Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Good morning and welcome to the Tuesday, June 9th, 2026 Board of Supervisors. At this time, we will read out our closed session agenda.

Item 1, pursuant to government code 54957.6, conference with county designated labor negotiators Teresa Hitchcock, Judy Hawkins, and Shea Johnson regarding the following employee organization, Service Employees International Union, SEIU, Local 1021. Okay. Any public comment?

No, no, no. We have no online public comment. And with that, we will close and go into closed session and come back at 9 a.m. Thank you.

Excuse me.

Welcome to the June 9, 2026 regular meeting of the Calvary County Board of Supervisors. Will everyone please stand for the pledge?

Supervisor Handel. Supervisor Handel.

Supervisor Handel.

Supervisor Handel.

Supervisor Handel. Supervisor Handel. Supervisor Handel. Supervisor Handel.

Post session for today, June 9th, item 1, pursuant to government code 54957.6, conference with county designated labor negotiators Teresa Hitchcock, Judy Hawkins, and Shea Johnson regarding the following employee organization, Service Employees International Union Local 1021. Board action, no reportable action taken.

Thank you. Staff announcements. Lisa. How did I know?

Good morning, everybody. You just knew it. Lisa Medina, Environmental Management Agency. And this is Shawna and JC. So JC is one of our pups that's up for adoption. JC is a spayed female Border Collie mix, and she's about seven months and 30 pounds. We've had her for a little bit, so she's probably gained a little weight. She's very playful and very lovey, and she gets along with everybody. She did great in her behavioral evaluation and is happy to meet all other dogs. She has a pup boyfriend named Weeman. Who's neutered? And Weeman is also up for adoption. Weeman kind of looks like JC a little bit, a little bit shorter and shorter hair. So Weeman is also white and cute and similar in size, and they do zoomies together when they're playing out in the yard. She also loves playing ball and on walks. She's not too bad in relation, as a matter of fact, she did really well today, huh Shauna? But still she could benefit from some training. She knows sit and stand and down commands. She's very affectionate and people-oriented, as you can tell. She's really calmed down a lot. And she's about eight months old at this time. We guess that she'll really be a very fun, loving, good home for a family, and she'll grow into a very sweet family dog. And as with any, if you have a pup at home, a meet and greet is welcome, and you can bring them to our shelter to meet JC. They can meet each other. You can contact us at 209-754-6509. Our next free rabies focus, rabies and microchip clinic is this Saturday, June 13th from 9 to 1130 here at the Government Center. Dr. Kathy Gatlin will be the attending veterinarian. We cannot stress enough the importance of a rabies vaccine. This is a disease that's 100% fatal, but it's 100% treatable. And I will share a little bit of myself, my story with this. I just finished the rabies treatment vaccine and it was very interesting. um and i i can't do enough and here i am the animal service director right and i just want to share that story so i can't share enough how critical and it is for everybody to get the rabies vaccine my pups were vaccinated fully vaccinated of course but as with anything we want to take those precautionary measures and make sure that we protect public health and our animals primarily number one that is all i have does anybody have any questions

Thank you.

My announcement probably won't generate as much enthusiasm or applause. Michael Martin, Interim Director for Integrated Waste. I'm here today to make an announcement about a numerous number of recycling events that will be taking place throughout the county throughout the month of June and July. So our first event is coming up here this Saturday, June 13th in Copperopolis. From 8 AM to 12 PM, that's the recycling event where residents can bring in appliances, mattresses, tires, all the various things that are difficult to get rid of. They can bring to this event and we can work with them on making sure they get disposed of properly. So our first events in Copperopolis in June 20th will be in Valley Springs. June 27th will be in Arnold. We'll make our way to West Point in July, San Andreas, and then Angels Camp. So we plan to cover the entire county, all the different districts. So this flyer, I'll leave a few copies here if anybody's interested. It's also available on our website, on the homepage of the Integrated Waste Management website, where they can find that information as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike.

Good morning. I just wanted to remind everybody that summer reading started yesterday and for the first time we have an adult summer reading program as well. There are bingo cards that you can pick up at any library branch. Both adults and children will have pin trading as a part of their summer reading program, something our staff came up with this year. If you are a Disney adult or know of a Disney adult, you might know what pin trading is. but as a part of the summer reading game you can earn little pins that go on a lanyard and you can train that trade them at any library branch and also at a couple of community partners a couple of stores reached out to us and said hey can we have pin trading at our store so please um look into the summer reading program either for a child or for yourself and i'd love to see you there this summer thank you thank you

Ms. Fowler. Take my chance.

good morning mr chair honorable members of the board jesse fowler agriculture commissioner director of weights and measures um i'm going to apologize it's going to be kind of lengthy because it's actually two so if there was just one to be shorter i have an announcement regarding two pest alerts uh you might have seen some of the coverage on the news recently so the first is called glassy wing sharpshooter and anyone who has a vineyard is well aware of what this pest is it's a non-native invasive insect pest that is not currently established in northern california it's uh kind of stops at fresno southern california is infested uh it was actually discovered coming out of a nursery in fresno there's 13 000 grapevines that were shipped to northern california they all came from a virtual nursery and they went to costco stores now this was between april 21st and may 21st uh we don't have a costco Nevertheless, we have had seven responsible residents who have called our department, who actually purchased these vines and brought them into our county. We're doing everything we can to collect these and properly dispose of them. We haven't found any GWIS life stages, GWIS is the short for glass spring sharpshooter, on the vines that we have retrieved. But that said, there are 19 counties that have found Some, some life stage, some of them, all of them on these vines. So this is this is a really critical time to get out there and find these before they can get out and spread. They're really good flyers. So, we're basically asking please contact us if you're not in this county contact, whoever your agriculture commissioner is. California County Department of Agriculture. We're at 2097546504. Also, Costco has been really cooperative. If you did purchase a vine, you're going to get a full refund, so that's not going to be an issue. But we do ask that you don't move those vines, so please don't take them back to Costco, because if you move it, there's a chance you can move that pest. Give us a call. We're going out to your house or wherever you have planted these. We are pulling them. We are properly inspecting, double bagging, and disposing of them. And just as a heads up too, so with this particular pest, it has over 250 different species that it likes. So basically, if that leaf is large enough for its egg mass, it's not too furry, it's not too smelly, that's its new home. It particularly likes to live in urban landscaping. So again, this is something that goes beyond just us worrying about grapevines. And again, they're very hard to spot. So even if your vine looks healthy, there's still a chance that it could be infested with this pest. And the reason also why we're really worried about this, especially in regards to the grapevines and vineyards, is because it does harbor a disease that's called Pierce's disease. It's a bacterium. And although it's not dangerous at all to people or animals, it has been shown to kill a grapevine within five years because basically it gets into the xylem, which is kind of the water part. It clogs it up. That plant just basically dies. So again, If you have one of these plants, please, please call us. And then the second species I'm here to talk about is the new world screw worm, which is a type of parasitic fly. Now I'm gonna keep this really light as the damage they can do to an animal. It's pretty horrifying if you're interested, there's lots of pictures online. The reason why it's horrifying is that unlike other species of blow fly, And again, these are really hard to tell. If you saw them flying around, it looks like they're generally just called like a green bottle fly. It just kind of looks like this shiny green or bluish colored fly. But that's why it's really important if you see something odd on any warm-blooded animal, they feed on any warm-blooded animal to reach out to us, to the state, because what they do is they feed on living tissue. which is what makes them unusual. All the other blowfly species, they actually feed on necrotic tissue and double fun fact. So you could actually have this guy on there feeding on live tissue, creating dead tissue that brings in other fly species. So you could actually have both. So again, Air on caution. If something looks odd to you, please reach out. They will lay their eggs on open wounds, tick bites around mucous membranes, like around the nostrils or the eyes and around the navel area of newborn animals. This is typically where they're found. The infestations are not contagious. So if you touch it, you're not going to get it. It's from these eggs. But they can cause serious, often deadly damage to livestock, pets, wildlife, again, anything warm blooded people, anything warm blooded. Now, they were eradicated in the United States in 1966. They've been moving up from Southern California, from South America, which is where they've kind of stabilized themselves. They've moved up through Central America, through Mexico. And on June 3rd, the first one was actually found in Texas. It was found on a calf. And then since then, so already we're up to three infestations on calves in Texas. and there's one dog in new mexico that has been found with uh the new world sprue worm so because of that the united states department of agriculture has responded with a protocol of a 20 kilometer quarantine zone so this is a really strict restriction that's in place on animal movement while these eradication efforts are underway so if you're going to move or intend to move any livestock or pets from the quarantine areas you are required to have a california entry permit to move them into this state and that is because these guys they're not really just like flying from one animal to the other and that's not how they're moving what's happening is they're being transported so there's an animal and again it can be something small like a tick bite and you know you have the egg on there you you load up that animal you take it across the state you take across the country and then you have that infestation and they fly off and then they they do their thing so thanks to the strong surveillance and rapid response though there's currently no infestation repeat there's no infestation in california but that's why i'm here because i again please keep your eye out for anything unusual on any kind of wounds any kind of feeding behavior and if there is a suspicious case please contact uh our department again or you can contact directly the California Department of Food and Agriculture. There's information about this glassy-winged sharpshooter, about the New World Screw Worm on our website. There's information on California Department of Food and Agriculture's website and the United States Department of Agriculture's website. USDA also has a dashboard, which is kind of nice, actually shows you the most up-to-date what they found. We have social media. We also try to post everything we can there for our department. So, these detections just serve as a reminder that your help in early surveillance detection and response are the critical components to safeguarding California agriculture. So. Questions I can take from you doing glooms. That's why I went after the library. Thank you. Thank you.

All right.

Mark Warren, Any further staff comments.

Mark Warren, All right, Stacey sent.

General public comment any item of interest to the public that is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the board and is not posted on the consent or regular agendas may be addressed during the public comment period. California law prohibits support from taking action on any matter, which is not posted on the agenda unless it is determined to be an emergency by the board of supervisors. If public comment is completed before the 30-minute allotted time period, the board may immediately move to the next order of business. If public comment is not completed during the allotted time period, it will be continued as the last item of business in order to provide an opportunity for the remainder of comments to be heard.

Public comment.

Public member and I have a comment. Good morning members of the board. My name is Dr. Marielle Conception. I'm a family physician here in Calaveras County and I'm a mom. My boys attend our public schools and are signed up for the reading program this summer. Since 2015, I have been one of only two physicians providing outpatient obstetric care to this county. There are no others. I also care for uninsured patients with communicable diseases under a contract with this county. So when I speak about protecting public health in Calaveras, I'm speaking as someone who does this work every day. I am here because I have questions about how our taxpayer dollars, the taxpayer dollars of every single person in this room, are being spent on public health leadership. I am questioning the investment of public money in a county health officer since 2021 who is trained not in primary care or family medicine, but emergency medicine, and who does not even reside in this county. When I looked into applying for the county health officer position myself earlier this year, I asked questions that were never answered. I recently learned through my own research that this county sits only 1.6% above the herd immunity threshold for protecting a widespread measles outbreak in Calaveras County. I found that on my own research. No one responsible or who's being paid to be responsible for public health and protecting our public health in this county informed me of this or this community, and I am a physician. That concerns me very deeply. So today for public record, I am asking this board for questions in particular. How is the county health officer performance being evaluated? How many hours of service are actually being provided annually that this person is being compensated for? What oversight does the county health officer have for their contract? And how does the county measure effectiveness of our public health dollars investment in a public health officer? i am also requesting that the board place on a future agenda contract oversight practices our public health leadership needs and performance review procedures need to be transparent we're paying for them i intend to follow up in writing and to make sure that these questions are answered and relevant public records are made available to our community thank you so much thank you

Good morning, Mr. Chair and honorable board members. My name is Armando Valerio. I'm a Delta College trustee. I was here last year to introduce myself to all of you and to the community. I'm back again, just to make sure that I'm present and answer any questions that you may have. I brought some promotional items from our CTE program. We want to make sure that we're getting information out there. So I have some information here, some promotional things. So I'll give it to Mr. Luper because he can get it through Calaveras County Office of Education and then yourselves as well. If you want the information since then, we've had meetings with Calvary's county office education. We had our board meeting here as well in these chambers last year. So trying to aggressively make sure that we're representing Calvary's county. Just to let, you know, I'm 1 vote on 7. so if there's issues that you bring to me, and you're still strong about. Come on down down to the valley there and help me out because I'm only 1 vote on 7. But I'm really fighting for Calaveras County. I understand some of the issues that surround Calaveras County. You know, up until two years ago, my family had property here for 40 years. So definitely you can't say I've never been here because I have. But anyway, I want to make sure that Present here, Delta College is here, whatever we can do. Again, there's budgetary issues also when we have these big pie items that sometimes we may have to scale that back, but want to make sure that you have my ear and advocating for Calaveras County any way I can. So I'll give that to Mr. Luper, all this stuff here.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the County Board of Supervisors. My name is Steven Looper. I'm the president of the Calaveras County Board of Education. And I'm here today to speak on behalf of my board to express our really strong support for your continued collaboration in our inter-agency approach to address student attendance through the work of the Calaveras County School Attendance Review Board or SARB. By maintaining the active participation of a representative from the district attorney's office, we create a powerful incentive for families to engage in significant attendance improvement. Our annual SARB report underscores the urgency of this issue and the importance of our coordinated efforts. During the 24-25 school year, 1,464 students in Calaveras County were identified as chronically absent. This represents 29.1% of our student population, which is significantly higher than the statewide average. This means that nearly one in three students in our county is missing valuable instructional time. And as importantly, they are becoming disconnected with the relationships, supports, and opportunities that school provides. This reality reinforces the importance of SARB's multidisciplinary framework, which brings together educators, behavioral health, child welfare, probation, law enforcement, and the district attorney's office to support students and families through both intervention and accountability. Specifically, the presence of the DA's office increases the authority of every other supportive agency in the room. When other school interventions are unsuccessful, the involvement of the DA's office ensures that the accountability mechanisms are available to uphold our state's compulsory education requirements. Students who are truant and or do not graduate from high school are far more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Without sustained collaboration, the SARB's ability to support students and hold families accountable for students' attendance would be significantly diminished. The effectiveness of our SARB is directly tied to the continued participation of county agencies, including the DA's office. These partnerships provide the expertise, resources, and authority necessary to respond to our complex attendance challenges. As you consider future funding and resource allocation decisions today, we respectfully urge you to recognize the value of maintaining the District Attorney's Office participation in SARB. This represents an investment in the well-being of our students, our families, and the long-term vitality of Calaveras County. Thank you so much for your ongoing commitment to our children and our community.

Morning Board of Supervisors. I'm Jared Hungerford. I'm the County Superintendent and a member of the governance team of the County Board of Education. And so I'm co-signatory of the letter that Mr. Looper just read. And I simply wanted to state that the investment of having the district attorney involved in SARB is a relatively small one compared to the output both in the present and in the long term we know that students that don't graduate from high school and students that are truant are far more likely to commit crimes far more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system all of that costs our community financially and in other I would say more important ways as well more than the investment that would we would make in the support that we received from the district attorney that authority in the room is very important for the cooperation that we receive in providing supportive services to families so thank you so much for your support

My name is Christopher Butner, publisher of CalaverasWatchdog.com. The final vote count of the June 2nd District 5 Supervisor Primary Election will be certified soon. The certified results appear certain to confirm what I have stated from this podium several times when addressing Ben Stopper. You're done, Ben. You've squandered your opportunity to continue representing Calaveras County District 5. You are quoted in local media as having stated that your life's events have gotten very interesting and that you have not been able to make the time in certain instances for your constituents but are working on that. You committed a Brown Act violation against me and refused to respond to my cure and correct requests. You insulted me by exchanging inappropriate text messages about my appearance with one of your constituents from where you're seated now. You may recall that I obtained your embarrassing text messages as responsive records to my public records request and posted them to my website. Your official misconduct is repeatedly protected allegedly willfully by county council this morning. I am making a final respectful request to you since you have refused to acknowledge for more than 4 months concerning whether you have resided continuously in district 5 during your incumbency as is the state's legal requirement. Under California government code section 25041, a county supervisor must reside in the district they represent throughout their term in office government code section 1770 provides that the office becomes vacant upon the office holder, ceasing to be an inhabitant of that district. These are not matters of opinion. It is the law that defines who may lawfully hold the district 5 seat. A written declaration of your continuous residency signed under penalty of perjury is being requested of you by me for the final time. Ben, the public is entitled to your assurance of continuous district 5 residency. So I request of you again, Ben directly and on the record. To provide a sworn and notarized statement, affirming your continuous residency within district 5 during your incumbency. If that insurance cannot, or will not be given a California citizen possesses the right to seek the consent of the attorney general to test title of your district 5 office through proceeding under code of civil procedures. Section 803 that step is avoidable. The remedy is your signature on a sworn and notarized notarized affidavit. on another pressing issue calaveras county district 3 supervisor martin hubbard who also holds the title of calaveras visitors bureau executive director appears in the epstein files 14 times which will detrimentally impact tourism especially for those families traveling with children my name is christopher butner read the extensive epstein report at calaveraswatchdog.com thank you

Good morning. On a different matter, Tim Hicks, Angels Camp, and Six Mile Road near Murphys. This is a formal request for the Board of Supervisors to place the following item on a future agenda. Existing Verizon cell tower located at 150 Vallecito Bluffs in Douglas Flat accessible by Six Mile Road. When it meets, I'm asking that the board should direct the planning commission to place on its agenda the same cell tower to determine whether the tower was lawfully constructed with a valid administrative use permit. The planning department documents cited in your packets that I've given to the clerk show clearly that the tower was approved and constructed in 2018 using an expired administrative use permit and because of that the cell tower was constructed with the following violations no public notice of a new AUP was given No survey has ever been taken on that site, even with the 2011, 2012 portable cell tower that was constructed and later decommissioned. There is no environmental report following CEQA has taken place. No AB 52 tribal consultation has ever taken place. No evaluation of setbacks. roadway clearances, easements, or fire safety clearances has been done since there's never been a survey of that site. It is my recommendation that the tower be energized, shut down until a valid AUP is approved that meets the 2026 codes and regulations. Your packets also include public comments i would have made had planning commission meetings occurred during the month of may

good morning tom and facino i rise in support of mr hicks with the top 10 reasons the board of supervisors should put a discussion of the cell tower on its agenda in july number 10. the valesito cell tower controversy raises larger county-wide issues that the playing department needs direction on from the board of supervisors These include who decides an appeal is heard by the Planning Commission, how are non-conforming commercial uses addressed over time, and will the portable temporary conversion to permanent fixed procedure remain available to applicants seeking to circumvent the very wise and the very carefully crafted 2024 zoning ordinance procedures and requirements for cell towers. Number nine, if the board of supervisors gives timely direction to the planning department, then these policy issues could be addressed in the upcoming zoning ordinance cleanup. Number eight, addressing the cell tower issue at the board may help people to avoid taking matters into their own hands, which often leads to litigation, property damage, violence, personal injury, or jail time. Number seven, reasonable people like those in Vallecito prefer to resolve differences out of court. Number six, it costs less to resolve differences than to pay lawyers to fight in court. Number five, people like it when they get to tell their side of the story and when the supervisors are responsive to the legitimate concerns raised. Number three, the county needs many more things that supportive people can reference to counter the constant chorus of county critics. Number two, people are inspired when their local government works well, especially when the state and federal governments are not working well. And number one, it's just the right thing to do. Thank you.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Further public comment.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Miss Simpson online.

PB, Lupita D Montoya, We have no online public comment.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Okay. With that, I'll bring it to the consent agenda.

Consent agenda items are expected to be routine and non-controversial. They will be acted upon by the board at one time without discussion. Any board member, staff member, or interested party may request the removal of an item from the consent agenda for later discussion.

Are there any board members that would like to remove any items from the consent agenda?

Chair, I don't want to remove any, but I will abstain from voting on item two. Item two?

Is there any staff that would like to pull an item or any members of the public?

Item two, Chair.

Item two. Let's double down on item two.

So I'll consider a motion on the remainder.

I'll move the remainder.

We have a motion by Mr. Hoverty on the remainder.

I will second.

And we have a second by Supervisor Andall. All those in favor? Aye. Passes on 5-0, vote of the board. If we're going to be discussing the item, we'll see. Sir? Yeah, but good time behind those doors.

Item two. Item two, agreement administrative office authorized the board chair to execute an agreement with the Calaveras County Visitors Bureau for tourism promotion for the period of July 1, 2026 through June 30th, 2029. Thank you. Mr. Butner.

My name is Christopher Budner, publisher of CalaverasWatchdog.com. For three years, I have repeatedly appeared before this Board of Supervisors, County Council, and the County Executive Officer, and have repeatedly notified all of you in writing that the Calaveras Visitors Bureau was fraudulently misrepresenting its legal type as a public benefit nonprofit corporation. For three years, my factual claims of fraudulent misrepresentation by the CVB have been met with official silence while this county government engaged in alleged criminal conspiracy and covered up its criminal conduct. This was not a paperwork error. It is intentional deception ongoing for three years to conceal the CVB's legal type. More than $1.2 million in county transient occupancy tax has been transferred to a business bureau that continued lying about its legal type and refused to be accountable to the public for its blatant lie. The CVB has lied to the City of Angels Camp for two decades, contractually representing itself to the city as a nonprofit association. I filed a formal grand jury complaint. I filed criminal complaints with the sheriff's office against the county council, the CVB board of directors president, and its executive director i await notification of the status of those criminal complaints from the district attorney's office my factual claims to all of the above parties are met with silence today under slight of hand cover of a consent agenda item yet in clear view of an ill-informed and apathetic public that permits this deception and criminality to persist the government is on the verge of producing the missing link of probative evidence confirming The CVB has been a mutual benefit nonprofit corporation since July 12, 2021, as I have long claimed and not a public benefit nonprofit corporation as the CVB has persistently failed to contractually correct, confirming my allegation that a criminal conspiracy exists for three years since August 2023. between the Board of Supervisors, the County Council, the CEO, the Calaveras Visitors Bureau Executive Director and its Board of Directors, the Sheriff and the District Attorney. Upon the Board of Supervisors voting 4-0 with one abstention and the Board Chair signing the revised four-year contract, I will have the County's written admission of guilt and complicity in a criminal conspiracy affirming my repeated accusations of fraudulent misrepresentation i have leveled against the cvb's leadership and county government for three years with this new evidence i have grounds to file formal state-level criminal complaint implicating all of you with the california office of the attorney general copying to the secretary of state california state controller franchise tax board fppc and to update the irs complaint filed in july 2025 against the cvb for willful and persistent fraudulent misrepresentation of its legal type my name is christopher butner calaveraswatchdogs.com thank you stacy is there any other comments online and i would ask the public also is there any other further comment on this item none online

all right um i'll bring it back to the board um boy that's twice again reported the attorney general right now today already man we're on a roll i'll move the item we have a motion by ms vollendorf do we have a second i will second we have a second by supervisor and all all those in favor aye passes on a four zero one abstention go to the board

yeah man we went through that fast even with public comments all right well uh yeah martin and then um we'll get started on the regular agenda and i'll wait till 10 to have our break yeah

yeah we're gonna get it we're gonna do the animal services before we take a break seven

Stacey item 13 regular agenda item 13 resolution administrative office 1 authorize the county executive officer to execute, notarize and deliver a, a site with lease pursuant to which the county will leave certain county owned real property as collateral to the California infrastructure and economic development bank. I think. in exchange for financing the animal services facility project and be a 10 million dollar financing lease pursuant to which the county will lease back from i-bank the resulting animal services facility and related improvements to authorize county council and the county executive officer to execute and make non-substantive changes to additional documents required to implement the leases and construct and construct the facility requires a four-fifth vote

So chair, members of the board, today we're bringing forward an item that represents both a long awaited investment in critical public infrastructure and a significant financial commitment during a time when the county is facing real budgetary challenges. And I do want to talk about this a little bit. I know we've all heard even in public comment folks concerned about the county's reductions in areas that were not required to fund. But I want to make it clear that this is a financial commitment that's going to require some sacrifice. And if we're not willing to sacrifice things that we're not required to provide, in order to invest in this facility, then I feel like we need to be cognizant that that's a true choice that we're making. For more than 20 years, Calaveras County has recognized that our existing animal services facility is inadequate. The current shelter is aging, undersized and unable to meet modern standards for animal care, public health or operational efficiency. Multiple grand jury reports, internal assessments and community discussions have all identified the same conclusion. Replacement of this facility is essential for the health and safety of our staff, volunteers and the animals in our care. the proposal before you today allows the county to finally move forward with construction of a modern 10 555 foot square foot animal services facility in san andreas the new facility will include proper intake and adoption areas medical treatment and quarantine rooms administrative space outdoor exercise yards and durable energy efficient building systems To finance this project, staff recommends entering into a $10 million financing lease and a corresponding site lease with the California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, IBank, through its infrastructure state revolving fund program. Under this lease back structure, the county will lease certain government center buildings to IBank in exchange for an upfront payment of $10 million, which will be used to fund construction. Once the animal services facility is complete, the county will lease back the building and continue to occupy it, making semi-annual base rental payments at a fixed interest rate of 4.22%. At the end of the 30-year lease, the building becomes the property of the county. This is a standard and widely used public financing mechanism, one the county has used before for other long-term capital projects. The terms include a 10-year period during which prepayment is not allowed, an annual fee of 0.15% of outstanding, well, it's 15% of 1% of outstanding principal and construction requirements such as fixed price contract and a $1.5 million contingency. The total project budget includes the $10 million in iBank facility funds and 4.96 million in county matching funds. It's important to note that we've already spent a sizable portion of that 4.96 on design and engineering for the facility. I do want to acknowledge the broader fiscal context again. As you're well aware, and as we will discuss in the upcoming budget presentation, the county is experiencing significant financial pressure. Revenues are flattening while operational costs continue to rise. We are taking steps, including the proposed budget reductions that will be discussed later today to stabilize our long-term financial position. These reductions are difficult. They affect a lot of different areas, but they're necessary to ensure the county remains structurally sound and also in order for us to be able to finance this facility. Even in this environment, however, it's important to recognize that some investments cannot be deferred indefinitely. The animal services facility has been identified for two decades as a critical need. Delaying again would not only prolong operational and public health risks, but could also expose the county to higher construction costs and potentially higher interest rates in the future. moving forward now while simultaneously implementing the budget reductions needed to protect our financial stability is the responsible path approval of this item will authorize execution of the financing lease and site lease and authorize the ceo to execute related documents and minor amendments it also authorizes county council to issue the required legal opinion confirming the county's authority to enter into these agreements A four-fifths vote of the board is required because this is a lease-backed transaction involving county-owned property. In summary, this project has been a documented need for at least 20 years. The financing structure is standard, cost-effective, and provides a fixed interest rate. Moving forward now prevents further cost escalation and operational risk. Most importantly, the budget reductions we are recommending through the budget process are essential to ensuring the county can responsibly take on this long-term investment while maintaining overall fiscal stability.

Thank you. Any questions of the board to start or should we go to the public comment? We'll take public comment. Public comment.

um you you're all entitled to to your three minutes um if at all possible it'll be possible well i i and i and son like we we love i love the love for the pets and the animals we love it but uh if if there's excessive repeats can we please uh Keep it down to the love of animals.

