that urban growth area in that part of the county we look at kind of this 165 corridor as being the westerly kind of cap for it and the easterly cap for it being you know somewhere um just east of foley kind of near where the easterly portions of foley sea limits are um the yellow areas are the rural neighborhoods you can kind of see in that south part a lot of those areas have already started transitioning out of farmland production into rural neighborhoods um as you go to the east there the the orange area that's lillian and uh the you know got some rural neighborhoods south of that but also that light blue area all that black blue you know north of 98 east of 87 and 32 and all that that's farmland preservation so when we talk about farming if you think about anyone's ever been to those areas you've just got you know hundreds of thousands of acres ambiguous acres of um active farmland and so we talk about that that's when we talk farmland preservation those are the areas that we're kind of have in mind We also have some farmland preservation that has similar characteristics south of Magnolia Springs around the 49 area. You can kind of see it on the map. And also north of 98, north of Magnolia Springs. So then the dark blue area is the rural preservation. And you can kind of see a lot of that area is transitioning into more timberland and more rural living. The green area, you can kind of see Weeks Bay and Fish River there. You can kind of see our conservation buffer following Fish River up and some rural preservation transitioning up into rural neighborhoods around the Silver Hill area. Then the Eastern Shore, you can kind of see the urban growth areas around Fairhope out to 181. That's the pattern we've been seeing for at least the last 10 years. That's going to continue. The 181 corridor over there kind of is the delineating line for where we want to sort of kind of guide the urban growth to sort of stop on the 181 corridor. And as you get east of 181, transition out to the rural neighborhood areas. Then moving up to Loxley, you can kind of see the same thing there about some of their growth is anticipated. They've grown north of the interstate pretty rapidly. We think that eventually they'll start seeing a little bit of growth to the southeast. But the red areas are areas of regional economic opportunity. So on the east side there, the brown line going up, that's the Baldwin Beach Express and the interchange there. The red area is the interchange at I-10. And Mark will talk a little bit more later about the Baldwin Beach Express 2 extension from 10 to 65. And as that happens, that interchange is going to be a lot more prominent in the future. So we really anticipate that area being an economic growth area. Same thing over in Locksley. We've seen a lot of, Locksley's seen a lot of expansion with their distribution centers and a lot of their industry. We think that's going to kind of continue around the I-10 interchange over time. So moving up to the central part of the county. You can kind of see Loxley and I-10. We're on the bottom half of the page there. But the village node there in the center, that's Stapleton. You see a lot of rural neighborhoods that are happening in that area. That's actually been kind of the pattern for quite some time, and we kind of anticipate that to continue. You can see the brown corridor on the east side there, that's Baldwin Beach Express 2 extension going up to Baymanette. And then, so Baymanette is, you know, that's been, there's a lot of things changing in Baymanette right now. With Novellus coming online, the big red area is the Novellus mega site and the whole economic area that's under construction right now. So we kind of see that continuing to be a major driving force in that area. But as that continues to develop out, we kind of think Dave and that will start growing northeast along the 31 corridor to go out and touch some of that industrial complex out there.

Jay, I want to interrupt you just a moment and just to clarify what he's saying. If you look at that screen that's projected up there, those colors are not as vivid as they need to be. And so it's kind of what's supposed to be, you know, rural preservation or whatever kind of looks to me. I don't think I'm colorblind, but it looks gray. And so, you know. It's a whole lot better picture on the screen he's looking at than what's up there. So just wanted to point that out. That's not as clear as it is what's on these screens in front of us and that. And we will have this on our website so people can see more clearly. So sorry to interrupt you. No, you're right.

Maybe you needed to breathe. You're right about that. But then you can see the 225 corridor on the west side there, and basically everything west of the 225 corridor is in preservation. A lot of that already is in preservation, and definitely the Delta should continue that pattern of preservation on the west side. then um north part of the county basically what we look at is you know as novellas come you know continues to come online and some other things that will eventually happen around novellas you know we do think that that area along the 65 corridor will continue to see some residential growth and things like that the you know the orange areas are stockton to the west raven in the middle and then perdita on the um the east side there But that's kind of where we, for the next 20 years, we don't see a whole lot happening anywhere north of that. I think from 65 south is where a lot of our growth is going to be absorbed. From Stockton and Raven north, it's all rural Timberland now. It's going to kind of continue to be that way. There's no utilities available there. It's just not ready for growth, and nor should it be encouraged to have growth up there. It's just not where we want to see it. But I think that is all for the future land use plan. Mark, turn it over to you for transportation.

