Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to the thursday july 9th 2026 open session for the board of carroll county commissioners as we always do we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance in a moment of silent reflection i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god I hope everybody's doing well and everybody had an absolutely wonderful Independence Day. And so first up on our agenda, as always, is Priority Carol. And Commissioner Kyler, we'll start with you this morning.

Okay, and I'll be relatively quick. Fourth of July, of course, great for the county, great for the families, and they made it work. and a lot of the counties didn't so i appreciate their diligence and fighting the weather and uh we kind of lucked out um and uh but i want to thank all the staff that's not an easy job to orchestrate all that and they did quite well um i want to mention um And I'm not sure if we have mentioned this before, but past Commissioner Stephen Wentz lost his father and his mother within a week's time frame. And they are having a celebration of life at a later date. And I think it's the funeral home or the obituary is saying they'd prefer donations to Pleasant Valley Fire Hall, which doesn't surprise me. from them. I wanted to mention that. And then Phil Boone, his services were this week. And that was tragic. He's been sick for a while. And a lot of the people probably know AP Boone and Sons, Bud Boone, and then Maryland Printing, Andrew. Yep. um is is his son so uh that that was very touching and uh it's it's uh i know it's the cycle of life but it's tough when it whether whether they're old young sick well um it's tough yesterday was the opioid prevention coalition with uh carroll county health department and that's always good information some good stats uh um on what the health department's doing, the hospital's doing, some of the police. It's a pretty good meeting, and I try to make it when I can farm Museum summer picnic was last night with their board and that's a great you set with them that's a great board yeah I did oh they're not here yet so I can say this out loud I did comment that they have too many lawyers on it on the board but other than that it's okay and The attorneys agreed with me, you know, but he did charge you for it, too. Yeah. But a good a good board and good discussion. And the farm museum's great. They've they've just done some trees between the pavilions on a steep area. I think I think it was combination of landscaping, but also safety. So people weren't walking on the steep slope. So that looked pretty And it was just it's nice to be out there. And speaking of being out there, this Saturday is the car show. And that's at the Farm Museum. And that was pretty big last year. I don't know if it'll be bigger, be the same, but it was pretty big last year. It'll be interesting.

Should we start taking bets on whether or not your judging gets overturned again this year?

Well, I think that's why they like me as a judge, because I'm irrelevant. None of my choices win, so it's easy to cater to me and listen to me and then outvote me.

thank you thank you commissioner commissioner good morning carroll county i'm not really sure how to follow up on that one but we'll do our best here uh first off hope everyone had a wonderful fourth of july and independence day uh somehow interestingly enough and this was not planned but myself and two of my colleagues we uh absolutely showed up at the Farm Museum at Red, White, and Blue. So we did not plan this, but it was a good event. I know, obviously, there were some storms that came through quite heavy that evening as well, and I'll get to those in a moment. But also, in the... celebratory feelings regarding the the 4th I wanted to share a picture this is Loki the rescue pity Loki was a dog that was a rescue from the humane society here in Carroll County Loki luckily found a really great home and he had made his way around various Carroll County organizations prior to being adopted But he also is an internet celebrity. So if you were looking for somebody to follow on Instagram, consider that. Also want to give a quick congratulations to Aunt Nett on her new puppy. She may be watching today. I don't know. Also... A sincere thank you. Getting back to the storms for a second. I want a sincere thank you, though, to Carroll County Department of Emergency Management and Communications, Carroll County Fire and EMS, the volunteers, law enforcement. As we all know, there's been power outages not only in Carroll County but throughout the state. But I want to just share some numbers. to give some context to what all these individuals were dealing with during these storms. So by the numbers, 468 911 calls, 343 administrative calls handled, 340 total calls processed during the busiest hour alone between 6 p.m. and midnight by dispatchers coordinated, 90 fire and EMS incidents, 50 government-related calls, 126 sheriff office calls, and 46 police calls. So I just want to say an absolute heartfelt thank you to everyone from Carroll County Department of Fire, Emergency Management and Communications. Again, Carroll County Fire and EMS, our volunteers, police, law enforcement, the Sheriff's Department, everyone, because it really does take all of us to keep everyone safe. And, you know, these individuals do it best, but they also put their lives in harm's way at times to make sure we are safe and taken care of. And I greatly, greatly appreciate that.