None of us know what we're going to say, but we got you. Good morning. My name is Christine Albertine, and I'd like to comment on the pending vote for funding a new animal shelter. I think everyone here agrees there is a real need for a new animal shelter. What should be funding is just not an animal shelter, but rather a building that is comprised of many components. First and foremost, it's a living facility that is providing a home and shelter for the many homeless and unwanted animals in the county. While some entities can pick and choose who they take in, the county cannot. Second, this was also served as a law enforcement facility for all the animals involved in cases brought by the district attorney. Again, you can't pick and choose when animals are brought in evidence in these cases. It's certainly not a good practice to mix the two groups. The design of the new shelter will facilitate the separation of the jail animals and the shelter animals. Third, you are building a medical facility. The new building must be able to take care of minor medical issues and is also able to provide an adequate quarantine area. Just look at the tragedy surrounding the recent Parvo outbreak. Fourth, you are building a mental health facility. No more will the animals or staff have to work in a dungeon-like environment. Can you imagine going to work every day surrounded by kennels filled with barking dogs, no windows, closed quarters, and air quality which is probably debatable? Fifth, by having a nice new open shelter facility with room to show off all the adoptable animals, you're not only improving the mental health and staff of the staff and the animals, but you're offering hope. Hope that is the new environment, more animals can get adopted and staff and volunteers can decompress a little bit. That is what you're voting on. I hope you vote yes. Awesome. Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

And we're all elated to be at this point. And I was very moved by when you said sacrifice. It's going to take sacrifices on the part of this county to put this shelter, this new facility together. And of course, I see this as a moral issue, the hypocrisy that we have a no kill shelter that we're proud of, but we keep animals in substandard conditions. I see this as a legal responsibility. This is something the board has supposed to have been doing for years so that this board and subsequent boards, we talked about it the last time we were here, kicking this issue down, kicking the can down the road, which we really do not need to do anymore. We shouldn't do it anymore. But the whole issue of sacrifice, it's like the county, the animal services staff and the animals that we care for have sacrificed their comfort and their safety for years while we got a new courtroom and a new jail. and a DA's office and behavioral health and all of the other capital improvement projects that you have done, which needless to say are necessary and were needed, but is now the animals and the animal services staff, it's now their turn. So I can only... So I really hope we're gonna have a good outcome with this today. Thank you.

Thank you.

morning i'm debbie beaufort uh over the last 25 years i've said enough about this project i just want everybody here today that is supporting it to stand up including staff awesome and i really hope you guys vote the correct way thanks i also thank you for actually moving it this forward and staff has been fat everything everybody's been fantastic so thanks

Good morning. I'm Joanne Elliott. I'm on focus board. I just want to share a conversation that I've had over the past six months with people in the community. who, I don't know if you've read, I'm sure you're all aware of, I transport animals to other humane societies when we have an opening or an opportunity. And they're adopted very quickly when they get to the new shelter. And when I've talked to people about it, most people say they don't want to come into our shelter. They go home and they have nightmares. So I think having a new shelter, which is welcome and warming, we won't have the overcrowdedness. We'll have the opportunity to find more homes for these animals. And people are going to want to come in because it's friendly, it's clean, and they're going to walk out with animals. So I think that's something to really consider and look at the benefit of having a new building. Thank you.

Thank you.

Further public comment in the room? Online.

We have no online public comment.

Okay, I'll bring it back to the board. I just want to say the legal reasons.

The can has been kicked for far too long. Grand jury reports. There's one today. on the animal shelter and uh it's a matter of time i mean it's gonna end up costing us anyways not just our morals you know and and uh i just i'm happy to be here during this time so we'll see how it goes with the rest of the board any questions anyone

I don't see Alex. Do we know Alex? There you are. Super. I just really wanted to thank Alex, Debbie. I'm getting a little emotional. Christine, and it's been a really long, what, almost four years of meeting with you and talking about this, and it's just a big day. I'm really excited. So thank you all.

Thank you, Alex.

Ms. Foldorf, it looked like you got your finger ready. Autumn?

I will also say thank you to, you know, Debbie, Ann, who many of you have reached out and shared your insight over the years. You know, I think that we all recognize the need for the shelter, not only for our four-legged friends, but for the staff and for the volunteers. And we see you and we appreciate you and we know, you know, what you do to provide the care for these animals. This is not a decision that I think anybody takes lightly. As our CEO pointed out, we have to, you know, weigh out everything as we go through these times. This is a huge infrastructure improvement, which I've learned over the last couple of years, you know, the specifications that go into an animal shelter. It's not just another capital improvement project. So I appreciate the amount of conversation and meetings that we've had. to get to where we are today. Look, I'm getting emotional too. And like we've all said, you know, at some point a board has to be willing to accept this responsibility and the challenges that come with these longstanding infrastructure needs. And I'm also happy to be here for it.

That's cool, Laura.

I just want to say thank you to all of you in the room that have continuously come to the board. It has been impactful. I know that it was a hard start in the beginning, but to see the collaboration between those in the community and our staff to get to the point we are today has been incredible to be part of, to watch. And I think each and every one of you, from community members to staff, to putting the hard work in and getting us here today. So thank you.

Mr. Toffanilli?

I've been on the board I've been on board for a long time and it's been a subject that's been touched for all the years that I've been on this board. And I'm very happy that we get to this point today that we can move forward with this, get this done, get it finished and move forward and uh and find out what the next item is going to be coming forward but um it has been a long time because even before i was on the board it was a subject talked about many many times and public comment so um we're here we'll see what the rest of the board has to say i'll entertain a motion

I'd like to move this item. A motion by Supervisor Hoverty. I will second. We have a second vote. Roll call vote. You can start with me.

District 5?

Happily, aye.

District 1? Aye. district three i district two i and district four sorry yeah district three all right and district four that's he's on a five over the wall

It's not built yet.

We'll have you all there when the first shovel hits the ground.

I know it's out of order, but I remember one piece of information that will add another layer of happiness today.

Okay, I'll take some happiness. As long as you aren't reporting me to the Attorney General.

I received notification that Gimme Shelter has received a donation of $20,000 from the Broll Charity Foundation of Arnold. Yeah. So we currently have just right around $78,000 to buy additional things for the shelter that will not be covered by the loan.

That's awesome. 10 minutes to assess.

May I say one more thing? Yeah, you can say it. First of all, your agenda will be lightened up now. And secondly, there's a lot of folks who have put in in the early 2000 for the shelter that were kind of gun shy now waiting. And I would say I'm very comfortable in saying there'll be a lot of donations towards it now.

i'd be happy to see that thank you so much thank you we appreciate all this support 15 minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes

There we go item 14 resolution building 1, conduct a public hearing to find exempt from sequence 3, receive and accept the building department fee study and for adopt the resolution authorizing both new and revised fees for the billing department.

Good morning chair members of the board, Doug, all of our chief building official. As you're aware, the building department is funded primarily through regulatory fees collected for many services that we provide. And over the last few years, we have had the opportunity to move some programs into our department and implement your strategic plan goals, streamlining those services, and therefore what we're bringing to you is a summary of the proposed updated fee structure that captures the cost to provide service across everything that we have adopted into our department and updating anything that we have previously had responsibility for. To my right is Nicole Kassam, who is representing NBS Government Financial Group, who provided the fee study for both the Building Department and the Environmental Health Department. I would like to turn the presentation over to her to go through the process of how these fees were proposed. And then I would like to bring it back and talk through the highlights of what these new proposed fees mean. At this time, I'll take it away.

I'm sorry, do we need to open the public hearing?

I'll open the public hearing. Thank you, Ms. Simpson.

That's why she's in charge.

Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Nicole Kassam with NBS. I just have a brief presentation on the industry standards behind how fees in California are established and kind of summarizing this report for you. So I'll just head through that pretty quickly for you. So really what I just want to cover is the scope of the project, what the goals are, and the summary of the results. Really, when we do fee studies, the goal is just to understand what the total cost of providing services is for any governmental service for which a fee can be charged. That takes the most amount of time in our process is actually establishing the assumptions and so forth. And then when we get to the outcome, step two is where the board decides how to set the fees, either at full cost recovery or something less, depending on whatever the local reasons might be for doing that. So these are really cost recovery opportunities. These are revenues that can be adopted by the board. And what we're not talking about in this report or today are any taxes or penalties or fines or development impact fees. Sometimes those get confused with fees for services. So really we're talking about a specific fee for specific service. Fees are governed first and foremost by our state constitution, Article 13C, Section 1E defines the difference between a tax and a fee in California. And basically a fee is a fee and not a tax as long as it doesn't exceed the reasonable cost of providing services. So that's what this report is all about. And then kind of below the constitutional authority, you'll see many places in various codes that mirror that language. One that is very much relevant to the building fees is 66014 related to building permits. Again, says fees may not exceed the estimated reasonable cost of providing the service for which the fee is charged. So what we studied in our scope of work with the county is the building department and I do want to note that's the building division only we did not look at the code enforcement part of building and then the environmental health fees and the onsite wastewater fees right now we're hearing on the building department fees. Our project approach is kind of a standard consultant approach. We collect data. I'll go over what the main data points are in just a second. We review the fee structure. We perform a cost analysis, and that's on three different levels of cost, annual, hourly, and per unit. And then we arrive here in step two, where we're looking at the outcomes and deciding ultimately what fees the board wants to adopt. So in terms of data, we're working on a budgeted scenario for starts with fiscal 2526 and the staffing associated with that. We do look at one year of permit related activity and revenue, mostly as a cross check to make sure that we're not building a fee model that grossly over or under collects costs we work with time estimates for each individual fee service and of course we have to start with the fee list that the county has in place today When we look at the fee structure, what we mean there is fee names and categories. So we pull up the list of fees that's currently in place and we go through every single fee in the fee list and sometimes we add fees, sometimes remove fees, sometimes we restructure fees. And there are three types of fee structures commonly seen in California. There's a flat fee for service, which is like a one and done. There are variable fees that are based on project square footage or different types of criteria. And then occasionally there are fees where a deposit is paid and time and materials is billed against that deposit. Those are the three most common types of fees in California. When we look at our cost analysis, I mentioned that we look at that on three different levels, annual, per hour, per unit. So I think what's important to recognize is that when we use the term total cost or estimated reasonable cost or full cost recovery, you hear all these terms, that's basically including all types of identifiable and eligible costs for recovery, which are commonly known as direct costs. That's the hands-on, time, salaries, labor, etc, for processing a permit or doing an inspection. And then there are indirect costs associated with that individual providing that service, which can include departmental management, certain types of non labor costs, countywide overhead costs from your countywide cost allocation plan. So that is what total cost recovery is all direct and indirect costs. We convert that annual cost into an hourly cost. So that is sometimes called a fully burdened hourly rate. And in this case, we've developed a composite rate for each department or division that we've looked at. So the outcomes are there in green, building at 173. And environmental health has their rates, which we'll hear about later. On a per unit level, it's very simple formula. We work with each department that we study and we talk about what are the main steps in the process of approving a permit or completing a plan check. That gives us a time estimate or a time to complete. And we multiply that by the hourly rate to get the maximum fee amount. And that's just not, you know, whatever time times whatever rate, the rate is carefully reviewed. And so is the time data that goes into it. And then the fee model has some checks and balances using projections of workload and so forth to make sure that these are reasonable estimates. And we're not picking a number out of the sky and charging too much or too little for the service that we're charging the fee for. So this is the annual summary of results. This is just an annual picture of cost recovery by each department or division studied. For building, you can see a cost recovery rate, which means how much of our total cost of services are we recovering, of about 83%. Environmental health, a little bit lower. Total for all departments or divisions studied, around 74%. so really what the study does is it just says here's what you're charging today here's what you could recover at full cost recovery and so if the board were to adopt all the fees in the study at the maximum we're looking at additional eight hundred and eight thousand dollars in costs recovered um and that's going to be a different discussion for each different department and division in terms of where you want to adopt the fees The report appendices are pretty voluminous. They show the calculation of each individual fee that is proposed for adoption. I do want to note that a typical outcome of any fee study, especially if there's been a fee program in place for many years, is that some fees go up, some go down, some are about right. So that's 95% of the time it's a recalibration. Some go up, some go down, some are about right. But overall, you have a net need to increase your cost recovery if you want full cost recovery. We also provided the full detail of the analysis, should you have any questions about that. And then we also did a comparative fee survey, a pretty high level fee survey of other agencies. that being said again you know the nbs report really looks at that blue bubble there the full cost of providing services including all direct and indirect costs or eligible costs for recovery the green bubble represents what the county is currently charging or recovering and the board has the decision there with the red arrow in terms of how much of that gap do you want to close by adopting the fee proposal that's in front of you today Doug, and I are here for questions. I think Doug, you have some additional add ons in terms of presenting what what you would recommend for adoption at this time.

Right? Yes. 1st, I'd like to kind of skip a rock across this board memo and just hit the high points of what really all of this means. There are some significant changes or proposing that actually benefit staff and. In in some cases, multiple departments, because the way we're restructuring the fees, and that's the first one I want to focus on really because it's the biggest change the cannabis fees. As they're currently adopted are a, the fee study that was. brought to your board in 2019, I believe, captured all of the cost for every department that was involved in the cannabis permit processing and regulation. So that fee, so for instance, building environmental health planning, county council, anyone who had anything to do with the review, was captured in that fee. But that also meant that that is not revenue that went into a single department's revenue account. That went into a special revenue fund and every department was responsible for doing their time sheets specifically for that program, doing your quarterly transfers to get that money out of that account and into your department's revenue account. In addition, because it's a special revenue fund, you have an entire layer in the budget process of determining how much money is proposed to be in there, how much will be taken out, and every department in their budget, they have to do the work to show how much they expect to draw out. If you end up running over, you're done unless you take it to the board and ask to get more draw. So there's a lot of time and effort from every department involved in the current fee structure. The fees we're proposing here are specifically the services that the building department provides to cannabis cultivators. So that means that in the process of streamlining and meeting your needs in the strategic plan, not only the building department, but the other development departments have streamline the system down to where this flows just like a building permit, just like a grading permit. And so when they do a review, they're reviewing the same basic functions. They're looking at site plans, they're looking at documentation, they're rendering determinations. They have their own fee already established for reviewing building plans. this is no different now so we are going this proposed fee structure is that we're going to charge the flat rate for our review and as it routes every department that sees that document and reviews it will charge their individual fees What that ultimately means, the proposal here, the current example is cannabis cultivation fee $12,000. And every department struggles to get that money out of the SRF and manage time and account, right? The proposed fee model would look like this. The program would process the permit to where it's approved. The applicant would come in. They would pay the cultivation permit fee, the environmental health review, the on-site waste, the planning review, the public works, and the total of all of those is about... 1474 is what I have here. That also gives every department the opportunity that if they need to adjust their fees because there's been changes and they need to bring a fee study to you, they're allowed to change their fees without changing the entire architecture of the cannabis fee. So this particular model that we're proposing is really a culmination of a lot of streamlining and good cooperation interdepartmentally. And it does save a lot of staff time in addition to providing a lower fee to the cannabis cultivators to recognize that lower amount of work and that streamlining that we've provided. That being said, we also have another program that we've made some changes to, and that would be the grading fees. Similar, not quite the same, but this particular program, your board adopted a resolution that adopted a fee that was a deposit base, like option three that Nicole had mentioned, where you pay $1,300. That is a deposit. the review the cost of the review is taken out of that deposit and if the application is approved the remainder that is in the deposit carries over to the to the inspections and then as the the inspector does their job they bill hourly against that and at the end of the project before the permit can be finaled the applicant has to go back to the department and pay any remaining fees that are due So if the applicant isn't paying attention and needs a lot of help, this could be this could be a lot of money. OK, we've done our time studies based on the streamlined process for this program in our department. We are recommending a base fee. This flows just like a building permit now. So it captures the amount of time on average for a plan review. which counts the first and second reviews of the application, and it accounts for three inspections. So if there's any re-inspects in the field, we would charge a re-inspection fee just like we do with a building permit. If we show up and they cancel and we're already there, that's a re-inspection fee we spent the time. So same thing would happen with a grading permit now. In addition, with a review, if they go to third review, fourth review, we can capture that with our hourly rate. in the case of approved plans where we find that they need to amend their plans. Will they submit a plan revision just like a building permit? We charge the plan revision fee. So it eliminates the deposit process, which then eliminates the staff time because you have to manage that deposit. And at the end of the project, you have to either issue a refund or wait to settle up. In this case, when we final the permit, it is finaled nothing left for the customer to do nothing left for staff to do um moving further into this um and i do have to admit just a quick question sure i'll not just in some some cases you know

We have a new customer coming in that's not real familiar with the process and everything now. And they messed up a couple of times and you keep sending them back for corrections. At that point, your staff starts putting in more time as opposed to this $1,474.51. um permit fee at that time is there a way for because i i see this i see this as a positive note i'm always in favor of reducing fees or you know fines or you know as a government but at the same time we have to keep our staff paid so at the point that someone grips a couple times along through the process You know, and they start costing the county more is. Is there a buffer in this that takes care of that a little bit or is there a way for you to. Acquire those.

Well, as I said, this is the cost to provide the service, and the service is this many hours of plan review, this many inspections. So if they go over that, well, the first thing we do, I'm going to take a step back and say customer service. The first thing we do, if you've been through the second review and there are still problems, we start reaching out and wanting to have a meeting. We meet with the designer. Which is costly. Well, yes.

yeah no there are some there's there's some stuff and you like to help them along with the process you have you i've seen you've been showing me sheets where you use like how-to sheets you know and it goes through each step of the process for like building permits per se and and you know so i i get it you after a second plan review you're willing to sit sit down it's like hey these are your ducks this is how you get them in a row

Essentially, yes. But to answer your question about the cost recovery, there are some features that we or some services we provide where we don't cap, we can't capture the cost. Many of them are the questions that we answered to counter where nobody comes in and gets the permit. Even the mundane questions like where's public works or where's environmental health? I can't charge for that. There are some services.

That's my supervisor's phone number.

Right. There are also other services that your board has widely agreed that we should not be trying to run down in charge. Me meeting for 15 minutes with an individual to help guide them through the process is not something that I think your board is going to be keen for me to try and categorize.

I'm not even certain. People end up taking a lot of accounting time. People really like to take time.

Right.

And I understand that. But I get it. You help them through to success, gets them paying their taxes on the business also. So we see another positive result that way. So I'll stop running that one down.

Okay. Well, now I lost my place. I want to start all over. Okay. So thank you.

Okay.

So we're on solar. There we go. Okay. So with the solar and I, and I have to admit, um, we had i'm going to back up and say we had planned on rolling this out a few months further down the line but because of the the main event is coming this afternoon that being the budget um the this pro this got moved a little faster than i had anticipated so there's a few typos in here and the solar is part of that um the solar uh as proposed is meant to reflect what is required in government code related to the statutory maximums you can charge for specific solar systems i will say that anything that is a roof mount for residential Um, we have streamlined that down to an over the counter permit. So this, the fees that are proposed here specific to solar by kilowatt that does not address those residential roof mouse soldiers. Those are over the counter. And similar to all the other over the counter permits, or the majority of them, they've only gone up 3 dollars. So it hasn't been a significant impact and we can set that aside. What we're really talking about is your ground mount solar installations, your large commercial installations, which we really didn't capture well to begin with. And because of the statutory maximums, we really needed to break them down. I will say that as in the proposed fee study or the fee schedule that is attachment A of the resolution, there's a couple of errors here because I slid over what would be 100% cost recovery as proposed by NBS, but that's above the maximums. So where on page two, of the proposed fee schedule, your residential ground mount, I say 477. That's actually the maximum is 450. The kilowatt rate, it says plus each kilowatt above 15. I put 38. That's actually supposed to be 15. That's your statutory maximum. The commercial solar energy system up to 50 kilowatt. the maximum is a thousand so that needs to be adjusted down to a thousand and then at the bottom of that it says plus each kilowatt above 250 that should be five dollars not six so so i would propose at the end of this if you were to vote on this resolution you'd be voting uh with these amendments okay so but um do you have them all noted yes

Okay, I'll keep that in mind when we get there.

Okay.

So along with the other amendments we come up with.

Right? Well, there's, there's a couple of typos in there too. I'm falling on my sword here.

This is I'm sure I'm sure can help you with those.

Okay, so that being said, the remainder is really building fee structure cleanup and and fire permit fee updates. And why, why are we keeping the fire permit fees? That's a big question. We, the county did end the MOU with the JPA. Sadly, and and so why do we really need these fees? Well. While we don't have an MOU with the JPA, we are allowed by law to be a contractor for individual districts. We can provide the service. We can recover the cost. And we have had an incident come up where a district wanted to contract directly with us for a short duration while they had a person out. We provided that service. It worked, worked well. So what we're doing is we're retaining the fees so that if any districts want to contract individually with the county, we can follow that legal process and enter into that contract and have a fee structure so that the county is not charging the district. They are collecting the fee, and then, at the end of the service contract, we turn all of the data over to the fire district for their maintenance. So that's that's the main reason why we're keeping those fees. We're proposing to keep those fees with the building permit fees. We've made a couple of Significant changes the over the counter permit fee was different from the online permit fee in the previous fee structure because our, our time studies showed that we spent more time processing online fees over over the last 3 years. We've made some advancements. The community's gotten used to using the online system. And so the time, there's no real disparity in time between these. They flow like an over-the-counter permit, whether it's online or not. So we've eliminated that fee so that the $274 fee for the online services is gone. Everything is now the lower rate. So regardless of it, yeah, anything that says over-the-counter permit is also... your online permit fee okay so so 248 dollars which is three dollars higher than the current fee model um and then here's where here's where the other typo is we have uh on the first page of the proposed fee schedule um the bottom in the over-the-counter category you have uh siding or plywood and sliding stucco we really didn't need that l in there And I don't know how I missed that, but it's there.

It's going to be bad stucco if it slides.

Well, yeah. It's not so stucco. That's not a good application, I would say. So going beyond that, though, I think that it would, since the fee is the same for both of those, I think it'd be more appropriate to recommend that this is a siting slash stucco fee. And instead of having two separate fees, we just represent that regardless of that construction type, the fee is 248. Okay, so other than that, most of the other fees only go up around 3% between 2 and 3%. There is 1 significant increase and that is limited density rural dwelling. That 1 originally was about 1200 dollars because we were using what we used to call the all other fee. that's the the catch-all and it accounted for one hour plan review and three inspections and then we would pick up hourly rate or each additional inspection or each additional hour plan review in our time study after three years of running the limited density program we've recognized that we've been charging them a lot after each inspection, after three, because the average project is still a dwelling. It's still going to have, you know, the combination of work doesn't scale. So it ends up being proposed at 4503. But if you look across at the single family dwelling permit, it's still $1,200 cheaper than the single family dwelling. And it does open more opportunity for alternate products, experimental products, modifications of code to meet intent. So there's a lot of things that this program has still benefited greatly, and the fee is still lower than the single family. So we've met our intent on this program. So those are the primary changes. So I'd like to stop running my mouth here and take questions.

I'm going to leave it open for me to run my mouth. At your pleasure, sir.

Shall we do public comment first, Board?

All right. Public comment. Mr. Bolger.

Chair Stopper, Honorable Board, Mark Bolger, Rimrock Farms. I don't have a ton to say on this other than I think, and don't take this as a disparaging comment to previous iterations of DCC, but as a frequent customer, It's a lot more streamlined now that it used to be a lot more streamlined. Um, everything with the building department, um, environmental health moved very smoothly. Um, I'm not surprised that the study showed that, you know, a reduction in fees for specifically cannabis would be, um. Appropriate so by, um. My 2 cents is this makes perfect sense to me and I would encourage the board to adopt that the other fees, the nominal increases also makes sense. I mean, I'm not specifically cannabis. I'm pulling building permits all the time and. A couple of dollars here and there in today's economy and with the inflation we're experiencing all that doesn't make much sense to. To gripe about so anyway, appreciate you guys time on this. Thank you. There's a positive 1, Doug.

So far so good. We'll take it. Any other comments?

Online.

We have no online public comment.

All right. Martin, do you have any questions? I actually do not.

Not so much a question, but thank you. In strategic planning, we have been asking for more streamlined approaches and more transparency for the public and just for the process to run smoother and to hopefully, by front-loading more information, which you're attempting to do, some of these things won't go away. you know the people that are building and doing these projects have a better idea of the process and how to get through it timely so i appreciate your efforts on that and thank you for taking on additional my pleasure thanks miss foldorf

I just have one question. You brought up a lot of corrections that need to be done here and things. Are you going to bring this back after you iron out all those items that you brought up that were not consistent with what they were supposed to be, the numbers and Would that we, he was asking for an amendment right now. And I think that's what I'm asking. Yeah. Does it need to come back to the board?

No, I don't think so. The typos, the sliding stuck out. Those are very obviously clerical errors that can be fixed. And then if I understood you correctly, Doug, all of the.

numbers are um being adjusted slightly downward to comply with uh statutory requirements yes and so um you know it's nothing that you're saying no as an attorney because a lot of times things have to come back if we're substantially raising them where there's question on whether we were uh making money off of the thing then that would be the law right

uh well sorry we couldn't do that in any event but um right but yeah i would agree that if um if doug's team if mr oliver's changes were um to increase these beyond what had been published then we would maybe want to consider bringing it back to a future meeting date but um i don't think that there's any issue with the board if it so chooses adopting this reso with those edits today okay i apologize i just got excited excited

Because she's told me.

I want to back her up. You know, I'm really impressed with it for the most part, Doug.

I'm going back to 3.53.530 payment and then 3.53.020 refunds.

Um, and, and, you know, cause as we know, what, what proposition is it that regulates it so that permits can be no more than what it takes to process the permit?

That's there's a plethora of laws.

Yeah, I know there's people voted on it. So here we are.

Um, just going through how many, so we have this.

cannabis fees we have the exercising of the rights to apply that people exercise but they didn't so they went through and they paid their permit fees and they so that they established it but they didn't necessarily plant an acre yet or something right

If I'm reading this right, what you're saying is people have paid for applications that they have not got issued or commenced work yet.

Yes, yes. That way they can hold on for the right to apply. Correct. What's the number on those?

Off the top of my head, I believe it's floating at around 90. Close to 90? Yes. How much did they pay? Did they pay the old $12,000 and change? My understanding is yes, they did. by the way we did provide every one of those services so going back into the record with staff you're saying you provide every one of those services for a permit that was never exercised fully and does not have it grown correct because in in most cases most applications well every application process includes every every review from from staff in multiple agencies including the inspection for reclaiming old sites in addition to the inspection to make sure that the site is ready. Now, other than maybe one inspection, all work was complete in order to give the letter to the customer saying that your application is accepted and you go to the next step.

I don't know how I can wrap my head around that. You did all the work to put in that costs $12,000 for not a plant going in the ground or a fence being put up on a piece of property. It's just the paperwork that- Well, I'm not building the fence though. I'm preparing- You gotta inspect those.

You gotta make sure that they have... How large of a driveway for fire?

Right.

Go down the list, Doug.

I've been here talking with you about it when these people did their inspections and everything and going through the process. I just don't see without them actually having a grow there how you spent all the time and did all that work.

All the documentation required in order to verify that they are not only eligible, but meeting all the requirements of every department. I could see that. That's the bulk of the time. That's not all the time.

I can hear you on the bulk of time, Doug. That's not all the time.

Negligible. Maybe $200. And that's just conjecture.

Ultimately, if I could- You have to go out and you inspect a site on the permit once or twice.

3 times it typically we do an initial inspection determine if it's if it meets the requirements on then a follow up if there are corrections. Yes. All right.

Yeah. No, just just those 2 inspections right there according to your inspection things at 200 and some odd dollars a piece. Yeah. Accurate another list of things the well inspection.

Well, as it pertains to... That one's almost up anyways, though, this next year. Right. As to any fees that we've already collected that are... That are part of this program, I would say that if there is an interest from the board to review this, we should probably meet with council and prepare a response to any questions you have regarding that. Yeah, I can say with with certainty that we have kept meticulous records and in order to even release.

And I can believe a majority majority of work was done when it comes to processing the paperwork, especially when it comes to working with. regional valley water control board and you know everyone else down to the state sending them the letter of intent and every time there's a lot of staff time that goes into it but by no means is it all the time doug

Well, but to that point, these permits never expire. These applications sit here until someone uses them or they transfer their rights. So I've got 90 permits ready to be completed and issued by the applicant. And they've paid their fees. Yeah, it would be nice. But the fees are paid and the application is ready. Right. I get it. I get it.