Thank you, Jay. Before we get started, I want to say a huge thank you to my transportation team. This is the collective work of over a year's worth of effort by a large team, and Frank and his guidance on this as well, and especially Jessica Maya, who helped me put together the visuals for this. I want to get started with the transportation plan. is our vision for the next 10 years I know this is a very aggressive vision that we're undertaking here and our guiding principle for all of the transportation improvements that we'll be talking about this morning is a safe efficient transportation system that supports regional connectivity so this connectivity we're talking about is better connections of our roadway networks better connections of our communities our urban centers, our distribution centers, our commercial centers. And the way we're going to determine what's needed, where's it needed, is a vision metric. And a metric is a measurement that tells you how you're doing. So we're going to set our goal of every road in our whole system of a level of service D or better and a volume to capacity ratio of 85%. Now what that means is, in the transportation terminology, We can give ourselves a report card. Now, D sounds like a bad grade, and there's some times I would have taken a D gladly, but in this instance, it's a little bit different. A scoring system is from A to E, so it goes all the way out, and then there's F, which is beyond capacity. So a D means you're operating at about 85%, so these two terms are interchangeable. So if you imagine... You're a pipe or you're running down a roadway. What does that mean? Well, you're running at 85% capacity, which means it's busy, but it's still moving. Now, this is really good to mainly focus on the most intense areas of transportation. If you travel the county road, most of the time it's very free-flowing traffic. until you get to an intersection and that's where you start to see the congestion and I'll talk about that later on in the presentation I think it's important that we kind of talk about how are we grading our roadway networks how do we know when it's time to provide a new connection or provide a new intersection improvement so the overall transportation plan is a guide on how Baldwin County is going to respond to future land use and growth Transportation and land use are interchangeable. I mean, they're a symbiotic relationship. As land use changes, the transportation needs for that area changes. As you build corridors, land use changes around those corridors. So it's important that these two guides work together and not against each other as we start looking into the future. The plan identifies our roadway capacity, our connectivity, and multi-modal needs to maintain a functional network. And in a nutshell, we're looking across our whole network of roadways. We have 1,400 miles of paved roads and 200 miles of unpaved roads. And that could be gravel, that could be dirt. We have a lot of roads in Baldwin County. Baldwin County as a whole, land-wise, is larger than the state of Rhode Island. So we're a big county, and we have a lot of roadway networks, and we're very spread out. So it does provide some challenges, but also opportunity to distribute the transportation needs across multiple roadway networks. But like with any good plan, if you don't update it, you don't keep it fresh, you don't reevaluate what you've achieved to see if it's working the way you want it, What do we see in the growth? How are we seeing growth change? And how do we need to adjust in the future? We've got to keep this plan updated to align with current and future growth patterns. So we have four main goals of our transportation plan. Safety, efficiency, a connected network, and it needs to be fiscally responsible. So obviously safety speaks for itself. We want to improve the safety of the regional transportation network. Some of the intersection improvements you'll see, some of the connectivity plans that you'll see are in a direct result of addressing some safety issues. Areas we have higher than normal accidents. Efficiency. We want to make sure that if you get on one of our roadway networks that you can get to where you're going safely first, but also in an efficient manner. You drive the speed limit, you should get there. You shouldn't be impeded by traffic. Now, I will say, I will caveat this. As you all know, if you're in a hurry, you need to get to a doctor's appointment or drop your kid off at school, inevitably you're going to get behind that one person that's driving 20 to 30 miles under the speed limit. or a farmer that's needing to move something from one field to another. This doesn't address that, so I just want you to know when you get behind somebody that's just driving slow, you just have to smile and bear it. But having a connected network may give you another road where you can peel off and go around this individual with a parallel roadway network. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. And then first and primarily, if we can't afford these projects, we can't build these projects. So we have to be physically responsible with what we're proposing. We have to look for partnerships. We have to look for public partnerships, whether that's grants or municipal partnerships, and also private sector contributions. As developments grow, we need to ensure that the developers pay their fair share to mitigate their impacts to the transportation networks throughout the whole county. So how are we gonna achieve our safety goals? I'm gonna take each one of our four goals and give you some high level ideas of how we're going to judge a success. Safety goals, we're gonna advance intersection and corridor upgrades that reduce conflict points. These are our dangerous intersections, misaligned intersections, intersections next to hills where we need more turn lanes or we need traffic signals. Support multimodal improvements for all road users. Some of these transportation networks, especially as you're getting closer to your urbanized areas, needs to be multimodal. They need to be complete streets and that means we need to have detached bike trails. I'm a big advocate of those in areas where they make sense. We have other connections we have to to continue on between urbanized areas. Address high crash corridors and intersections. We already mentioned that with our safety goals. Develop a countywide safety plan through the Eastern Shore NPO collaboration. So we're actually studying the whole county right now in a partnership with Eastern Shore to look at where our needs are from a safety standpoint. We'll put those in a comprehensive plan on its own and that will open us up for additional public funding opportunities to do even more with your tax dollars. So our efficiency goals. We want to advance roadway connections to reduce travel times and distribute traffic. Roads respond like a pipe network. If you have a pipe that has too much water in it, it gets under pressure. You add additional pipes to that network, guess what? That water goes to where there's no pressure. Roads respond the same way. If you're driving a roadway network and you build additional roadways that have that aren't underutilized, travelers will automatically migrate to these roads to get to their same destination. You'll offload a major road like a Highway 59 or Beach Express and instead try to find a County Road 65 County Road 55 or County Road 32 to try to find another way to get to your destination without having to fight the congestion, sometimes on our busier highways. So that's why we're going to look strategically at these networks of roadways and build these connections that gives people parallel roadway networks. So if a County Road 64, for instance, is really busy, you can go one road over and hopefully find some relief. We're gonna use data-driven analysis to identify our capacity and our congestion needs. So what we're talking about here is the county commission has invested in the Highway Department to allow us to utilize some state-of-the-art tools that will be able to look at real traffic throughout the whole county and look at where are we seeing real-time congestion, where are our numbers at? And this helps us not only identify areas of need, but also with an integrated real-time travel demand model, which we've just completed, to take