and and that's a great comment and i forgot and i i didn't write it down we're in the middle of carnival season yeah so please support them all and i would echo that from commissioner kyler yes please come out and support the carnivals i know at times it gets a little challenging with the weather that can affect the carnivals

But if you can't make the carnivals, find some other ways. I know Westminster does a 50-50 raffle. But in any ways, you can support our volunteers because that's a huge piece of our community, and they're very, very important to all of us. But just a great group of people, and we're very lucky and fortunate and blessed to have dedicated volunteers. Last night. Let's see. Where was I last night? I was at the reading of the Declaration of Independence Over at the historic courthouse had the pleasure of being one of the speakers at that as well as judge Hecker I want to thank judge Hecker again for giving permission for us to utilize that space Wonderful historic courthouse we have in Carroll County and it's 6 p.m Last night not only was it right here. It was read across the nation and actually across the world. I So it was 250 years later, it was just absolutely impressive. I want to thank the local Door to Virtue Masonic Lodge for their involvement in helping with this, as well as the local American Legion post here in Westminster. And I want to thank all the community that came out. Luckily, it was a little cooler last night, but still was a little warm out there. after that i was over at planning and zoning last night till i think that ran until about 10 o'clock so very busy evening last night but a good night also wanted to uh mention somebody someone because i always do talk about how we work together as a community be it you know volunteers whatever i want to give a shout out to solano's i know they're down in commissioner krebs's district but It's just a testament to what we do so well in this community. They were on Facebook and they had put out some things over the weekend on Sunday for people, the neighbors that had lost power. They were telling people stop and bring a cooler and fill up for ice for free. And it's just, it's great to see that that's how we do things in our community. It's not all about business. It's not all about everything else, but it's about looking out for your neighbor. I thought that was absolutely just spectacular to see. This evening at 6 o'clock, the Historical Society will have their ribbon cutting for the new Nagana Exhibition Halls, as well as a number of other dedicated spaces. And it will also be the opening of the Carroll at 250 people places in the making of history exhibit. That exhibit will run about a year, year and a half. Interestingly enough, Carroll County didn't exist. 250 years ago so it'll be touching on a lot of earlier things that occurred here pre-carroll county and going up and going through the timeline there will be a few interesting surprises if you like history definitely something to check out and then right after that at six o'clock not to be uh out out done by their other event uh the historical society's holding their shaken and stirred event on main street at covalent spirits from six to eight uh this one will be is titled the untold stories of the revolution in carroll county uh it's a great lineup of speakers for that as well and uh that's all for me thank you very well said commissioner gordon on all your comments and you as well commissioner kyler commissioner garen

Yeah. Good morning, Carroll County. I'll segue into some of Commissioner Gordon's comments. I walked in this morning and there was a copy of Carroll History Magazine, Volume 2, on my desk. And I want to commend the Historical Society of Carroll County for putting this together and everything else they do. It's such important work. If we don't honor our heritage and look at our past and all the hard work people have done to establish one of the the greatest counties in America, if you ask me, then we're doing everybody a disservice. So this is a great publication, and I commend the Historical Society for putting together. This is truly an interesting read, and I guess if you want a copy, I would imagine you can.

Yeah, they either have physical copies, I believe you can get at the Historical Society, but if I'm correct, they're also available online on their website. There is a digital version as well.

