Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Pledge will be led by commissioner Feltner. Okay, we will move into the agenda of county department presentations, C1 budget overview. We do have a public comment section. Is there anyone here that's filled out a card that wishes to speak? See none.

We'll move to board discussions. I guess we're doing the board report. I think we're doing the county department presentation budget over a few. Okay? I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yes. A motion to have commissioner Goodson and Delaney with

I think that would be good.

I'd like to make a motion to have commissioner Delaney and Goodson join us.

Second by Felder. All in favor say aye. Aye. Carries. I have such great commissioners that keeps me on track here. Don't know what I'd do without you guys. So I got ahead of myself. We'll go straight to budget overview.

Okay. Good afternoon commissioners. A couple things what I'm going to do is it's just me today doing a little bit on the high level, keeping it a little bit informal but we're going

to talk

about at the board, last Board meeting, you asked what we're going to do in the budget workshop and I said we're going talk facilities and you asked to see infrastructure. But I also want to point out that facilities is infrastructure. So we're going to cover a lot of stuff on infrastructure, some might be surprising. Just as me, if I talk too much, start waving your arm or talk too fast, start waving your arms, let me know so I can slow down. We have staff in the room.

Folks, if there's if they have a slide related to the department, they're here. So if we have questions, we have the available staff ready for you guys. And then just before I get started, a couple of thank yous to Keith, Jill and Tad who have been stuck dealing with me for the last week to put everything together, of course the budget office and all the departments because we've been asking them lots questions, lots of nuggets of information to put this together for you guys. Sorry, that helps if I work the clicker. There we go.

So the topic is we're going talk about the county infrastructure and there's kind of the subjects we're going to go through. And then believe it or not, a little bit of insurance funds, some revenue options and then questions and board discussions and whatever direction you want to go with. So at the last workshop we talked about the color of money where we go through our $2,500,000,000 budget when you get down to it is about $288,000,000 of operating funds in the general fund. And then last year to help balance the budget we went through a number of recommendations to general funds for cuts. So I just want to highlight there so you can see what we cuts reductions for the better word, but what we did not fund in the budget that we would like to fund.

So there was a number of public works items there. Was quite a bit of facilities management items. We're going to discuss that a little bit. The next slide is you're going see the parks and recreation items. And so we have an asterisk there. That was one of our last minute updates because based on your action on Tuesday, they restore the parks and recs through the MSTU. So those reductions have been restored and then you see a couple other reductions. Just want to point this out, this was in the budget message. This is the items that we removed from our recommended budget before we gave it to you so we can fund all the other needs and the priorities that you had. And I don't have it in front of me.

I should also point out that when you look at the cuts, we give instructions to the county charter cap is 3% or CPI or whatever is less. So when we talk to the departments, if they have general fund, we don't let them ask for more than 3%. So when you look at the number of the cuts we've had, a number of departments that actually received a little bit less in general fund, IT was one, they received about $70,000 less with network switches. Then there was a number of other departments that even received up the full 3%. So when you look at this list of items removed or requested budget was even after we restricted the departments asking what they could ask for.

So we went through a lot of folks took a little bit of a haircut last year to make sure we can balance the budget for you. Along with the public works funding, there is the detention center, we had correctional impact fees. Normally we spend about $3,500,000 a year just on various function of the detention centers anywhere from repairs to maintenance. We had some impact fees, we're able to use those for this year. Now there's $3,500,000 reoccurring is an issue that we now have to address.

And then the road resurfacing, it was kept the same amount of money as last year, but due to inflation and construction costs. So instead of 50 miles, we're going to go down to 40 miles. The reconstruction went from 7.5 to five. At the board meeting on March 17, what you did with Parks and Rec, you also restored 1,500,000.0 of that back into the road resurfacing program. So the miles will be a little bit better than 40 now. This is kind of a slide what we always show. These are cumulative change in the CPI since 2009. I just want to point especially for the folks on TV and Zoom or Teams. You can see the blue is the consumer price index. That's what we follow along with our cap.

And so that's the blue line, but you can see our construction costs and the general municipal cost index is higher than what we've been able to do. And you can't tell it in this slide, but we had two or three, actually we had three years over 3%. The cap is CPI or 3%, whatever is lower. So those couple of years we had 8% inflation and another year 6%, we only increased the revenue by 3% those years. So if you have a lot of bad years of inflation, the cap keeps you underneath just even the inflation rate there.

Our next for next this coming budget year is 2.63%. And we just went over some budget guidelines for departments. They probably don't even know this year, but the guidelines to them will be 2.320.6% increase not 3%. Nobody fell over in their chair, so. Under facilities, just I love the chart here, just some of the fast facts.

There's 154 buildings that facilities is taken care of. There's 2,600,000 square feet. They're under direct management of 76,000,000,000 to 1,800,000 square feet. You're going to see from a couple departments are going to show that the different infrastructures they maintain. Our facilities budget is $45,000,000 and we're having a hard time. Well actually we can't keep up with everything with the current budget to be honest the way it is. So there's just some fast facts. I like at the bottom the average building was built in 1971. This building we're in here opened in February, let's see when I come back, February '1 this building opened up. So this building is 35 years old.

So we don't have a lot of young facilities out there. And so the older they get the more rehab and more repair you have to put together. So this is a list of some of our critical needs. Public works was nice to divide it into different areas. I'll kind of read through it, I won't catch everything, but in the North area we have a couple million dollars and this is beyond just constitutional needs, I'm going highlight those, but you have the historical courthouse, we have the Brevard Room which is a community room up there that needs HVAC.

The detention center where estimating there's at least $6,000,000 of repair there. Four sprung structure tents, I hope I got it right, that's the tents, but there's called sprung structure. We are working on replacing the fabrics with the Sheriff's Office on that. In the central area, the county service complex, that's the Merritt Island, first old folks still call it the Merritt Island Courthouse. Timmie G.

J. Mills Fire Rescue Center, that's a multi story building in Rock Ledge that houses fire rescue and public safety. And then the South area, South area includes Viera, so and you'll see some coming up next slide about elevators and HVAC, the Moore Justice Center across the street working on envelope repairs, we're working on buildings down at Sarno And then we have the Melbourne Courthouse chiller and tower equipment. So we have a lot of immediate needs already that we're trying to fund find and fund for this next year's budget. Major issues there, I got to say I'm learning a lot from Skip and from Mark and that's why we have him right here.

Skip Bell is your facilities management manager. Mark Bernath is the public works director. I'm going to start on the right side is HVAC. We've been working, last year we completed projects. You're always, always, always going to be working on HVAC no matter what you do all throughout. And then we have budgeted, we have another six or actually seven different HVAC projects that we're working on right now. And when I say we have what we have budgeted, that's we budget what we think the costs are, costs could be different. So you could get in, once you start tearing ceilings apart or walls apart, you find new stuff and floors. So that's the way of budget and that's what we try to accomplish. Elevators, even without Skip's instruction, I learned about elevators can be a pain.