that data and put it into a traffic model so we can test new roadway networks, new intersection improvements, to see how they're going to respond, to see if it's worth the investment. So before we start going down and spending hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in design, we want to make sure that we have some way to validate our projects before we even get off the ground with them. So we want to create a well-connected network. As I mentioned, interconnectivity and parallel roadways do a lot to remove traffic congestion, and also keep in mind, you get on a two-lane county road somewhere and there is an accident, unfortunately, then you don't want to be stuck on that road for hours. So parallel networks give you opportunity to find alternate routes if there is traffic congestion due to an accident. But also, if we had a major tropical event, we do not say the H word this time of the year, but if we had a major tropical event, we want to look for other ways to get people in and out of our county. If we need people to come in to assist us, we need to get our residents out to get them to safety. We want to have as many roadway networks as we can. So we want to advance our major corridors, such as the Baldwin Beach Express 2, which will go from I-10 to I-65. County Road 65 and County Road 20 are just a couple of major county-level corridors that we want to invest in. And this will improve our east, west, north, south route options. And there's way more corridors I'm going to show you in a minute. Coordinate our improvements for the municipal and development patterns. So we want to make sure that our corridors that we're proposing support our municipal partners as well as development patterns that we're seeing. So if we start putting corridors in areas that don't have the traffic yet, but we have some that have a current day need, we need to invest in those locations first. And then support regional planning partnerships for long-range connectivity. So this, again, is where you all come into play, our planning departments come into play, our municipal partners come into play. We all work together and understand where the needs are, not only for the county, but also for our municipal partners so that we can work on roadway networks that serve everyone. Fiscally responsible investments. Prioritize projects based on need, visibility, and long-term benefit. We're not getting our bang for a buck for a project. Might want to be looking at another one. So we want to look at those projects that are going to provide the most relief as quickly as possible. Use our innovative improvements to meet traffic demands. Look for new Look for new technologies. A few years ago, a roundabout was unheard of, and we use them now quite frequently, and they're very efficient. A lot of people don't like a roundabout. But the truth is, if the power goes out, a red light goes down. A roundabout still works. So keep that in mind too. If you look at the area that we're in, you look at the eastern shore and there's a prevalence of roundabouts in the eastern shore. That whole corridor functions just like it does today, even if there is a massive power outage due to a tropical event. And coordinate our investments with ALDOT, our MPOs, our municipalities, and private sector partners. I'll have some numbers in a few minutes regarding about how all of our spending, what makes up all of our spending. Where do we see funding coming from? And we have a lot of outside funding that really stretches each and every one of these tax dollars. The county commission has done an excellent job of being aggressive of looking for as many funding sources as possible to meet our needs. And that's a goal that we're always going to have. linchpin of my presentation is our connectivity plan this is going to identify gaps in the roadway network and needs extensions needed extensions highlight a regional corridor such as the Baldwin beach express to create more resilient and efficient transportation systems and support improved north south and east west mobility so this is a 10-year roadway connectivity plan this is this is my and our team's dream of what we'd love to see undertaken in the next 10 years. And I'm going to zoom in. You'll be able to see this better. But as you can see, we have plans for the entire county, starting at I-65 and going all the way down to our coastal communities. We'll start on the north projects. At I-65 and 287, And also, let's go ahead and mention the BBE-2. BBE-2 is this burgundy or dark red line here from I-10 all the way to I-65. 25 miles, divided highway, four lanes and two lanes in each direction. This is toll-free. and what we're looking at here is a continuation of the Baldwin Express to I-65 to really open up a major north-south corridor all the way to I-65 and this is much needed. So with any corridor like this that you establish you want to start looking at opportunities to establish east-west connections between these major what we call arterial roadways. These are our biggest roadways in Baldwin County. Your Highway 59s, your Baldwin Beach Expresses, your Interstates, your US 98s, these are our major corridors that we utilize to get north, south, and east, west. So our first corridor that we're looking at is what we call the Tiff District Commercial Corridor. This is going to interconnect 287 and the new Baldwin Beach Express just north of Novellus. And this is important for two reasons. The first, it will help with the distribution of freight and traffic from Novellus and that whole development in there. And this, although Novellus is the first project, hopefully we see more growth of industry in this area. It's a great location for it. And then secondly, it's going to encourage economic opportunities at I-65. And if you know today, if you're going through this area, there's not a lot to entice you to stop at I-65 and 287. So this is going to create some incredible commercial opportunities for Baymanet to really have people stop at I-65, get gas, get food, rest, whatever the case may be. But this will support those opportunities as well as provide for better traffic distribution in Avellis. Going down, we'll have the next project, which is actually in the middle of Baymanette, and that's the Red Hill Road and Clark Avenue connection. This is a 30Q project that we have with Baymanette. It's gonna help with school distribution during busy times. we'll continue on south the county road 39 west connection so what this would do this will this will connect from state route 59 back to the bbe2 at stapleton so it provides an east-west corridor for stapleton right now they're pretty much a north-south corridor you have 31 you have 59 so this provides them an east-west corridor as well better connectivity between two major arterial roads Also, it helps with any time we would, if we did have some type of emergency situation on Highway 59 in an area where it's very narrow compared to the rest of the route, gives a way to detour around that area. Finally, we get down into the Loxley area, and we have the bedrock extension. This is also a 30Q project partnership with Loxley, and that will extend bedrock from 31 to State Route 59. And then we want to continue that on with improvements to Truck Route 17 from Highway 59 all the way through to County Road 112. which is this road right here that goes into Florida. Loxley has done an incredible job in investing in distribution centers in Loxley. It's become a hub of distribution in Baldwin County. And this will support the... the distribution that's already there and additional opportunities in Locksley and provide better ways for freight to get in and out of the Locksley area without having to rely solely on Highway 59, especially if they're going north. Hopefully they'll just connect eastward to the BBE2 and go all the way to I-65. Now we're going to focus on the central part of Baldwin County and start still in the Loxley area. This is the intersection of the Beach Express and I-10. There's a little mom and pop place, a little gas station here, sells beaver nuggets. I don't know if you all have noticed, but they're pretty busy in the summertime and any day that ends in Y. So what we're doing here is we're looking at building some parallel roadway networks to help distribute that traffic around County Road 68. County Road 68 is the