Sure, yeah, I'm sure people can go online and work all that out. So again, my... Heartfelt thanks to the Historical Society for everything they've been doing for America 250 and publications such as this. And then lastly, the May 2026 unemployment rankings are in again. And once again, for, I don't know, maybe as long as I've been a commissioner, we have the lowest unemployment rate in the state. That means Carroll County is the hardest working county in the state. No offense to anybody here. But that's so important. I think that we need to, and that's not something the commissioners did. I mean, obviously, we try to foster an environment where businesses succeed and people want to live. Most people commute out of the county, and they don't mind doing that because they come back to Carroll County, which they love. But this ranking, you know, when you've got people in the county who understand that, the principles and the value of hard work, integrity. It leads to charity. It leads to people doing the right things. It leads to strong neighborhoods, strong communities, if you will. I don't think this statistic is anything that should be understated. It's very important. And we're all obviously up here very, very proud of that, but more so I want to congratulate the people in Carroll County for being so hardworking and realizing the value of that. And look what it creates. It creates a wonderful county to live in, and that's no accident. So I wanted to highlight that it's at 2.8%. Queen Anne's County is a close 2.9%, so they're right behind us. Most of these unemployment rates are definitely below the, about half of them are below the national average, which is also encouraging. So my congratulations to everybody in Carroll County for working so hard. It means a lot to this county. It means a lot to the heritage of this county, and it's a testament all to you. So I just wanted to highlight that, and that's all for me.

Well said, Commissioner. Thank you. Commissioner Krebs?