We had to do a major reduction in elevator at the central, the Kathy Sweinsberg Library. When that went down, now you have to rebuild it to meet new codes. So all our elevators need to meet new codes. We have to do new monitoring on our elevators. The recommended lifespan, and you may hear me use the word useful life, that's a federal term, but the lifespan is twenty seven years. 19 of our 31 elevators are beyond that right now. But you can see the crew has been working pretty hard over the last seven years. We've been able I didn't write down the number. There's about 10 of the elevators we've been able to replace, rehab and fix up. And we have budgeted for three of the elevators this year.

But so we still got at least half dozen more to go. And that's just rehabbing. That's just not if they break down or there might be an issue with them. The detention center, we have multi at one point we had multi years major projects and we had to take the S off because it was a duplicate, but it does feel like multi years where there's a lot of work to do. You can see there's a pretty nice overview of the detention center.

You can see the older existing building at the center. There's a newer wing on the right. And then if you look at because we're going to talk a little bit about the pods, you can see the four green structures there at the lower right hand corner, those are all the different pods. But so over the years we've been working on plumbing chases. I have a friend who is actually an architect and plumbing is different in a detention center because they can back it up. It's everything. It's not your standard plumbing you find in a building or even a house or a building. So we have a lot of work there. Of course, we're always working on the HVAC replacement. The jail doors which you just saw at the last board meeting, a couple of million dollars there to help finish up our jail doors, refurbish the showers in there.

We got a more HVAC fiber cable. Then what we had it was speaking with the Sheriff's Office, some of the key points, the last expansion of the jail was 2006. And since then the population has grown by 25%. And the tent structures were somewhere around 2,005. That was the last expansion we've capacity is still running.

There's a committee that keeps on it probably running 80%, 90%. But the thing to remember is it's almost impossible to have your jail at 100% capacity because if you're dealing, if somebody gets sick or you have different things, you may not be able to double up in a cell, you have to move stuff around. So if capacity is 1,500, that doesn't mean you can have 1,500 inmates every single day in the jail. So the sheriff does a really nice job working with the various county departments that keep that number where we can. I put in their hundreds of work hours annually, skip and crew do a lot of work. The sheriff department is already in there doing a lot of work. And then for expansion, rough, rough number of new pod might cost $40,000,000 So all there once. The committee, can I

say something real quick The on committee is the public safety council that meets here and I'd share that? And they work collectively with with all the stakeholders with if you will, and to to keep the jailhouse population at a at a certain level. Yeah. And and so it's a it's a diligent thing that's always ongoing even making sure that people get to state prison when they need to go because that's getting them out of Arch Hill and on to state prison. Something they work on a lot.

Yes. And that group has been pretty successful. Commissioner Alvin remembers back when we had to add on, we had a sales tax for the detention center because we had to expand, we had suits to make sure on the capacity and that committee came out of and that's been a big help to keep us at the proper level of population. This is a constitutional officer offices facilities needs. Tad and I met with let's see a tax collector, property appraiser, supervisor of elections and representative from the clerk's office last week.

Went through the six, I call it the six stories Brevard County Government Center North or something like that. I'm old, it was a six storey when I got here, so I'm going to call it the six storey. So we went through all the floors looking at what we need to do. But as you take a look at the HVAC system, there's at least another $2,500,000 of repairs. We have windows, we have electrical upgrades. So you can see there's about $4,000,000 of immediate needs in the six storey. We have reoccurring down at the Sarno Complex of about $300,000 a year. Some work, I don't know how familiar you are with the elections office at down on John Rhodes. It's a pretty comprehensive building. He's got a lot of functions in and out of there.

So we have some work there. We got East Precincts we're working on with the Sheriff's Office. And once again, just to repeat the detention center of $4,000,000 but there's also a couple other costs there that I kind of almost called it almost non prisoner related, but I mean it still has to do with the facility. So we have some costs there. A couple of pieces of good news at least with this is as we come back in our mid year adjustments, you're going to see that in April.

We're going to be able to put some funding towards the HVAC system. So we'll be able to start cutting down on that $2,500,000 a need. And just meeting this morning, I at least heard that we had a walk through with the different contractors for windows and we had a much larger number than we thought of contractors that are interested in bidding on the project. So hopefully that will lead to some lower costs than we hope, but there seems to be a lot of interest out there for that. So this doesn't cover everything in the constitutional needs, but it gives you some of the highlights and what we were shown last week.

Then we have, there we go. So we have other and hunt that we call unfunded enhancements. We've been working on actually throughout the county working on bathroom replacements. You can see in this building the first two floors were able to be completed. We took the funding out for the 3rd Floor. There's other buildings, Buildings D And E next door here, they need some work. A And B are quite there. Like I said, restrooms are thirty four years old where we spent a lot of time, the crew was out today, they work on the washrooms up here and across the building. So they're there every time. A bathroom is about $100,000 a pair and I've heard it from somewhere else that it would be about the right number.

So it's expensive to fix bathrooms nowadays. And then we have other we have LVPs, I forget exactly, but that's your flooring. So we have other needs out there. So we're looking where even when we do stuff in house, there's about $800,000 in need there for flooring, we have another $2,000,000 So just in the government center and the Melbourne offices and the Merritt Island offices, we're looking at about another $3,000,000 of needs for facilities. So that's what you see under facilities.

What I ask and I'm going to highlight some of the departments because there's more than just what facilities overseas directly. You got the library system. So they're operating out of 18 buildings. We have that many branches, main library 17 branches. Interestingly, only 14 of them are owned by the county, some libraries are owned by the cities and a number of libraries actually sit on city owned land.

It's a little interesting how we put stuff together. But as you can see, the library needs, their needs just under $12,000,000 in their budget they have about $4,000,000 funded. So at least about unfunded list of $7.4 Now the libraries operates under their own MSTU, so they don't use general funds. But I want to point out is they generally spend about $5,000,000 a little over $5,000,000 a year on infrastructure needs and they have $7,500,000 in these right now. So that shows that they're a year behind.

It would take them a while to try to get caught up and that's assuming that we don't have any other issues that might happen to the buildings. So there's more than a year and a half of needs that they have out there. Parks and recreation, I'll start off right in the middle. It's a little hard to see there, over 130 parks, over 1,000 different buildings and facilities anywhere from fields, lights, playgrounds, bathrooms, boat ramps, community centers. They got a lot and they spent a lot of time and money on it.