And to what Mr. Oliver is saying, I would just add that, you know, there's a variety of defensible ways to calculate fees. And one, of course, is to track time spent on a particular permit application, a particular permit. Others are to do averages. So there's going to be variation, right? Some are going to take longer. Some are going to take a shorter amount of time. And that's not an indefensible way of calculating fees.

Thank you.

I'm just questioning it and I will question it further later on because this isn't the decision we're making today. So.

Are you happy with the metal building thing, Derek?

Well, I'm thinking about, and you're probably going to say, correct, because I know it is, but your additional fees are, if I'm doing a commercial building and it has steel columns and steel, and one of the columns was But base was poured off and then we had to get an engineer, uh, come out and re, engineer it, move it, dig it out that those plans would have to be submitted to you for your approval department's approval before they move forward. And that would be additional fees that you would charge. And that's the type of.

Yes, yes, they'll be the plan revision fee.

Yes.

Okay.

What size metal building can I do over the counter, Doug? well that depends uh do you have an agricultural operation i may a year after i'm not here no agricultural uh five thousand square feet five thousand part of our part of our ag building program for anyone uh watching that wants to participate in that program they can contact our front counter at 209-754-6390 6390 thank you

5,000 square feet is pretty reasonable, Gary. I'm happier with that. Is there anybody that wants to put in a motion?

Right. Close the hearing.

Oh, I can close the hearing first. And then is there anybody that is on the side of it?

Just for clarity with the amendments. Okay.

Yes.

And clerk, do you have those edits? They will be provided. Okay.

Doug, you got them all. I got them. I want to add. Thank you. That was my. Laura.

with the amendments? We have a motion by Mark Hubbardy with the amendments.

Second.

Second by Supervisor Fullendorf. All those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? 5-0 vote of the board. Hey, Doug. Didn't take too long. Good job.

Not at all. Thank you, sir.

But he's not going to take as long. Yes, I am.

I know. It's even faster, I promise.

That's why I'm trying to go with it. Doug's not going to take no longer. I'll be around to talk about the other thing.

Very good, sir. I'll be here. You've got six months to dodge me.

Item 15, ordinance building. One, conduct a public hearing. Two, find exempt from CEQA. Three, adopt an ordinance amending chapter 3.53 building department service fees. And four, authorize summary publication of an ordinance.

Second verse, same as the first. I'm opening the meeting.

She was doing science to me over here saying.

Okay, well, this item is the 2nd reading on May 26th. I brought your board the 1st reading to repeal significant portions of this ordinance related to the building fees as your board is where the ordinance trumps the resolution. If you were to adopt that resolution. Without me taking these out, the ordinance would prevail. So, essentially. This vote would eliminate everything that is a building service fee from our ordinance and convert that to the. Code enforcement service fees in ordinance and then in not this year, but next fiscal year, we will do a fee study to amend the code enforcement fees and then remove the remainder from ordinance.

Any questions questions. Okay. Public comment online.

We have no online public comment.

Bring it back to the board. Shall I close the public hearing? If there's no questions, I'm closing the public hearing.

And retain a motion. Is there any amendments you want? Did you know typos? I got this one, right? Okay. Sarah.

Well, you got on the other side.

I'll say yes. And a second by Supervisor Hoverty. All those in favor, aye.

Those opposed, 5-0, vote aboard. You did do that quicker, Doug.

Thanks, sir.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Get rid of your phone so I can't find you.

All right.

All right. All right, Lisa. How are you going to pay for this animal shelter?

Well, I might have to find another job to support that. If I were to win the lotto, I would definitely throw all my money towards the shelter.

Let's let the lady in charge go first item 16 resolution, environmental management agency 1, conduct a public hearing to find exempt from secret. 3, receive and accept the environmental health and onsite wastewater department fee studies for adopt a resolution, authorizing fee adjustments for environmental health and onsite wastewater departments and by present and replace resolution. 2018 to 20 are 29.

I will officially open the public hearing.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair, honorable board members, Lisa Medina, Environmental Management Agency and Environmental Health Director. I oversee, as you know, five departments, Environmental Health, Onsite Wastewater, Animal Services, the Ag Department, and I'm also the Air Pollution Control District Officer for Calaveras County. So today we are going to be asking the board to look and approve our fee schedule for Environmental Health and the Onsite Wastewater departments. We require these updated fee structures to address our deficits, which is caused by eight years of inflation, rising costs and new regulatory mandates. Adjusting these fees is critical to maintaining essential health and safety, permitting fees and retaining qualified professionals. The rationale for the fee adjustments includes outdated fee schedules. We haven't done a comprehensive fee study since 2018. Unprecedented cost increases, inflation, operational costs have significantly outpaced our current revenue, resulting in structural deficits. threat to core operations without full cost recovery the departments face operational shortfalls that threaten their ability to process permits and handle customer complaints our core community service that we provide we protect the local community from physical chemical and biological hazards by actively regulating our water and wastewater by ensuring domestic water well safety, water quality monitoring, and proper septic system oversight, public health and food safety. We monitor retail and commercial food establishments. And we also currently are under a little bit of a stress by vendors, illegal vendors that are coming into our county and setting up shop and having pop-ups in our different communities. body arts and tattoo services, public pools and spas, environmental safety. We manage our hazardous materials, waste, domestic and public water wells, solid and liquid waste, and both above-ground and underground storage tanks. Our land use review, we work closely with building, planning, and public works in systematically reviewing our department approvals and collaborating with them and other departments to ensure compliance with modern environmental health and best practices. Public health and our risk management. We offer public protection. This public relies on inspections and programs to prevent environmental degradation and to protect our drinking water. Also staffing vulnerabilities. Without adequate cost recovery and modernizing fees, the departments are at risk of being unable to recruit and retain the qualified professionals necessary to carry out these essential public mandates. So as we look to ensure the long-term solvency and operational efficiency of our services, it is vital that we re-evaluated our current fee structures. Thank you, NBS. Over time, the cost of delivering our services has risen while our fee schedules have remained static. This disparity places increasing strains on our budget. This formal fee study provided the data-driven insights necessary to establish equitable pricing models, optimizing our cost recovery and to secure a sustainable revenue stream for the future. by underlying and identifying areas where our fees do not align with current market price as operational costs the study directly assisted in creating financial solvency for environmental health and on-site wastewater departments allowing us to maintain our high service standards without continually relying on general fund subsidies as you may have thank you for your time and continuing leadership and supporting our department's financial health and thank you nicole So some of the differences in our fee structure include some additions of our fee structure, including consultations. Consultations is one of the new fee structure requirements. Typically, as an example of that, say for example, a food facility operator comes in and wants to get our services or get our advice and help them navigate through our food facility process permitting. And that might include a actually visit to the actual site to see what they have in place at that time. Do they need specific equipment? Is the equipment that they have on site going to be approved under a permit process? You know, the other operator that left the facility might have had older equipment that might not have been approved for state standards, according to our Cal code. So that is something that is due along each one of our programs. Environmental health has over 17 programs. We're probably looking at two more additional programs that might be coming down the pipe for your approval at a later time. But at this time, that is one of the newest ones and probably only the only ones that is new to our fee schedule. All the other ones pretty much align with our surrounding counties as far as the fee structure. Are there any questions?

I'll jump in. It's all right. Thank you, Chair. We are seeing a lot of these unlicensed vendors popping up at our bigger events, and they literally are just either setting up a table or running carts down the middle of the street. What is the protocol when that happens?

So the protocol typically is we respond on a complaint-based response, and we have been receiving quite a few complaints lately. We recently had a vendor come into Valley Springs and set up a cookie shop from a Tesla truck. So at that time when we receive the complaint, either they can call our direct line or they submit a complaint online through our complaint processing and we respond accordingly. It's hit and miss because a lot of times they show up after hours. So staff, of course, quite a few of our staff live outside of the county. I have a few that do live inside a county. So they will respond accordingly. We send a cease and desist. Typically, we might ask the sheriff, you know, to come to assist us. The sheriff has been real responsive in assisting us quite a few times. They are other speaking languages, and they do have interpreters that are available to help us convey and help them navigate that message. But it's unfair business practices to the brick and mortars that have paid their permitting and licensing fees.

And if we were to encourage them to get a license, how long does that normally take?

We typically will process a turnaround license within about a week for a permit. We're real good about that. We're also very proactive at making sure that people that come in over the counter have all that knowledge up front, you know, so they can make the best informed decision.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

For business licenses that you're only one part of the whole process though. Is that correct?

The business license is only one part and we don't deal with that business license. We do, you know, respectfully, we do ask that they, you know, processing that business license with the appropriate department, um, because it is part of that functionality of, of operating in our county. Um, but we primarily designate our time towards helping them and assisting them and understanding our process and permitting application.

Excellent.

You bet.

I'm not quite sure how to ask this, to be honest. Okay, so outside of the business and where they're setting up, how does it work with the location they're setting up? Because some of these places are private property versus public property. Sometimes the owner doesn't necessarily know that and find out someone has illegally set up shop. how would someone go about through that process? I mean, do they call the service or do they call your office to report an unlawful Well, they could be permitted, but how do you then capture that they should be on that location?

So again, that is a complaint response basis. You know, we, our inspectors do not go out looking, you know, for those people. I just don't have enough staff, you know, to do that, to be real proactive in doing that. So our response is complaint driven only. So for an example, if someone sees someone setting up shop or, you know, of course, we're not going to go after the lemonade stand, even though we're supposed to. You know, we're going to be responsive to that person that is selling, you know, making sandwiches in their front yard and selling to the public. And again, everything is driven from the public mindset. You know, if this facility, like a brick and mortar, for example, they have that legal value time permit to operate because they paid their fees. They've committed, you know, different different things um at will you know where they are operating their kitchen appropriately they've gone under inspection you know by your inspection staff on an annual basis you know they've done all the things that they're supposed to do these other operators and i'll use for example the the latest one it was a crumble operator in a tesla truck and they're popping up all throughout our jurisdictions and they were selling cookies from the truck well we received the complaints from our constituents you know from that particular area that's the only way that we're going to know about that now there are other areas of upcoming on the 23rd i'll be presenting a micro enterprise home kitchen operations that is a new type of home-based restaurant facility that will be up for the board's approval and recommendations this is going to be a informational item only but that is an instance where i guess what i'm asking is the location not necessarily whether or not they have a business license the business license capture the location that they are authorized to sell in those areas i guess is what i'm getting at so the location so the location depends on whether it's zoned appropriately for that type of use i think that's more so than what if someone else sold it

What, I'm sorry, what? Don't want them selling on their property.

That's not my line.

I'm getting like, okay, they, illegal or not, say they do have their business license, are you capturing where that, they packed all of that, okay? But how do you check that where they're setting up shop is actually approved? because the side of the highway where it's actually private property, not necessarily Caltrans. They may be permitted to sell out of their truck and they pass environmental, but how are you capturing the location of where they're selling?

So I think you're speaking more towards a mobile food facility. Could be. Yeah.

Even somebody's pop-up, even like the crumble, even the pop-up, they're popping up on private property.

Yeah. And those are illegal. They're not permitted to operate at this point in time by law or by our code.

So that's I might be missing something, but if someone is on someone else's private property without permission, that's probably trespass and

Well, that's what I'm asking. Do they call you to complain or are they calling the sheriff's office? If I got a call and said, hey, this vendor is on my property. They said they have a business license from the county, but they're not on my property. I didn't sign off on this. Who do I tell them to call? Do I call the sheriff's office or do I tell them to call both of your offices?

That would be, I wouldn't start with the sheriff. I would start with probably us. And then we would probably involve Doug's shop for code compliance because they're operating without a permit.

but then so captured i don't know about that so again i would say if someone is if someone is trespassing that's generally a matter for law enforcement and the property owners should but if they say in the county signed off on my business license but if but that business license isn't going to say they have permission to operate on someone else's private that's what i'm asking how do you capture the location

Well, environmental health is a department that we make sure that we have all the permitting applications. We have a checklist that we go off, including are they zoned for that location? Do they have permission? Do they have a business license? Have they gone through all the appropriate?

Okay, so they need a checklist. Yes, yeah, we have a checklist.

So, Amanda, what we normally will do, if someone comes into the public counter, our public counter, which we have a excellent public counter permit technicians and that offer the services and they have a lot of wealth of information we will direct them number one you start with the planning department right the planning department will direct them accordingly this is what you need to do ABC one two three this is what you can do in these zones this is what you can't do And typically that's where we refer them to start. By the time they get to us, they already have a pretty good general knowledge. For those illegal ones, it's a complaint process only. I hope that answered the question. There's a lot of questions in there. And if you want to ask me on those separately, I'd be more than happy to be available.

So basically just tell them to call the Sheriff's Office. if they're trespassing, even though they have a business license from the county.

Right, having a business license from the county. Quite frankly, we can't give somebody permission to trespass on someone else's private property. Right. So there should not be any scenario in which someone nor I think that there is where someone has a business license or other authorization from the county to be on someone else's property. And the very the fact that they may have a business license or some other permit or license to operate in no way gives them authorization to do that somewhere where they're not supposed to be doing it.

I'll direct them to the sales office.

Another thing for you, Rochelle.

Actually, the Sheriff's Department has been very beneficial and very helpful with us every time we run into a scenario with the vendors that are popping up and that are illegal. So they've been very, very helpful. Thank you, Rochelle.

Actually, just to answer your question, Amanda, we do capture the locations. It is complaint driven and dispatched us for the CADs to Lisa's office when they do come in. So she is able to see it.

And that's usually after hours, so thank you, Rochelle.

Mr. Trapanelli? Let's make sure the subject doesn't leak.

Oh, we do our best.

Especially if I'm down him.

Again, if you have a complaint, you can certainly go online or call our office.

I got two points. Not for that. I'll just show up across the street of some Catholic church.

Are there any other questions? I can't attempt to answer.

Do we do public comment? Okay. Public comment? Oh boy.

Armando Larry, private citizen. I want to address this issue because in San Joaquin County, we have the same kind of issue. And I go back to my days, work in public health with COVID, where this whole thing with enforcement, right? You have a department that's supposed to enforce it, but they have no law enforcement capability. So you run across this. Cascading effect in my concern, it always has been from the environmental health perspective where these folks are setting up on, you know, on curbs. They're setting up on sidewalks. They're setting up on private land. They're there and then they're out. Or they're consistently, but from the environmental perspective. Are they preparing the food correctly? There's a lot of issues. So it really is a big environmental health. And I want to give support to environmental health because I know it's always limited in resources to be able to do the enforcement part of it. But this is a big issue. One person getting sick, now you have a pathogen that they have to identify. know if it's somebody on the street corner who gets sick and they pass it on somebody else how do they track it right it's going to be very very difficult so to tighten that up a little bit but there needs to be a law enforcement arm that gives you teeth to provide that enforcement because it potentially can be a big public health issue thank you online we have no online public comments

shall i close the public hearing sure you got any questions gary we're good i'll close the public hearing now entertain a motion it'll be so exciting today come on i'll move this item a little more from the heart next time on please i'll second we have a motion in a second all those in favor aye aye That's five over four. Very good. Thank you both.

Thank you.

You went three items that quick. Sweet. You earned your money. Gary. Yeah. No, the next slide. Well, yes, we can do a five now, Gary.

And then we're going to probably around lunch. Good. If you say so. Your chair. I'm just asking. Five minute break. Yes. I said yes. Five minute break.

That's it.

Welcome back. Stacey, can you give me an intro for this next budget hearing?

Yes, sir. Item 17, action item, administrative office. One, receive a presentation on the fiscal year 2026-27 county executive officer recommended budget. And two, provide the CEO with direction regarding any changes to be incorporated before the recommended budget is presented to the board for approval on June 23rd, 2026.

Good morning, Board. Are you ready?

Denise, you got it.

Good morning, Board. Denise Huebner, Assistant CEO, here to present the 26-27 CEO Recommended Budget. The topics I'll be covering in this presentation are the county budget guidelines and process, the overall budget, general fund overview, revenue outlook, department's personnel, capital asset and CIP requests, and board direction that is needed and staff recommendations. California counties develop their budgets according to state law, primarily the County Budget Act. The County Budget Act allows counties to use either a one-step or a two-step process. Calaveras County follows the two-step process, meaning the board must approve the recommended budget by June 30th and then hold public hearings and adopt the budget by October 2nd. Once the board adopts the budget, it becomes the county's official budget of record.

Denise, could I stop you for just a second? Sure. I just want to let you know that I am an employee of the CalVirus Visitors Bureau. Are you? Before we start, yes. And before we start, I just want to make sure that when I receive income from the CalVirus Visitors Bureau, so anytime the TOT will be discussed, I'll be refusing myself.

regarding the tot and the cdb thank you i shouldn't say that first thank you thank you sorry no problem so denise can we keep those consolidated at one time so that martin doesn't have to skip back and forth um sure it shouldn't be a problem with the presentation slides right it's just when we have the discussion for right council yeah i think it's fine for mr jr to go through her presentation and then before the board discusses or takes any yeah but we'll isolate here there we go

We got you, Barbara.

I was kind of hoping that she was going to have a hard time navigating that.