intersection at Buc-ee's. And as you know, that traffic backs up onto the interstate, and it also backs up onto 68 and backs onto the Beach Express. So what we're looking at improving in that area is better connectivity between County Road 64 and County Road 68, which will help address the congestion as well as improve safety at the intersection of County Road 64. And the way we plan to do that is to shift the red light about half a mile further south. And by doing that, you get more room for the cars to kind of funnel through that area. We'll move over to the eastern shore in and around the County Road 64 and Highway 181 area, Bell Forest area. The County Commission has invested millions of dollars in widening. We're three-laning County Road 64. Utility relocations have begun on that project. When that is complete, we'll start the roadway construction. But we're gonna three-lane County Road 64 at 181 going east about two miles. Well, we also know that there's going to be certain peak times of the day that that intersection is still going to back up. You've got multiple schools in that area. You have a lot of residents. You have a lot of business. And that early morning commute is always challenging. So we're going to help alleviate that with some of these road projects you see in this area right in here to build parallel networks to County Road 64. So if you're commuting down 64 and you see that 64 is congested in the mornings, everybody's getting a little more savvy on their GPS units on their phones. You can go down and go east or west and it's getting backed up. You can always go north or south and find a parallel roadway network, and whether that's Pleasant Road or Milton Jones or even Cordy Road, give our locals more opportunity and more choices to avoid traffic. Moving into the Robertsdale area, we're going to improve Fairgrounds Road and extend that to the Beach Express. As you know, our emergency shelter is on this road. This provides better access to this in the event of an emergency and it getting activated. So people can now get to that shelter from the Beach Express or from 59. So it gives the east side of the county and the west side of the county more connectivity to our emergency shelter. One of the projects that you've probably seen in the media quite a lot is this continuation of County Road 65. Right now, County Road 65 starts in Bon Secours and goes all the way to County Road 28 in Summerdale. And what we're doing is we're picking it up at 28 and we've opened bids. They're under review right now. And as soon as those reviews are complete, we'll be moving forward with building the next segment which will take 65 up to 32. And then from 32, our goal is to get it to County Road 48. That's the red light in front of Walmart and Robertsdale. So that gets us all the way to 104. So this is going to create a north-south corridor. It goes from the state route. Actually, it goes all the way to the north part of Robertsdale because it becomes Palmer Street. It's a 21-mile corridor. And so what we want to do also is provide some relief on County Road 55 adjacent to the new elementary school and extend County Road 48 to 65. Now, moving into the Summerdale area, we want to realign County Road 32 at 55. Anybody that's ever driven that route or had to navigate that intersection knows there's some really bad hills in the vicinity of that intersection, and we have had multiple crashes. This is a project. This is a safety-driven project. It's really going to help improve that safety of that intersection by making it align a little bit further east where it's nice, flat terrain. You've got good visibility in both directions. Moving over into what I'll call the Elsinore area. A long time ago, there was a road, CC Road, that extended south of Highway 90 many, many, many years ago, probably 40 plus years ago. A bridge went out and it was not a very utilized road, but we would love to see that road reestablished. And the reason being it would provide direct connectivity from the whole southeastern part of the county to US 90. And why is that important? Because in the case of an evacuation, US 98 can get very congested and everybody's moving into Florida. And if you could skip 98 and go one more state route up, you can go east and west off that state route. So it's very important to provide our residents opportunity to move out of the county if they need to in a case of an emergency. We also have a Warner Road extension from 83 to County Road 87. Again, this is just trying to interconnect some of our heavily utilized county roads. And finally, we're gonna move into the far south extreme of the county. This is the Bon Secours Gulf Shores and Orange Beach and Perdido areas. First, we're going to look at some of the interconnections in the West Foley area, Manic Road, Laurent Road, Grantham Road. These roads are just interconnecting existing county networks where you can see there's some gaps. We have county roads on either side. We want to fill in those gaps and give our residents more opportunity to run parallel to US-98 without actually having to utilize it. Then this is another major corridor. This is County Road 20, which goes all the way, it changes names a few times, but it's Bay Road all the way to Mobile Bay and goes all the way to Perdido Beach. And we want to fill in a couple of gaps that we have in this corridor to provide a major east-west corridor from Mobile Bay all the way to Perdido. A little further south, we've got a couple of gaps. County Road 16 becomes Keller Road. If there's a gap in the road, it stops, and there's a bridge needed. So this would fill in that gap, so County Road 16 would actually go all the way to 59 finally. And we're looking at pushing, some of these are 30Q projects that are already underway, but we want to extend our north-south corridors as far south as we can into our coastal communities so that the folks that do want to commute down to the beaches, whether it's Gulf Shores or Orange Beach, have a north-south corridor that runs parallel to 59 or to the Beach Express. So one of them is the extension of Grund Lane that will take it from County Road 10 down to County Road 6, and then there's an existing roadway network that's already here, and we'd pick that up and take it all the way to Waterway West, which gets you to the bridge. And on the east side, we have a 30Q project already in the works to extend James Road south all the way to the Coastal Gateway Boulevard, but then we'd love to see that continue on to County Road 6 to match up with the intersection improvements we've already got underway with a partnership with Gulf Shores at County Road 6. It's a lot of road connection. We also have a lot of intersection improvements. What I'm gonna show you is over 40 plus intersection improvement projects that focus on intersections where we currently are seeing delays in congestion. Recognize that most of our delays occur at intersections. When you travel a county road, even one as busy as 32 or County Road 64, you'll realize that most of the time your commute is very pleasant until you get to a major intersection. So if we're going to invest money into transportation projects, many times you get more bang for your buck by investing in intersection improvements. Now, that doesn't mean these are low-hanging fruit that are real easy to accomplish. Anytime you're looking at a major intersection, you've usually got a cluster of businesses, homes, utilities that you have to work with. And so we've categorized it in two different categories. We have minor intersections, which are mainly just right turn lanes or maybe some stop conditions. And we have major improvements, which could be a full signalized intersection, could be a roundabout, it could be an intersection that we've had to add left turn and right turn lanes on all four of the movements. So again, I'm gonna show you that our intersection improvement plan starts in Perdido and goes all the way down to South Baldwin County. So our north projects, We have some minor intersections in the Perdido area. Moving into Baymanette, the Willie Cooper intersection, this is going to complement the project we already have for the connectivity in our TIF district. We have some areas, County Road 39, they do not align up right now. We're going to fix that alignment. We have some dangerous curves in some