About average they allocate about $3,200,000 for infrastructure needs and that's above what they do on a daily basis for maintenance and repairs and constructions of new items. But you can see their unfunded list is somewhere around $30,000,000 So looking at almost ten years of needs with the parks and recreation. And then I asked them to put together, you see at the bottom, so we have eight community centers out there and they're divided up between community nature and senior centers, lots of infrastructure and then other centers amenities. You may or may not know we went out to the voters in 2000 for a referendum to build more and to pay for more park facilities. We had to go back on again in 2006 to complete the funding.

And luckily all but one of the debt millages have been paid off. The last one will be this year. But what I want to point out is, so these facilities we've been putting together, they're now reaching their twenty five, thirty year lifespan. So they're going to start requiring major repairs or major maintenance. Some things may have reached their useful lifespan.

But we don't have to pay for those repairs we're going have to come out of our operating. When we built it, we issued debt to build it and then we had different separate operating fundings to operate our parks. Now that the debt's gone and so we lose that ability to bond that out. So any major repairs or replacement of these facilities are going to have to come out of their operating millages or and they also receive some general fund or general fund. Just a couple of minor things before we get into public works is to let you know there's some good news.

There's this just gives you an idea of the different departments what were out there. Natural resources needs a facility to put together the aquatic harvesting equipment. The extension center has a roof replacement. Did I say it right? Okay, roof replacement, thank you, rough. And then I want to point out because the extension center, it says AgCenter, that really kind of operates as a separate community facility. They host lots of meetings. They had the Blue Origin, the famous Blue Origin meeting was there. It's used by a lot of the public. It's a public need.

It's more than just UF and the IFAS program. Mosquito control has been putting a lot of money together and spending a lot of years and you can see their biology laboratory. There's a picture of it right there. So they've been putting together the money, but there's still about $800,000 short. Mosquito control has their own MSTU. So that comes out of their own budget. And as I'm pointing out, many of these MSTUs are also operating under the cap. So they just can't decide to raise the MSTU by $800,000 to fund it. We have to stay within the charter cap. So Road and Bridge, we talked about and there's a slide about their maintenance and drainage and everything you need to do, but Road and Bridge needs also they make sure their maintenance shops are well maintained and put together.

A few years ago we put funding together to do a needs assessment and so you can see up there that we have over $25,000,000 of upgrades, replacement, fixing we have to do of the maintenance facilities and that's just the three of them that you see listed. We're working pretty hard on the Melbourne Central Fleet, I'm old, I call it CEP. When I got here, that's what we called it, but there's a picture of it. There's about $40,000,000 in needs. We have $23,000,000 of it funded and are actively working on it right now, but we're still about $17,000,000 short.

So I mean this is to help the crews that go out and help the people as we go out and fix the drainage and fix the roadway. So we need to make sure that they're operating in good facilities. Information technology, you may not think of that as infrastructure, but definitely to me that's the backbone of everything we put together. There's been heightened awareness of security and attacks going on. We know of one place that has actually was attacked and their system was brought down.

So we always try to make sure we keep an eye on everything and try to stay up to date. This last year we're able to fund their department with their existing funds. But you can see if you look at the bold parts, we're looking at having to replace our network connectivities, the switches, the firewalls keep everything up to date that that's going cost us about $80,000 a year. When you look at the systems with all the servers and all the infrastructure go to servers beginning in 2019, we're looking at $350,000 and then all our storage, once again more equipment, we're looking at $400,000 a year. So you're basically looking at a need between $400 and $5,000 a year of IT starting in 2027.

You've seen this chart before, this is a chart put together by utilities As you know and you're going see in the next slide we have a number of wastewater and water plants that we have to bring online, upgrade to make sure we meet all the new regulations based on the revenue. As you can see the costs are going to exceed the revenue existing that we have. And so there's the listing of them all, literally from Mims down to the South Beaches down to Port St. John, South Brevard, Sykes Creek, Port St. John or regional, a new regional plant.

So they put together a list, their needs are going to be over $865,000,000 or so. Right now we have about $71,000,000 funded. That doesn't mean we're not moving forward the projects. We have $793,000,000 of unfunded needs. Eddie and the crew and our lobbyists both federal and state have been really good to help us with getting grants going through.

So we'll stay active with the grants at some point. We'll be issuing debt to build some of the plants and facilities. You will see us coming back to talk about connection fee adjustments and user fee adjustments as the studies go along and we know what we need to do to meet our funding gap. Right now the analysis and studies are ongoing and utilities has a deadline of 2032 to meet all these regulations. So I mean, some of this stuff is occurring even without capacity needs that we have to make sure we have upgrades.

Solid waste, I kind look at the two of them as partners because they're both kind of working similarly. They have to expand their capacity. So the new solid waste facility up down on 192,000,000 We have the first part funded at about $35,000,000 Part two is still unfunded, but we'll be looking at some kind of debt financing for that. The Titusville Transfer Station is currently under construction. It's right now it's funded with bonds and commercial paper.

That's what the CP is. That should be completed by July. So that means that's some good news for Tom and his crew. And the central cell three at the central disposal facilities is right now it's funded with some commercial paper, but we still have $31,000,000 to go to complete that. So to help funding sources that is right there at the disposal assessment adjustments, debt issue, gate charges, impact fees.

And so he's got studies going on. They all have studies to show the cost and because we have to if we have to issue debt, have to justify what we need the debt. Why it's not super directly connected, you'll probably see us in the next month or two talk to you. We've been talking to or speaking with Waste Management, their contracts up next year. And so they have a chance for extension, but so you'll see us talking about that and the rates for collection.

Just a warning, just heads up there. This is my favorite infrastructure slide because and I don't know if people think beaches are infrastructure, but this is Brevard County. It's extremely important to Brevard County to our tourism, to our businesses, to our residents. So it's infrastructure and we've made major commitments. So as you can see on there, so over the last over the years we replaced 16,000,000 cubic yards of sand that has cost us $375,000,000 $31,000,000 comes the TDT stands for tourism information tourism information tourism development tax.

And then the rest comes from various grants mostly from the Corps of Army Corps of Engineers for the funding. We have a commitment or a plan with the Army Corps for the fifty years and you see we're going to spend $600,000,000 So over the next forty three years and as I was showing the slide to my wife as she pointed out, she was you better live to see the end of that. So that would make me 101. So I plan to see the end of that contract. The other one is across the street or close across the street is the UTSA facility.

We own that, that used to be the spring training site, worked on a really nice working arrangement with U triple A where they rent it from us. As part of their contract, they put in $250,000 a year of their own funding into the capital fund. For the first five years of the agreement, we also put in funding, but we're now past the five years. So that Stadium Capital Fund has about three a little over $3,000,000 in it. They being UAAA spends about $350,000 a year out of the fund and just kind of little off the side there, they have to run those approvals through tourism. They just don't get to spend that fund as they see fit. We work with them. They have to get approval through the county and make sure they spend the funds. So it's just not going spend as they want. But the point I want to point out to you all is that we got 15 fields that require turf replacement.