Yes, thank you. I have an old piece of business from right before the 4th of July. At the end of June, we had our LifeBridge Health annual meeting celebration, and I bring this up because a lot of Carroll County was a part of it. So, you know, Carroll Hospital was a part of LifeBridge, along with Sinai, Northwest, and Levendale. But we... At that meeting, we honored a young leader in philanthropy, which I think was pretty interesting. And this is some pictures of it. Neil Mutzler's on the left. He is the outgoing chair. Jeff Wothers is coming in. He's from Carroll County. He's our board chair. So Jeff is from Carroll County. There's someone that got honored in the middle. And then our new LifeBridge CEO is there the only female and the outgoing president is also there and he also serves on the Maryland Stadium Authority so I just wanted to mention the young leader and which is another young leader in philanthropy is Sean Burns. And Sean had a disability when he was born. And he's had many, many, many, many operations. And he was very grateful for his orthopedic surgeon over the years. And so he donated a sum of money to endow a chair to his orthopedic surgeon as a grateful patient, and I think for a young person, and Sean is as active and as incredible a young man as you can be, his disability has never stopped him, it's never disabled him, and we're just proud of him, and it's nice to see him honored, and for him to take his resources to endowed chair to his surgeon who has made his life more palatable and easier. We were very proud of him in Carroll County, a big showing from Carroll. And he's the son of Marty and Carolyn Burns. And I always say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree because the proud parents are also very active in philanthropy and they serve on many different groups in Carroll County. And they also own a small business, Visiting Angels. and served on many boards and commissions. So that's part of the team. I think there's another picture there somewhere. And then Dr. Hobart was there. She's the surgeon at Carroll Hospital. She's the medical director for breast health. And this is our new incoming. Carroll County Hospital president. I just met him that evening. His name is Brian Cauley and his wife. We will be meeting him. Hopefully, he won't have to get to the hospital anytime soon. But he's our new president and COO of Carroll Hospital and the senior vice president of LifeBridge Health. And he brings 25 years of health care executive experience, most recently serving as hospital senior vice president of operations at MedStar Health. We welcome Brian and his wife and thank all the Carroll County people that help at the more regional level on the board at LifeBridge. I wanted to mention the whole 250th anniversary of our country, Everybody seemed like it was 4th of July, but really it's been a culmination of all the things that you've talked about. And I have really enjoyed learning in the paper every day. There's something about some history, and you talked about the book, and we had a group that's been meeting for over a year, putting forth different things at the library and just everywhere. I don't want to start going down that path, but they've done a really good job of bringing history back to life and reminding us of where our roots come from, and I've enjoyed that. So it did culminate a little bit disappointingly for a lot of people because of fireworks. Look, we got theirs in. I know a lot of people got canceled. Parades were canceled. And there were people all decked out for these parades. Some are having them later. I know Annapolis canceled their parade. But it's certainly a Fourth of July that people will not forget. So the extreme heat canceled celebrations all over. And the weather hit randomly. So it hit Tawny Town randomly. earlier in the evening. So you got to have your your fireworks. And in Eldersburg, we were hit very bad. In particular, we got hit by a microburst or they called it a ratio with two inches of rain in a very short period of time and 20,000 power outages. And multiple trees were down. They're still down as I was coming up here. And you mentioned all the people that were involved, the emergency center, the first responders. I know Limeboro had 80 mile an hour winds. But everybody is to be commended. And this is when you take for granted your dispatchers, your 911 center, how many calls are coming in at the very same time. And that same evening, my husband and I were traveling back from somewhere. The storm hit later. And we came across a tree totally covering the road. And I had to call the 911 in that area. and how they handled it. They're all over, but had it cleaned up so people could access the roads. And it's their holiday, too. But they're there. They don't miss a beat. And things like just traffic management, making sure people can get around the blocked roads. But the biggest problem that we had was people with medical issues, because some folks were out electric until Tuesday night. So when you're on oxygen or you're on some type of medication and it's that hot, we had a lot of people had to go. I know Turf Valley was totally booked because that's our closest hotel and people were paying $500 a night to stay in a hotel because they needed the air conditioning because their medical emergencies. And we don't think about that. So sometimes just inviting someone in to sleep and in your home And using your air conditioning is a big opportunity, especially with the heat that we've had. So I just want to say a big thank you to everyone involved. And I know the Sykesville Fire Department had 45 calls in a very short period of time. And the preparedness, we talk about preparedness all the time, but this is when it happens. You're prepared. They communicate the teamwork and the dedication. It was just very apparent all over the county and how people came to help the areas that weren't hit. So very job well done to the entire team. Commissioner Cotter mentioned the Overdose Prevention Coalition. Yesterday, we both were there, and it was sort of a reboot. We used to have two groups, and I'll mention this for Michael from MACO. A number of years ago, when Governor Hogan first got in, he wanted every county to put these opioid response groups together. And we already had something going on in the county, but we put together another group, and it really is one of the – Shining stars of what Carol does about working together. And it was called a senior policy opioid group. And I've been on it since, I guess, it's been 10, 12 years. But sometimes things see their useful life, and you have to re-correct that labor. One of the most important things we decided to do early on in that process is put money into prevention. Because you just can't treat your way out of this stuff. So we have to start with prevention. And a decision was made years ago to earmark money for, middle schools and we started with them we started with the Boys and Girls Club that we had and that's expanded to all over the county we have I think we have Boys and Girls Club in every middle school now I think Mount Airy was the last to go and they've been very successful and they just earmarked 1.4 million dollar a federal earmark for a new North Carroll Clubhouse project that's being completed and if these the prevention piece starting with kids in middle school is huge. So I think it's been very successful. It was a very good meeting. And the share of fatal overdoses are down 38.5% year to date, which is really fantastic. um it's a third month in a row without any fatalities in carroll county we've had eight about 88 this year i believe which was eight too many but it's way less than it used to be and we've had a 50 drop since last year in just total overdoses so um good statistics i think the the work will continue but it's it's been working and 51 of our overdoses are fentanyl through fentanyl is still coming into our our county and into our country um And one of the things they were talking about with prescription drug overdoses is most of them is because people are taking them not as prescribed. Now, is that self-inflicted on purpose? But making sure you follow the prescription is very important because that's one of the biggest problems with overtaking prescription drugs. So just trying to get some of that information out. I think all this stuff's posted online. And we really do have a great team in Carroll trying to fight this scourge that's been on us for a long time, but getting better.

Very well said, Commissioner. Thank you very much. So in the interest of time this morning, and also because all my colleagues have so very well articulated and excellently addressed things that I would have said as well, I'm going to skip ahead through my priority carol this week and go straight into item number two, which is a reception of Maryland Association of Counties. Good to see you, Mike. How are you?