The county budget is our roadmap. It guides planning, supports transparency and accountability, and helps ensure long-term fiscal stability. It allocates resources to carry out the board's priorities and meet state and federal mandates. And it gives residents and stakeholders a clear picture of what the county values and how public funds are being used. The recommended budget process starts right after mid-year is complete. Budget instructions went out in late February. Department submitted the request by April 3rd. Admin met with department heads and fiscal staff throughout April and all adjustments were finalized by mid-May. The budget was published on the county website on May 21st. Board approval in June gives the county a working budget for July through September until public hearings on September 8th and formal adoption of the county budget scheduled for September 22nd. There are two main approaches to financial forecasting, each with its own benefit and risks. A conservative approach estimates revenues low and expenditures high. It reduces the chance of a shortfall, but makes the budget harder to balance. An objective approach aims to match revenues and expenditures to actuals, which is easier to balance, but carries more risk even if revenues come in lower than expected. The recommended budget is prepared largely with the conservative approach, which the county has historically used to minimize the risk of a budget shortfall. We're facing several key budget challenges this year. Federal and state funding shifts continue to affect our programs. Inflation is driving up the cost of goods, services, and construction. Utility costs are rising. Insurance premiums continue to increase. Our CalPERS unfunded liability adds ongoing pension pressure. Workforce challenges tied to budget constraints have made it difficult to fund positions while the overall cost of employees continues to rise. Aging infrastructure and maintenance add to this strain. And finally, we must be prepared for unexpected factors, emergencies, regulatory changes, or fiscal shifts that may arise throughout the year. I want to start budget review with a snapshot of the budget as a whole. Total revenues for fiscal year 26-27 are projected approximately $280.6 million, a modest increase of roughly $725,000 compared to the fiscal year 25-26 adopted budget. While overall revenue growth is small, several revenue categories show notable shifts. Intergovernmental revenues move in different directions this year, with state revenues increasing about $17.4 million, while general intergovernmental revenue shows a decline of $19.2 million. This decrease isn't largely a loss of funding. It's the result of a change in how the behavioral health funding for the building is reported. Federal revenues also declined by about $5.2 million, reflecting reduced federal funding for the year. In contrast, miscellaneous revenue increases by $4.2 million, including $2.5 million in the roads department for prior year Caltrans reimbursements. Operating transfers in rise by $4.7 million, driven by transfers from special revenue funds to support ongoing operations. Other financing sources decreased by $3.2 million, primarily due to adjustments in internal cost recovery and reimbursements within the Health and Human Services Agency. Finally, taxes increased by approximately $1.14 million, contributing positively to the overall revenue picture. Taken together, the fiscal year 26-27 revenue outlook reflects slight growth supported by increased miscellaneous revenue and small gains in tax revenue, while reductions in other federal and intergovernmental revenues temper the overall increase. This increase is somewhat skewed though. Because more funds are being brought in from special revenue funds to support ongoing operations. And while contingency balances and no friends or funds are showing corresponding decreases. For the upcoming fiscal year, total recommended expenditures are at $404.5 million, representing a decrease of approximately $13.3 million compared to the fiscal year 25-26 adopted budget. This overall reduction is driven largely by decreases in one-time or variable cost categories. The most significant reduction occurs in capital assets, which declines by about 14.3 million dollars reflecting fewer planned one-time infrastructure projects namely wagon trail appropriations for contingencies also decreased by 7.4 million indicating a smaller reserve set aside for unforeseen needs despite these reductions several operational areas show growth operating transfers in or out increased by 4.7 million which reflects special revenue funds supporting ongoing program needs Other charges went up by $5.3 million, mainly because of a change in how we process reimbursements, which is directly tied to the $3.8 million drop in intra-fund transfers. Salary and employee benefits rise by 2.6 million, reflecting the cost of maintaining the workforce and supporting service delivery. Services and supplies increased by 924,000, a relatively modest change that largely reflects the higher prices of basic goods and services needed to support day-to-day operations. Overall, the recommended budget reflects a strategic reduction in one-time expenditures and other targeted reductions while prioritizing stable funding for workforce, core services, and operational obligations. Next, we're going to go into the general fund. When we received all general fund budget requests, the general fund was showing a $12.6 million structural deficit. After working with departments holding services and supplies to status quo and correcting errors, the deficit was reduced to $8.7 million. Admin then identified just under $3.2 million in recommended reductions through vacancy savings overtime and extra hire reductions, department closures and scale downs, expense reductions, position freezes, and layoffs. To close the remaining gap, we're recommending the use of one-time funds transfers. a $1.6 million transfer from the PARs investment account to cover a portion of PER costs in law enforcement, a $650,000 draw from county capital, $488,000 in prior year unimbursed cannabis-related revenue, and a redirection of contingencies from transient occupancy taxes and parks and recreation of $290,000 and $170,000, respectively. Using one time funds gives the county time to identify longer term cost saving opportunities and explore additional revenue streams. We do not expect these challenges to be limited to a single fiscal year and we recognize the need to pursue practical and creative solutions to minimize budget gaps. I also want to mention that departments have been clear that any further reductions to general fund services, supplies or staffing will result in significant service level impacts. The general funds anticipated funding ending fund equity as of June 30th is just under $4.2 million. The estimate is based on the conservative approach and rollover balance generally comes in stronger than anticipated. Final revenues and expenditures will not be known until after the fiscal year ends and the books close. Of the 4.2 million in rollover fund balance, 1.8 million is rebudgeted to general fund contingencies and 2.35 million is used to fund a portion of the general fund deficit. Sorry. I want to highlight that the fund balance is not high enough to support a transfer to county capital this year. This is important because that fund not only supports major capital projects and new assets, but also our IT and building infrastructure maintenance needs, which typically run $2.5 to $3 million per year. The low fund balance also underscores how close the structural deficit is to becoming an actual deficit. General fund contingencies are set at $1.8 million, which meets the board policy level of 2% of the average of general fund expenditures over the prior three years. And the general fund reserve is set at $6 million, meeting the board policy level of 8% of the average of general fund revenues over the same period. Both contingencies and reserves will be updated in September after the books close and new reference years available for calculations. General fund revenue by budget class. Next, I want to review the breakdown for the general fund. The largest sources of general fund revenue are taxes budgeted at $34.6 million, which is an increase of $1.1 million. Transfers in totaling 18.6 million, which is 1.4 million higher than the prior year. Charges for services at 9.2, which is 302,000 less than the prior year. And it's important to note that while total revenue appears to increase by 1.2 million compared to the prior year, This includes 3.2 million in one-time funds used to close the budget gap. When those one-time transfers are removed, ongoing general fund revenue totals 73.8 million, which is actually a decrease in revenue compared to the prior year. Total general fund expenditures are budgeted at 81.2 million. The largest categories of general fund expenditures are salaries and benefits at 48 million, representing 56% of total expenditures. This reflects an increase of 1.5 million over the prior year budget, driven by salary progression and employee retention. Services and supplies at 25.7 million, or 30% of total expenditures, which is a decrease of 457,000 from the prior year budget. This year, the general fund is budgeted to receive $79.3 million in total revenue when including Proposition 172 funds and transient occupancy taxes. Of that amount, $3.2 million come from one-time transfers, and additionally, just under $32 million is tied to department-specific revenue sources such as grants, reimbursements, and other restricted funds. When we remove these restricted and one-time funds, We are left with approximately $44.3 million available for true discretionary use. General fund discretionary revenue comes from the sources we talked about just previously. We're estimating $38.7 million in general fund revenues, which include taxes, franchise fees, and other broad use revenue streams that are not restricted. The general fund receives 3 million from POP 172, which is dedicated to supporting public safety, the sheriff and fire. Sorry, I just jumped ahead. And let me scroll. Third, we project 2.65 million in transient occupancy taxes. So taken together, those three sources provide a total of $44.3 million in general fund discretionary revenue. On the expenditure side, general fund discretionary uses total just under $50 million. Of that, $45.58 million goes towards covering the net cost of our general fund departments. $2.36 million is allocated to community organizations, and $1.9 million goes towards county contributions, including required maintenance of effort payments and debt service obligations. The difference between our available discretionary revenue and our discretionary uses creates a deficit. This year, we were able to close that gap using one-time transfers of just under $3.2 million, along with $2.35 million in rollover fund balance. This situation highlights an ongoing structural challenge. Our recurring costs continue to outpace the discretionary revenue sources we rely on to fund essential services. While one-time solutions help us bridge the gap this year, they're not a sustainable long-term tool for maintaining fiscal balance. This chart is the breakdown of all the functional areas where the 49.6 million of discretionary funds are used. The functional areas with the largest net costs are public safety with 28 million net cost, which is 56% of the use of discretionary dollars. Public safety includes all the sections displayed in green. County admin and finance with a net cost of $13.9 million, which is 28% of the total dollars, which includes all blue sections. Some costs in this category are fixed costs such as $3.9 million in insurance and $895 in utilities. Community organization with a total of $2.35 million. And this category includes the discretionary funds that are distributed to external entities. And then again, county contributions of 1.9 million for maintenance of effort and debt service payments. Next, I'd like to walk you through the $2.35 million in discretionary funds allocated to external entities. You can see the full breakdown in the table and chart. The items grayed out are required contributions. The recipients of the largest share of these funds are FIRE, which receives a total of $1.33 million to support local fire districts and cover the cost of this CDF dispatch contract. The Calaveras Visitors Bureau is budgeted $400,000 to put towards tourism promotion. UCCE is allocated $181,000 for programs such as Master Gardener and administration of the 4-H program. Area 12 on aging receives $112,000 to support services for the senior population. And finally, $160,000 is dedicated to Cosgrove Creek vegetation management. Next, we're going to go through the TOT distribution. Transient occupancy taxes are local taxes charged on short-term lodgings such as hotels, motels, and vacation rentals. Transient occupancy taxes are budgeted with 25% to sheriff, 25% to fire, $627,184 for the roads MOE, and $400,000 to CVB. The recommendation is also to pay for the Deckard Tech contract of just over $48,000 that's needed to maintain host compliance and was previously paid for out of the tax collector's budget. Admin's recommendation is that in future years, we would deduct the Deckard Tech contract prior to allocating the remainder of funds. Due to the need to pull in one-time funding to balance the budget, admin is recommending a $290,000 transfer from TOT to fund the general fund. This transfer is made up of $41,000 in anticipated prior year rollover fund balance and $249,000 of revenue expected to be received in fiscal year 26-27. If ending fund equity in the TOT account is lower than anticipated after the books close, then this will need to be adjusted in September. Admin is requesting direction from the board after this presentation on whether the TOT distribution is to remain as budgeted or if there are adjustments that need to be made. Today I want to take a few minutes, maybe more than a few minutes, to clarify the purpose of the County Capital Fund. How money moves in and out of it and why it cannot simply be moved to solve the general fund deficit. There's a common misconception that because this fund has a balance, we should avoid making reductions in the general fund. The reality is more complicated and understanding the structure of this fund helps explain why. The county capital fund is the budget unit that receives all general fund discretionary rollover dollars at the end of each fiscal year. A few years ago, when department budgets were more inflated, we routinely saw rollover amounts of $5 to $6 million, which created a healthy fund balance. However, about three years ago, when the county made a concerted effort to reduce the structural deficit, budgets became more realistic. We didn't take true reductions, but we did remove excess budget capacity. The benefit was a more accurate financial picture. The trade-off is that rollover amounts are now much smaller, which means that the capital fund no longer grows the way it once did. As of the close of the current fiscal year, we estimate the county capital fund balance will be $15.6 million. Looking ahead to next year, the only new deposit currently budgeted is $500,000 from the integrated waste management loan repay back for the Rock Creek Phase 3 project. Beyond that, there are no additional revenue sources planned for the upcoming year. If the general fund rollover ends up higher than expected, that could change during the September budget adjustments, but that is not guaranteed. Now let's talk about how these funds are used. County capital dollars support several major categories. First being board approved capital infrastructure, such as the district attorney building and the animal shelter. Second is general fund capital assets with the largest recurring costs being sheriff office vehicles and outfitting. Third is critical building and maintenance and IT infrastructure, which keep county operations safe, functional, and secure. And lastly, we have transfers budgeted to the general fund and a deposit into this 27th payroll fund for the additional payroll in fiscal year 27-28. As you can see, this fund is not just used for constructing new buildings, as a lot of people think. It is the county's primary source for ongoing capital asset replacement and maintenance of existing infrastructure and technology. These two categories alone require about $2.5 to $3 million every year. At the current rate of deposits and spending, we estimate the fund can sustain these obligations for only two to three more years. After that, if the fund is depleted, those same costs would shift directly to the general fund, increasing the general fund deficit by that same amount annually. Admin is often asked why we don't simply pull all available county capital dollars into the general fund to help cashflow operations. On the surface, that sounds like a simple solution, but using large amounts of one-time money to cover ongoing expenses is widely recognized as poor fiscal practice. Once the money is gone, the county faces an even larger correction because costs continue to rise over time. Additionally, there's another issue that would arise from that practice, deferred maintenance. When we postpone building repairs or delay replacing critical assets, the long-term cost to the county increases significantly. Small problems become big problems, which can become emergencies. For all these reasons, the county capital fund should not be viewed as a simple fix for the general fund deficit. It plays a critical role in maintaining our infrastructure, our technology, and our ability to operate safely and effectively. Protecting this fund ensures we avoid even greater financial challenges in the general fund in the future. Additionally, admin requests board direction for the projects that are rolled from prior year to ensure that capital priorities remain aligned with current fiscal realities and organizational needs. Okay, our revenue outlook is next. Here we have the estimated figures for the 1% property tax split for the upcoming year. This chart illustrates how each portion of a property tax dollar is distributed among local agencies. As you can see, the largest share goes to our school districts. which receive 55% of all property tax revenue. There's also an additional 12% allocated to ERAF, which is additional funding that helps support education. What may be surprising to some is that only 17% of property taxes collected flow into the county's general fund. This is the portion that support the wide range of county services our community relies on. This is just another visual that shows how each dollar is distributed. Again, you can see the general fund is just that small chunk in the middle. Secured property taxes continue to be one of the county's most stable revenue sources, showing steady and consistent growth year over year. For fiscal year 25-26, we've received $16.9 million to date, nearly reaching the budgeted $17.2 million. Looking ahead, secured property taxes for fiscal year 26-27 are projected to increase to $17.9 million. I'd also like to walk through the breakdown of the 8.25% of Calaveras County sales tax and highlight how those dollars are distributed across state and local entities. The single biggest share of sales tax collected in Calaveras County is 48%, which goes to the state general fund. The county general fund and incorporated city together received 12% of overall collections. This is the portion that directly supports local services and operations. The Sheriff's Office receives just under 6% related to Prop 172 allocation, which supports public safety operations and related services. And Fire Services received just over 12% of total collections, which comes from a combination of Measure A and Proposition 172. It's important to call out this category because it reflects a shift from prior years because voters approved the Measure A funding in 2024. As a result, our fire districts are expected to receive more than an additional $8 million in Measure A revenue for fiscal year 26-27. Sales tax revenue tends to be more volatile than property tax revenue, and the trends we see often reflect the overall health of the economy. As of the preparation of this presentation, current year sales tax collections totaled $3.87 million compared to the $4.6 million we budgeted. Collections are expected to come in right at the budgeted amount. Looking ahead to fiscal year 26-27, we're assuming a status quo level of revenue as we expect sales tax to remain relatively flat. We will continue to monitor collections closely, and if adjustments are needed, we will bring those forward to the Board during the September budget process. Transient Occupancy Taxes. In Calaveras County, TOT revenues have remained fairly steady since 2021, averaging about $2.7 million per year. For the current year, the county has collected $2.73 million, exceeded the budgeted amount of $2.65. Admin will continue to also monitor TOT collections and bring forward an adjustment if needed in September. Excise taxes are budgeted at $2.85 million for the current year, and year-to-date collections have reached just about that amount. The recommended budget also remains at $2.85 million as we expect excise tax to stay relatively flat. Now on to department requests. Our staffing recommendations for fiscal year 26-27 budget cycle includes a series of targeted personnel adjustments across multiple departments, including recommended layoffs, department level reductions, and other requested organizational changes. These recommendations reflect changing operational needs, ongoing budget constraints, and opportunities to improve efficiency. In admin, we're recommending the addition of a one new airport tech position funded entirely through airport fees. At the same time, several cost saving reductions are proposed, including layoffs or deletions within Calaveras Community Media, disaster preparedness, facilities, human resource and information technology. Facilities also includes one reclass and one title change. Together, these actions represent both strategic restructuring and meaningful general fund savings. In the assessor's office, we are proposing to freeze an appraiser one position temporarily to allow further program evaluation and would like to reconsider filling this position at budget hearings in September. This will allow admin to do revenue analysis and review the general fund status after the books close. For the auditor's office, we recommend deleting a fiscal assistant position, which contributes to additional general fund savings. Within building and code compliance, one permit tech funded by building fees, which was previously slated for removal is on the list and recommended for deletion. We are also proposing the layoff and deletion of one code compliance officer due to budget reductions. In the clerk recorder's office, we propose reclassifying an election coordinator position to an election manager to better support election operations. The additional cost of this change is completely offset with overtime savings. During budget development process, the admin offices had proposed deleting the county archives position. Since then, the clerk's office identified SRF funds that can fund 80% of the position's cost, allowing the employee to mainly focus on scanning historical records. The remaining 20%, if funded by the general fund, would allow the archives to continue on a limited basis. Admin recommends making this adjustment to the budget to include this change and bring forward the 23rd budget approval meeting. In county council, we recommend freezing a paralegal position to help reduce general fund costs. And for the district attorney's office, admin proposes freezing two positions, a deputy district attorney and a district attorney investigator, resulting in further general fund savings. In EMA, we're recommending the deletion of an air pollution control specialist position that's remained vacant for several years, along with freezing of three other environmental health positions. These freezes will remain in place until the outcome and revenue from the new fee study is known and budgeted as environmental health is currently running at a deficit. The Health and Human Services Agency has the largest group of recommended changes. Behavioral health reposition control numbers are being aligned with their correct divisions that has no fiscal impact. We're also adding a new psychiatrist position and an estimated cost of $457,000 funded entirely with non-general fund dollars and offset by the elimination of a psychiatry contract when the position is filled. Several positions across behavioral health and human services are proposed to be frozen to help control expenditures and due to reduced funding, including the CMCAA director position, which is being held due to funding uncertainty. Public health includes several adjustments as well. Two positions, the emergency preparedness manager and clinical nurse, are recommended for deletion, resulting in a combined savings of just over $304,000. We're also recommending that a social worker three be reclassed to a staff services analyst has a small increase but will help operational capacity. In addition, we're recommending the creation of a new county health officer position with a cost of just over $200,000 that will also be funded with redirecting existing contract dollars if that position is filled. For integrated waste, we're recommending the freeze of an integrated waste engineer until a broader view of the program can be completed. And for the library, two actions are proposed, freezing the transportation officer position, which results in general fund savings of $28,000, and adding a part-time bookmobile and outreach coordinator. That new role is limited term and funded by the Friends of the Library with no general fund impact. In the Planning Department, two items are recommended in the budget, the deletion of the Econ Development Division, which results in a layoff of the Econ and Community Development Manager, and the deletion of a Planner 1-2 position. Together, these actions generate just over $360,000 in general fund savings this year, which compounds year over year. Within the probation department, we're proposing the deletion of one admin assistant two position and freezing of two additional positions, a deputy probation officer one and a probation technician. These changes result in approximately $336,000 in general fund savings. Public Works, one new land development manager position is being added, funded entirely by non-general fund sources. And we're also recommending a reclass from public works analyst two to a senior analyst, which has a minimal cost impact. We are also recommending the freezing of the engineering manager position, which the department has been successful at recruiting to offset the cost of the other changes. The Sheriff's Office has one recommended change, freezing a Sheriff Services Tech II position resulting in an additional $86,000 in general fund savings. Overall, the recommended actions result in a total savings of approximately $2.63 million, which is just over $2 million in general fund savings and roughly $567,000 from non-general fund sources. All positions listed as layoffs have been funded for three pay periods to allow for adequate employee notification. These adjustments help ensure staffing levels remain aligned with funding capacity while maintaining the continuation of essential services. Several staffing requests were reviewed but are not being recommended for inclusion in the fiscal year 26-27 budget. The building department requested a reclass of an account tech to a senior account tech, as well as the addition of a building inspector, both funded through building fees. These requests were not recommended until the results of his new fee study was known. Within the Environmental Health Management Agency, three requests are not recommended. A new Office Tech and Ag, a new Supervising Animal Services Officer, and a reclassification of an Animal Care Specialist to Animal Care Specialist 1-2. All of these requests are not recommended as combined they would result in a general fund cost of just under $200,000. In Health and Human Services Agency, a title change from Behavioral Health In behavioral health from clinical services manager to deputy director was reviewed but is not recommended as the request is not in line with the outcome at the recently completed org review or classification and compensation study. We are not opposed to a title change at a manager level which was communicated to the department. For integrated waste management, the addition of a program coordinator position funded by integrated waste fees is also not recommended until after program evaluation can be completed for integrated waste. A requested reclassification and probation from converting a probation tech to an office tech was also not recommended as that probation tech is on the list to be frozen. And finally, in Public Works, a reclassification of roads and bridges from road maintenance worker to senior maintenance worker is also not recommended at this time. Together, these items represent roughly $410,000 in total costs with impacts both to general fund and non-general fund. These items were withheld to maintain budget stability and prioritize higher need operational requests. Moving on to capital projects. The county has three separate CIP accounts, the countywide CIP account, the airport CIP, and the road CIP. This year's countywide capital improvement program includes a diverse set of facility upgrades, safety improvements, and infrastructure. Each funded through a mix of county capital funds, grants, state revenue, and specialized fee programs such as solid waste and integrated waste management fees. Key projects include major facility investments, such as the behavioral health building at just over 21 million paid for completely with state grant funds, and the district attorney's new facility with a remaining cost of approximately 5.5 million funded through a combination of SRF dollars, accruing ARPA interest, and county capital. Other significant improvements involve health and safety upgrades, including the animal services facility building budgeted at their meeting board allocated funding level of 3.3 million. museum elevator upgrades led lighting replacements and several solid waste facility enhancements. Additionally, there are targeted infrastructure and access improvements such as parking lot repairs, gate replacements, slide mitigation and safety upgrades across multiple sites. Overall, the countywide CIP project reflects a balanced approach addressing regulatory compliance for IWM, improving public safety or public-facing services, and investing in long-term facility sustainability. Since the budget was finalized, it was identified that the integrated waste management rollover project for the weather structure came in over the projected $30,000, by projected $30,000. Admins requesting that a adjustment to line item 5652 be made for, to be brought forward with budget approval June 23rd, that adjustment will be funded solely with integrated waste management fees. And this is to ensure that staff can move forward with the project that is already in progress. For the airport division, two improvement projects are planned. The first includes general structural improvements, 25,000 funded entirely by airport fees. And the second is an updated automated weather observing system replacement, which totals $300,000 with the majority being federal aviation grants, but has a required 30,000 local match paid for with also airport fees. For the roads division the capital program includes a broad range of roadway bridge safety and paving projects across the county these projects are all in line with the board approved five year CIP plan. Overall, the roads program represents a substantial investment in infrastructure reliability safety and long term mobility backed by a diversified mix of federal state and local funding. Next, we'll review capital asset summary. This slide's an overview of the key capital asset and equipment requests submitted across several departments for the upcoming fiscal period. Overall, these recommendations prioritize upgrading core technology systems, replacing aging public safety vehicles, and supporting critical operational needs. Beginning with IT, we're recommending three major infrastructure upgrades, replacement of the library network switch, an overhaul of the data center UPS system, and installation of a new east-west internal firewall. Together, these investments, totaling just over 600,000, will strengthen the reliability, security, and continuity of countywide IT services. In facilities, funding is proposed for a half-ton pickup to support daily maintenance operations. This purchase is covered by the reduction of other budgeted line items within that division. The District Attorney's Office is requesting approval to purchase a vehicle funded entirely through the PATH 3 grant. The Sheriff's Admin Patrol Division were recommending rollover of funding for five vehicles carried from the prior fiscal year, all pending outfitting. In addition, three new F-150 patrol units are included in this year's recommended requests. The Sheriff Corner Division is requesting a marked cargo van to support field operations, and the Sheriff's AB443 Division is requesting capital equipment funded through AB443 funds. In the Probation Department, the requests include a reentry specialist vehicle and a transport van, both supported by PATH 3 grant funding. And the Recorder's Office is seeking a large format map scanner and printer to enhance document preservation and improve customer service. This purchase will be funded through an SRF. And the Sheriff Emergency Services Division is requesting a command vehicle to support incident response and field coordination. Animal Services has three requests this cycle, a security system and two cargo trailers. These items are funded through a combination of Animal Services, SRF, fund balance, and an ASPCA grant, and will help improve operational security and transport capacity. Within Human Services Admin, the recommendations include three 4x4 or 5 passenger vehicles to support staff field work, along with a printer to meet ongoing admin needs. These items are funded through MA and realignment allocations. For behavioral health, the proposal includes a printer as well as a truck to support their program operations funded out of behavioral health dollars. Integrated waste management is requesting approval for two purchases funded with integrated waste management fees. The first is the acquisition of a replacement bucket for a loader and the second request is for bull litter fencing. In addition, The narcotics unit is requesting approval to purchase a cellular forensic locker system paid for out of narcotic seizure funds. Overall, these asset requests represent targeted mission critical investments designed to enhance operational efficiency, replace outdated or high mileage assets, strengthen public safety and support departments in delivering essential services. The review of capital assets identified a total of $414,000 in assets the admin is not recommending in the upcoming budget cycle. These items span several departments and were evaluated against countywide priorities, available resources, and operational necessity. Within the IT department, a proposed enterprise Wi-Fi upgrade totaling $65,000 was not recommended at this time. For the district attorney's office, a Chevy Tahoe and outfitting costs were also not included in the recommended capital plan. incorporated in the sheriff's vehicle request for an additional Ford 150 patrol truck and the coroner division sergeant's vehicle. After review, neither was advanced for funding due to budget constraints and prioritization of other essential public safety needs. The coroner sergeant's vehicle, however, is planned to be brought forward as part of the 2728 budget package. Overall, these items not recommended for funding total just over $400,000 in general fund. Well, admin is seeking direction on whether any of the funding provided to external entities should be adjusted as the county continues to face significant fiscal constraints. And with most departments countywide experiencing reductions, despite rising operational costs, we're evaluating all discretionary expenditures to ensure alignment with our highest priorities. The grayed out entities shown here represent required costs that the county needs to pay and therefore not subject to adjustment. As discussed on a prior slide, the recipients receiving the largest portion are FHIR, CVB, UCCE, Area 12 on Aging, and Cosgrove Creek Vegetation Management. So staff recommendations would be to maintain the hiring freeze, to make adjustments related to SRF funding for the Archives position to be 20% general fund, a limited base for archives with 80% SRF funding. Increase the CIP amount for the integrated waste stairs weather structure by $30,000 funded with integrated waste fees. Have the board review county capital funded projects to ensure that the capital projects remain aligned with current fiscal conditions. provide board direction on TOT distribution and funding to external entities, and then also provide board direction on any additional adjustment to the budget as presented and given to you. So I would like to extend my appreciation to the board, department heads, fiscal staff, the auditor's office and information technology. Admin does recognize that this has been a challenging budget cycle and we understand the countywide impacts that budget reductions have on staff and operations. We sincerely appreciate the collaboration, professionalism and hard work that enabled our team to present a responsible budget for the board's consideration. That brings us to the end of the presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

I think we'll do public comment, then we'll round back to the board after lunch.

So staff and board, we're going to do public comment, lunch, then we'll come back and work with Denise and the rest of the admin, if you don't mind. Public comment? Online. Oh, Julia.

Yes, thank you.

Let me guess archives.

Okay. Julia Costello, and I'm speaking for the. Calaveras Heritage Council for the archives and. I appreciate you went from 0 budget, which was alarming to 20% coming from the general fund, but I wanted. to make a small play to actually increase that from 20% to 40%. 20% would represent one person from the recorder's office being there one day a week or devoting that person's time eight hours in a week to issues related to the archives. And I just want to say that that's I don't believe that that's enough. I have paragraphs here on how important the archives are and what valuable documents and I won't go on and on about that. but I want to say that um the future of the archives is in your hands and I see four critical aspects the secure facility and I want to compliment you on taking the important step to um appropriate money to solve the water leakage problem in the roof of the archives building which I think all of you may have been there by now and if you weren't appalled at the mildew and falling down back wall, you got the point and adjusted that. It also needs modernization of shelving and storage. These are future goals. And the documents from the basement of the county museum were recently recovered and removed because the county museum has moisture problems. They are now stored in the Colombo building, but they have not yet been inventoried or conserved. So there's a huge mass of county archives that We haven't had time to even look at. The Recorder's Office hasn't. Digitizing the collections, Rebecca Turner has notably made all the scanned deeds available on the computer in the Recorder's Office. You could call up the 1854 deed of your great-grandfather and there it is in handwritten beauty, all scanned in. The next on her agenda are the assessment records and early newspapers. The ultimate goal is to have all of these documents and others available online, not just in Recorder's office, but you can just call them up on your home computer. This prevents not only continued damage from handling these documents when we go in there, but will allow unlimited public access to your costs. I'm in the yellow zone. Additional funding. Rebecca has committed to researching other sources of funding, grants, donations, partnerships with other departments. The Calaveras Heritage Council that I am with has agreed to serve as the nonprofit 501 to assist in these kind of getting more money. Our website, calaverashistory.org, if you haven't gone there, Um, it now gets over 65,000 hits a month. And if you type into Google Calaveras County history, it will be the 1st thing to come on. Yeah.

Thank you very much. You're in the red. Okay, but we have more people here for the archives. No, it's Marvin. Oh, you see some people in the back that maybe didn't come.

I think. For also for the museum. Both.

Okay.

Oh yeah. Yes.

So you have plenty of public comment to follow you on.

of Judith Marvin-Murphys. I'm speaking for Foothill Resources. I also was the first director of the County Museum and Archives from 1976 to 1988. I know the County Archives is important to not only the history of Calaveras, one of California's original 27 counties, to its original settlers and current population, but to the county departments who may unknowingly depend upon it for research for county projects. As a partner in Fertile Resources, a cultural resources management firm founded in Calaveras County with Julia Costello and myself in 1983, we have conducted numerous studies throughout the state for various state, county, city, and private parties, all of which depend upon county archives for information required under federal and state laws. the National Environmental Quality Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the California Environmental Quality Act. All of these projects require in-depth historical research to determine if they may affect properties eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or the California Register of Historical Resources. A process also required for our new historic buildings and structures ordinance. If eligible and adversely affected, mitigation measures must be followed. Within Calaveras County alone, we have produced mandated survey inventory evaluation and mitigation reports for over 100 projects. Every single one of those projects involve research in the county archives. Continued access to these documents is critical for legal compliance. I will read this list in full, but we'll mention... I will not read this list in full, but I can pass it out to you. But we'll mention a few federal, state, and county projects. the Utica Water and Power Authority for re-licensing, the McCollumy River Pump Storage project, the New Molonez Dam and Reservoir project, the McCollumy Hill Sanitary District Treatment Plant, 12 projects for the Calaveras Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest, and numerous Caltrans projects, including the Wagon Trail project, and the Angels Can't Buy Bass, amongst others. And for the Calaveras Big Trees, we've produced numerous reports. For Calaveras County, we've produced Calaveras County Criminal Justice Center and Courthouse Project, another one on the county roads that access federal lands in Calaveras County, public works department and mining projects the royal mountain king mine project the carson hill gold mine project and numerous subdivisions including greenhorn creek tuscany hills murphy's creek estates etc and for the city of angels

Mayor Mrakas, So hard to make comments. Mayor Mrakas, See the red light, we did three minutes.

Mayor Mrakas, Okay, as a city of angels can. Mayor Mrakas, facade improvements and I urge you to please, please. Mayor Mrakas, fund.

Mayor Mrakas, Well, the next place.

Hi, my name is Emma Meinhart. I'm the executive director for the Calaveras County Historical Society, and we have been aware of the archives building falling apart. So I'm very excited that it has, it is going to be going through and starting the phases to be fixed. With the records that are kept in the archives, as Judith and Julia have said, they go back to the very beginning of our county. Most of our long-term families are in those records, whether they served or were in the newspapers, in some faction they are in there. So they are also incredibly important to the research that myself and my team conduct for the public. So we rely really heavily on the archives. Working with the Recorder's Office on this new proposal of the 20% general fund, We will be working with them to also secure some extra funding through grants, through being a fiscal partner and other avenues to help support the archives and the asking of a large map scanner, which will benefit not only them, But could potentially benefit other institutions that might need it and could possibly even create some revenue. So. I just the archives are really, really important not only to our history, but to the people that are seeking their history. Thank you.

Donna nothing.

Not yet. Okay. Anybody else for public comment.

online just a reminder for anyone online if you would like to provide public comment please raise your hand we have no online public comment thank you stacy we're going to take lunch we'll come back and then we'll uh get down to brass tacks how long are we taking lunch stacy Did you want to do one hour or 30 minutes?

Oh, one hour, right? Or half an hour? It's all you women need to make the decision. Okay, 30 minutes it is.

We'll come back at 1 o'clock.

1 o'clock.

Okay.

1 o'clock. Thank you.

We're back to the budget item number 17. So we've been through public comment, your presentation.

Does the board want to ask any questions to start with, or do we want to have staff start standing up? Amanda, I see your wheels turning.

All right, your staff. Thank you, Gary. So we'll start out with staff. Anybody, should we go in alphabetical order?

We prepared a schedule.

That's like the sheriff say.

And Sheriff Whiting is first up.

Oh, yeah, right there.