It could start beginning in about two years. The fields are getting that old. I think the first ones were coming in 2016, 2017, somewhere in that neck of the woods. That's about $10,000,000 As you can see, $250,000 a year from UAASA doesn't cover it. We'll have to talk with tourism and we're actually sit down with UAASA how to address that need. And I meant to mention and I didn't we also have the turf over here at Viera Regional that was paid through tourism taxes. That was a $5,000,000 project. They're probably about six years in, so at some point that's becoming due to for the parks too. So I didn't highlight everything. I didn't want to torture every director in the world, but I mean there's other important infrastructure out there that I didn't highlight.

Valkyria Airport, Adam does a really nice job of getting grants, a lot of this funded through DOT and federal FAA, mosquito control, they have their own MSTU, but they have a lot of infrastructure in between their vehicles, airplanes, drones, buildings, labs. They put a lot together. Have another good example is transit services. Their capital needs are survive on grants. They're 100% federally funded. Even if so they have needs that they can't meet with their grants, but there so there is quite a bit of infrastructure out there. And I want to make sure I bring back to you all, you helped all this at the last meeting. Mark did a wonderful job explaining. You guys want to know what we need to do about improving our drainage infrastructure. So that's the same slide as you saw before.

So you can see the impacts of what we would need to have additional drainage crews where we can get the frequency down between two and three years to one and two years. If you want to double the support staff and the drainage crew again, we can get cleaning each ditch a year. Then he has a number of other projects in here that will help and you can see the well, it's the funding impact to go with it. Sure. Our last department we're going to speak about is employee benefits and risk management.

It's infrastructure, but at some point I do need to highlight this to you all. If you take a look at the top chart that is our balance, our fund balance for our employee benefits, that's health and pharmacy. Our claims costs are around about $70,000,000 this past year. It's gone up for the last few years, it's been what loaded from 60,000,000 to $65,000,000 this year was a little higher year. So as part of the budget, we are going to rate adjustment of 6% for employer side.

And you can see on as we as an employer were paying about $15,000 a year per employee for health insurance. At the bottom part, the bottom chart is our risk management, auto liability, property insurance, general liability and workers' comp. The claims last year were a little over $8,500,000 That as you can see we're down to $4,000,000 That one's a little bit getting drained quicker than I want to see. We're really down to like maybe a couple of years before we'll have an issue with the balance forward. So we see our rates are going to go up between 812%.

I'm pointing these out for both of you to show you both areas because it's a budgetary need, it's a budgetary impact to everybody, not just us, the constitutional officers that may be in it. There's a couple other outside organizations that joined with us. We'll be looking in '27 for going out for procurement on the health benefits side. We do annual renewals every year in risk management. More wonderful news is the legislature passed to increase the sovereign immunity limits.

It's been two hundred and three hundred forever probably. I'd seem to remember that now. They passed the bill yet to three fifty and five hundred. Now it hasn't been signed by the governor. Melissa, our HR Director, just preliminary, they're thinking that may raise our risk cost by about 20%.

We don't know yet for sure as we'll see when we come with a renewal, but that will have an impact. But so we just started taking a look at this is going to be a little multi year. I do want to look at and change and how we charge out our to the difference whether it's department wise, employee wise, vehicle wise, So we're going to take a little bit more in-depth look at because we got to do something before we come to you guys with some help or some direction. We got to do something to make sure we can kind of level off our fund balance in these two items. Then last but not last but not least, but I do want to point out a little bit of good news.

The Florida has their own Doge office and they put a report together. This is from Page 15 of the report and I'll read at least the first sentence. To the credit Brevard County leaders lowered the countywide millage rate supporting Board of County Commissioners agencies each year during this period over 20% in total. But if you take a look at that chart, can see how we've been going down some one other county has gone down every year, which is Pinellas County. Other ones have kept their military stable, down a little bit, one actually went up Broward County.

But if you look at that chart and it goes back to fiscal year twenty twenty one, our fiscal year twenty twenty one millage rate is actually the highest millage rate we have is fiscal year twenty twenty one in this chart. So our highest rate is actually lower than any of the other nine counties lowest rates. So I want to put that out that is commissioner direction, is staff working to keep the budget balance and that's also but you're seeing a lot of effect of the cap in that. So this is and you've seen this, a number of times before. We had it in the budget message.

We talked about it last year's workshops. Talked about it at the last workshop. There's other different ways for to generate some revenue. Public service tax, we that is up to 10% on your various utility bills. We don't implement any of it.

Every municipality implements it in some form that could generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000,000 Under our charter that requires if even if you guys decide to do it five point zero that requires that it has to go out to the ballot, the voters have to vote on it. We just can't implement it ourselves. The fuel tax which you all talked about the last couple of board meetings ago could generate up about 9,000,000 super majority vote or you can put it on a ballot referendum. But that 9,000,000 only gets you the transportation related expenditures that we highlighted throughout this report. Discretionary surtax, the local government infrastructure right now that's zero five zero we have for or 05% for Sorrel.

The charter regional transportation tax is also a what they call the discretionary sales surtax and that's but that will get you transportation related expenditures kind of similar to the gas tax. And then last but not least is the finding the critical need to exceed the charter cap limitations. Under our charter as I said earlier, we can only increase our revenue from millages by 3% or what the CPI is. I'm double checking to make sure Keith says I he wants to make sure I say it correctly. If we go above that and we have done it twice before that I'm aware of that takes a super majority vote about the Board County Commissioners.

You have to put a resolution out, you have to describe what you're doing, describe the costs and the reasoning behind that. So that is also a way to help raise some revenue to meet some of our infrastructure needs. So those have all been shown to you before in the budget message, in last year's budget and in the workshops. I didn't do too bad, half hour. I thought practice yesterday was twenty five minutes.

So we're open as I told you as we went around the briefings, we were just going to give you a high level overview, give you some numbers there and then basically get out of your way for discussion. We have staff here to answer any questions if you have anything specific on some of the numbers. And then we'll do our best and follow whatever direction or information you need.

Thank you for for

One technical question real quick. You said 3% or the CPI, it's a lesser of the two. Again, we agreed it's 2.63%, right?

Got it. Thank you for correcting me. So this coming year's cap is 2.63 percent. Okay.

Thank you.

So it's not spelled out in agenda. Assume this is the part of the agenda for questions from the commission.

Got one Well

Let's see. Good here. Public Yeah.

That would probably yeah. Treat it treat it like an agenda item, sir. That'd be a good way to go. Yes.

We got one card. Lisa Cullen. That sounds familiar. Lisa, good to have you here. Hey.