Very well, Mr. President. Good morning.

Good morning to you. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks very much for having me. Mr. President, commissioners, I'm Michael Sanderson. I'm the executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties for your worldwide viewers. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. Tries to assist, educate, support county leaders and all the services we provide across the state. We also are active on policy issues before the state and try and make a visit to each jurisdiction's governing body over the course of the year, hear from you about your local priorities, and talk a little bit about what's happening at the state level. I bear regrets from MACO's president this year. MC Keegan Ayer is a council member in Frederick County. She's serving a great deal of time during her final year in service, she's term limited out, serving as MACO president and joining me on these visits, and reached me last night and said she is still bedridden with a nasty sort of stomach bug sort of thing. So since her regrets, was hoping to join today, but instead you get just me, I hope that will do. And I'd be happy to talk for a few minutes. Let me, my plan is I've distributed a packet of information. I won't go through that in a lot of detail. I see you've got other items on your agenda and so forth. So I'll try and economize on time. And then if there are things you want to spend more time on, that's probably the best way to do it. I do want to start by just saying for me professionally, this exercise of being an agenda item on the meeting of our local governing bodies is a great centering moment for me. I spent a lot of time in Annapolis where there's lots of politics and invective and that kind of stuff in the conduct of business in the policy world at Annapolis. Like reading through your agenda and hearing the various comments that the commissioners have all made this morning already about leadership in the county and things you're engaged in in the community and the ways county is responding and serving your residents. It's really helpful. It's helpful for me spending lots of time in Annapolis to come out to the county seats and be reminded.

Now you have to stay for the whole meeting. That's right.