good afternoon historically yes for budget it does go in alphabetical order so i do want to thank this board county admin and especially my fellow department heads for allowing us to jump in line and present i do have a state sheriff's meeting that i'm trying to get to this afternoon but i did not want to have to do this on zoom so when we're done discussing the sheriff's office budget although i will not be here in person I well know that county council and all of you have me on speed dial. So if you need to call me back, I can log in on Zoom or I have other members of my administration that manage our budget units that are more than capable of presenting past today if the need arises. Fiscal year 26-27. This will be our fifth year of budget reductions. Yes, to what Denise spoke to you about this morning, a lot of that started at mid-year in phase one of fiscal year 22-23. was starting to glean contingency money and extra money and bringing us more in line to our budget to actuals. But we took major reductions over the last two years and gleaned our line items, not just reducing budget to actuals, but taking money out of the budget and making concessions. And we have been taking reductions. So this is year five of reductions. I don't want to just repeat what I said during last year's budget hearing when we took the major budget reduction, but I am forced to say again, and I'll start with what I ended saying last year. We are beyond the tipping point in our ability to preserve law enforcement jobs, services, resources, and programs. So as I go through the Sheriff's Office budget reduction highlights, I am asking this board with this budget hearing, please make the difficult decisions needed to prioritize essential services and public safety when you're analyzing these budget impacts. We often refer to the Sheriff's Office budget, but realistically, it's 18 different org keys. Finishing out a grant and consolidating some of our narcotics stuff, we have it down to about 15 different org keys. Those are 15 different divisions that we operate, plus an additional 15 designated funds or special revenue funds. I have 132 positions. The sheriff's office currently has 121 employees, plus another around 60 volunteers that work hard for the people of Calaveras County. to ensure public safety and quality life. So at last year's budget hearing, I kept my speech very generalized as to the budget reduction impacts. And it was just a lot of warnings that any future reductions will impact the level of services. This year, I am going to go budget by budget and really more deep dive and discuss what reductions mean and the impacts that it has in this recommended budget. So I'll start with a 32 budget, which is mainly our patrol and administration budget. Last year, when we took that major budget reduction, we already cut the overtime budget. We reduced the travel and training budget. I already talked to you guys about the impacts that it has if we don't keep up with the level of training, not only that's mandated, but just keep up with industry standards and law enforcement, and we reduced other line items. While costs of everything in this nation continue to increase, our local budget allocation continues to decrease. We are already at multiple years of decreased spending. We are making a conscious decision of not moving forward with a lot of projects and proposals. We have a technology committee within the Sheriff's Office that's constantly reviewing industry standard and law enforcement investigations, and we're having to tell them no sometimes on proposals now because of the reduced budgets. We needed a mechanic shop for proper fleet maintenance. And although our AB443 Special Revenue Fund could have financed that project, it would have depleted a fund that's crucial for a rural sheriff's office like ours to have the ability to keep up with vehicle equipment and technology needs. With these multi-year budget reductions, we are only accomplishing meeting our needs at this point from special revenue funds, grants, and donations. I made the decision last year to completely scrap our mechanic shop capital project because sometimes we are forced to make hard decisions in light of negatively affecting operations or public safety. And we could see the projected trend that we're having to use our not sustainable special revenue funds and constantly moving our ongoing revolving costs coming out of those funds. So we completely scrapped a large scale capital project because that decision was pragmatic and we had to make it. So if you look at our capital projects over the past couple of years, General Fund has assisted with our patrol vehicle purchases, but that's pretty much all that it's been able to assist us with. It was through a community grant that we got the new drone. It was through a grant that our search and rescue team got a new side by side. It was through the Homeland Security Grant that we're obtaining some crucial equipment. Our SWAT team vests, body armor are expiring, and that would have been a huge chunk. And with the general fund reductions, we moved that through the Homeland Security Grant. It was through donations accepted and funneled through the friends of the sheriff that we were able to get a crisis negotiation team van. The new canine and canine vehicle that is extremely popular and useful in our county, that was all donations. That was not through the general fund. And it was through AB443, our special revenue fund, as to how we were able to still purchase unmarked vehicles for investigations and a new command vehicle for critical incidents. We debuted that command vehicle in running our county fair through it, and it worked extremely well. It will streamline operations and proper accountability of personnel for critical incidents. That was not through the County General Fund. That was through our special revenue fund. It is through AB443 that we're currently purchasing e-bikes to bring back the sheriff's bike team that we can use at incidents. And so I just wanted to note all of those things, all of those capital projects. And just as Denise highlighted in some of her presentation this morning, she may have discussed some more capital projects for my office, but the two unmarked vehicles, again, are coming out of AB443, not general fund. And the emergency services vehicle, the OES vehicle, that is coming out of the EMPG grant. That's a grant funded capital that's not coming out of general fund. So we've been working hard through budget reductions to keep up with our equipment and technology needs. And we've been working, as it's noted in the past, to increase our bed contracts, our contract with the Department of State Hospitals, our contract with other counties for renting bed space. We've been looking where we can increase revenues as well as getting creative with grants. These are all things that we've been proactively doing in our department. But we also continue to have to move and increase the amount of revolving costs and annual costs into our special revenue funds due to the general fund reductions. And it's quite frankly, it's hindering our spending options. AB443, all those things that I just named that we were able to accomplish, the more that we have to move in there, the less that we are going to have. We already have to annually budget over $120,000 in our annual ongoing revolving costs. That's mainly a lot of our software systems, the annual cost for that. That now comes out at AB443. Our annual GIS ESRI license, which went up by a couple thousand this year, we pay for that out of AB 443 every year. And due to the general fund reductions last year, and now from this point forward, it's looking like now we have to pay our $60,000 a year TASER price out of AB 443, and that used to be a general fund contribution. The TASERs, of course, are crucial, less lethal force options for deputies and correctional officers. So let's talk about marked patrol vehicles for optimal fleet maintenance and replacement schedule. This board previously understood how our marked vehicles are crucial for our responses to emergency calls, and you guys used to commit to allowing us to buy five marked vehicles per year. The sheriff opted to defer any and all vehicle purchases for a couple years to help with the structural deficit. So we didn't even purchase patrol cars for a couple years. And then last year, we asked to purchase the five vehicles again, and it was only recommended and we only were being approved last year to purchase four new patrol cars. So we started making that purchase in July of last year. Those cars got here last week and they're not even on the street. They still need decaling and radio programs. So when you guys give us the approval to purchase cars, it's now taking an entire year for us to receive them. So we have not had new patrol cars yet hit the street. um so this year we understood we shouldn't ask for five again we'll just ask for four and now it's recommended that we only get three new marked patrol cars this continued downward spiral is uh very concerning for our ongoing fleet maintenance All right, the recommendation to reduce the Sheriff's Operations Division overtime budget by $200,000 in order to help balance the general fund deficit is also concerning. I warned this board last year that continuing to make major budget reductions to public safety is going to have an effect on our operations and the level of programs and services. And it's hard to notice because we keep doing it. We keep showing up. We keep figuring it out. We keep allocating staff to all these community events because we're still going to focus on meeting our community's needs and expectations. But if the overtime budget just continues to be reduced, it's making it harder and we're burning our people out and that has an effect on retention. We worked with county admin on that to put that amount in 5801 instead of the 5006 for overtime. So we're hoping for salary savings, but continuing to build such a high amount in anticipated salary savings is just not sustainable. We have been extremely fortunate in this current fiscal year that we did not have a high number of costly critical incidents. I would love to say that it was our patrol deployment plan or our community interactions that reduced crime and we didn't need as much over time, but it really was just luck that we were able to pull off as much as we did with the existing budget and that's before this year's reduction. So when you take the $200,000 reduction in overtime or salary savings, and then you add that to the $350,000 in anticipated salary savings, that's taking over half a million dollars from salary costs that we had in our department submitted budget that is not in this recommended budget. Right now we currently have several lateral deputy applicants in our background process, and I'm really hoping that we can hire them and save the county on recruitment, equipment, academy costs, the training costs, and that we can get some experienced law enforcement officers on our street or hitting our street and patrolling. But the recommended anticipated salary savings estimates sweeping some of the allocated salary costs by assuming that we will have recruits in the next academy and they won't be hired for nine months. But if we end up hiring lateral deputies, it's going to make fulfilling the anticipated salary savings very hard, if not unobtainable. So like I said, just continuing to try and balance the general fund deficit by sweeping our salary savings is not a sustainable plan. And I know that Denise highlighted that as well. Unfortunately, staff turnover is inevitable. So, we currently have 1 deputy that's processing out for industrial retirement and I was on the consent agenda today. So that'll be salary savings. We have a corporal that's leaving us for another agency next month. And I know of a couple of their staff that I'm aware of that are applying elsewhere. It doesn't matter. You know, it. morale, culture of the department, money. You know, we can try as much as we can, but people are always going to do what they need to do for their family and move elsewhere. And unfortunately, when people leave, it takes us an entire year to fill it. So I do anticipate that we will end up with the salary savings and meeting the mark. But when we have to freeze positions, eliminate positions, or slow recruiting efforts to fulfill anticipated salary savings, then this has an effect on our recruitment and retention. So with all of that, It sounds very doom and gloom with the salary savings, but I will say in sitting down with county admin, I do think we will hit the mark for what is an anticipated salary savings in it. Unfortunately, just because of turnover, but this board just needs to realize if complaints come in, when we go down to minimum staffing, when it takes us so long to recruit and hire new deputies, response times go up. If any projections are contrary to that, then I will definitely be coming back to this board at mid-year. All right, so I wanna remind the board going into the next fiscal year, although Denise only highlighted one position freeze in our department of an SST, I would like to remind you that we already eliminated three deputy sheriff positions over the past couple of years due to budget reductions and increased employee costs. This year, the recommended budget does require us to freeze a deputy sheriff position. If you look in the 32 budget book that was released to the public and is part of the recommended budget, it wasn't listed in the presentation this morning. However, we are going to have to freeze a deputy sheriff position. And what happened was we were asked with the recommended budget to move point. five FTE funding for one deputy and use the Calima CalMet Special Revenue Fund in the amount of $75,000 to pay for a deputy position. And we figured out that we do have enough money in that fund to do it. So we moved a 32 position control number deputy into 41. But with it covering only half the cost of a deputy, it is going to force us to freeze a deputy position. This also will be pulling more expense compared to the annual revenue from that SRF. So projections for future fiscal year impacts will be underway to determine how many years we can do this before it depletes the fund. For now, this is sufficient for sustainability, but we'll have to be projecting out how many years we'll be able to do that. Like I mentioned, County Admin is recommending to freeze the Sheriff Service Technician to save around $86,000. The only thing I can say to that is over the past year, we repeatedly were asked by this board to take on extra divisions, the Office of Emergency Services, the Coroner's Office. And I asked this board repeatedly every time I came to the podium during those discussions, Please don't ask us to do more and then cut our budget. July 1st adds the additional SST position assigned to the coroner's office. However, this 2627 budget now recommends freezing an SST position, which means that my staff will be doing more with less. With the unprecedented expectations of transparency with the public, the high demand for disclosure of information, of processing of the body camera and other increased use of technology and law enforcement, we are doing our best to meet the needs of the district attorney's office for what is needed to prosecute criminal cases. But freezing that sheriff service technician position will absolutely have an effect on our records division. Moving on to the coroner's budget, I just want to highlight and reiterate what Denise already said. The planned budget, our submitted budget had two vehicles for the new coroner's division, the vehicle for the sergeant and then a transport van if we need to transport decedents. However, due to the increased cost of the vehicles, We were asked to only purchase one vehicle this year and defer the second vehicle purchase for next year. I think we are able to operationally handle that and manage it, but it's just moving another capital request to next year's budget and the outlook doesn't look that great for next year. So I hope you guys have good memory when we ask for that vehicle next year because we're going to need it. All right, moving on to discussion regarding our dispatch budget. There was no highlight in this morning's presentation regarding dispatch, but the budget reduction is absolutely going to have an effect on our dispatch budget. The significant amount in the recommended reduced salary allocation of around 108,000 to balance the general fund, it hits this budget really hard. I really hope that now we're up to full staffing of dispatchers that the overtime usage will go down. But of course, that's not a guarantee with critical incidents whatnot. So the recommended budget is looking at a 70,000 dollar uh reduction in their overtime budget and that's pretty significant with that coupled with the anticipated salary savings being swept and the possibility of a renegotiated contract for ambulance dispatching that could reduce our revenue i'm forced to voluntarily unfill a dispatch position in order to meet the demands to balance that org key So although it wasn't listed as a frozen position, we are going to unfill it because it's a pragmatic decision because otherwise I don't think we would be able to meet the proposed reductions in this recommended budget. So we will work with one less dispatcher in our schedule. That is currently an open position and does not require any layoffs. We would rather do that than take such a reduction to our overtime budget. Again, we're going to be keeping up with the budget to actuals. If we determine that the renegotiated contract turns out okay, if we're seeing a trend of much lower budget to actuals in the overtime budget, then we will revisit that decision to unfill that position, which is why it wasn't required to be mandated frozen. The jail budget. It's been a long time since we have been able to accomplish good staffing levels in the jail. So I am very thankful for our jail recruiting, hiring and training team. Now as a reminder, over the past couple years, we already eliminated two correctional technicians and four correctional officers. So yes, we are filling positions, but we have less positions to actually fill. This is another major budget in the sheriff's office that's recommended for reducing the overtime budget by a 100,000 dollars. That's significant again. We're all hoping the increased staffing level will reduce our budget tactuals on what's being spent. But until we get staff through the training program, time will only tell if we're going to be able to retain them who's going to stay, you know, and while they're on training. As regular COs call in sick, you know, we still have to cover shifts. So that's yet another one that we will be monitoring to reevaluate at mid-year. Our marine safety budget. We have already unfortunately dealt with our first drowning this year. Our revenue from our grant with the State Department of Boating Waterways was reduced this year, unfortunately, just as every other sheriff's office has been dealing with the same thing. With that reduction and to balance the general fund, it's recommended by county admin to reduce the overtime budget for marine safety by $10,000. We have been getting by with receiving a DBW grant augmentation over the past couple years, but that's never a guarantee. So if we end up with numerous call-outs or multiple drownings, the overtime budget will definitely get depleted fast, not only with the use of our boats, but with our dive team. So that's another one that, again, building this budget, this is an awful lot of monitoring for mid-year and coming back to this board. Court security, our sheriff's office, as well as the state sheriff's association and the majority of the other sheriffs in the state of California, we have tried lobbying for years with the state department of finance regarding each county's allocation for court security funding. And our costs are far exceeding the revenue that we are receiving. We have only been able to sustain this budget without general fund through creative scheduling and saving in years when we could, and then using the built up special revenue fund to augment the shortfall in revenue from the state. The funding is falling well below our actual costs, and we are already using significant overtime of deputies to cover court security from the 32 budget. I bring this up, of course, to highlight two things. The 32 budget in overtime is being reduced, and that budget is also helping cover the mandatory staffing requirement in court security. And then secondly, we've been putting this board on notice for several years now in county admin that court security is going to start impacting the general fund at some point, and that time has come. So, like I said, we have a lot of org keys. We have a lot of divisions. So I know I went through a lot rather than just a generalized sheriff's office budget. But I want to make sure you guys really understand what the impacts of these budget reductions are doing to law enforcement and public safety in our county. So. In totality, from what our office budget submittal was compared to county admin's recommendation, including the vehicle capital purchase requests and everything, we estimate from what we submitted to what's being recommended is around a 1.2, almost $1.3 million reduction. You'll see the budget book. Like I said, some of the proposed reductions that I've been speaking about in the individual divisions to overtime budget, some of those are reflected in 5801 instead of 5006, because if we have people leave and we can account for recruiting costs and the anticipated salary savings, can be made up there rather than reducing our overtime. We worked with county admin and we're really hoping it works out that way. But for instance, like the jail budget, we didn't have open positions to be able to do that with 5801 so that it had to equate to the reduction showing up in the 5006 overtime line item. I also just want to emphasize what Denise already highlighted this morning that use of one-time funds to balance this budget is not sustainable. And we are going to be right back here next year, probably with even harder decisions to make. So I'm asking this board, It's time to take a really good look at revenues and overall allocation of funds to determine relevant ways to defer funds back to public safety, essential services, and of course, law enforcement. So I'm saying it out loud specifically, and I'm hoping you guys are gonna have a discussion about Prop 172, about TOT distributions, and about this board's discretionary allocations. Please prioritize public safety. All right, so I know I just monologued to highlight the impacts of the recommended budget reductions, and I don't like pointing out problems without potential solutions. We're more than willing to be part of solutions when it comes to cuts. I think we have shown over the past couple years working cooperatively with county admin during budget compilation and as evidenced although some of the voluntarily unfilling positions or freezing positions within our department they weren't in the budget presentation because we're showing this board that we're already making those decisions because we know that that's what's necessary during these times so I can easily pack this room with concerned citizens and business owners that have offered to come in and make this budget hearing much longer than it needs to be and I chose not to because I continue to hope that this board is just going to make the necessary decisions to prioritize public safety without the need for the grandstanding. That concludes my comments about our budget. Any questions?

You don't need much to question or.

We got some work to do Mr. Thank you. Sheriff and I have notes from when I met with you that I'll go into later on when you get into the budget.

All right, thank you very much.

Like I said, I'll be available via zoom in the next couple of days and I can easily step out of the state sheriff's meeting as needed or members of my fiscal staff can come back if we need to have any future discussions. Otherwise, I won't be in person from this point.

Thank you for the time that you've given all of us.

Real quick before we get to this, can I just do a facility break real quick?

Okay.

Thank you, Stacy. Ms. Durham, our esteemed assessor.

Esteemed.

Be nice. I am. So, as Denise pointed out earlier,

the property tax revenue brings in about 13.4 million dollars in tax revenue a year which is 17 goes the general fund which she out said it was about 2.6 million so um I would say that our department who's the beginning of that is somewhat important to the tax revenue I mean for the revenue for the county um she kind of alluded to you know we've been steadily increasing and we're a steady funding source for the county but anytime the economy starts shifting and going down it could affect um property taxes like we said we've seen in 07 and 08 when we had a major decline in the market which affected revenues um forward for several years For my budget, the CEO has recommended that we freeze our position. And what we talked about in our discussions was freeze it till August or September when the board made their decision. At that time, it would be decided if it was eliminated. So that is a $114,637 reduction, which is an appraiser position within my department. I want to say that in the 25-26 budget, they did eliminate one of my appraisal positions then. So we're on the second round of reductions to my office. Just to explain a little bit how we operate is our assessment role operates on a fiscal basis, July 1st to June 30th. while our appraisal work reflects events that occur in the corresponding calendar year. So we work events that occur between January and December. Then the state gives us six months to complete those events that happen within the calendar year. We'll be closing our assessment rule coming here up on the 16th, so we can deliver it timely to the auditor by July 1st. we would normally be working events for this year's role between january 1st 2025 through december 31st 2025 if we had adequate staffing and no backlog based on the three-year average of events that we receive um from change in ownership, new construction. We currently have six appraisers who do approximately 85% of that work. So we're not catching the mark of 100% of if we want to do a whole year's worth of work, we're only capturing 85% of it. And this one doesn't even capture the backlog that we have. So that would just be working in the events that we have in that calendar year. With seven appraisers, we would achieve a little over 100% of those events. But this doesn't count for all of the statutory requirements that we're not doing in our office. This work that we are completing includes changing ownership assessments, new construction, parcel splits, informal review requests, decline in value, business property assessments, aircrafts, vessels, possessory interests, calamities, and assessment appeals. So our office is not, there's other statutory requirements that we're required to do each year that are falling down and we're not doing. so in 2029 and 2030 fiscal year the state is going to come in and survey our records if we don't meet the criteria of 95 of accuracy and doing the statutory requirements they give us they will um hold withhold our subventional uh supplemental subvention money that comes into the county that gets somewhat distributed between the three offices the auditor tax letter and myself When I took office three years ago, we had over a four year backlog. And as of today, we have, it's approximately one and a half years. Um, then I think my staff for that, they've done a wonderful job. Um, while these events, when you calculate and I'm calculating, they go over multiple years, but if you would take the, the number in totality, it's a one year's worth of work. Um, if we were fully staffed to get the backlog backlog caught up, then still be a year behind because of the current year's assessments wouldn't be able to be done. Um, So if we did, if you funded our seventh appraiser that we need, I'm confident that we can shore up our backlog and be within the year, which means that we wouldn't have multiple years of tax bills going out to the property owner for them to pay over an amount. So if we finish that all in one year, we'd only have the one year of the 2026 events that we can't work right now because we don't have time to do so. And we can start working on some of the statutory requirements that we are supposed to do. I know you all received the email from the property owner that was talking about the confusion of assessments over multiple years. It's a financial constraint for them. I mean, they're getting tax bills that can range from five to $10,000 that they have to pay in one installment. So it is essential for us to get caught up and stop that from happening for them. So the backlog, it increases the workload for everything. It increases assessment appeals for us because we assess a property as of the date of the event, the date of the change in ownership, the date of new construction. So if these are two and three years, property owners getting the escaped assessment and they're going well that ain't the market right now so then we have them calling and we have to explain to them that well that was the market in 2023 okay maybe not now you need to prove to this or we need to prove to them that what you have is what is assessed which takes employee staff to explain that to everyone all the time It also affects the auditor and tax collector because all of these escaped assessments and multiple bills, they have to process and they have to create the bill and they have to collect. uh the tax collector does offer a uh four-year pay plan for the property owners so it's not if they apply for it um the burden is kind of shifted um lehua has given me some information regarding um what the foreplay plan actually um does and what it means to the counties um a general fund as well so If anybody receives an escaped assessment that exceeds $500, they're eligible for this payment plan. Currently there's approximately $1.7 million in outstanding property tax obligations remain under active payment plans. So see how that's County cashflow issue. Managing these plans involves significant staff time and resources, including annual correspondence with taxpayers, payment processing, payment tracking, account maintenance, and administration of default procedures when minimum payment requirements are not met. All they do is pay a $50 payment fee and there's no interest and there's no penalties for these payment plans. so she gave me an example um let's say total amount of a bill is five thousand dollars usually we would get that in two installments of twenty five hundred dollars each if they enroll in the payment plan they would pay the thousand fifty for the first year because they have the fifty dollar plan fee and then for four succeeding years they have to pay a thousand dollars That's it. So there's no compounding interest, no nothing. So the county is only realizing that money over five years. So another reason why we need to get these going and not stagnate this out this backlog and get it done. i do believe by funding this position you're helping um the property owners of the county along with the general fund i think the hundred and the 114 000 um 637 that is costing the county is we're going to be realized we don't have any problem realizing that amount of money for our office um i do want to echo um richelle's I agree. We should be looking at TOT and how we're distributing monies outside of our county departments. We have to invest in our people. I mean, I think I look just as a general, my leave balances for my employees who are stressed about trying to get the events done that we have. We try to put limits on them telling you to produce this amount. um and i it's undue stress and i think we need to start thinking about our county employees and all departments as a whole um so that's all i have any questions for me if i may lori um

Thank you really appreciate it. I mean, between the tax cost collector, the otter controller and the assessor's offices, you are the ones that do the work that bring in the money into the county, and it's your your revenue generators. And that work is invaluable, and we have to be pragmatic about when we move forward. If I may clarify one thing to my understanding with talking with Teresa, The September revisit isn't just to decide whether it's going to be terminated. It could go either way. And I, as a supervisor that supports revenue generating offices, like it's a no brainer for me, you know, as opposed to, I'm not going to name any other offices, but your revenue generators, you know, that one position could fill five positions if they get the type of work done that needs to get done.

And, you know, even freezing the position for that amount of time, by the time recruitment happens. So if you tell me right now until September, you can't fill it. That's six months worth of somebody I don't have, which isn't going to help me very much.

I hear you. But I'm just clarifying for now. I'm not saying I'm making a decision, Loree.

Yes. I'm saying it'll affect us.

Yes. I hear you clearly. And I'm talking about revenue generating right now, and it's appreciated. And I do know the numbers that you have caught up on, and it's impressive. And we appreciate the work that you've done, along with the follow-up from the auditor and controller's office and the tax collector. It takes all of you. So I'm acknowledging it. I just want to clarify that. And, you know, we got some hard decisions moving forward. And you did reiterate something that's on all of our minds that the sheriff brought up. And we're going to have to make some hard decisions.

Okay. Any more questions for me? I have a question. How long have we offered the payment plan option on these?

They've always been an option.

And it's basically once we get a letter similar to the one that you shared with me.

Once they get a notice that says they have an escaped assessment. And they know they have that. And they notify them.

Thank you. How was that created? Was it board of supervisors or your guys' office just making that decision? Yeah, I know. I guess we could, but since it correlate to this department too.

Yeah.

So that's actually something that we follow from the state. So anything that we bill out, that's a prior tax year, that's an escape assessment over $500. We offer the payment plan for each year that we bill out.

If you're not behind, you don't really have escaped assessments. You're going to have some because we get information that people pass away. There's a date of death. Usually, people only take care of those things is when they're getting ready to sell their property. You can have someone who died in 09. They never reported it to us or recorded a document. Then they're reselling in, you know, 2026. We have to go back to the date of the death, factor it forward, and we can do four years of role corrections on them. So in that plan, they would be able to apply for it. But those wouldn't be a large number as we have now with the backlog we have. Because like I said, one point number, she gave me over a million dollars we have because of people getting multiple years and just high amounts that they just can't pay. Got it. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Oh, good afternoon. You're on the list before I am.

I want to use my time today to kind of talk about the different ways that I'm looking at the situation. As the county auditor controller, I know that I'm fairly new to the position, but I do have a responsibility to examine how the budget's put together, make sure that we're following all the pertinent best practices, compliance with so many things. and it goes back to you know as we started the meeting with the animal shelter financing you know that that was something that's always been a great idea. It's always been a great use of funds, but it took a long time to make it at the level of priority that it is now and past today. And I don't want to have an opinion so much on that, but that priority comes from somewhere else. We have a bucket of money that if it gets rerouted to the debt service on the animal shelter, it has to come from somewhere else. And those types of priorities is within your purview and privilege to kind of set those priorities. This board has also done an amazing job of letting competent department heads set those priorities for their departments and bring the cost of those things to you for approval and for funding or for appropriation, it never feels good to feel like you're less of a priority than another department. No one wants to feel that way. And I know that none of you want to make any of us feel that way. But as you keep saying, difficult decisions have to be made. I would like to point out that as the county auditor controller, I do support the recommendations of the CEO's office. As difficult as they are to kind of look at, but in my history of, you know, in the business world, things sometimes happen, positive and negative, and it becomes the new normal. Any tough decisions that you make, this county will adapt and this county will continue and not all of it will be comfortable and not all of it will be popular, but we will overcome, we will continue going the best we can. As a department head, I'm looking at my own personal budget and I'm in kind of a unique state because I don't have any special revenue funds. I don't have any revenue generating for my own budget unit. And I also belong to a group of departments that are considered central service departments. So admin, myself, the tax collector, IT, HR, insurance, even the grand jury costs, those all get kind of charged to our non-general fund departments. But the board's approach to the costs of our nine departments has been very generous. You know, we provide those services to other general fund departments that don't get charged and it doesn't hit their budget. We provide those services to outside agencies and we don't charge for any of those services. That generosity does go a long way in the community. And I'm not giving an opinion, but you have always been very generous with our time and our services on top of what other people have mentioned about you know, using discretionary funds to help outside the county agencies and programs. Within that department and being so new in my position, I've heard the commentary, I've heard the warnings over the past several years about this point and about what could happen next when we take a, not a hypothetical, but an assumed budget shortfall and it becomes an actual shortfall. Once we don't have the resources to do what we need to do, then it no longer becomes an issue of priorities, it becomes survival. And none of us want to get to that point. In that spirit, from my appointment in November till now, I have kept one of my positions open just because I wanted to see if my department could run leaner and still provide all of the services that you're used to and that the community's used to. And that's why you saw my department eliminating one of my positions. With that position, I only have nine people total. So losing one, that's, yeah. But I believe that the great staff that I have, I believe that we can still meet everything that we need to. If further cuts become necessary, in all reality, what that looks like for my department is a slowdown in services. We can't cut anything. We're still gonna pay checks and we're still gonna do payroll and we're still gonna do the property tax. We can't eliminate anything that we provide But we also, at this point, we provide a good timing on services that I would like to not have suffer. So if me eliminating that position can help us as a non-revenue generating general fund department address that, that's kind of been my focus. You know, the last four years I've kind of been running my department's budget and it was always my goal to not only be under budget, but, you know, be able to show that we're making progress in efficiency and other things. I'm not saying that all solutions come from shaking up a department. I'm not saying that all solutions are just, you know, do it leaner and meaner. I've heard several other departments talk about we've gone through years and years of doing more with less. And eventually we get to the point where we have to do less with less. And I hope that's not where we're at. But that's really, that's the comments I wanted to make on the budget. I appreciate all of the time, the, the kind approach that your admin team has worked with these departments. Even where the toughest decisions are being made or recommended, they've done so with grace and with kindness, and I appreciate the team that you are empowering, and I do support their recommendations. Any questions for me?

yeah or more of a thank you because you brought up something that i haven't put too much thought into but i know that happens um outside services you the otter control county council that and i could go down a list i left county council off the list sorry sir no no no no no but they they they do outside services just the same as you do and um for I'm not going to say far too often. That's the wrong word. We've been very generous. And it's the right type of generosity because it's working with the community. Because we're all working to be successful together. But as I said last year when we were discussing the TOT and we still gave it to the fire departments, you know, how is that fair to the sheriff's department? Because they are our responsibility. We do carry the responsibility of safety in every which way as county supervisors. But the fire departments are outside of our purview as opposed to the sheriff. And the sheriff took cut and the fire departments didn't off the TOT per se, you know, as an example. So at a certain point, working with the community doesn't always mean giving ourselves a hundred percent away so much as there's a little bit of cost to that so that we can continue to help the community in a beneficial way and still probably cheaper way than they would hiring someone else outside So I think that's something that we might wanna discuss a little bit later on after we get through all these departments. So thank you, Greg. I really appreciate your perspective and I appreciate the work you put in and you are a revenue generator because what she has goes to you and then it goes to the tax collector. You're part of that framework. So you are a revenue generator, sir. Small cog in a big wheel. Thank you. You're a very large cog. Doug. Chairman.

We just went over stuff, man. I'll make it fast. OK. Yeah, our department doesn't have the level of complexity or the level of importance that many of the departments you're going to hear from have. So what I go to when I hear what's happening in the budget is, what am I going to tell my staff first and then what am I going to tell you? Um, I'm going to talk about building and code compliance at 1 time, because strangely, while they're 2 separate budgets, 1 of them is impacting the other. And I'm just going to come out and say that. By reducing a code enforcement staff member, that staff member has the right to bump down to the previous space and she chooses to do that. And she has. That means that the previous employment she had was a permit technician, which means she moves into that position and then. permit tech who's currently there is the one that unfortunately has to be laid off or relocated um so cascading effects so i start thinking about how do i uh show your board how we're going to roll with this because when i met teresa and a team um I heard what the budget was. I knew exactly what needed to be done in my department and it is sensible. It is correct. Is it the right decision? Yes, absolutely right decision. Is it horrible? Yes. That employee is an excellent employee and I. most likely will not be able to get her back if things get better in a year the type of employee where once once somebody realizes they got something good they're not going to let her go so that's that's that so but so let's talk about cascading effects building department and code enforcement are in my mind always have always been forced multipliers for every other development department and many safety Departments, we, we don't hold the same level of authority or.

Or level of responsibility, put the word right out of my mouth for your safety. Yeah, yeah, we're in the building. You do inspections. We keep buildings being built. Excuse me buildings being built would not be safe for people and have it. So we're going up there. Don't put yourself.