other areas. But all in all, you see what this intersection improvement plan does. is it works with our current major corridors. It works with our 55s, our 13s, our 64s, our 32s, our County Road 20s, 16s. And so what we're looking at, if we can improve these intersections, we're gonna see a lot of improvement to the overall comfort level of our drivers in Baldwin County. I'm not going to go through each and every one of these because they're just, either they're a major or minor improvement, but know that we have over 40 intersections that we're looking at right now, and we know that number will continue to grow, but some notable ones that are under design Red light at County Road 91 and 98. That's been asked for for many years. A red light at County Road 12 and Hickory. That's a dangerous intersection. We've had a lot of accidents there. And additional red lights and improvements at intersections along that County Road 65 corridor. Multiple improvements along the County Road 64 corridor here. This is just going to be an overview of also, in addition to all of our future projects, we do have some maintenance projects, major maintenance projects that we have to undertake occasionally. Our county maintained bridges, the Highway Department of Baldwin County maintains 159 bridges. We only have out of the 159 bridges, five that are currently weight restricted. And for each of those five bridges, we do have a plan in the future to address those. The first two are what we call the Phillipsville Road Bridge and the County Road 87 Bridge. There's also a County Road 64 Bridge, and this is east of the Beach Express and north of I-10. So it's kind of in an area that relies heavily on timber. So these bridges... needing to be improved really would improve the economic opportunity for timber harshen in those areas and also for our residents to depend on these bridges that's about a 56 million dollar replacement cost and we're currently seeking federal grant funding for that replacement probably the single largest bridge we have is the county road 32 bridge over fish river that bridge is over 60 years old And it is weight restricted and it is kind of narrow. So we've also applied for a federal grant. I've got some momentum with that to replace that bridge. And that will be a major undertaking. I make no bones about it and it will create some detours. But when it's complete, it will be a stronger bridge with no weight restrictions and it'll be a wider bridge that also will accommodate if you had to pull over or if you had somebody that wanted to walk across that bridge. Right now, if you stop on that bridge, you have nowhere to go. Still Road, this is a smaller bridge, kind of in that same Rosenton-type area, and this is actually on the current alignment of the BBE-2, so it would be replaced as part of the BBE-2 project. And then Scenic 98 at the Grand Hotel. That is a very low bridge and goes underwater quite frequently. And because of that, it's been posted because of some structural issues. So we are currently working on this project right now, and we're scheduled for 2027 to start the replacement project. So this is one that's completely in-house funding. So there is, I will say, there's always a catch with everything you do in life. You know, that's the truth. And when you look for federal funds, and federal funding is great, and it meets a need, but also know, and I know that a lot of times our public gets very frustrated with how long some of these projects take. And when there is grants involved, there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of federal bureaucracy that you have to go through. We have to go through it. Our partners at ALDOT have to go through it. And so where possible, we try to fund these as many projects as possible. Sometimes they're so large and the need is so great, we have to look for other opportunities for outside funding. So just keep in mind, when something takes a little long, You're always free to call me and find out what's going on, but a lot of times it's because there's a long, drawn-out federal process that we have to go through. So talking on funding, since the last adoption of the master plan, which is a little over three years ago, Our collective funding is comprised of essentially four pots of money. We have privately constructed transportation projects that total about $9 million. We have private funding for transportation projects that total about $1 million. So let me explain the difference between the two. When the development comes in and they bring to us their development, we said we need to see what type of transportation impacts you're going to have. Many times, The developers have to build projects on county roads, existing county roads. These are not the roads that are inside the subdivision. These are on county roads. They have to build turn lanes. They have to build left turn lanes. They have to build right turn lanes. Sometimes they have to pave roads. Sometimes they have to put in new red lights. But those are privately constructed transportation projects that the county requires the developers to do to mitigate their traffic impacts. Sometimes the county already has a project in the works, and if that's the case, then we will assess that development, their aid to construction based on the number of, how much traffic they generate, and then they will pay us that amount and we'll use that funding towards a project. The last phase of County Road 65, we had a development that paid us north of $250,000 for that project because we had that on the books and they came in right next to it. So the other two pots of money I'll call the public funds. The county funds, these are county funds that are provided to us through the county commission. 63 million dollars in the last three years. And we also have grant funding transportation projects, that's 32 million. So these are our big grants that we get from the federal government through our state agency, through ALDOT, our partners at ALDOT. And so collectively in the last three years we have spent 105 million dollars on transportation. to kind of equate how much of that is tax dollars and how much of that is outside funding. This is about 60 cents on the dollar is actual tax dollars, and then the other 40% are coming from other funding sources. So the county commission is very good stewards of your tax dollars. We try to stretch those tax dollars as far as we possibly can. So this is just a few examples of some privately constructed transportation projects. These are turn lanes on county roads. The one in the bottom left is an actual dirt road that we required the development to pave. So what we're seeing is improvements to county roads that all of our residents can benefit from that are being funded by developers. So our future funding needs, to kind of summarize all the various projects and capital outlays that I've talked about, I want to make sure that I emphasize one thing before I do that. These are capital projects. These are projects that do not exist today that we want to implement. This is not maintenance. So what is not included in any of this is our annual maintenance budget so stuff that you most of the time want to see us do ditch maintenance mowing road resurfacing that's not including in that that's going to continue on and we'll continue to fund those projects this is only we're looking at new investments new capital projects so This is like if you've got your own personal budget, you know, you've got a plan for your electric bill, your water and sewer bills. That's something you've always got to do. That's our maintenance. That's our dedicated maintenance funds. But when you have a capital purchase like a car or major appliance, that's what you have to plan for. And that's what this is. This is the major purchases. So connectivity plan, implemented estimate for all of those roadway networks I showed you earlier is $1.15 billion. The intersection improvement plan, right at $89 million, and the bridge replacements, which were six, $89 million. So what that equates to is a grand total of $1.33 billion in transportation funding that is going to be needed in the coming years to meet the goals and objectives of everything that I showed you today. Commissioner? You want to take a break? Okay.

You didn't talk that long.

Let me pull yours up. That works.

Okay.