But to be reminded of the work that counties do, the word politician sort of has its own negative connotation and so forth. If people actually read through the agenda of items you're considering today and all the community events that you're speaking about and proud of and so forth, It's a bad rap. Folks who are in public service deserve a pat on the back rather than a kick in the butt. So, that said, a few things I want to offer. I want to talk about policy. I'm going to sort of reverse my usual order and see how that goes. One bit of news that's broken in the last few days that's been flittering around for a while, General Assembly apparently intends to come back to town for a brief special session to talk about legislative redistricting, not for their districts, but for the congressional seats in Maryland. You've heard about this issue as a national back and forth, big partisan squabble. Our state's gotten caught up in that a little bit. Be that as it may, that's not really a MAKO issue. I will tell you as an Annapolis insider, the process for a special session could go a variety of different ways. But what I do expect is Members of the legislature will be able to introduce bills if they want. So if you're angry that your bill didn't get passed this last session, there may be delegates and senators who decide to just put in their bill and we might see, you know, Senate bills 2 through 18 or whatever introduced. I don't expect that this will be another bite at the apple for all the issues that didn't get resolved during the last 90-day session. i think the full intention of the legislative leadership will be to keep this tight come to town for a couple of days they're going to talk about the constitutional provisions regarding the drawing of congressional congressional districts put that on the ballot for voters to decide on a constitutional amendment put that on the ballot for this fall with the potential for there being a process of new maps for the 28 election So that's the timetable, a little different than the sort of headline fights back early this session about perhaps redrawing things for the 26th election. So this isn't rearranging the districts for 26. It's the idea of mostly looking at a state like Virginia and the Commonwealth of Virginia They had provisions in their state constitution that had them redrawn districts, got thrown out in court. Maryland's trying to avoid the same fate if the voters agree. So that's the idea with the special session. But don't anticipate it'll turn into a 30-issue special session. It'll basically be one issue. You can be confident about that. I'll speak broadly. There's a number of things in the packet that I shared that are updates on legislative wrap-ups and so forth from the last session. I want to speak about non-fiscal issues for a moment and close on the state's budget situation, which I think is the biggest topic for us. I will say on the broad... umbrella of affordability were some of the hottest issues this last session and kind of culminating over two or three years and you're hearing this on the campaign trail delegates and senators and the governor are as well affordability is a pressure point in Annapolis in a number of ways It's shown up most conspicuously as they talk about energy policy and housing policy, and I think this is starting to seep into families being concerned about the cost of childcare is another element of the same in all these areas. The concern of affordability has multiple components. Some of them are probably government related, but quite a lot of this are market forces that are sort of beyond what delegates and senators can do with legislation. But still, we see legislation trying to target and address and help where we can. On the energy front, Everybody's electric bill has been going up. The indication is that's going to continue. If you read into this sort of stuff, this looks like it's a not short-term but medium to long-term trend. There's a spike in demand for electric power being driven largely by high-tech users who want lots of compute power and are The capacity for data centers and big electric users and so forth is part of that equation, getting lots of attention politically. Maryland has not been a big leader on building these hyperscale centers. We're going to have probably our first campus in Frederick County, but it's not like there are 30 or 50 more huge campuses knocking on the door to come to Maryland. But this is happening anyway. the impact of data centers and the high demand for electricity. I mean, I drove here using a GPS on my phone. I looked up the agenda for the county commissioner's meeting and so forth, and I got a nice little tidy AI summary that told me about you all and your background and what wonderful people you are and so forth. I like that, right? Everybody likes that. And so the data centers are humming and using lots of water and lots of power and so forth, and that's created... A big complicated political situation for everybody in power. Distribution lines also, as you know, a controversial part of this as well. The Northern Virginia data centers are thirsty for energy and there's not enough down there. They need it from Pennsylvania and we're the middle ground who are catching strays on those issues. This is the foreseeable future. Energy policy is going to remain a hot topic. For most of my time at MAKO, energy policy was none of our business. it's basically everybody's business right now, and the trend is gonna continue. They tried to concatenate six or eight or 10 different ideas into one big bill to provide some nominal savings for people on their electric bills. A lot of that savings comes from taking a few years off on some state-created programs, but there's just only so much the state can do to provide ratepayer relief. Maryland's in a weird spot where about half of the county deregulated the generation process about 25 years ago. Maryland did so, so the market is partially regulated. The companies like BGE who do the distribution network are still regulated utilities. They have to come before the Public Service Commission and get their rates approved. But the generation is just an open market, and that makes things tricky and complicated. So I don't think this debate is over. I think far from it. But also the upward pressure on electric rates is also not over. We haven't been building. We, the United States, have not been building generation capacity for the last 30 years in a way that might have served us better today. as that old saying, when's the best time to plant a tree? 30 years ago. Next best time is today. So we're in kind of that situation on energy policy. Housing, kind of a similar circumstance. It depends what report you read and what expert you ask, but almost everybody has a number for how many units we are behind in housing units that we need today or we need for the people of the next 10 years in Maryland and so forth it's in the tens of thousands it's a lot of pressure on the current housing market there are other elements too that are well beyond what a senator or delegate can do with a bill they can't bring interest rates down by passing a bill in the general assembly what they can do is put in bills to talk about the the sort of approval process at the local level through zoning and permitting and things of that nature. And I think there's an element of truth that local approvals, some of it guided by state policy, that actually was put in place by the General Assembly, but we're the ones on the ground doing that work And they've made some changes to process. There's a kind of a hard fought compromise over the last couple of years to pass a couple of bills. There was some big broad bills that ended up sort of dying of their own weight. One big bill saying any place that's zoned residential and you've got water and sewer capacity should be a good place for multifamily housing, apartment buildings and condominiums and townhomes and that sort of thing. I think that was probably too big of a bite for the General Assembly and members heard, got lots of cards and letters about that proposal. But some other compromises came together, and I think on balance should help spur some housing, some more certainty up front. If you're in the building trades, the idea that you'll get some decision-making sort of locked in sooner and more certainty in that process. You can pay impact fees later in the process. There's some challenges for local government to implement that, but I think they are surmountable challenges. It's a pretty reasonable compromise. So some really big intrusive ideas failed. Some reasonable compromise passes. This issue also is probably not completely behind us. I won't get into childcare other than to say the arithmetic of childcare in Maryland is challenging for an awful lot of working families right now. And I don't know how you resolve that short of throwing a lot of public money at it. And as I'm about to get into the state is already turning their pockets inside out, looking for cash for things that are already on their plate. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see some interesting ideas in the future on childcare as another area where what could we do to try and combat affordability concerns. So with that, sort of set the table for fiscal issues, which is the biggest thing on my mind, and I think the position the state is in right now, fiscally, is the most challenging I've seen. I've been working with MACO for more than 30 years, and some years before that, as staff to the General Assembly on fiscal issues, this has been my beat for a really long time. And I think we're in the trickiest spot I've ever seen. Multiple factors at work, Maryland's economy is not growing in the fashion that we got used to for an awfully long time. A lot of pieces at work there. Realignment in the federal workforce and then sort of those who serve and are secondary to the federal workforce is part of it. We've probably lost 25,000 Maryland jobs in federal downsizing and so forth, but then there's another effect beyond that. The folks who serve them lunch and cut their hair and so forth also feel some effects there. Maryland's economy's been softened in ways where, for most of the time, having a big federal presence was sort of a cushion. We felt recessions less severely in Maryland than most states because the federal government didn't have big contractions. Since we're in a big contraction, we felt it a little more aggressively. There's also outward, like domestic migration analysis by the state comptroller shows we're losing people and businesses to the south and to the west. for a variety of reasons, kind of a laundry list there, that's too much to get into, but what that's left us with is, over most of the time that I can recall, if inflation was two or three percent, the economy is growing at three or four percent, you would expect state revenues to grow at something like four or five percent. And in a $25, $30 billion state budget, that would mean like a billion dollars of new revenue a year. And that was enough to sort of feed the birds in the nest, to make sure that people who showed up and said, I'm eligible for Medicaid, they can get service, and the state employees can get their colas, and you can just sort of keep the show running on four or five percent revenue growth. When you have 1% revenue growth or thereabouts where we've been and what we're projecting, the math just doesn't math very well. And that's part of where the state is. At the same time, we have spending commitments at the state level. that have sort of built on that, the terracing of, well, if we're gonna have a new billion dollars each year, we can commit to public education over 10 years to the tune of $4 billion. And if we spread that out evenly, I don't think that's absurd logic to think that we can take the first 400 million out of that new billion dollars every year and sort of pigeonhole it for education, because that's our first priority, and then we'll let the other chips fall where they may. But when the billion dollars isn't showing up, you've got a serious math problem. The state has run out of pre-funded reserves in its education trust fund, and it's FY28 when they start, they need to pay cash for the blueprint rather than the piggy bank. And suddenly their arithmetic is in real trouble. Their own staff say their shortfall for FY28 is about $2.5 billion. We'll see what happens with things like the income tax and with sales tax in the months between now and the start of the legislative session when the governor needs to introduce a new budget. It would not come as any surprise at all to folks who have been trying to read these tea leaves if that 2.5 is 3, 3.5, 4, a larger number than that. A $3 or $4 billion problem in a state general fund budget that's less than 30, is a big problem at the same time the state isn't right on transportation we still are way short on local highway user revenues and that's scheduled to fall off a cliff next year the governor's under a lesser obligation to fund us locally they're having trouble needs that we've got before us so that's a that's a companion fiscal problem and actually the state hasn't been keeping up with public school infrastructure either jurisdictions that are growing or have older schools that need renovations and repairs every year we've got hundreds of millions of dollars of projects that are on the a list and b list and are ready to go and everybody agrees they're meritorious and they deserve state funding and the state just they run out of cash So we have plenty of projects ready to go that even with a sort of supercharging over the last several years under Governor Hogan and the General Assembly at that time, the Build to Learn Act was meant to sort of clear the deck of a lot of projects, but we're still not even there. So you pull all those things together, and there's going to be a whole wave of new delegates and senators who are going to be shown around Annapolis. Here's where the bathrooms are. Here's where you get your stationery printed. Here's your new committee assignment. You know, all that sort of stuff. By the way, some of the first votes you're going to take are going to be some very difficult fiscal issues. It almost has to end up being... I'm not trying to make a Mako forecast or anything, but it almost has to be a combination of all of the above. They almost certainly will have to find some new revenues of some sort. It will almost have to include some reining in or extending of spending commitments of some sort. And how that works is a big, big unknown. I've never seen a big package come together that didn't affect counties in one level or another. The last couple of years as we've been working toward this problem and getting through the 2025 session that had some revenue increases and the 26th session had some shuffling of the deck and so forth, they started to become fond of, billing counties to continue state services. And in your budget, forgive me, I didn't look up the specific number, but I'm sure your last budget include several million dollars to basically pay an invoice for a service that you don't feel is inuring back to the residents of Carroll County. It's just now a burden on your property tax and your local revenues to pay for some overages in the state pension system and for the administration of the state office that does property assessments. We're now paying for 90% of the ladder and 50% of a bump in cost of teacher pensions. By the way, who could have seen this coming, that teacher pension costs would go up if we're in the middle of a 10 year ramp up of a commitment to education where most of the resources are going to hiring more teachers and paying them more robustly. The idea that this is a surprise outcome from the blueprint is a little, it kind of begs the question. That said, that's the environment we're in fiscally. I think it's almost certain to turn into Like, try and get this done as soon as possible. I don't think it serves anybody's interest to have this drag out past the 27 legislative session. So I think it's big reckoning. And that probably, I mean, if we're talking about a magnitude of three or four billion dollars, we're into thousands of dollars a year per household. These are numbers that are even larger than people's concern about their electric bill. people you heard about whose vehicle registration went up a couple years ago or so forth I mean those are big enough numbers to affect affordability generally in Maryland I don't know what the resolution is going to look like MACA will be a voice at the table talking about fairness with local budgets and the effects on property taxes we will try and be as effective on those issues as we can but they're not gonna have good and easy options presented before them. I hate to say words like this, but it's a buckle up situation for taxpayers, for service recipients, for the public sector and all the services we provide and so forth at the state and county level. It's gonna be a large fiscal reckoning and probably common pretty soon. So that's a little bit of a grim forecast. There's other items that I tend to do is talk about three or four things rather than the six or 800 different things that MAKO got involved in over the course of the session. If there's anything I've missed, I'd be happy to talk further about it. If you want to talk about grim stuff in more detail, I'm here. And if you want to be angry with Annapolis, I can take a punch. Anyway, love to hear from you all.