First of all, I wanna thank you all for having your discussion about facilities today. Jim and Tad came to visit his government center in North Regard, and I'm here to speak for the inhabitants of that building. This year has been pretty bad in here. We have no heat. There were days that it was hovering around 60 the

going

next week. Week. I just want to to to go thank Jim I'm and Tad for coming to go visit the government center in North Brevard, and they took a tour of every single every single floor of that building. And like I said, I'm here to speak for those inhabitants of that building. During this past cold snap, of course, the building has no heat, so it hovered around 60 degrees in my office, and it just got colder as you went down because heat rises.

It usually stays around 53 degrees on the Bottom Floor in the clerk's office. Yeah. It's cold. I did they work with gloves and it it's just I don't know how they do it. The HVAC in that building is, I guess I guess Skip would say way beyond its useful useful life.

There are the chillers that serve the building are no longer operational. So we have chillers that are setting portable chillers that are setting outside the building that thank goodness are no longer powered by diesel generator. That was another fiasco within itself. The building's windows are not sealed, so therefore, the cold and any fumes come right through the building in every regard. Brain is a constant visitor through our windows as our wasps.

On the 1st And 2nd Floor, there is a rat problem. I haven't experienced rats. I don't believe anyone above the 3rd Floor has experienced rats, but the building is in serious need of some of attention. It is it is getting till it's almost inhabitable. On many of the air conditioning vents, you can see some type of black mold or black substance that is coming through the vents.

So our HVAC has to be addressed, and it's been passed over year over year, and I would say if it was inspected, building just needs to be torn down and something else happened. So I thank you for your time. If you have any questions, it's there's there's several 100 employees there, and they need a better place to work. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions? I'm looking forward to my tour. I'm gonna go up and take a look at it. Obviously, something we value is our county center, Titusville, our county seat.

Our county seat.

Yep. Our county seat. We we definitely wanna take care of that. Any questions? That was the only card we had. Thank you for being here and sharing that. I think board. Think the of

And

concise, clear, communicated extremely well in a very, very straightforward and simple way. On slide 19, the utility services department infrastructure needs. Notice countywide we have a big ticket, a $793,000,000 shortfall. I'm curious what's going to be the impact of that shortfall. Does that mean we will be facing moratorium? If we don't meet that unfunded need, does that mean we're not gonna get building permits because they can't get they can't get sewer permits? I know we're facing a moratorium and a big part of the campaign and septics, but what is that what is the impact of that?

Consent order.

Pardon me?

It would be a consent order from the state of Florida.

What does that mean? Explain

that. And probably Morris can explain it more from a legality side, but a consent order is in the state of Florida. They would come from the Department of Environmental Protection through their legal department notifying us that we are not abiding with state law. So the projects associated on that list, majority of them, if not all, are associated with the Florida statute. So nutrient removal as we have those conversations and all of our laws as related to water and wastewater are in chapter four zero three.

So if you go under chapter four zero three, four zero three point o six four point four zero three point o eight five, and I say this because as director, it's just ingrained in their subsequent laws coming. It's a notification basically that within those laws, they give you a deadline of when you have to achieve your goal. So if we do not achieve it legally, we are not following the law, which would then result in a consent order.

So let me ask further. So this doesn't mean and if we have an unfunded need and whatever that may be, main capacity in the plant, does that mean we we don't have the ability to treat the sewage? Are we So

the the question came, commissioner, that what what's occurred in Florida at least on the on the wastewater side is about twenty twenty, twenty one, Florida started enacting a bunch of laws increasing the standard of disposal treatment. You know, if we go back prior, you hear the buzzwords of nutrient reduction. Well, that requires advanced wastewater treatment. That is the expectation not only the state of Florida, but the EPA expect. All of that has a cost association.

If you think of how the and I you know not to put it in such a way, but the business model of what utility services are, we are very different from most other utilities even from a Brevard County geographic. When we think of Cocoa, it's one continuous area that Cocoa oversees. When you think of Melbourne, it's the same model. When you think of Brevard County utility services, we are essentially six independent utility services, none of which we have the ability to interconnect. So in the magnitude of how our logistics are set up, we really don't have the benefit of scales of economics so to speak.

What we do for one we have to do for another. The issue then becomes if we look at them individually, some of the areas, again, from a payback period from what we would generate in that area would be a lengthy amount of time. So we're constantly doing a fund shifting. But now with the intensity of these state laws, and let's not forget what really threw this into a wrench was 2022, 2023. And I know there was the graph showing the construction index, but that really threw a wrench in it because what I'll give you an example.

The norm for a typical lift station project used to be about $11,200,000.0. Now on those same projects to 2.4. And when I talk with other utility directors, it's just, you know, thirty years of doing this, the data points of what I used to think would be the price of a project have been thrown out because they're constantly moving higher and higher.

So what I hear you saying, this is real interesting, this is not necessarily just quantitative treatment, but these costs are what are probably qualitative treatment that we meet standards that are based by state law, which I assume a lot of those state laws were mandated by federal law as well. Yes. So it's not just have to still defend the state a little bit.

Well,

it was probably many of the the nutrient reduction requirements of federal law as well.

Absolutely. But when you're going through this when you're going through the exercise of achieving the goals of whether it's water or wastewater quality, you have to look at it from the sense of what service area are we expected to provide. And I understand they may not be coming today, but a utility, you have to be at least three to five years ahead of it. Because if you think in the world of development, they move much quicker than we do in government. So, again, it's quantitative and qualitative.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So next question I have is, are any of these standards imminent? Are we facing any immediate consent orders? I mean, we're already facing the septic moratorium, but what are we looking at from a time frame when we have to suddenly find ourselves?

The closest ones right now are gonna be the water we're going And other to to

the that

do

The other ones with related to the wastewater quality, I believe it's either 2032 or in 2034 are the threshold for that. But as we speak and we say this conversation now, there are still additional laws being or bills being provided. Right now, it's one of those things and, you know, commissioner, you've spent a lot time in Tallahassee. And, you know, when you see the same common bill being floated year after year, it might not pass the first year, it might not pass the third, but it may be the fifth or the seventh that will get through. And what's alarming to us as utility directors, we're seeing those bills.

We're seeing those bills that have been floated now four or five years straight. And in conversations, it will occur. So now that would be an additional cost on top of what's presented.

And I know in Tallahassee, I've been there, we run a victory lap, which is good. We have increased the standards, the nutrient standards, gonna clean up Florida waterways, which is good, but we're not providing the funding or we're not having the utility hearings or the ratepayer hearings. We know there's got to be a follow-up. People have to step up and fund those, and there seems to be a lot of public support. Do you think we have any immediate need to start looking at rate adjustments to meet this standard?