No, I appreciate that. We're going beyond that. If. If a sheriff calls and says, this is a hole that's going to get someone killed. We need to get people out of here. I want to be able to send a person there. If a building inspector is or if there is a Work without permits that is not caught that actually is a safety issue. Most importantly, however, cascading effects. If we don't catch the person building without a permit that has an addition or a large remodel, we are not capturing our own revenue and we're also not capturing tax revenue. From the improvements on that property that are reported through the permit process. so there will be some reductions in our services but they're not going to be in relation to anything that's going to affect another department or anything that's going to relate relate to public safety so if we can support our fire department or our sheriff's department yes that's the first thing we're going to do Um, I know, and I've, I've lived through a pretty tragic 2009. Where a board once decided we're not going to publicly and they're going to publicly announced. We're not going to enforce. Enforcement on permit violations 80% of our permit. Activity disappeared. Can't do that. Not only is there a requirement, but there is a revenue concern that spans the general fund, right? So as it pertains to the building side of this budget, The recommendations that I made that were put on hold now that we have this, this study adopted. Thank you again. We'll be recommending that for the final budget. Just put make sure that inspectors are because we have mandatory inspections. We have to do that cannot be missed. And that's going to ensure we do that. We will be able to meet our requirements for the cannabis inspections to make sure that the tax revenue is being reported correctly. we are gonna be able to meet our MS4 obligations for stormwater quality. We're gonna be able to do our inspections within 24 hours. There will be about a one to two month delay as workload ramps up in the summer. We may have one day delays, a week long additional delays in plan checks, but not significant. We've just recently caught up on our plan review expectations. So if we lose a week, That's the price of doing business for now. When it comes to code enforcement though, Sabrina and I have worked on the triage method that your board has. She has improved on it since then. It identifies what are our priorities to spend resources on. I'll say that minor violations that are a level 1 to level 3, we will not be able to get to. We won't be working on department-specific issues. We'll be working on interdepartmental concerns. But fire safety, structural safety, no permit, things like that that are going to be key, we will be getting on. But if someone is complaining that their neighbor's light is shining in their backyard, I'm sorry. I don't have the bandwidth for that, and I apologize. Don't be sorry, Doug. We got to prioritize. I will call that consent. Ultimately, that's where we stand. Any questions?

Oh, man. There's going to be a dirty email later.

Something I really didn't Stress too much is look, our, our inter departmental cooperation right now is really good.

Yes.

And what I don't want is to tell another department head. I don't have the room to send a staff member to help you with access. Not going to happen.

Right?

All inter departmental communication all all inter departmental goals are what we are going to be focusing on. So that means any, like, for instance, if I have to amend an ordinance, if it's not critical. I'm going to work on an interdepartmental project first because that's going to save time and or money in more than one department. It's going to cascade through multiple departments. So that's going to be our internal direction with your consent, of course, moving through this next year.

It was one incident last year for code compliance that blew the doors off of your budget for the most part, right, Sabrina? that was pretty much one hit quit right there for your budget right and that and that was that was important to get done and that was interdepartmental

Correct in addition with the reduction, because we are now working with 50,000, rather than 80,000. That means that and we get more done by boarding up buildings and we get more done with a. Potentially a restraining order, or a court order vacate. Rather than spend 30,000 dollars. You know, I want to county council. I'm just saying, I want to explore every other avenue. Yeah.

No, we're facing every direction I'm hearing now. very good and i'm acknowledging where it went last year i remember something doug sir you didn't ask for anything you just educated us that's right okay thank you doug thank you sabrina thanks doug I wish I could give more good news out.

Can I just walk on up?

Of course you can. You're her boss and she's my boss.

Casey doesn't need bossing. Rebecca Turner, the county clerk recorder, registrar of voters, clerk to the board and archives. I'm primarily here to discuss archives, not because I want to ask for anything. I know we're in a tight situation and I do want to do what we can to assist with this. where we're at today um but i do want to recognize that archives is holding important public history and the current staffing lab levels will limit what can actually be accomplished um we essentially took a position that ranged anywhere from 2010 to 35 fte to 60 fte That really kept the department stagnant. We didn't modernize, we didn't grow at all as a department or do some of the things we really should be doing as an archives. Now we're taking that position to 20 percent. Yes, it's being funded 80 percent by Recorder, but it's being funded by restricted funds. That means that position has to be working on a specific project related to the Recorder's office and it could be audited and we need to show that that project really is being worked on for 80 percent. So we are taking the archivist from 100%, which thank you at Midyear for moving it to 100%, to now back to 20%. I just really want to be clear about what the expectations for a position at 20% would be. Very, if we have served the public at all, it's going to be extremely limited by appointment only because we have collections there. We don't know what we have. um and before we can even start to digitize or we need to understand what's there so it's like what records are in our possession uh who do they belong to that's really important um who should have access are they official records are they public records are they confidential or restricted should they even be offered to the public as we're trying to have more public hours should we even be sharing these records i i don't know that's concerning um and then the condition should they be uh allowed access if they're falling apart and deteriorating? Is that even good for the public to continue operating like that? So our number one priority really is understanding what collections are in our possession. My biggest fear when they said archives was closing is, what do I do with all this stuff? I don't even know it's here. So it's like, how could we, if we did have to close and we got to that point, how could we disseminate it if we don't know what we have? So I do think that 20% really needs to be spent identifying what is in our collection, what should be in our collection, and how we want to operate it going forward. I do think that's in the best interest of everybody, even the people who are like, they want to get in right now. I think it's the best interest that we are taking care of what we need to take care of before we keep operating in that status quo. Our number two priority is really digitizing records. I think we can serve the largest number of people being able to do that. But again, getting to that point of digitizing, we need to know what's there and what's the most important item to digitize or preserve. And then lastly, I think we need to build this to be a sustainable long-term I don't think it's wise of archives to keep depending on county funds, even though we're storing county records. Right now, we haven't been able to accept new records into archives in over 15 years. like county records should be going into county archives but they're being stored in uh many storages places and other other other areas that also cost the county money they should be coming to archives ideally and we can't do that the way we store things um because we don't have room for more if we had different shelving situations and we knew what really should be or not be there that would be a completely different story but archives could be some kind of sustainable savings for the county as well if it was if it was used properly. So essentially what I'm trying to say on that is please don't expect a lot at 20%. We're going to do what we can. I truly believe in keeping the records properly. I want to do what's best for them. But again, we went from the last over a decade, it's staying stagnant at a 60% position. I don't think there should be high expectations for 20%. I was asked to me, well, can't you ask for more? And I'm like, I'm really feeling lucky that archives isn't being cut altogether. So I've told the community like I've met with them. This is our straits. This is where we're standing. Don't expect that we're going to be immediately open again just because we got this. And they're like, well, can't you ask for another 20%? What would that look like? Well, that's another $22,000, which does sound minimal. But yes, we could be open more with that amount. Again, I'm happy with what we have, but I just want everyone to recognize the practicality of what we're offering. And it is the Recorder's Office putting this position on life support. We do have projects that could probably operate for another two years supporting that 80%. But I can't guarantee projects continue after that. So my goal, if we're going to keep accounting archives, is finding another way to fund that 80% in the next two years. And being open one day a week, which consumes that 80%, is not plausible that I'm also going to find a sustainable solution. So I just wanted to clarify that. I did also want to note, as clerk to the board, our overtime did get cut. Every time you guys come in for closed session at 8 AM, This one has to work overtime. We don't currently have an overtime fund, so please keep that in mind in this current budget. and i believe since we're i feel like this is a question i should have asked you already sorry denise so you correct me if i'm wrong i believe um our elections position even though we're on a freeze if this goes through and the archives position is approved that position's not frozen and we can request it to get filled because i'm really worried going into november june was a low turnout for galliveros county election and we were we were treading water, getting everything accomplished. We worked weekends. Thankfully, almost all my staff from every department volunteered to help on weekends, but people were done. They were tired of working weekends after a while. And so our overtime did go up for this last election because we were short staffed. Thankfully, We have a great team and they support each other. And when they see somebody else just worn out, they volunteer like, hey, I think it's my turn to step in and help out some. But we really need to fill our position for November because it will like it always is. It'll be a higher turnout election. And if we are treading water with 50 percent turnout, I can't imagine when we're back at an 80 percent turnout, which I expect November to be. So I'm not necessarily asking for anything, but I would like to keep what I have. And I just want you to know what to expect that it's not looking pretty going forward. Oh, one more thing. We bill special districts in elections because by government code or elections code, we are allowed to do so. A lot of times, special districts will come back to us and be like, that's way too expensive. We can't afford that. Well, we don't make a fee. We charge them at cost. So generally, I'm like, OK, well, you can go look at what other options you have and have somebody else conduct your election. I've never had a special district come back to me and say, oh, I found a better deal. They've always come back and the county offers the cheapest deal there is. So I'm just advocating if there are departments that can bill, it's very generous of the county to not do so. However, we still would be giving them a deal than them doing it somewhere else.

Yes.

That's all. Thank you.

Can I speak to the elections position?

Oh, sorry.

yeah um so that position is funded in your budget right now because the other employee was going to bump back to that position so there should be no impact to that elections position if the archive plan is moved forward okay thank you is there any board members have any questions of our lessons official martin no okay hey rebecca thank you appreciate it

I just feel very strongly about the things that happened collectively in that building. So anything that we can do to figure out whether historical societies or what have you. Thank you. It's your fault.

Yeah. And thank you for meeting with the Historical Society to come up with some solution. And maybe it's a great strategic plan topic to help them figure out what the next two years is going to look like, especially I agree with you. I think it sucks that it's not open, but maybe this is the perfect opportunity for you to really inventory what you have. Yeah, it's a great opportunity for you to inventory what you have so we can make better decisions in the near future.

I completely agree. Sorry, Amanda, I shouldn't have sat down. I do think this is a good time to get eyes wide on a problem that it's not, it didn't start this year. This has been an ongoing problem that we've kind of just shuffled and put under the bed a little bit longer, but it does need to be seen that we have an issue and we need to address it.

And I think we all value what the archives mean. We just need to, we need to, have a different viewpoint on it. And I think this is a good opportunity.

So have you ever got a cost to find out what it would cost to digitalize all of it? So somebody wants to look something up, they can just go online or whatever.

everything we'd be looking at millions of dollars i'm thinking one project at a time i know you'd have to scan it yeah we do a lot of digitization projects in the recorder's office so the recorder's records alone um to have all of the deed books back to 1850 plus indexing cost us eight hundred thousand dollars so it's a very expensive project

We ran up against it with the museum because a lot of times two people start and then they don't finish. Half of it's kind of been done on these cards over here, half of it's over here on those cards, these cards over here, and try and get it all on one modern catalog IT or what have you. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.

And then you've got microfilm to deal with.

When I started in the office, that's the same thing. We had like five, all of our records were split out into five different methods. You'd have to come in and it's like, you can find this year to this year, here and here. So yes, we finally have everything in one format. I would love to do that with everything else.

But how about going forward? for going digitalizing going forward obviously going back would cost millions but going forward start digitalizing not saying that you destroy the records yourselves but at least it'd be digitalized and and it'd be simpler for people to access it and so um we don't currently have records coming into archives going forward because we're out of space um but projects like this

Projects like digitizing what we have and having a proper inventory. To be honest, better shelving. Our shelving is not adequate. We could bring in more records and yes, digitizing as they come in. Generally what comes in archives though are collections. We don't get like one paper at a time. We get an entire collection at a time. Sorry.

I would also hit up Judy and Judith to get them to help you write some grants.

Yeah, I feel like we're building a good relationship and this is plausible.

They are the grant queens.

Yeah. And they mentioned it, I believe, Judy, even Emma and kind of bringing in that grant writing and use this as a time to kind of create your goals and see what's there and restructure it.

And again, I want to say that sounds amazing. Grants are usually project based, which means we have to have some employee on our side to run that project. And at 20%, it's very limited, but we will do the best we can.

I think we're going to get a grant and we'll be able to fund it and make it so it can work. Because part of that's administration of the grant. Much of the time, not always.

So.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you, Rebecca.

Thank you, Sandra. Did you want me to go to the podium, or is it okay? I want you to go to the podium. No, no, Sarah, sit down.

I'll keep this short. Obviously, much like the auditor controller's office, my office does not generate revenue for the county in a way that shows up in the budget. But in addition to supporting, surprise, in addition to supporting county departments, and outside districts uh with a wide host of functions um you know i also believe we are assisting the county in avoiding expenditures that might otherwise be incurred you know whether that be avoiding legal problems defending the county from lawsuits um assisting with contracts and procurements you know procurement i think on the front end um we do save the county money and we do provide those services in a very cost effective way um So I would just say two things that I want to just highlight about our budget or the impacts that this will have on our office's operations. Unlike several fiscal years ago, we have not budgeted extra funds for outside counsel. So beyond existing ongoing litigation, we've not budgeted for those. I will say, even though we gave up an attorney position, I think, two last year, the year before, maybe two years ago now, and are therefore running very leanly. I have an extremely competent team of litigators in my office. I feel confident in saying that At least when it comes to litigation, probably the best we've had in over a decade. My team is fantastic. That allows us to keep some things in-house and defend them ourselves rather than retaining outside counsel, which is obviously cost effective. One of our elected officials was served with a new lawsuit last week. We've got it. We're going to handle it in-house. And that's not something that necessarily would have been the case. None of you know why. I would have told you.

I didn't know I was being sued.

That's something that even a few years ago, we wouldn't have necessarily been able to handle that in-house, but because of the group of attorneys that I have, we are able to do that. That said, if there are new lawsuits that pop up over the course of this fiscal year because we haven't uh budgeted for that you know you may you may see me at mid-year we'll obviously do what we can to avoid that but um what we've budgeted for is what we're currently aware of um and then the last thing you know the main uh difference in the budget i requested and the budget that administration is presenting to you is um you know freezing uh my second support staff position which had already been reduced to uh from full-time to part-time um and now will be No time. What that means is we have a five to one attorney to support staff ratio, which is not really industry standard, to say the least. As a practical matter, that means two things. It means that the attorneys in my office will be doing their own paralegal works to a large extent, because while our paralegal is fantastic, she's only one person. My attorneys are perfectly capable of doing that. Everyone, sorry, all of you, you just need to understand that if we're doing all of that work too, it may take a little bit longer to get to some of the legal work. And I, as always, appreciate your continued cooperation with us. And then, you know, if we don't have somebody up front or answering the phones at any given moment that is why we only have one person and again she's fantastic but she also gets to take lunches and be sick and go on vacation and so um we will absolutely work with it but that's and i do want to say both administration and human resources have been extremely generous in helping us out with some of those support staff functions we are all you know working as a team in this building um and helping each other or at least they're helping me with um with those functions which is greatly appreciated um and so we will we will keep on keeping on but um if you walk in my office and have to ring the bell that's why and i do my best to listen for it so ring loudly and that's all i have unless you have questions for me

I just reiterate, talking to Greg Sessions, hearing Rebecca, I think we need to start being a little more pragmatic about cost to help. We don't need to bludgeon people with it, but we need to not bear the full burden. Share the burden.

And I have worked with Denise and will continue to do so on bringing a proposal to the board to. If the board wishes to be consistent with other counties and charge outside districts for my office of services, that'll obviously be the board's choice. I'm not going to. I won't lie to you. It's not going to be some massive. No, it's not going to be, but but it's not nothing and it. it reflects the time that my staff does spend for those special districts. And I will say like Ms. Turner, I think that the districts While you may get grumbling and pushback when you look at private law firms' hourly rates right now, they will not get a better deal anywhere. I can promise them that. Trust me on all retainer costs. Yeah. So I think it would be similar. And I will be bringing a proposal to your board for your consideration. And like the other departments, it would be only to charge the weighted actual costs of my staff.

Could I ask you, I know that your office spends a tremendous amount of time with PRA requests. We do. The amount of time, and that's valuable time. Is there any way that we could ever charge back for that?

um unfortunately the california courts have been um i don't know what the right word is to use the the courts have not uh granted public entities much uh ability to charge for anything other than the direct cost of copying which uh was at least something back in the day but now nobody wants paper records everyone wants electronic records we don't have direct reproduction costs so um unfortunately we have very little ability to recoup any of those costs.

But it is a strain on your department.

It is. We spend, frankly, an inordinate amount of time dealing with some PRA requests that we receive that are not at all narrowly tailored or looking to get specific identifiable records. A phishing expedition, you might call it that. And I will say the only so our only tool really is to, you know, we, we have to respond, obviously, within 10 days per state law, and we we then if necessary, with these really big requests that are voluminous, and we can take and we need to perform review, potentially perform redactions, we can and have to take longer to actually produce the records and the courts have

blessed that practice um so says it in there another 14 days on top of his head

To make an initial determination, yes. But then to actually produce the records, it sometimes takes longer. And sort of like our internal clients, members of the public sometimes have to be patient in terms of us getting the records to them. We're obviously doing what we can with the staffing and time that we have. But I will assure the board that if the courts ever give us any room to try to recoup some of those expenses, we will absolutely be attempting to do that to the fullest extent the law provides. Thank you.

Any other questions?

No. Does this return you? It's been a while.

It has.

For your pleasure.

That's a good sign. Thank you. Good afternoon. Barbara Youth, District Attorney. Included in the CEO's recommended budget, as you know, is two positions being cut from the DA's office. One is an attorney position. The other is an investigator position. We kind of have this perfect storm of events coalescing right now, which makes the attorney position even more critical than it's been over the last two and a half years that we've been trying to fill it. If we didn't have this perfect storm, I would concede that we two probably could all band together within my office. I also have excellent litigators. I don't want to get in trouble with my office for not giving them a shout out after County Council gave hers. we probably could handle the workload. However, like I said, we do have this perfect storm of events going on. First, we have the mandate of race-blind charging. Now, I've mentioned this to you before. As a reminder, this is where we have to take our charging and put it through a two-step process. Now, how we do the charging is we receive crime reports from every law enforcement agency that catches a crime in our county. So the sheriff's office is probably our main contributor. We get the most volume from them. However, it's also Angels Camp Police, CHP, Fish and Wildlife, whoever is... Fire Department. I'm sorry?

Fire Department.

Sometimes, yes, fire investigations and even probation. So when they send us their crime reports, their investigations, we have to sanitize those reports for anything that could indicate the race of the individuals involved. Now, you would think that would be kind of a simple thing, just take off the face page, right? It's not. We have to take out the names, the addresses. We have to go colors. These reports are extremely hard to follow when we're making the charging decision. So we have to go through that process. make a charging decision without getting to look at the actual evidence, without getting to look at pictures, maybe listening to a 911 call or maybe reviewing a body warrant. We can't even talk to the victim because if we do, we might know about their race or the race of the suspect. That's the first step. We have to make that charging decision based on that limited information. Then we have to go back in, and we get to look at everything like we normally do. If our decision is different, we have to explain why it's different. This is very labor intensive. It's been labor intensive on our attorneys. It's been going on for a while. And that's why I've mentioned it to you before, because our attorneys, our charging attorneys, have gotten busier and busier being burdened by the mandate of race-blind charging. um in addition because of that burden it's causing us some filing delays filing delays are not good initially it does make cases weaker now we don't get reports as soon as the crime occurs we get them when law enforcement gives them to us sometimes it's um three weeks could be a month could be three months it could be six months before we actually get the report we have to run it through that system our attorneys have to do what they do and sometimes we do run up against the statute of limitations sadly In extreme cases, it doesn't happen very often, but if things keep slowing down like this because of our lack of attorney resources, we could be looking at situations where we are barred from prosecution because of statute of limitations. We don't anticipate there being any end in sight to this mandate of race blind charging.

You're having to prioritize your cases because of it also though, right?

Certainly.

Yes.

Certainly. In addition to the race blind charging, we also have the full rollout of body worn and vehicle cameras with all of our law enforcement agencies in the county. This was, I think about February. It's been a kind of a slow rollout. I think first we had angels, then we had the sheriff's office going to a full rollout, and now we have CHP. So the ability to watch body-worn cameras and vehicle cameras is a very good thing. It can be very beneficial. It's very beneficial to the agencies themselves because it results in less complaints coming in. We also get to see and hear what the officers are seeing and hearing. Fortunately, no smell, but we get to see it. We get to hear it. We get to make our own judgments on what is the demeanor of the suspect? What is the demeanor of the victim or of the witnesses? Sometimes when we watch them, we might actually elevate the charges. Sometimes we might spot a defense to the situation, and we can be better prepared in court. Sometimes we might see something and say, hey, that's not how we understood the situation from reading the report. We may charge less. We may actually dismiss. We may actually say, hey, we don't really think this person did it, or we can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt based on what we're seeing in the body warrants. So it's a real full circle exercise. And there is that benefit to having that luxury of seeing and hearing what the officers are seeing and hearing on scene. That said, the videos from the body warrant cameras and the vehicle cameras are incredibly resource heavy. incredibly in terms of attorney time staff time and also data management the attorneys have to review all these videos so they could be prepared in court we represent the people when we go to court and the people are entitled to informed and prepared counsel Videos from these cameras fall squarely within material that has to be discovered to the defense. It's constitutionally required that we provide the information to the defense. There is absolutely no way around this. If we fail to discover these materials in a timely manner, evidence can get suppressed, cases can get dismissed, the county could be subject to liability, and attorneys can lose their bar card. There's no ifs, ands, or buts around this. And I want to tell you just the real impact that we have. If you take the sheriff's office, for instance, if there's one deputy that responds to a scene, that's four videos for us. It's the video that is on their body worn camera right on their front. It's two vehicle cameras and a video from the backseat of their car. If there's no one in the backseat of the car, it's pretty quick to review. But if the suspect's in the backseat of the car, guess what? Sometimes they say things. Sometimes they act a certain way. We still have to review those. And the video and the view we get from the patrol vehicle, sometimes that is also very instructive. Sometimes the officer might not know what's going on behind them. When they're forward facing, they don't know what their vehicle is capturing. We have to watch those as well. So if a solo deputy responds to a scene, maybe it takes them an hour. That's an hour of the deputy's time. It's still four videos that we have to deal with. It could be two to four hours on the attorney's time. And if you think about how many calls they respond to, how many reports they give us, how what their staffing is compared to how our staffing is, it adds up. And it's kind of an unimaginable amount of time that we have to spend watching the videos. If there are two deputies on scene, it's double. you can pretty much multiply the videos by how many deputies show up on a scene and and then the depending on the crime it elevates even the four five ten correct it can be for sure if that's an officer safety thing it depends if it's a if it's a really serious situation we want the deputies to go but there is a result of an inordinate amount of videos that my staff is responsible for taking care of It's definitely not uncommon to have 10 plus videos per case. Since the body worn and vehicle cameras have become universal locally on a local level, I personally spend probably 10 to 20 hours a week extra watching them so that I can comply with my discovery obligation. These have absolutely overwhelmed my attorneys. And like I said, this is something new. If we didn't have this, we might be in a different situation. We are very fortunate that Angels Camp Police shares a portal with us so that we can go in and grab the videos to our system. The Sheriff's Office, we're very glad that they are working with us so that they can put their videos directly into our system instead of a very burdensome process where they were uploading them, we were downloading them, and then downloading them to our system that tied up our computers. So we're very fortunate that our key law enforcement partners have worked with us to save our staff time. In addition, with all these agencies going live, we had a very sudden increase in our data usage and a very steep increase in the costs. IT helped us and figured out a long-term storage solution to hopefully mitigate some of those costs. We have extra hire staff by grading a lot of the videos for closed cases over to our long-term storage. However, there is no solution for the attorney time it takes to review and manage these videos. They're not going to go away. And they are evidence. We have to review them. We have to maintain them. And we have to discover them. Discovery is a non-delegable duty that is for attorneys only. And that's where we're at with the body warrants. One final note just on the videos. You might think that it makes our job easier for prosecution in court. It doesn't. We don't get to go to court. It just hit play. That'd be easy. That's not how it works. We only get to play the videos if there is some kind of hearsay exception and the court allows us to play the video. Now, if we do get to play the video, we have to prepare clips. We have to put that on whatever media the court desires, and we have to provide transcripts. Now, my staff's got that down. We're very good at it. But I just wanted to let you know that so that you would understand that it's not this panacea. It hasn't made our jobs easier. They're here to stay. There are good things about it, but it has been very burdensome. In addition to the race line charging and the full rollout of all the body worn and vehicle cameras, we lost the assistance of an extra hire attorney that was helping us out with the charging. That was in February. So we've been limping along because we had an extra hire attorney who was helping out doing the charging. We don't have that resource anymore. Adding on top of this perfect storm is the recent law changes. And I don't want to dive deep into that because I understand Chief Probation Officer is going to talk to you about that a little bit later. But what you need to know is that it is very hard for the courts to keep people in custody. while they're pending their case. And so what we've seen is that, I'll use the sheriff's office as an example. Sheriff's office maybe arrests someone and we review the case doing our race line charging. We file it. And then the court lets him out. And then they're almost immediately doing the same crime again. The big ones are trespass and violation of court order. It's a repeat. It's on repeat. Sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day when I'm at the sheriff's office reviewing all the in-custody reports. I'm reading it and saying, I just read this. What's happening? And then it's such a shock. Oh, my gosh, this person was out of custody. They should have been in custody. I just charged them with this. But it's this repeat, which increases caseload and makes cases take longer. So because of that perfect storm.