Well, obviously, that is a very large number. Now, if you listen to a lot about federal government, a billion dollars is nothing. They talk trillions of dollars all the time. Even for the state, the state will talk about billion. For county government to talk billion is pretty much unheard of. That is a pretty big ask. And again, it's new funding that we need to find, or new ways that we need to do this. And I wish I could give the commission, the citizens here, a single, reasonable, responsible, realistic solution, but I can't. And ignoring it is not reasonable, it's not realistic, and it's definitely not responsible. it's not a solution so what we're going to be doing in this particular case and just to kind of put this in perspective is when mark showed what we've done in the last three years would use a hundred and 105 million in the last three years doesn't take long to divide 105 million into 1.3 billion realize how long that will take us to do and if you remember at the beginning of this It's being shown as a 10-year plan. So needless to say, our ability to accomplish all this in 10 years based on the way we're going today, we would definitely not make it in 10 years for sure. We won't even get, maybe get third of the way there possibly in 10 years. So how we need to approach this is, and I like analogies, and my analogy is the toolbox. So in other words, from our ability as a county commission, what is in our toolbox? And today we are not really going to be able to identify how we're going to utilize all these to get to that very large number. Really, if you looked at the agenda, we're going to be talking about only one of those tools that's in our toolbox that I'm going to give you a little bit update. But I want to kind of give you an idea of the things we need to be at a future work session. Probably more than one. I'll guarantee it's going to be more than one. These are the kind of tools that we're going to have to look at from enhanced local partnerships, which is the one tool that I'm going to talk about when I finish this. Long-term debt strategy, I'm going to cover that just a little bit. But then also considering reallocation of current resources. I mean, that is a possibility we'll have to think of, especially if we're going to try to utilize more of a long-term debt strategy. Current revenue enhancement, utilize authorized revenue sources. There actually is a... A couple of little things that are on the books right now that we have the authority to do, but we have not utilized those today. Some additional pursuit of state and federal funding, obviously we will continue that. And again, it's depending on working with our local delegation, the possibility of additional dedicated revenue authorization from that delegation for us to attack this very, very large plan that we just do not have the resources to do in our current state. Well, what I wanted to kind of get to, and the one tool that we have been using that has been successful, and it actually has, and probably, actually, if we had not put it in, it's speeding up our process a little bit. It's not getting us to the 1.3 billion, but it's definitely helped us close to, basically, right now, it's a, it's essentially $51.7 million, but it's actually a $60 million project. of course it's our three 30 cube and i always say i always tell frank said every time you use this say 30 cubes say the award-winning 30 cube program uh because we did recognize for the for for this program uh and you can see this is uh some of the partnerships we have and the projects we have going on and i see some of them here in the room and we greatly appreciate your partnership in it and it has been been helpful and again it's been so helpful that we want to kind of look at it a little bit closer and actually uh essentially extend this program but i wanted to cover one thing about this program to let you know that this didn't just come to a whim we just didn't sit there and pull a number out of our hat where it comes from is one of the things that we've been working on because not only is it planning you know master plans for for uh running zoning or transportation plans for highway it all has to be interconnected not only do they need to plan but we also need to be planning from a debt strategy plan long term and also a budget plan long term these things have to be interconnected and i will i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say that hasn't been done but it hasn't been done to the level necessarily uh that that we we should be doing it and we're we're in the process of doing that and this is how 30 30 cube came about what you see here is essentially one very key there's several metrics but this is probably one of the most important metrics when it comes to your your how you utilize your debt. I'm one of these people that are, I'm not gonna say I'm a, I really, I don't necessarily believe that, you have to be sure to manage your debt. A lot of people like if you get Dave Ramsey. I like Dave Ramsey. There's a lot of things about Dave Ramsey that I like. But Dave Ramsey is absolutely, completely, totally against debt. I mean, he hates debt. So I consider myself more of a crowns ministry guy that understands that if you do not utilize debt, if you wait too long to try to actually go as a pay-as-you-go basis, that project's going to probably cost you ten times more than what it cost you if you would have just gotten debt if you managed the debt. So you're controlling the debt, the debt's not controlling you. So this is what this graph is kind of, this metric is kind of what it gives us is a picture of are we controlling the debt or are the debt controlling us? And These lines that represent a key percentage, and they're colored lines, and if I say the color wrong, bear with me, I actually have a red-green deficiency. So sometimes I call them a color one thing, and somebody says, no, no, Roger, that's not red, that's orange. But as far as I know, that's a green line at 10%. That's 15%, it's a yellow line, and the 20% is supposed to be a red line. Hopefully it is a red line. Okay, good. Anyway, I'll just give you an idea. When Jay put up his color-coded planning, that gave me a headache. Those colors just blurred all in for me, so I struggle sometimes with it. But anyway, here we go. I've got to get those numbers right. But anyway, what started happening was is that we, over the last, since basically starting 18 through now, we got to where we started actually controlling our debt levels to a level that basically, according to rating agency metrics, is where we should be to be able to better manage ourselves. And what happened, I got here roughly in 2023, and knowing and projecting out, seeing that this upcoming trend was coming, that we were actually going to have some flexibility, and how much flexibility we have, I eventually went to Frank's office, stood outside his door, actually leaned up against the door frame, and I said, Frank, If I could come up giving you $30 million, what do you think we could do with it? And that conversation led to the 30Q program, basically. So, again, I think it's been very successful. Hopefully our partners here can attest to it. But I might give you an idea of what these percentages mean because they're kind of important. So in the rating agency world, low 10%, it's excellent for the local government, typically having financial flexibility for operations and emergencies. In other words, it gives you a lot of ability to deal with issues that come along unexpectedly, but also at the same time, again, you're really truly controlling your debt. 10 to 15 you kind of start getting to that point to where you have to be it's a moderate financial strain requiring careful cop careful operational planning and when revenue drops or economic downturns can be problematic requiring capital suspension and hiring freezes that's that's kind of a typical move that we'll do when we get to that point the important one to really start seeing is this one here the 15 to 20 percent it is a very high burden on the local government experiencing very low financial flexibility vulnerable to revenue drops and economic downturns, requiring service cuts, and especially, usually including reduction in forces. That's what a RIF is, reduction in force to counter that effect to be able to stay operational. Anything above 20%, it's basically a critical danger zone and can usually lead to credit downgrades, and it really, really puts a lot of pressure. And the reason why I bring those up and want to point this out, again, because, again, Debt service is one of the tools we can use, but we have to be very mindful of how we utilize it. I'm going to give you a little perspective to this. This is Baldwin County from 2022 to 2011. As you can see, Baldwin County was heavily leveraged and was consistently in that high burden and in sometimes that critical zone, especially when you look at 2007, 2008, 2009. What happened during that period of time? Yep. Housing market collapsed. Financial markets collapsed. And anybody who's working here