Oh, absolutely. And it's already in the works, sir. So upon conclusion of this, and I've consulted with both Jim and Tad, we've already completed the connection fee. And again, the connection fees from this department go back from 1993 and have been unadjusted. They're that. Then

to

presumptuous, but if the connections that. Fees were to be placed and if we showed that graph, there is still a delta there. And let me say, there isn't a project in our CIP that I would say we should be doing. These are literally we must be doing. The shoulds have been removed about two years ago.

Well, we know there's a lot of public support for Cleanup Lagoon. Oh, hi, commissioner. You you have the floor.

Oh, thank you. Sorry to interrupt. I I was just wondering just because we're on this topic. Is are these things that could be paid for by the infrastructure sales tax? And what would that look like? Because when I talked to Morris last, we could still possibly have some time to update the language to include some of this stuff.

Morris, would you wanna comment? I believe the question is if the board revisited its decision to just renew the save our Indian River Lagoon half cent surtax and instead make it a full penny with provisions for infrastructure. Could funds generated by that be spent on these projects? And the answer to that would be yes.

Or even keep it at a half cent, but just expand the allowable uses?

Potentially, yes. But it would be the even though it's still a half cent, it would be the equivalent of implementing a new sir surtax?

Well, I'm looking at our half cent generated last five years right about 500,000,000. I'm looking at $793,000,000. So it would not fund it, and that's if you used every penny of it, which means none of that money would be going toward cleaning up the lagoon, it would be providing sewer treatment. That's the challenge we're

Can ask one technical thing And on if you did let's say you did the half penny and expand it in that last scenario, half of the funds generated there also would then go to the municipal governments. Roughly, yes. Doesn't just stay in Brevard County.

Right. Either by formula or, you know, local agreements or local agreements, but yes, it wouldn't be exclusively to county. So And if we sort of revise the existing half cent to expand the uses, we would absolutely be in a position The uphogging. Renegotiating those agreements with the municipalities. Mhmm. And

commissioner, let me add because you're mentioning about state funding. So on the next on the next board meeting, you'll be seeing that we're gonna be submitting for state revolving fund. And state revolving fund is it's a great program. It started in the early eighties. It's associated associated with with water wastewater. However, due to the demand, the rules have changed. What the rules have changed used to be, you could submit for multiple projects. Now they've scaled that back. Now what they've done is they've scaled it back where you can submit you can submit on multiple projects, but as an entity, the maximum we can get is 25,000,000. Now that's pending what the board what their committee decides.

Excuse me. So, you know, we will be taking, you know, leveraging that because it it is a lower interest rate. We always submit every opportunity that FDEP has and we've been in communication with our lobbyists both on the state and federal level to try to see how we can leverage it. As we know we're doing the effort as it's related with the space industry and we want to make sure that we're leveraging federal dollars and not county dollars on the infrastructure for that. So we are definitely trying to stay as aware as we can to to stretch our dollars as far as we can.

I have a lot of questions. Can I ask you a question?

Sure. Sure. You know, we're we're not alone in this and and bringing our our wastewater up to the new standard. Right? So how did right. So how do how do other municipal governments how are they how are they tackling that?

Well, they have an advantage because like I said for for, you know, and like I say, I I feel quite comfortable in that question because commissioner for ten years prior to being a utility director, I was an engineering consultant as a VP doing water wastewater with a variety. The a treatment plant. And there you have the ability to get, you know, the scales of economics in terms of keeping your price down. But as we function, we're essentially six independent. So if you think about the nutrient removal, we have six wastewater plants.

So what would an advantage of, you know, whether it's a a Coco Melbourne, Coco Beach, they're putting their assets all into one asset. We have to do that times six. And it's not just the nutrient removal, now it's into the disposal, especially if you're in the Indian River Lagoon. So disposal methods is traditionally a deep injection well. And going back eight years, if you asked me what a deep injection well cost, it used to be 6 to 8,000,000 was the swag number.

Today, we're getting into numbers of twenty five and thirty. The state now has now said, but every five years, you have to do a test on that well. And the testing period is about a five day period. The state used to allow a period of time where they would allow you to discharge to the Indian River Lagoon during the testing period for the benefit of testing the well. Come 2032, that is no longer allowed.

So now that requires a second deep injection well at a cost of around $2,530,000,000 so that you have the benefit of when you test one well, you transfer it over so nothing gets discharged to the lagoon. These are the challenges that we have times six.

Can I ask one follow-up there? Reuse. We talk about reuse a lot here because Viera has reuse for and so is Suntree for irrigation. And now is that is that cheaper? A cheaper model producing reuse water than than having to do another deep injection well?

Is it cheaper? It

If you were if you

were starting to construct a new plant, would you would you go the way of we're going to we're going to look to a deep deep injection well or we're going to try to do reuse with

So the DEP does so the DEP does not allow reuse to be a primary disposal. They consider that a secondary. The reason being is it's it's considered a secondary because we have no control of the homeowners shutting off their irrigation pumps. Right now, today, we are producing more reuse than demand. So if you can imagine, we have the the wetlands that we're familiar with.

By permit, that is our primary disposal. Why? Because we control it. So the DEP doesn't give you an option if you decide to go full reuse, you don't need to do a deep injection well. They don't consider that an option.

That's interesting on the demand situation because we know when it gets dry here that there's pretty heavy demand on reuse at least in this part of

it's county. Cooler weather right now, but I'll guarantee you in about a month or two, it'll be flipped.

When it rains more? Maybe. Okay. Alright, sir.

What are we looking at to fix this problem? We see the gross amount, the number, but what are we looking as far as potential rates and adjustment of rates? Is that a is that So

for connection fees right now, just to give you a sneak preview, the sanitary or the sewer connection rates would double. And the

What are they?

Commissioner, I I I will if this is a pop quiz, I hope I score a passing grade. I think right now it's twenty three hundred, twenty four hundred if they're gonna go up to 48. The water because we have smaller, we have less water, but it's a calculation. And again, again, I'd be thrilled to discuss this one on one and how the calculation was formed. It's going from 1,700 to I believe 5,000 per ERC.

And how about the monthly rates? What?

Monthly rates are still being worked on, sir.

So we don't have those numbers yet.

I anticipate in the next two to three months we will.

Okay. The other Josh, this is and I assume we have a lot of the ratepayers that are using Berwad County sewer in cities. This is not a jurisdictional thing, especially with the cities doing the the large annexations. So we this is not a county city thing. A lot of our ratepayers are in the cities. Am I correct?

When we talk about ratepayers and incorporated, the beaches come to mind. This is where we have satellite bead Indian Harbor and whatnot. The only areas like what we call South Central that we reside in Palm And

York.

We have the the New

So two or three months, we'll get we'll get more news of and I'm

You'll get more. Yeah. Yes.