I didn't say violation of what was the second thing that you said? Violation of court orders. Of court orders. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's a domestic violence restraining order or some other court order to stay away from somebody. Thank you. They get released and they just go back and do it again. So as I shared with you in prior settings, attorneys have been very difficult to recruit. We've had numerous failed recruitments. This spring, we actually had someone successfully complete background. And unfortunately, that attorney did not have a start date before the freeze went into effect. The freeze went into effect on April 13th. and we did petition with admin to try to just hey can we still can we just set the state the start date because we already had somebody lined up and they passed background but we were not successful in getting permission to fill the position So with a freezing of the attorney position, we will definitely be having to look at some services to reduce. One will be SARB. We will no longer be participating in SARB. We've been a partner with SARB for decades at this point. And that's changed over time how we participated. The current model is working very, very well. We've had this model in place for probably at least 10 years. As soon as we found out on April 29th that we were not going to be able to fill the attorney position, we did alert our SARB partners, and I believe some of them came here today earlier. That is a really tough choice for us to make. However, if I have to choose between doing DUI cases and doing SARB crime prevention, I mean, there really is no other choice that I can make. But we do believe in a start mission. It is crime prevention. We get to work with schools and supporting families and supporting kids. Keeping kids in school is crime prevention. In addition, we will not be doing asset forfeiture. The asset forfeiture is where we take drug dealers money. It's kind of an extra punishment. It's not in the traditional punishments, but we can go through an administrative process or a judicial process, a civil case to discourage them of their profits. That interrupts their business. It's an attempt to keep them from continuing on in their trade. With asset forfeiture, I'll use the sheriff's office as an example again, their narcotics team may find money at a scene or they may find a vehicle and they will let us know. And if it seems appropriate for asset forfeiture, we file the paperwork and eventually, hopefully, we can forfeit the funds. 24% of the funds go to the state general fund. 65% goes to the law enforcement agency. 10% goes to my office. 1% goes to CDAA. And I think if you recall, you had some of the designated funds from the sheriff's office narcotics account. That's asset forfeiture money. So with asset forfeiture, the officers have to be trained in order to do it. And my office is the one that carries it out. The training is kind of expensive, but I have people in my office who are trained. So we train the officers on it. That satisfies the requirement. And then, like I said, we are the ones who take the cases forward and hopefully are able to forfeit the funds to law enforcement. And once again, we will be having slowdowns in charting. Turning to the investigator position, if you recall, this position was established by the board at mid-year. It was established, I think, in February officially. We worked with admin and HR to take two open positions in my office and consolidate it down to the one position for a cost savings. This was part of a reorg and a cost savings. We took the tasks of those two positions and farmed them out to other employees because this was going to be a way for us to move forward in other ways. I don't want to go into the details on that too much at this forum. But some of the tasks were given to our investigations division. The attorneys took some, the staff took some, and the investigators took some. This was never meant to be a long-term fix. This was about a six-month reassignment, at which point we were working towards getting a new investigator on board. And then our investigations will be back up to 100%. So we sacrificed two positions voluntarily, went down to one, and now we're here with that position being frozen. So with the freezing of the investigator position, there will be impacts to service as well. Unfortunately, when kind of looking at what was going to happen, it's really going to burden our frontline law enforcement partners because of how our investigations operate. Our investigators are advanced law enforcement. They don't go out on patrol. They usually don't pull people over. They're not as visible, but they are law enforcement. As such, they help out our partners in many, many ways, and we will be having to reduce some of those assistance. We will be having to reduce the in tandem investigations that we conduct with our frontline law enforcement agencies. They frequently ask us for help. Is everything okay? Okay. And they ask us for help because my investigators are advanced. They're looking at things differently than patrol might look at it. They're looking at defenses, so thinking about what the jury instructions are. And a lot of times, it's very helpful for frontline law enforcement to have that extra resource and that expertise to tap into. I'm not going to say we're never going to do it, but because of the shrinking in the resources, we may not be able to do that as much as we do now. The other reduction is going to be in the cases that we adopt from our frontline law enforcement partners. Case adoptions come in three basic ways. One is that our law enforcement partners ask us to take a case. Maybe they don't have the resources at the moment. They're overwhelmed with something. And they come and they ask, can you guys do this investigation for us? And we do. We do. We are going to be limited in our ability to adopt those cases. The other adopted cases, I would say, are cases where law enforcement has submitted a case to us and it's just not quite there, right? It just needs a little bit more investigation. And we typically adopt those and take it the rest of the way, take it across the finish line. We're not going to be able to do that. Those cases are going to be sent back to law enforcement. Submit it when you can finish the investigation. The other way is when other agencies or individuals, for whatever reason, are reporting the cases to us. Sometimes we take those. We take those because we know our law enforcement partners are busy or because of the importance. We're not necessarily going to get to do that to the extent that we do now or that we prefer to. Those people will be told, hey, sorry, go to your local law enforcement agency. The other reduction is going to be seen in search warrant and emergency arrest warrant drafting. When there is certain situations and based on our partner's staffing levels, we do help them as we can with writing a search warrant and also with arrest warrant. We're not going to necessarily be able to do that to the extent that we have been doing. The last thing would be extended times for search warrant review. So every search warrant that's issued in the county and kind of read about, hey, this is like the sheriff's office or angel service search warrant. Those have come through my office. We review them. We review them for legal sufficiency before. the officer goes to the judge we do that it's very important so that we don't have something fail later we do all this work and it fails later because it's not legally sufficient and the evidence gets lost or there's there's some type or or misidentification of an address you know and then that's going to cost um county liability so we review all the search warrants um that the officers write before they go to the judge We will still do it because of the importance. However, what we currently do is we drop everything when one of our partners needs an arrest warrant, a search warrant. We do that because very frequently they have staff waiting on the scene, right? And the longer it takes to go through the review process, the more it's costing in personnel. And we are sensitive to that. So we're still gonna do it, of course, but we're not necessarily gonna be able to drop everything to do it for our partners. So in short, the less our investigators have time to do, the greater the negative impact is going to be on our frontline law enforcement partners. We are a public safety agency. We support our partners so we can all build stronger cases and provide better service to victims and hold offenders accountable and protect the public. We have been excellent partners to our frontline law enforcement partners, and we will continue to do our best, but this cut will be felt by our partners and crime victims as we cut back services and frontline law enforcement partners become more and more burdened. Thank you for listening to how these facts will affect the DA's office as a public safety agency. I do want to assure you that we did work with admin on our budget. There were cuts to our overtime, to our extra hire, other services supplies. We agreed to bring in more designated funds. We accepted all of that. We were very surprised on April 13th when the cuts came out, and we were very disappointed when we didn't get approval for at least the attorney position on April 29th. Admin encourage us to share this information with you, and I appreciate admin for scheduling time for us to do so. I would like to echo what the sheriff requested that you prioritize public safety and remind you that the DA's office is a public safety agency. We are law enforcement. I do want to point to the text on page 192 of your book regarding Prop 172. And I quote, Proposition 172, approved by California voters in 1993, established a permanent half-cent statewide sales tax dedicated exclusively to supporting local public safety services. Revenue generated from this tax helps fund core public safety functions, including law enforcement, fire protection, district attorney operations and corrections. We've never received 172 funding. We are very sensitive. Um, I think maybe disproportionately so to when there are general fund issues, because we don't receive any of these funds. Um, so I would encourage you and I would echo with sheriff side to take a look at those strongly. Um, and also possibly the as well, because that is also supposed to go to public safety. I did not bring any stats as far as how many. Um, I'm sure you, they do. Um, so my office is absolutely affected. And we are, again, one of the public safety agencies that should potentially be covered and helped out by the TOT.

We're not so much a question, but thank you for explaining all these different things that you guys are doing.

I'm sorry if I was long-winded. I know it's hard to explain what we do.

You made it simple for us laymen up here. You've explained a lot of that to me prior, Barbara, but it's complex what you do. and it's no small feat in getting through the finish line on getting someone justice served so we appreciate the good work that you do do when you do do it um and there's also what you didn't bring up and i think we need to have a discussion later on in the building is the health of where you're working at because uh your building sucks That's just it. It sucks. I talked to Ray Waller on Saturday. He put that there as a temporary fix. It was only supposed to be a couple years. I told him the tiles were falling out of the top of the ceiling. It's not fair to use. So we're going to have to be pragmatic and start moving forward on your capital asset also. That's, you know, you retaining and getting the job done, you also have morale to deal with and a healthy place to work in that we have to think about. So if you don't mind me bringing it up.

It's a little embarrassing, frankly, but I appreciate it.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be mean, but it comes out mean because it's the truth. I apologize because I take responsibility of what the prior boards didn't do for you and what we haven't done in the last eight years since I've been on the board with you. I have to take part of that as it's a little embarrassing for me too because It's partially my responsibility that you're still there.

Well, I thank you for visiting my office and seeing it for yourself. I recall when I kind of didn't give you a choice and you did see how it was. It's worse now because that was a few years ago.

I've been in since actually.

OK.

But yeah, I thought I had a choice.

I wasn't going to go behind bars, so. All right. Any questions?

Yes, I have a question. Well, one is a comment. I hope after we get through this list, we can have that discussion about Prop 172 for your office. I guess I just would like to know, and maybe that's when we have that discussion, what it can and cannot be used for your office. You know what I mean? So I'm curious because I wrote a lot of things down. And then the other question is, for the last couple years, how have you then... Related to sharps, how have you augmented your time with sharps? Because it's what have you been doing in the past and why? I know you weren't able to hire, but why couldn't you continue that?

It really is that culmination of events, kind of that perfect storm I was telling you about. It's always been an extra kind of, right? But it's such a worthy extra. We decided to make the commitment and continue to do it. It used to be mine. I used to go to SARB and I finally had to give it up. And I hated giving it up because it was my opportunity to be with the schools and all the partners that we have on SARB, which is... it's multifaceted, and to meet with parents. And what we found, a lot of times it was, we had a lot of people in common. So if kids aren't going to school, it's because something's going on in their house. And it could be an illness. It could be financial. It could be that their parents are involved in crime. It could be a lot of different reasons, right? And so we would listen, figure out what can we do as a group to band together to try to help these kids, but help the family sometimes. And so it was so worthy. And I truly believe that keeping kids at school is crime prevention. And so we sacrificed a lot so that we could continue doing that. The attorney I have assigned right now loves SARB. She doesn't want to give it up. This is not a good day for us having to give up SARB. But because of the race line charging and because of all the videos from the body worn cameras and the vehicle cameras, because we lost an extra hire attorney who was helping us out doing all the charging. Those two are very recent things. I think the attorney had stepped down in February. So it's just this culmination of events that have kind of all occurred at the same time, plus the law change. if there was a way we could we would still would because it is it's been worth the sacrifice it's just it's we have to there's just an impact if we can't fill this attorney position okay thank you thank you that's all i have chairman thank you

Oh, Lisa.

It's me again.

Yes. So first of all, I want to say that I'm very humbled by my colleagues, the things that they have to say. what they do, how they do it, the challenges that they have. So I wanna honor all of them at this point and for the ones that we haven't heard yet already. I'm also very humbled and very emotional about the approval for the animal shelter. That's gonna be a huge thing for us moving forward. And I'm also very humbled by the approval for our NBS fee study. That's gonna significantly increase revenue on the environmental health side by the tune of almost $382,000, and then for the onsite, $121,000, which currently we are in a deficit for for onsite. So that's going to help significantly. Now, what I do want to point out in this fiscal budget is the phrasing of some positions. As you know, Environmental Management Agency incorporates the Ag Department, the Air Pollution Control District, animal services, environmental health, and on-site wastewater. Out of those departments, the ones that are affected, of course, are animal services. I want to say thank you for not freezing the animal service officer position. That is critical to our public health and safety. And from just the amount of responses and animals that we get to the parvo cases to our escalated rabies cases which you know i had a very finger in the pulse experience with we those positions are critical to our community protection and public health So I do want to bring that up as well. The positions that are being frozen on the environmental health side include our environmental health manager, which I have taken responsibility for that and moving forward with that. And then also a permit technician and also including one of our The reasons why I would be moving forward to have those unfrozen is we don't know how soon we're going to be able to implement these fee schedules because we have to give so much public notification, alert our stakeholders of the increase in the fee. So it might be anywhere from 30 to 60 days. So that goes past that into the next fiscal year. So I do want to bring that to everybody's attention. We also have several programs all across the board that are state mandated. which means as long with everybody else said that if we don't fulfill those mandates, we risk grant, you know, not getting a grant like our waste hire grant and, or solid waste grant, you know, so there's a lot of critical infrastructure, just like everybody else was speaking to their own specific infrastructure for fiscal related things. I, we have our own as well. So that is, that's something, That will lead to an impact on services to the public. I also mentioned this morning in our presentation that we've had quite a few complaints regarding the unpermitted food vendors and that doesn't include our regular inventory of things that we are required to inspect, including our hazardous material, business sites, our food facilities, and now on top of this, our unpermitted food vendors, which we can only respond to after hours because if we get the call, hey, so-and-so is out here, you know, on the corner, so-and-so, and we have to respond, give them a cease and desist, I have to call up, you know, my staff or even myself, you know, even though I'm dragging my leg in response, um have to call the sheriff to help us out at times just in case because we do get um people that are not too happy with us you know a lot of them come from out of county and we have to have that i'm not going to put my staff at risk so that's all about what i wanted to say i just want to make sure you know that i'm identifying those critical issues and the protection of public health and safety which all the departments do across the board under the environmental management agency And that's all I have. Do you have any questions?

Thank you, Susan. You do a lot. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you. I love this community and I'll always do 150%, almost 200, all across the board.

Make sure it doesn't run down on my property.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have Facilities and Grounds. Sir.

Good afternoon. Thank you for giving me, allowing me the time to speak here this afternoon. Kevin Nobles, Facilities and Grounds project manager for the county. I'll try my best not to bore you to death. So I'm going to stick to this script to make it as quick as possible. It's not very long originally. I thought I only had 3 minutes. So hopefully that'll be good.

Yeah, everybody thanked me.

Everybody. Thank me. But I'm here really just to talk about some of the things my department does that you may not be aware of and how the budget cuts affect these things and really the facilities department as a whole. So just to give you some insight, the facilities department currently has 15 staff members That consists of management engineers, our maintenance technicians, our groundskeepers, and all of the custodial staff for the county. And we manage and assist at over 60 different locations throughout the county that the county owns or leases or that we're involved with. So quite a few different areas. Since implementing a new CMMS maintenance system back in April of 2023, the department now manages over 2100 assets and has successfully completed over 9600 tasks. This is not including standard custodial services and the many capital improvement. And special department projects, which we are now starting to implement into that computer system. So, you can do the math on that in a short period of time and just how much basically a work order comes through. It could be a large or small. It can be large or small. You're right. It could be changed this fall, or it could be re, this entire building. um that could be one task as well so 9600 for our team is is pretty awesome to brag about so um and since joining the county in late in 2022 a lot of my time and the department's funds have been spent tackling really a long list of what we feel are past deferred maintenance and department restructuring in order to create efficiency compliance and to bring the county into some more modern times so And with the help of a like-minded and problem-solving administration department, CEO and the board, we are finally starting to shift the focus to current issues and are now planning ahead on more of a multi-year approach. And while we have had to deal with some budget cuts in the past, last year and again this year, my team has managed to maintain a can-do attitude and doing the best we can with what we have approached. but with further cuts it would make it more difficult for my department to maintain the current status quo and little by little our hard-earned efforts and progress would be at risk and I imagine it wouldn't take long for the constituents staff and even visitors of the county to notice the change and other than the obvious visual changes such as green lawns and fresh paint and etc I went ahead and jotted down just a few things that would be affected by budget cuts Starting with the general response time to our many service tickets that are submitted by staff and the public would be extended. We would still take care of it, but it might be a while before we got there. Our capability to proceed with property improvements and general wear and tear maintenance of our facilities and the expected image of a county-owned managed facility is jeopardized. The required ADA compliance and recommended improvements are also at risk. Beautification enhancement projects would probably decrease, and that would be one of the first things to go. There would be a reduction in our planned capital improvement projects, which we help manage, that affect all citizens and staff members. Deferred maintenance items from the past will not be prioritized, resulting in possible cost increases when they do finally get addressed, and preventable emergencies may be overlooked. If we kick that can down the road, pretty soon it turns into an emergency. The budget cuts would affect the ability to progress with a preventative, proactive approach that we are currently going for, rather than just a reactive response on our multi-year maintenance plan. And we use that to identify future needs and to prevent any additional necessary costs, hardships, or downtimes of our systems. The replacement of county vehicles that are 30 plus years old would not be an option, which leaves the facilities department fleet not receiving the upgrades it needs. The ability to replace agent equipment, tools, systems, and technology that increase the overall department efficiency would decrease. We'll be forced to rely more on vendors and subcontractors rather than our own skilled in-house employees, leading to increased costs, lower productivity, Other departments are then burdened with additional administrative tasks to manage review contracts, purchase orders, invoicing, et cetera, for smaller jobs that the county's maintenance techs could and should be handling. The ability to keep up with compliance and industry changes, such as energy efficiency laws, lighting, et cetera, are lowered. The progression with current shovel-ready projects that already have money and time invested through studies, planning, and initial pre-construction phases would be at jeopardy. Preventing risks and financial liability to the county by properly managing grounds, potential hazards, and addressing special requests of staff and the public could be affected. The ability to assist with the logistics during state, federal, and local elections when needed may come to a halt. That would be some overtime stuff that we've done to help them out. Preparation of disaster management, such as cooling and warming centers, fire and brush management around county properties and structures, et cetera, would need to decrease. And in-house and complete custodial services would need to be reduced in one form or another and possibly be at risk of also being subbed out. And last but not least, staff morale could decrease and turnover would increase. While this list does not include everything, I hope it has given you guys maybe a little more insight into how budget cuts affect my facilities department. Thank you for your time. Does anybody have any questions or comments?

Just for clarity, you're saying any further cuts would be all those things. Are you saying with the cuts right now?

We, with status quo right now, we are hanging on. We're doing a great job. So.

But you're giving us a warning for the future.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, we've already made a cut. One, we've had some restructuring this year that we did. Last year, we lost a position. You know, I still think my crew is doing a great job. Like I said, we have some vehicles that are over 30 years old that we are utilizing right now on a day-to-day basis. You know, I did see some of that in the budget.

what's that i said so am i yeah um yeah so any other questions no thank you okay oh i do have to say thank you kevin yeah good to see that i appreciate the detailed report okay and the quick more warning four minutes stacy turned it off for you

okay martin marcos 10 minute break for staff okay and then uh we can come in back refreshed uh 25 after perfect thank you

All right.

Good afternoon. Set.

Go.

Go. Good afternoon, Chair, members of the board. Marcos Munoz, your Health and Human Services Director. From a budget standpoint, this has been a challenging year. On the state and federal level, we have been challenged on several fronts. Challenges include but are not limited to the impacts of HR1. indigent care, the reinstatement of the Medi-Cal asset limits, the workload caused by Medi-Cal redeterminations, IHSS county cost shifts. I can keep going on. There's plenty more. But the impacts have been felt across the state in all county health and human services departments. We are now in a wait and see. with potential changes still at the state level. Some good that may go through, so we are crossing our fingers and hoping that those come through over the next month. At the county level, we have been proactive trying to get ahead of things. We have reduced several vacant positions between mid-year and now. Many of those within our public health department as they saw the highest reductions in positions. We have reduced contracts. We've even cut back in other areas where we could. We have been thoughtful of what we put forward and we have been thoughtful as we move forward. I do want to acknowledge that this has been a very difficult budget cycle and I understand hard decisions need to be made. I do not always like what is recommended, but I understand why. For example, I do not like that in my budget the recommendation is to transfer from public health $272,000 additional realignment to environmental health. but uh even though i don't like it it's probably the same recommendation i would have made if i was an admin so i understand it i get it um i know why i don't like that i'm being asked to use a special revenue fund to fund um a clerical position in veterans as it historically was funded by the general fund i don't get it i don't like it but i understand it and again i would have made the same recommendation um those are just two examples but i say all of this because there is one item that hhsa put forward that is not being recommend recommended and i don't understand why and so this is the title change of the behavior health clinical services manager to behavior health deputy director From a budget standpoint, there is no cost to make this change. There is no cost to the general fund, no cost to any other federal or state funding source. The current salary range is that of a current deputy director I have. So I'm not asking to increase it. Again, the range is already set. It's already there. It's the same range as the deputy director that I currently have. I have been told that changes may disrupt the class and comp, that those will not be considered. This change will not disrupt any of that work. The class and comp helped push us to be more equitable across the county. This request does not impede on the work of that class and comp. The position with or without the title change still remains in the exact same reporting structure at the exact same pay range. I was told, or you heard earlier that it is not being recommended for 2 reasons. 1 being that it goes against the class and cop just for timeline purposes. The recommendations associated with the class and copper brought before the board for approval on August 13, 2024, the org. review wasn't completed until 2025. This position was reclassed after that August 13th date in September prior to any org review being completed. So it was after the class and COP and before the org review was completed. It was not a result of either of those. So it does not come down to budget or structure. It really comes down to the title. So why are we asking this position to be called a Behavioral Health Deputy Director and not use a different title? We are asking because, one, it is a common title used by many California counties, including our neighbor counties. If you flip through the DHCS directory, you'll find a numerous amount of counties who use this specific title, including small counties. It is more common than it is not. The other reason that was mentioned earlier was that they will allow us to recruit if we pick a different title. We have tried that for nearly two years now. Again, it was, as I said earlier, it was reclassed back in September of 2024 to a different title. We've been trying for nearly two years to try and fill the position. I mean, we've had no luck. In fact, it has been a little more confusing as people who have applied think it is clinical supervision and not really a deputy director. And so as we sit there and explain the job to them, we have lost people. Um, the other issue I have is right now I have one, just one clinical manager, and that is our behavior health director, Wendy Alt. I have no other managers that are clinical. The deputy director will be difficult to hire for, but people looking to grow their career are also looking for a deputy director title. They're not looking for a clinical services manager or another title. They're looking to grow their career by applying for a deputy director. And so that is one of the reasons we are also looking for it. My third point is, it was historically called the Deputy Director, Behavioral Health Deputy Director here in California. It was created in the mid 2000s, right after MHSA came aboard. When I started here at the county 11 years ago, there was a Mental Health Director and there was a Mental Health Deputy Director. um and which was all under the hhsa director sawicki at that time the same structure was under interim director lawless and again under director stranger it was eventually changed under my predecessor director allen and that's where the deputy director stopped being recruited for was back in about 2021 so since changing the title again we have actively recruited for it but i have not been able to fill it And in the end, it really comes down that this is a matter of preference. It is not a budget decision or a structure decision. It is a preference decision. And since that is the case, I do prefer to be in alignment with many of my fellow peers rather than trying to create something that is untested. So my ask of the board is to consider approving the title change request from a behavioral health clinical services manager to a behavioral health deputy director. And I do know we've already gone through public comment. I do want to recognize that on Zoom, our mental health board chair is on to speak to it if you would like her to, as well as the management association rep, Tony Argyllis, who's also in support of all of our management changes.

Thank you. Would the board entertain listening to the two mental health board chair. I'm going to take that as a yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Please, if you don't mind.

Christina, I have a question, Martin.

Go ahead.

I mean, Marcos. Yeah, we can give you more. We started with Martin.

Marcos, I do have a question.

How is this going to affect the Veterans Hall down there and what's going on there? Because that's been very well received and it does a great job. Is it going to affect it with the number of employees and how often it's open or what's?

So currently, we do not have a clerical position in veterans, but we are going to use our special revenue fund to fund that position. So we are in the process of two things. We have an outreach coordinator that we received a grant for since MHSA dollar went away. That position just posted, and we've been given permission by admin to use our special revenue fund to post and recruit for the clerical position.

Thank you. I'm glad to hear that. You can still have Martin's vote, though. No, I guess not.

Christina, go ahead.

Hi everybody. This is Christina Smith. I am the director of student support at the County office of ed. I'm also the chair of the Behavioral Health Advisory Board. So I am here just to speak about restoring the deputy director of behavioral health position. From both my education behavioral health board perspectives, I work closely with behavioral health on a regular basis. I frequently call on Wendy and her team to help me navigate student crisis, to support families and collaborate on complex situations impacting our schools. i also heavily rely on a high level of leadership in wendy to help me and partner with me in developing grants establishing mous and building required partnerships from the cde and all of this is to move collaborative efforts for our students forward um our schools are getting ready to navigate a pretty complex mental health program that we're implementing and i need the level of leadership from a directorship level to help me and to partner with me on that our schools are also navigating increased complex mental health issues that demand collaboration and growth and it's difficult to imagine that just one person can carry all of that responsibility alone and what stands out to me is that there is rarely another behavioral health leader available to share all of that and i frequently lean on wendy to support those things um this request is not about adding new positions or increasing costs it's about ensuring that behavioral health has leadership capacity necessary to continue serving our schools our community partners and our residents as someone who works closely with both systems i respectfully encourage that support thank you very much thank you and then tony tony

Yes, good afternoon. Good afternoon, chair and supervisors. Thank you for hearing my prepared comments on this topic. My name is Tony Arguelles. I'm speaking today on behalf of the Calaveras County Supervisory and Management Association. Our association does not typically weigh in on individual classification matters. However, we believe this request represents a broader organizational and workforce issue that merits consideration. County government continues to face increasing challenges recruiting and retaining qualified leadership, particularly in high specialized fields. Behavioral health is one of the most difficult areas in which to recruit due to the combination of license requirements, regulatory responsibilities, workforce shortages, and increasing state mandates. From a management perspective, succession planning and leadership capacity are critical organizational considerations. Positions should accurately reflect the level of responsibility, expertise, and accountability expected of those serving in them. The Behavioral Health Clinical Service Manager position carries responsibilities that will extend well beyond traditional clinical supervision and includes leadership functions that support department operations, regulatory compliance, workforce development, and continuity of services. We believe restoring the Deputy Director of Behavioral Health title better reflects the scope of the position and supports the county's long-term recruitment and retention efforts. This request does not create a new position, increase staffing costs, or alter the organizational structure. Rather, it aligns the title with the responsibilities currently being performed and helps position the county to recruit and retain qualified leadership in the future. We respectfully encourage the board to support this request. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. Marcos, I guess. Yes.

With Health and Human Services being the behemoth that it is, and thank you for taking the beast on. You've done a phenomenal job and we look forward to you continuing to get the beast under control. How many people underneath you?

We have just over 200 people.

and sectioning this off into because i mean you got public health you've got behavioral health mental health you have i mean i can go down a list sectioning off with moral leadership to work to work with you to do that is what Am I not talking into the microphone?

You are.

Okay. I'm just going to finish my train of questioning, Teresa. But you feel confident that this will help be able to manage the beast?

I do feel confident. I think it'll give Wendy the best opportunity to find support in a clinical management position. Okay.

Thank you. Yes, Teresa.

So I would like to address this. And I have Judy Hawkins standing by as well. The issue is currently that Ms. Ault is the deputy director for behavioral health. So you would, in essence, have a deputy director reporting to the deputy director. The way the structure is, is that we have Marcos as the director of health and human services. We have a deputy director over public health. We have a deputy director over behavioral health. So that doesn't make any sense. We're not opposed to additional management structure to help support. We totally agree that it's essential in order to make that department function. We would like to see them try a different title. We understand that there have been some issues with trying to recruit for the clinical services manager and that um what you're really looking for is someone who can add a level of administrative support to that department we do believe that there are other titles that may be more successfully recruited for um but it will create structural counties or structural issues for the county as a whole in order to add that particular title. So that's the reason we're not recommending the title. Judy can talk to the actual history of it and what happened with it. But in other counties, a lot of times behavioral health is a separate standalone department with its own director. and a deputy director. So you will see that as a common title in California, but most often it's when it's a standalone department, not when it's a subsidiary of a bigger organization like we have here.

And if I can clarify one point, So I am the Director of Health and Human Services. Wendy's position specifically is the Deputy Director of Health and Human Services slash Behavioral Health Director. We are not asking for another Deputy Director of HHSA. We're asking for a Deputy Director of Behavioral Health. So it's there is some differences there. Yes.

So I feel like that's that's clearly OK, specific to the behavioral health.

So I would like to add some clarity. So we did have in behavioral health. John Lawless, who ran the department, he was the assistant director of HHSA, which is why he had a deputy director underneath him. When Mr. Lawless retired, and we did have the deputy director running things for a while, He did leave, and I believe either 20, 21. And so at that time, our HHSA director was kind of looking at restructuring. And so we put the deputy director aside with the intention of eliminating that position. And so when we were working with Ms. Allen as the director, we did retitle the position, making it specifically over the clinical services. And when we went through the org review, and this is something that I even recently talked with Ms. Whitchell, who was the person who conducted the org review, with the structure that we have in place, And yes, we do have HHSA deputy directors, and then they have their division directors. And so with that structure, it didn't make sense to have a deputy director underneath the HHSA deputy director. And one of the things that I also want to talk about the recruitment, there are things we could do with the recruitment through the HR department. They have not done paid advertising, those type of things. And so I would ask that we leave the position not a deputy director because it kind of blows up the structure that we just put in place. last year, August of 25. And so I do think that we can try to strategize a little bit more with Mr. Munoz, Ms. Ault on different recruiting strategies. And like we said, we do, you know, we Nick and I both looked at other counties, other structures, and the title's all over, it is all over the place, but we saw a lot of counties similar to us that did have a manager title to it. And that level of position truly should be, and in looking at countywide, it should be a manager level position.

When that position was created, I supported it knowing that it was not going to be another deputy position. So I don't know why. were revisiting it that was also pushed in front of the board by a former CAO. So I think we need to revisit that vote because I did not vote for that position to be created to create another management position. So it's either one or the other. I'm not going to go...

I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm just trying to point it out.

I know what the board supported in creating that position, but I'm not going to go back on my vote and then recreate another deputy position. So I thought the understanding was you guys would recruit for more of a management position due to the salary reasons. But if we're going to do that, then I want to relook at everything. And I don't think we want to do that because that could undo some current positions. So I'm not, I am not in favor of looking, I think there's a lot of history with that position and where we got from there to now, but I don't want to undo my vote when we made that decision. But I'm just one, I'm just one. And I know there are two other board members that weren't here at the time, but I'm gonna be cautious on backtracking on my vote. That's for me. And I don't mean any disrespect, Marcos. I think there was just a lot that was decided at that time. And I don't wanna do this on a whim. My understanding is that-

I know exactly what the thought process was when that was done.

I for one supported it with the understanding that was always going to be a management position. So if that's going to come back, not a manager position, sorry, the difference, not a deputy management, but a manager position. So if that's, I think we need to have a bigger conversation.

Would you support a title change that was not a deputy director? Like right now it's a clinical manager, or I don't know what the title is, clinical safety manager. Would you support a title change that's not a deputy director, but it's just a different manager position that better clarifies what the position would be required to perform?