probably could remember what it was like working here. Didn't you tell me, I think, yesterday that 50% of your budget was nothing but debt service in the highway department? Over 50%, which will add to what? A lot of reduction in forces, cutting of services. You have no flexibility at all. And again, I don't know what the circumstances were or something like that, but to me, that's not a position we ever want to be in again. So that brings us to where we are coming forward to this year. As you can see, we are in a much better position to do this. And why I'm bringing this up is, yes, we can... And we'll be able to address, in fact, yesterday Mark said something when we were in our pre-meeting that made me think of something that I'm going to actually approach. I haven't told you about this, but I'm going to actually approach him with an idea about how we're going to be able to maybe leverage a little bit more debt service to address some things, I hate to say low-hanging fruit, but things we can definitely get to because we have that flexibility to do that. But the thing about it is I'm going to tell you right now, and before I move on back to 30Q, There's no way in this world we can borrow away to meet that $1.3 billion requirement. It's impossible. It's financially impossible. We possibly, I'll cover this a little bit, there's something called the constitutional debt limit. I'm not going to get into that again. That's the reason why we need a whole other work session on this kind of stuff because it gets complicated. If we borrow, if we went to borrow up to our constitutional debt limit, we would end up, frankly, Again, we do not, based on my calculation, we would end up right there, right at that 20%, which is where we definitely don't want to be. So that's what I mean by we have to look at it as a toolbox approach and look at different things. Yes, we will be able to do some stuff, and I think we should start working towards doing some stuff. And one of the things that we're working towards is this. Again, what I was talking about is that we have a budget and debt management approach. And this is another thing that I keep running total on. Once we finish 26, I'll have these numbers too. From a budget perspective, what happens sometimes is, you know, what would cause part of this right here is, yes, we've had revenue growth, but more importantly, our debt load has been dropping. So our debt load has been going down, which is freeing up funds to be able to do debt service. But there's a habit. Most counties sometimes and cities sometimes have a habit of once that debt service is freed up, it kind of starts getting pulled into stuff like more personnel, you know, expand the expand other areas that needs money on a content can use basis which means you don't know how you know when now when you want to do a debt that that service you got to figure out where to pull pull some money back from to be able to cover that debt service so What we've been doing since I got here, and Beth, who's my budget director back there, she can attest to this, we started off with, okay, Beth, my conversation with her was, let's make sure, like our debt service one year, I'm just going to give, I don't have the exact numbers because I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was going to be like $9 million. But a couple years ago, I said, let's make sure we budget 11.5%. And what we have started doing is taking the difference between that 9 and 11.5 each year, no matter what, no matter what we're doing, and taking that money and moving it to our capital projects fund. or our 30Q program. And this is very important. And again, this year for our budget, we're targeting 13. The reason why 13 is important, because it gets us to about 7%. That's this far number here on the right. That's the last number we're at. But again, my target really be is eventually get us into the $15 and $17 million range. Again, that will allow us to do some more projects, especially focus more on transportation. So that's kind of where we're going. Again, this is what I mean by a budget debt service strategy And that's the one we've been employing basically since the three years that I've been here. And we're working towards that. So what does it mean? Well, right now, just using the $13 million... This is what we could do as far as debt issuance with just $13 million. If we want to go higher, which is a goal, these numbers will change. And again, this is just for example purposes. So what this shows is that next year, this upcoming budget year, with the difference between what our current debt service is and the $13 million, is we could do about a 63 64 million dollar bond issue and each of these numbers just show what we could do in that year if we don't add any debt so in other words it's not it's not so i want to make it very clear this is not how much debt we can do every single year this is overall total as long as we don't issue any more debt. So in other words, yes, by the time we get to 2030, we get over to 120. And again, I want to just tell you, because numbers will change, revenues will change, and we are going to build from, again, I want to go from Again, the 7%, closer to that 9%. I really don't like to get to 10, but if I, you know, somewhere in that range, if we can start building that. These numbers will increase, but I guarantee you they'll get nowhere close to $1.3 billion. It just doesn't, it's just, the math doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. But how this is important for 30 cubed is, We've been building scenarios in, and this is exactly what we have now. So this is still that, you know, again, for just today, looking at today's dollars, today's terms, you know, we are looking at 30 cubed. What I was talking about before, how we've taken money, like here we've budgeted $11 million, and maybe our debt service is nine. Well, that means we take... 2 million and move it over to capital projects or 30 cubed, everywhere we can find some funds to move in those projects. 30 cubed is supposed to be a $30 million debt project, but we have managed to, we actually have $14 million on hand right now. So that's $14 million we don't have to borrow. For 30 cubed, we just need 16 more. So based on Highway Department's projection, we'll probably do a bond issue that's in the red for 2028. We have needed about $4 million and the rest of it, the $12 million will be needed roughly in 2029. to complete the 30-cube project. And as you can see, we still have capacity to do more than just that. And also, we have facility needs, and say if we do a facility in 2028, whether it's the corner sheriff or county commission, whatever need is there, these models and scenarios I have, I can plug these numbers anytime and run them to see how we're going to handle it, not only from a debt perspective, from a budget perspective. So what does this all mean for the 30-cube program? Like I said, we did not do the full 30 that I was planning. So in theory, I have $14 million I could still go borrow. But as you saw on the chart, we still got pretty good with our capacity with the way we're budgeting things. So what we would like to propose and would like to propose the rebranding and re, I guess, kind of remarketing, I guess, in a way, but instead of being the 30Q program, make it a more permanent program, a permanent program that is kind of paying respect to the 30Q, because remember, 30Q was meant for, meaning the 30Q is $30 million from the county, 30 from the municipalities, and have it spent by 2030. Hence, 30, 30, 30, that's where the 30Q comes from. Obviously, moving to a more prominent program, that's not what this would be is. But in a way, we came up with a way to kind of honor that original 30-cube logo. And having the C3 gets it pretty close. But instead, we would call it Connecting Communities Collectively, formerly known as the 30-cube program. And what we would propose doing is in this, again, I can plug these numbers into the scenario any time at all, but actually doubling our commitment And that's just, and again, these numbers will change because it depends on when we actually do projects, stuff like that. It could be spread out more. We could end up putting more cash into it. But as you can see, we have capacity to definitely do this. I think it's been a beneficial project, a program with our municipality partners. I hope they would want to continue that, and we're going to put that out there as an opportunity. So what we're looking at again is Rebranding 30 cubed to the connecting communities collectively, which we're going to put an additional $30 million in county funds for a total municipal-county partnership totaling $120 million in transportation infrastructure projects. Again, now we just need $1.2 billion instead of $1.3 billion. Again, what I meant is we need every tool we possibly can. This is just one tool to do it. I hope the commission's supportive of us moving forward with this, and hopefully the cities already have some projects they want to bring to us. So that's all I have for you.