Far as the consent order, is that the right legal term consent?

It is, sir.

Are we are any of those imminent? I mean, within the next year or two? I mean, that's probably a question of Morris. I don't know. Yet. Pardon me?

Not yet.

Not yet. We still have a window.

We still have a window.

But you mentioned that window is about a three year period. We need to start thinking.

Yeah. And and let me say, sir, that for the most part, most of those projects, if not all, are already in motion. So we've already gone through the RFQ portion. We have a consultant. We are working through the design.

And the benefit of that is is because whether it's federal or state, even when you do come for an opportunity for a grant, they typically ask you what stage of the project it's in. It's critical that we get these projects at least if not more than 90% complete because that seems to be the threshold that they're looking for you to be seriously considered. So as we're turning out these projects and even though we may be in a situation today to say, why are you go why are you designing it for the benefit you don't have the money to construct it? We still need to because in order to be, you know, to be viable to get those grants when they do become available.

Makes sense. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? I'll give a little history here.

I've been you know, when I first got elected in '84 to the county commission, our prior commission in the early late seventies, early eighties were facing a consent order or a federal mandate to get there was direct discharge into the Indian River Lagoon, part of the federal clean water act. And a lot of those plants that we had were not county plants, they were with the growth of the sixties and seventies and the space programs, they allowed developers to come and develop these package treatment plants, and there were all kinds of package plants that were just not working. The developers had put capital reserve there, we had to inherit them and affluent was just being dumped into the lagoon, I mean raw sewage practically. So it was a lot of courage. Our commission stepped forward, and you know, as in so many things, I'll probably never get the due credit, but the commission of the early eighties, late seventies, really had a great solid waste director, I mean a wastewater director, which as we do now, great staff, a lot of capability, but they they what they were had a gun, a federal gun pointed there, but they stepped up and had to do a rate adjustment.

The public hearings were so big, they had to find some of the all the largest churches they could find. They couldn't fit people into any of the public meetings. But it was the issue of the day, day, and but they laid the groundwork for so much of of what has got us to this point now, our prosperity that we have now, and has been based on what they did, and it sounds like history does repeat itself. We're gonna be faced with some challenges here, and I appreciate it. The good news, it sounds like we have a little bit of lead time, but I what I'm trying to get is where are our decision points?

Do we have a a set of benchmarks that we need to act and react? And I hope that I know the staff gives us though that we we don't catch ourselves in a situation where we, you know, we haven't really thought ahead and addressed those. So I appreciate you bringing these numbers up. It was really interesting. Any other questions on the the presentations?

Okay. Well, that's great. We we matter of time with plenty to skip spare. I wanna thank staff for their

Mister chairman chairman. Yes. I would I would like to make a motion. Okay?

Okay. Can we can we take an action as a workshop? Are we able to vote? The board cannot take final action at a workshop.

The board can generally give staff direction and ask staff to bring things back for formal action at a future board meeting or things of that nature.

Okay. Did you hear that commissioner?

Alright. How about a request? Yep.

Okay. Alright.

How about a request?

Yes.

Okay. Can I make a request, sir?

Yes. Yes. Can is that more? Sir. Absolutely.

I moved to direct staff to evaluate what steps would be required to reset the general fund mill and trade to a level that would generate revenue needed to address the county's infrastructure and other critical needs. The evaluation would identify these needs and include any an an analysis that potentially impact property owners. Staff should bring back this to the board at a future meeting to discuss it.

Yeah. That's absolutely direction that the board could provide staff at this workshop.

Okay. Good. Good motion. Is there a second? I

thought we couldn't do a motion. Well But we agree. But do

we do a motion and second on a vote on that? We're not going to take final action, but we're asking staff.

You you can take a motion on directing staff to bring back. Okay.

I will second that.

That's for consideration.

So there's a second to the motion? Any discussion?

All those Can I can I clarify? Yes. To to reset the millage to to what are we talking about? A critical funding need?

Commissioner Goodson, did you to? Commissioner, do you wanna respond to that question?

Be to reset the it would be to reset the millage to handle the critical needs.

Okay. Is that to exceed the charter cap?

I don't think I

I I'm hearing I'm missing

the I'm missing To establish I'm hearing that it's direction for staff to do an evaluation and analysis of where the millage would need to be reset in order to fund critical needs and and then the commissioner listed off things to be included in that analysis.

With more so what I'm the way I'm hearing and understanding address the critical needs we come back with the categories are listed critical needs for you all and what the cost would be, what the millage would be to generate the revenue to offset the cost.

Okay. And also to clarify, we're not voting even for a tentative millage until July. Correct. So, you know, you can you can decide that, you know, at the June for for July meeting or you can give direction today to, you know, to start preparing those things, but ultimately, we're not voting for any of that until July.

That's correct. This this wouldn't be action today. This would be just direction. Otherwise,

staff will prepare a budget that is within the limits set forth in the charter? So we're gonna have two budgets prepared for us, we're gonna have staff, staff is gonna go in the direction of if you don't get a critical funding need, this is what fits within the charter cap, and if you do get a critical funding need from the board, then this is this is the budget. Is that

My understanding of the request was that we would be coming back to the board with evaluation of what those critical needs are and what that millage would need to be set at. So I think we would try to do that before we brought the proposed budget to the board in July and get direction, additional direction at that time.

And mister chair, and I apologize, I screwed up a little bit. You all asked for a third workshop, I mean, this may that's what we can target and bring it back for, and we had penciled in, we haven't put anything in calendar actually officially but we could have a third budget workshop after the second meeting in April. The same day, you know, you have your board meeting finished, you know, hopefully around noon ish come to set, come up here at 01:00. And I believe that's April 21 is that Tuesday. Yeah, thanks.

Does that give you time to to make the motion?

Yeah, because went out to sit down with the county attorney's office and the budget office. What I'm picturing is something to bring back to you all to look at and you tell us yes or no to start proceeding with developing a final critical need so that way we can be and that would be presented to you with the budget in July. I mean, you know, so I'm making Commissioners, say I say this so often, I'm making something up. So if we decide to, and I'm going to be silly, we decide that we want to build a four story on the Viera and we put it as a critical need and we presented you in April, you guys say no I don't want that in the budget. But if we come back and say we need to fix $10,000,000 of the elevators and you agree with that, then that's what we put in the budget.

Well, do want to say commissioner, that is an extremely good motion because we've all been briefed by staff and it's been difficult because of the need for direction. So I appreciate your motion, I think it's well thought out, and I will support it.

Does take a vote?

Any discussion? All in we have a motion. Do we have a second?

Second.

Second by commissioner Atkinson. All in all those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed?

Aye.

Okay. Pardon me? All those all those opposed?

Is that Nay. Nay.

So it's a four one vote with commissioner Delaney voting against. Did I read that?