But I don't think a deputy, yeah, I would be open and revisit, but I- Marcos, how do you feel about that?

I'm going to go at the direction of the board. So if the, if the board approves the title, I'll run with it. If they don't, I would, I would prefer the behavioral health deputy director as that is a common title amongst behavioral health departments. I hear you. And I hear, I hear Amanda.

Um, I think that's going to be a discussion later on because we aren't making this decision right now. We've heard multiple sides and you know what, when we come back to this conversation later,

We'll be having more conversations. Everyone can be here.

So I think we've definitely set some groundwork on it. Thank you. I appreciate your time. And Health and Human Services as a whole, thank you. All of you. Thank you. All of you.

Unless someone else has a question. Martin? I just missed him too quick.

say if there's anything that they come up with otherwise it's different let's hear it yeah i'm open to the conversation but now is not the time we're hearing everyone's input and we're going to come back to the rest tomorrow you're a group all right how about i start off with some good news

Last year when we met, we asked for a million dollars in capital projects. One of the promises I made to you then was that we would work to make that process predictable. We spent a bunch of time doing that. And as a result, I think going forward, we're going to see a lot more predictability in our budget. It's also given us the opportunity to be more creative about our approaches. So for example, the firewall project was an example where we looked at the size of our firewall, realized we could downsize, get more security, and save money at the same time. So this has been a project I think that's really helped us in our approach to cost safe. Along with that, the administrative office has been really helpful helping us work on our cost savings. We've moved a lot of things to multiyear contracts to save on sort of our interest. IT has a ton of challenges with costs right now, right? So software costs are always way above inflation rates. Hardware costs are super competitive because of AI data warehouse build outs. So we're always looking for ways to manage those things. One of those things that we've done is we've moved to multi-year contracts, which has helped in a ton of different ways. The Before I move on, any questions on any of that stuff before? No?

Okay.

So I do want to talk about the staffing change. I think it's important to note that where the impact that that has on us. When we look at IT staffing levels, like in the public sector, it's normal for it to be like one support staff to 28 people, right? In government, that's more around one to 50, right? We, this year without cuts, are at one to 59. This cut would put us at one to 65. It is impossible for us, for that not to have an impact on services. I think there are other things that come with that too. So that's support, but that's also risk. And Ms. Edwards was exactly right. A lot of service departments, what we really do in addition to our core functions is manage risk. And the less support staff we have, especially at the managerial level, the more risk that we entail. And so generally we keep county very safe but when things and if things go wrong it can be very very expensive right so in particular um this position uh works really closely with two of our most critical software platforms our finance system and our permitting system uh the this manager knows it knows both the systems kind of the most uh knows the vendors very well knows how to shortcut past support things um i'm not saying that there will be outages if this position is limited eliminated we already have outages what i'm saying is that the outages will be longer response times will be longer so so i would really um encourage the board to consider the impacts. It's not just sort of, I'll just write We often are looking at sort of increased vendor reliance. So there are costs there. In a lot of ways, we'll just shift costs from staffing to the vendors to we have reduced control over timelines for fixes. We have reduced control over outcomes. And many of our modernization efforts come from the business analyst team. It's where we're trying to do a lot of work getting more people working with our tools that we already have that have no cost. That's where we're trying to do a lot of workflow automation and digital service expansion. And specifically, I think some of the things to think about when thinking about eliminating this position is we will see more system problems. We will see slower responses to those system problems. We will see higher vendor costs and there will be key areas of support that will be much more difficult to deliver on. I would ask you to reconsider this. I know we're in a tough budget cycle and I am very sympathetic to all of the work the administration team has done. But we are talking about two systems that are problematic. And integral to the county, right? And honestly, we should be thinking about replacing these systems. And I know, right? But at the same time, we are eliminating a position that's key to supporting.

Right. You're the Band-Aid right now.

Yes, we are. We're the duct tape and band and wire.

Yeah. Keeping it together.

Yeah.

Any questions?

What are your thoughts on some of the legislation that's coming down to mandate local jurisdictions to be forced, I know Doug and I talked about this, forced to do more online, you know, processes that is going to require obviously more data and IT support.

Yeah, so that's good. I mean, one of our our big challenges has been with the permitting software, right? And as we've tried, you know, the land use teams have done a great job making that software work, right? And making advances with getting stuff done, but we've continued to struggle with online payments right and online filing for permits and those are the things that directly affect you know our citizens and our taxpayers and uh the require those requirements are going to be increased not decreased okay thank you

Martin, that is just one person, right? Yes. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, 1 to 59 to 1 to 65. Correct. Noted. It's a heavy ratio. It is. Especially with all kinds of people that use computers like me.

Yeah. Okay, thank you.

At least you got Denise over here. Hey, thank you. Thank you. Our esteemed librarian. Hello, hello.

Some notes on here. So I think my part's going to be a little different than the previous departments, partially because we are a different type of county service. I believe the library is very important, but no one dies when the library is underfunded. I'm not here to make a passionate plea for more funding. While I have a deep love for libraries, I'm also a fairly pragmatic person, and I can read the room and triage priorities as well as the next person. What I am going to do is make the case asking that everyone take a good hard look at library funding levels and evaluate what you expect for the level of funding we have. I'm planning on doing an informational presentation in August on this very topic, along with a general update on the library. So while I have a few things to share today, I'm not going to go into extensive detail here. I am a librarian. We are brokers of information and experts in research. So when there's something I want more clarity on, I find statistics. And I wanna share some of those statistics with you guys today, which I hope will explain why any change in library funding means a reduction in core services or open hours. And actually at this point, hours and services are at risk without a budget reduction because everything gets more expensive every year. And we have been operating on under the bare minimum since before I was hired. Our library has 58% lower spending per capita than the state average. The state average is $55 spent on library services per capita, which would give us a budget of $2,530,000, not our current budget of a little over 1 million. That doesn't mean much in a vacuum, so here are a few more stats. The state average expenditure per open hour is $872. Calavera spends 117. Our open hours are 9,443. The state average open hours per 100 capita is 12.18. Ours is 21.06 or 72% more open hours than average on 58% less funding. Our full-time equivalent staff per 1,000 capita is point, sorry, state full-time equivalent, state full-time equivalent staff per 1,000 capita is 0.46. Ours is 0.23 or half the stat average. That's actually an old number with several recent changes. It's closer to 0.18. In simpler terms, if we were at the state average, we would have 21 full-time equivalent staff, not just shy of eight. And again, that's eight full time equivalent staff running seven branches and a bookmobile. Not only are we low staffed, we have a below average level of professional knowledge and experience. I know everyone here loves to call our wonderful branch assistants librarians, but to be a librarian requires a master's degree. And I'm the only librarian position in the county, which also means there are zero promotional opportunities for my staff. The average percent of full-time equivalent staff with an MLIS at a state level is 27%, which means one out of every three full-time equivalent staff in your average library system has a master's degree. In Calaveras, it's just 8%, just me. I also happen to be the only manager in the department. I directly supervise all staff. I have no deputy director or library manager to help oversee staff and services. This year's cuts include our courier, The Curry is responsible for bringing holds back and forth between branches, bringing paychecks to staff, bringing the DIY craft supplies to the branches, and bringing all new books to the branches. The permanent bookmobile position is changed to a one-year Friends position, so that's been kicked down the road. And just to be clear, the Friends will run out of their bookmobile funding in two years if they fund this position. So this is not a permanent solution, having them help with the bookmobile. And no Murphy's renovation, which means the bookcases are still not up to fire code and there is not adequate space for children's. My point of all this list of stats is we operate more branches on less staff with lower funding, open more hours than the state average by a lot. Basic library maintenance is decades behind, policies are outdated, and day-to-day oversight is spotty due to lack of any management other than myself. We cannot continue to operate so much on relatively so little. I will have a more detailed presentation after some reading. Thank you. Do you have questions?

first of all and give my my colleagues opportunity jesse thank you for your sobering statistics and also thank you for your creativity to maintain things as you look at your big picture thank you i i want to say take a deep breath

Your heart's into it. I could see your hands shaking. But you know what? You were speaking my language. And I had no idea you were so smart. Thank you. And I hear you. But that gives me that I'm giving no promises.

Yeah.

We have hard decisions. And it's a hard thing to say to the librarian that just so eloquently laid down the whole truth in such a small amount of time.

that you're right the library is thought about last a lot of the times and it's not fair and and i do understand that the funding is not necessarily completely out of line with the size of our county but the current expectations to funding levels don't match up and something has to give right we hear you and it's going to hurt our kids it's going to hurt us

Because that has to do with education, that has to do with people getting in touch with the library, the library is integral.

And I, like I said, I am planning on doing a much larger presentation in August that include other statistics such as the use of our libraries, which is also below state average. So, It is going up, but let me see if I put these stats in here. I don't have the stats in here right now. Well, I took those one out because I didn't want to go half an hour. Off the top of my head, average library visits per open hour, state average is 91. Ours is six. There's a couple of stats like that basically are the average borrower per capita, state average is 0.7. So 70% of all people in the state have a library card. Ours is 0.23. So our, yes, 23% of our county has a library card. So our usage of our libraries is also way below state average. There are things you can do to improve that, but you can't improve the quality of services when if somebody calls out sick, that branch shuts down for the day. half the time the branches aren't being staffed by staff they're being staffed by volunteers if the staff has to go to the bathroom the branch is left open you can't run programs while the branch is open because there's no staff overlap so you don't have a quality of services that you would have with better staffing everything is just constantly behind we had not weeding is considered a basic library maintenance task that should be completed once a year ours hadn't been done in over three decades We have our internet policies from 2005. There are things that would be done regularly if we had more staffing, if I had somebody to delegate some of this stuff to. As the only professional librarian, the only manager, a lot of the stuff can only be done by me. And so while I have wonderful, intelligent staff, there's no position to promote them into where I could have them help me with this stuff. So I do think we could offer a better quality of services if we tightened up what we were trying to do a little bit.

Thank you.

Yeah, I know it's a lot to sit with. I wanted to give you guys an introduction on what's coming your way, August. But so come with a lot of questions in August. So thank you.

Appreciate your time.

Brad. Good afternoon members of the board on. Thank you so much. My name is Brett Samson, your planning director, and it's an honor to speak before you today. I know you have some really difficult decisions to make. And I just realized in listening to this that I need to change the name of the planning department to something else. So I don't follow libraries. So I need to change that up. Obviously, I know you are focused on health and safety issues primarily, as you should be. I know that the planning department, for the most part, we are a want and not a need. There are some things that are a need, but we are certainly not the sheriff's office. So I just wanted to disclose that I fully understand that, and I understand that we are also a very small department as well. I'd also like to personally thank Denise and all her work on the budget. It's kind of the roughest job in a local agency is the budget person. And Denise has done very well. She clarifies everything for us. She works very well with my department analyst as well. And I just wanted to say thank you for all the work. And I know this is a difficult time. I just really wanted to go into some of the significant impacts to my department with the proposed 25% reduction to my staff. And so I just wanted to go through, you know, kind of both parts of the impacts to my operations. There's the planner one and two position that is proposed to be deleted. And then there's the economic development manager position as well that is proposed to be laid off. And so I just kind of wanted to go through quickly those two pieces and how it's going to impact the planning department's operations. And certainly for the planner one and two is critical to the planning department's operations. It's that entry-level position. And that's the person that is answering phones. That's the person who's taking questions at the counter. That person is typically the face of the department that you see when you walk in and ask a question and that person directly takes off the pressure on higher level employees with higher level of education and training that are working on more complex projects. And so the loss of the planner 1 and 2, which we had hired, we had offered a job to a planner 1 to build a vacated position. And then the hiring freeze, of course, happened and now it's proposed to be deleted. Um, but we did have somebody with a lot of interest in the planner 1. we had, I believe. 30 some odd qualified applicants narrowed down to 12 and then picked a local very high quality candidate. Obviously things happen, the budget happened. So, but how that will affect that loss of that position, how that will affect the planning department is really that impact to the front counter and everybody having to fill in for that and really what that means is i plan on and really have been doing this for the time that we haven't had this plan or one is focusing on keeping the counter open focusing on having the public be able to come in and ask a planning question or to call in with a planning question uh handling business licenses um handling what i would consider low-level permits like temporary use permits for mobile food vendors which are by the way only allowed in the commercial zone and you need a temporary use permit from me to have one so that is a code violation um and if you want more hours then you need an administrative use permit from me and so we we take a very hard look at those and we work it with uh with code compliance and with environmental management closely um But the loss of the planner one and two is really, it makes everybody else have to multitask. And quite frankly, that means the focus needs to be on the front counter, the day-to-day permits and discretionary permits that people have paid a fee to have their permit processed. so really what's the last priority in that mix it's really the long-range planning projects and long-range planning projects that directly relate typically to our general plan unfortunately because of the loss of this planner one and two i'm really going to need to focus only on state mandated general plan updates that are required by law And quite frankly, we might be late on those as well.

We're already working on.

We're working right now on the open space and conservation element update. So we are working on that now, and we're about to kick off our housing element update focus as well. That is due the fall of 2027. So we are already late. We are already behind the eight ball. And quite frankly, without my ability to contract with a consultant that means that staff is doing it and that means that i'm down you know one full staff member and a lot of departments losing a staff member isn't a huge deal when you have a department of eight you know that's a big deal so that's why i said the 25 is if i'm losing two people that's 25 of the department so um I think that we can still manage to provide good service at the counter. I think we can continue to provide good service for people coming in asking questions and for their discretionary permits. I just wanted to make you all aware that the loss of this planner means that basically some of my planner twos and my senior planners are going to need to be working on lower level things the day-to-day operations so the long-range planning and those projects will suffer obviously they will suffer at future direction of the board as well to prioritize but in the meantime i will be focusing on state mandated updates which the two are the open space element and the housing element that's the big one so i do have quite a bit of housing element experience unfortunately i plan on basically handling that primarily myself but we will do what we have to do So the loss of the Planner 1 and the Planner 1-2 really does hurt the department. I fully do understand why it's being proposed. I've been through these budget cycles and budget crises many times, and not to really parody what Marcus was saying, but if I were sitting in the seat, I would probably put the Planner 1 up to be deleted. So I... I don't like it at all, but I understand it. But I just wanted to come today to tell you good folks what really the implications of that budget issue are. So that's the planner one and two, that loss. The proposed layoff of the economic development manager will also have significant impacts to the operations of the department. At the last board meeting, you received a presentation from economic development on the annual update on everything that economic development's been up to everything that they've accomplished everything that they feel that is their mission statement moving forward which um so you heard all of that i just really want to kind of give an overview of those impacts just to refresh your memory of what you know could be lost if this goes through um certainly future grant opportunities My department would not be more than likely submitting for future grants having to do with affordable housing or anything for utility companies or things like that. So us applying for grants would go effectively go away because that's the person in my department that would be handling that. existing grants that we have on the books now that were disclosed to you at the last meeting would have to be handed off to someone else. I simply would not have the capacity to be a grant manager, certainly for the PLHA grant as well. Certainly on the REAP 2.0 grant, Thank you so much for your previous direction. We are moving forward with that with the Habitat for Humanity check. And so that soon will be off the books. But certainly any existing grants, we would not have the capacity to handle those. We would have to hand them off to a different department or we would have to contact the state and say we have an issue with managing this grant. So grants would be significantly in demand. Um, one of the big things that economic development does, um, for the county is we implemented the pre application process and that was board directed, I believe, uh, several years ago. And so what we offer is a free service to people that want to do a project. It's any type of commercial project where they come in, they sit down with multiple departments, public works, planning, building, the fire department, Caltrans, we invite everybody, online is available too. The applicant comes in, they say what they want to do and they provide materials, and then they get feedback upfront from all of the various entities. and it's a real big benefit to somebody who's doing a project especially i'll just call it a mom and pop organization where they don't have the time or the money or the resources to be making any kind of critical mistakes with their project they need to know what the costs relatively are going to be and so this pre-application process is really critical for people that really don't want to get underwater with a project and want to know what they're up for. So there's no surprises. Economic development handles a large piece of that. Kathy Galino basically brings people to the county and hands off these potential applicants to my planning manager and they work hand in hand. And then the meeting is scheduled and set up. And so economic development kind of acts as a lead in that process. So there would just be less pre-application assistance. There would also be less assistance to business associations. in the presentation that you saw at the last board meeting you saw where um economic development acts as a liaison to business associations and so that link um would not no longer be there so there would be less assistance to those business associations There would also be less coordination with utilities. Economic Development attends a utility coordination meeting and other utility meetings to also encourage them to attend the pre-application process so that applicants get that information up front about their project. but that they also coordinate with utilities on grant opportunities and keeping them in the know of what potential grant funds that they could get in the future. So that coordination with utilities would be far less than it is now. There would be less assistance for projects that have already been approved, but then are working through our system. Um, economic development has helped. Coordinate and it's been very frustrating just, you know, the. Basically development in San Andreas in general, but helping out the potential hotel project. In making sure that they're moving forward, the economic development brought to me that a variance that they had was going to expire because the hotel hadn't started yet to construct. That was on my radar up front. I was able to give the applicant an extension on their variance so that that didn't lapse. Quite frankly, that would have been um very frustrating if that permit had had had lapsed and of course a lot of times applicants that are not reading the fine print they're not they're not too savvy on when things expire and when they don't so we do provide assistance to projects that are already have been approved and are working through building permit grading permit building permit and then occupancy we are talking about future potential new software systems for permit tracking which is very exciting obviously in this in this in this budget environment you know may not be in the cards in the near future but if and when we did replace the software package and our permit tracking um software uh economic development would probably be very much involved in that process rolling it out and acting as a you know a potential face of the county to deal with questions and people's comments so really you know the loss of the planner one and two and the potential loss of economic development would have a significant effect on the planning department um it just would um and it really already has because like i said we we lost the planner one because the person left due to a career opportunity. We immediately recruited for it. It was a budgeted position. We had a line out the door to fill the position, you know, people with master's degrees and local people that were very competent and qualified. And so we have been dealing without now that planner one for months and months now. And so we have been dealing with that hardship and we will continue to do so, but it significantly does hamper our operations. And again, just kind of like what I said last year is, I understand that economic development is, and certainly planning to a large extent, is a want and not a need. We're not sheriff's deputies. We're not directly related to health and safety. I would say, though, the same thing I said last year, is once you do get rid of economic development, it's not like flipping a light switch. It's hard to then re-plug in later with someone else down the road and to start it up in the future. Having said all of that, the budget situation this year is obviously different than it was last year. And I may not like it, but I do understand. Do you have any questions at all?

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Thank you. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Sir. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, We got. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Public works. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Oh. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, i'm asking the board. Okay.

I'd ask for other people. So I'd ask for you.

Um, good morning or good afternoon. Uh, Kathy Galino, economic and community development, just a couple of things. And thank you, Brett, very much for your support. A couple of the things I just want to share with the board are the grant opportunities. There is opportunity right now for us to get grants that would help offset my salary, if not my entire salary. I mentioned some of those during the May meeting presentation that I gave. Also, I'm a liaison to the Parks and Recreation Commission. So that's another facet that I have in working with our community groups, our organizations, our nonprofits. And then probably most importantly and most passionate to me is our workforce housing development, working with many both for profit and nonprofit developers for projects in Valley Springs, San Andreas and actually some in Murphy's. So there's a lot more to to what economic development is. And I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Mike, how bad are we doing?

We're doing all right. Mike Martin, your public works director and also interim director for Integrated Waste Department. So I will handle public works first and then we'll get into integrated waste immediately after that. so starting with public works what i will say is that the department is operating at a bit of a deficit having said that i think it's well known that our department is primarily funded through federal state and regional funding sources all special revenue funds very little of our department is funded from local funding through the general fund we get a small portion of the tot tax to help us with our maintenance of effort for sb1 funding so um and then we have a little bit of uh local funding for our surveyor position and some of our front counter staff everything else is funded through grants through uh roadway user tax and a lot of the other state funding that's made available to us Having said that, you know, we're able to operate at the current level. We've experienced a lot of staffing changes, turnover. We're carrying a lot of vacancies right now. That is affecting the department. It does affect the level of service. I know there's a lot of desire for us to be coming forward with other recommendations to improve the level of service, to increase the level of service. That will all cost money and funds that this department doesn't have. So I just want to make sure that's kept in mind as we move forward with those requests. We have a severely aging fleet in our department, snow plowing equipment that's 30 years old. A lot of our trucks and equipment that are essential to performing the services that we perform are aging dramatically, let alone a lot of the future mandates that will be coming forward with regards to electrification. But we do have those challenges ahead of us that we will have to manage at some point. And then I will say with, although SB1 revenues are remaining relatively flat, I don't see a forecasted increase to those revenues. If anything, they will likely decrease. The state is working on implementing a roadway user charge and it's in the very early stages. It'll be, yeah, it's based on mileage. It'll be a number of years before it really gets to legislation and we start to see any changes or improvements there. So this flat revenue or potentially decreased revenue is likely to be carrying forward for a number of years ahead of us. So something to be prepared for and to be aware of. And then, you know, our projects We front a lot of the money with projects that we do with the expected reimbursement from Caltrans and from federal government. So we do our bridge projects and we do a lot of our other projects. We front the money with our road fund and then we submit for reimbursement from Caltrans and from the federal government. If things change at that level, those reimbursements won't be available to us and we'll have a lot less projects we'll be able to do. You've seen our five-year CIP. There's a lot of projects in there, a lot of need, a lot of infrastructure improvements that need to happen. These funding sources all have an impact on that. A majority of those projects are unfunded. So as a department, we continue to work hard to partner with local agencies such as the COG and the state for grant funding opportunities and take advantage of those wherever that we can. Our partnership with the COG has been extremely beneficial in helping us out with our wagon trail project. We continue to remain funded for that project at this time. We're nearing closeout. Without that partnership, we would be in a lot worse shape. So the department is continually working to prioritize those working relationships with Caltrans, with the COG, and other agencies to leverage all those resources that are available and maximize our effort. I'm extremely proud of the staff, again, working through these deficiencies, working through the staffing turnovers. We've continually been consolidating and restructuring, consolidating and restructuring, and still being able to deliver the level of service. So I'm proud of them to be able to do that. But it's not at a level that we would like to maintain for much longer than we need to, right? So that's what I have for Public Works. If there's any questions, I can address those, or I could go ahead and move on to the Integrated Waste Department.

We're all pretty aware of public works, so he didn't give you a lot of tools to start with. And there's a lot of opportunity. And I feel optimistic with you there, Micah. MICAH BRODSKY- Thank you.

Appreciate that. Okay, I'll go ahead and move on to the integrated waste management department. So, as it stands at this time, the fee revenues are not sufficient to really build up the capital fund as we talked about earlier in the budget presentation. There's a lot of capital improvements that need to be done at a lot of our integrated waste facilities. A lot of them are regulatory compliance improvements, things we need to do to remain in compliance with the state and other entities. to keep us out of trouble. So we're having difficulty funding that. Having said that, there's a great opportunity coming up before us with our implementation of our commercial fee and potentially updating our residential fees. Through a contract that we have just got approved by the board today on the consent calendar, we'll be evaluating a lot of these opportunities, identifying where our needs are as a department and an operation, We'll be able to make recommendations on revenue that will help sustain the department and its operation and also fund future projects that need to be done. So I'm planting that seed now so that as the department comes forward again in the future here with recommendations that the board is aware of these needs as what it's going to take to be able to sustain the operation moving forward and potentially grow to meet future needs and also comply with regulatory mandates.

Excellent, sir. Get those fees back before I spit them in the air, man. Let's get it in. Any other questions?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Ms. Kim Gradoff, excellent to see you once again.

Thank you.

Some of these people missed Mike DeLordo's retirement.

It wasn't very nice. wasn't very nice it was very nice it was very nice that's what i was saying oh yeah it was nice awesome it was awesome so um i had originally planned on talking about some of the cuts to my department um in the past three years i have lost four positions two deputy probation officers a clerical assistant and this year my admin assistant is looking at being eliminated as well. It's a 13% cut of employees to my department. We are working through that as best we can, but I did want the board to know that some of the impacts it has especially had on the day reporting center and the adult front office. There is nobody permanent person to cover the front office at the probation department right now. So it is either or depending on availability of staff, myself, my assistant chief, one of the supervisors, If a deputy is available, one of my deputies will step in. And at this point, I only have one probation tech, and she will also step in when she is available. So the front office, if you come in, is a little crazy. It's not always staffed. And we never know what's happening in our lobby, given the clientele we serve. We'll see. So, but I am not arguing to have any of this filled and fixed because I have a bigger ask. Oh, yeah. And apparently I lost the arm wrestle with the DA over explaining the new case laws that are leading us to this ask that she promised I would talk about. So pre-trial services, I know we haven't talked much to the board about them. Calaveras County, we've been Providing pre-trial services to the courts now for, I don't know, five or six years. It started as a pre-trial pilot program. And then when the Humphreys decision came out in 2001, the Humphreys mandated that the courts use individualized risk assessments to determine the likelihood of a defendant returning to court and also remaining crime free, and that they prioritize non-monetary release conditions over bail and certainly over any in custody, which led the state to develop pretrial programs and that was running the first year rather smoothly calaveras county got the court was awarded two hundred thousand dollars that was passed down to probation to provide pre-trial services Just in May, the Supreme Court of California again made another ruling in Kowalczyk that clarified the constitutional limits on pretrial detention, meaning that there are constitutional limits on who can be kept in custody and who the court can order to remain in custody. It further clarified that the setting of bail, specifically at a level a person could not afford, was unconstitutional. To the crime. Yes. The ruling held that the courts may only deny bail in a very narrow scope of serious offenses where there was clear and convincing evidence that there were no non-monetary conditions of release that will reasonably protect the public or the victim, as well as ensuring the defendants return to court. um so the pre-trial services that we provide at this time are the risk assessments those risk assessments are placed into a pre-trial report for the judge that includes the defendant's history personal information and anything else the court may require to make release decisions we have we have those reports are due to the court by 1 or 1 30 every day we have one full-time deputy probation officer dedicated to that and a full-time probation tech dedicated to that we also provide transportation services to ensure defendants are getting back and forth to court we pick them up from the jail when they are released and bring them to our office to set them up for whatever monitoring services they may require as ordered by the court, which can be anything from simply phone call reminders of their court dates to case management services, drug and alcohol services, drug and alcohol testing, GPS monitoring, alcohol monitoring, And there may be other things that the court throws in there on top, but those are the major things we do. We do residence verifications with them. Some we see at their homes periodically, others we have come into the office, or they may do phone check-ins. As of today, we have 155 individuals on pretrial services with 177 cases. So some people do have multiple cases as Ms. Yuk referred to earlier. There are currently 18 individuals on global positional satellite GPS monitoring, and there are 12 individuals on continuous alcohol monitoring. When pretrial services started under SB 129, the state allocated Calaveras County $200,000. Like I said, that came down to us. And that pretty much covered the majority of pretrial services from staffing to programming.

For how long?

For everyone.

How long?

For how long that lasted one year.

Yeah.

That lasted one year and last year we were reduced to, the court was reduced to 180,000. We still were able to provide services to the court. The court, we won't go into all of that. It's a big explanation and will take up far too much time and already 4.30 and being the very last person talking to you, Don't want me to last forever, I'm sure. This year, the court is reduced to, probation's allocation has been reduced to $124,000. We absolutely cannot sustain the pretrial program on that amount of money. That amount of money will pay for one DPO and about a third of a probation tech and nothing else. And like I said, the courts are mandated to release them, whether they're going to be mandated, whether we provide this level of monitoring or not. At the very minimum, to continue pretrial services, probation is going to need 115,000. More would be better. But if we look at cutting back on some of our services, Reducing the amount of people on electronic monitoring to those who are most at risk to the public and to their victims. I think we can make it with that amount of money.

This is hard because we heard it from the Sheriff's Department.