Thank you very much. We appreciate the presentations that we've heard from Jay and Mark and Roger. And these are things that the county commission has been doing asking for and these guys have helped us have the vision to do this. This is not a meeting to where we're going to discuss the funding of these. As Roger mentioned earlier, we will schedule and hold some work sessions and try to get through. I mean, I can just think of a few things like, you know, the next question is how much of that vision is already funded through things like federal grants, state and other transportation programs. There is an existing gas tax. There's Rebuild Alabama funds, developer participation, TIF revenues, future growth and existing revenues. So as we get bigger, we get better, as one of my previous commissioners always said, Joe Davis, I'll never forget that. So where we're at on the agenda, um they're really not anything else except for some some comment section and so i think to um does anyone if if anyone needs a restroom break or whatever i just advise you to just go ahead and do it because i would like to just go ahead and get through this agenda um um the next we don't have any addendum and then we have does anybody signed up for any public comments Oh, hallelujah. You know, that's a universal praise in any language. If y'all didn't know that, then you know now. Is there someone from the press here that would like to... Okay, I'm not going to belabor that one. Commissioners, let's start with Commissioner Gruber. I know this is an exciting presentation for you.

Yeah, this... working for quite some time. As you can see, you know, that we have not been wasteful of our tax dollars. We wish we could have done more, but, you know, we stayed within our means. We didn't put the county in debt. You know, so we're going to have to do some debt service coming up. Because, you know, a lot of these projects that we've identified, there's not a funding forum. And without that, you know, they're not going to happen. So, you know, I'm looking forward to it. Well, I'm not looking forward to it. Yes, you are. I'm looking forward to it. You're a taxpayer. You still care. But, you know, I hope, you know, that in the future we can – Go out and plan and complete a lot of these projects. The intersection improvements make a big difference. If it's a roundabout, those things, I hated them at first, but they're pretty good now. They work pretty good. And then our master plan, Jay, thank you so very much. We've been working on that for quite some time, and I think we got it right this time. you know, and hopefully we can get that passed. I'd like to see that done before I leave office because, you know, I've been promising a lot of people, you know, that yes, we're going to get this done. Again, thank you all and everyone for being patient with us and listening to us. And now you see what our vision is. And we hope with municipalities we can still do some more projects. It means a big difference. If we put $10 million into it and you all put $10 million, that's $20 million. And you can go all the way with $20 million versus $10 million. So it just makes good sense. And everybody benefits from it. So thank you all again. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks to the staff, Roger, Mark, Frank, Jay. I mean, and everybody else involved in. All the work and putting this together, it's been something we've been waiting on for a long time. Great job on master plan and. Tight tidying that up and I certainly think we'll get. That across our table and and vote on that. Before we out of here. Um, I think the most exciting thing for me on here is the impact on my end of the county with the BB to we've been talking about that since 2000 and. 18, so it was a vision that we've had for a very long time and to to see that being put on a map and being made public that that's going to happen is a much needed connectivity. Regardless of what. It's talked about bypassing cities and stuff like that. I mean, you'll have another way to go. One of two ways. You want to go into Baymanette and shop? Get off and go to Baymanette and shop. You want to keep on going? Keep on going. It's got to happen. Um, and with that connectivity, you saw the other little connectivities that are going to happen. Uh, through bedrock, the trail 17 through, I think I saw something where we're in a stapleton 39 that goes all the way to. I mean, that's I don't even see how people can complain about that. So. But I'm, I'm kind of on the same board as skip and this is a great project. Great implementation of a rebranding of a program that. You know, it just came out of just a conversation talking in a doorway and look at where it's gotten us because the municipalities that have partnered with us. Now, on these projects has gotten so much needed benefits out of all of the partnerships involved. I think definitely by far that bedrock. Project going across 17 all the way to. You know, just about the interstate is. 1 of the biggest 32 projects we've got to this day if I'm not mistaken. Great work team. We rely on y'all heavily. If we had to do everything that y'all did up there, we wouldn't be doing any. I mean, I wouldn't get any sleep. And I appreciate what y'all do because we play a small role in what y'all do. And the work that goes into this, the public has no idea. So I appreciate it.

Okay, I'll wrap it up. Thank you all for being here today. Thank my fellow commissioners, and most importantly, I think the staff. Not just the guys that presented, but there's a whole army of people behind them. I tell you what, that's just like they're behind us. We know you guys are behind. Guys and ladies are behind these guys sitting right here. y'all pull a new name out on me? Are y'all Star Wars fans or something? I mean, is that like C3 something else? Or, you know, it's not a humanoid robot or anything, is it? Okay, now that was C3PO, wasn't it? Anyhow, okay, sorry. They're They're a little bit younger than me, not much, but I saw the original Star Wars and Daphne in 1977. I didn't even understand a bit of it. I was 10 years old. Okay, so that's not what we're here for, but I'm so excited about all that. I generally believe that government should plan well. I believe that infrastructure should keep up with the growth, that debt should be used very carefully. Taxes should always be a last option, but sometimes we have to look at that. And then that government should prove it has spent existing money wisely before asking for more. And I do know that... We can show you that. We are a very transparent government and we appreciate your time and for being here. If you want to see in more detail any of this stuff, just shoot us an email or we'll start publishing some of this stuff on our website. um these plans are going to be implemented into our upcoming agendas so they can be adopted by the county commission um we do know that we do have a new commission coming in in the fall late fall but we're definitely in a good place right now at the county commission even though rogers the money man and giving us a little you know grim look at it I see opportunity. I see great opportunity in this. And I know where there's a will, there's a way. And you know what? The Lord didn't lead the people out of Egypt to the Red Sea. You know what? He made a way for them to cross it. And that's what I'm hoping. So sorry for that. That's just who I am. If you don't like it, then you just don't like it. But thank you guys very much. This meeting is over. Thank you.