I think

so. Is that correct?

What I heard. And we're gonna have Yeah. These options brought back to us in April.

Yes. We're not committing to anything. These are just options.

We're agreeing to have a workshop now in April?

Is part of that?

I'm fine with that.

Yeah, I'm fine with it too. But I mean, so yeah,

we're gonna do

I'm working a little bit on the fly, so what we'll bring back is critical needs for you guys to decide on to you what would be a critical need.

But even in the workshop where it's not a vote, that's that's some direction.

It it would be direction, yes.

That would be

Can I have

a question? Yes.

Would we be able because of the topic of this workshop, would we possibly be able to do it as a evening work shop so more people would be able to be available? As far as the public goes.

Well, I don't know if this is intended to be a public hearing like a public hearing on the budget. This is a workshop. If we're calling this a workshop, we wouldn't be able to take a final action.

Yeah. It would it would be a workshop. Like I said, I'm doing a little on the fly for you, chair, but that we present you a number of items that you could take a look at and then you would give us direction and then we go and develop the final resolution or whatever for critical need and present that is when we present you a budget in July.

And we're talking about the second regular meetings, that's a morning meeting. If we first. Right? Yeah. So if it were following that, I mean, I think just sort of naturally one or one or 02:00.

I think that

By virtue of that, we're all here.

Yeah. Right. It's a normal meeting at 9AM. We have that meeting, maybe a lunch break and come back, probably Mhmm. Like you said, I agree with that. I don't think we could I I wouldn't support doing it at night. I think that would be a hardship. Yeah. And we're not gonna take a formal action. It's it's a workshop. It's time for us to consider. Okay. Yes.

One more thing. I wanted to discuss the email that I sent out on Tuesday evening if we have the opportunity to do that.

Absolutely. So we can vote it on the workshop. Thank you, commissioner Goodson. And I do have a procedural question So on we we will would we advertise that as a part of the regular meeting that we'd phase into or do we need a time certain to the workshop?

I would call it a workshop, you know, agenda regular meeting and then come in to it as a workshop.

Okay. So if That we

makes sense. Yeah.

If we end up early, we can come in here earlier on the workshop. Okay. Yes. Commissioner Eckerson.

Thank you. So probably everyone in here saw the email that I sent out on Tuesday evening. I wanted to explain it a little bit to my fellow commissioners, but also to staff. So last year, being new, I felt like I was drinking from a water hose, right, trying to understand this budget. Don't feel like I had a whole lot of input in it to be perfectly honest with you.

So staff did what staff does, which is make it balanced because we have to. I feel like I want to participate a little bit more in that this year to the best of my ability anyway. So my office just went through and looked at some nonessential county services. All of these services matter to someone, multiple someones. They matter to me.

But I think it's important that we look at what we can because we're not talking about cutting the fat. Right? That that's we're not cut we're talking about service cuts here because the only way to balance the budget is either to bring in more money or cut stuff. So this is here because I wanted the commissioners just to have a look at some of the things that maybe we don't have to do. I mean, Jim, you said took a haircut last year.

Commissioner, you said facing challenges. All of that is lovely language for we're in trouble here. You know, we we all have a budget at home that we that we try to balance doing different things. So while some of them seem mean, it's couple comments I've heard. Yeah. These ones hurt. What I was hoping is that maybe we don't discuss it right now, but it encourages us to go to staff and say, hey. Is this foolish thing that that Kim brought up possible? Or do I like it or don't I like it? And get staff to weigh in and on on it a little bit.

While we probably, as a group, might not wanna put our names to these cuts because they are emotional. Maybe if we tell staff what we think, what we could support in full or in part, that gives staff some direction when we do ask you to start dealing with this budget. Right? If we have if you have commissioners who overlap in things that they would support reducing, it might help staff create some cuts that are needed. That's what my email was meant to do.

It was not to support getting rid of any of these things wholly or in part. It was just an idea for us to start talking for real about what some of these cuts could look like.

I think that's good input. Very good input. Thank you. Okay. I think well, we'll get to reports. We do we have a county manager report?

Yes, Mr. Chair, do have one. Thank you. Email went out a bit earlier today from Billy Prasad, the Planning and Development Director. We've been invited to the LNG workshop. I'm calling it the LNG workshop, it's an open house or workshop at the Canaveral Port Authority next Tuesday the twenty fourth. We've been asked to be one of the presenters and Billy will be there representing us presenting. And you'll see the slides they were sent to you and the slides are emphasizing the process it would take if an LNG plant was built on the count, if that became county land. So I want to point out it is not county land right now, it is port land. If somehow the port decided to sell it to the folks to build an LNG plant, there's a long process they would have to go to to get it permitted or allowed in the county.

So Billy is going to explain that and part of the process is explain to the citizens that there will be a number of chances for the citizens to speak up or have public input if that plan happened to be proposed in County land. So I just want to since I had since we just worked on it, I had the chance to discuss it in public, I just want to make sure it's out there. That and so I sure Billy would be a very nice job representing us and explaining the process.

So I have a question on that. So I assume what that means is if that transfer were to become reality and becomes Cali land and they wanted to put an LNG plant, they would have to do things like comp plan amendments, zoning requests, is that kind of what we're Yes,

sir. They would have to do a comp plan amendment, they'd have to do zoning, and they would have to go through the site plan

we'll And then, that. Do that.

Of little better

a we'll And

district, are you okay with that? Of

Yes, I am.

Okay. Thank you. Alright. Anything else? Alright. We will move to county attorney.

No report, mister chair.

No report. Commission district one.

I I just wanna say thank you guys for letting me participate remotely today, and I hope everybody has a great day.

Thank you. District two?

No report.

District three? No report. District four?

I'll say something really quick. I think I've done this every year. Brevard Zoo ranked as fifth best zoo in the nation in The USA Today 10 best readers choice award. So congratulations to our zoo. It's a beautiful time of the year if you get the chance, get out and see the animals. It's it's a it's a wonderful thing to have one of the best zoos in the country right here in Brevard County. Congratulations to them.

It is a phenomenal zoo. It's great. And I learned something. I was just there a week or two ago. Giraffes love to eat Brazilian peppers. I mean, they love it. I watched them. And they man, they devour them. Yeah. I mean, do we need to introduce giraffes into Boulevard's native habitat? There you go. Thank thank you, commissioner. I have no report. So, I think

Mister Ferry, you skipped me.

What was that? Skip to me. Oh my gosh. District 3. I'm sorry.

I don't have any report, though.

No report? Okay. How did I do that? I'm so sorry. Okay. I have no report. I think that concludes our business. If no objection, we will adjourn the meeting. Thank you. Thank you.

The opinions expressed by any member of the public during any period of public comment do not necessarily reflect the views or opinion.