Well, first of all, thank you very much for coming in. And I thought that was a very, very good rundown of all the issues that we're facing. And everything that you touched on are certainly things that we're concerned about as well as the county. With respect to energy in particular, apart from the cost of living and the cost of the increases, you know, we're still facing the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project here. And I think that, as you had mentioned, over the last couple of decades, we're not producing any new energy, which means that states like Maryland are going to end up being bypasses for energy transmission to other locations. And so I think from our perspective, at least from mine, heading into the next legislative session, trying to find some legislative protections for local government, for localities to – You'll be able to push back against these sorts of things or to have a voice saying, you know, we object to this in a way that is not existent now is going to be important. Some of the other things that you had touched on, for example, blueprints, that continues to be a lingering concern for us because, like the state, we simply do not have that level of income to be able to accommodate the kinds of designs that they have. Talking about housing, the accessory dwelling units, that's something that we're, there's still some vagaries and some issues with those that we're trying to parse out ourselves to try to understand know what counts what doesn't count how do we apply it the local control element of it as well right the local decision making process and then the last thing that i'll touch on because i want to you know certainly open it up to my colleagues as well uh and you touched on it very well in the last couple of minutes is the budgeting right uh you when you look at uh i guess over the next couple of years there's so much money that's being projected to be given to local governments uh when you take out the schools and everything else as our own budgeting department has pointed out Less than 1% of that is actually going to local governments, that increase. And a lot of people say, well, why doesn't the state just pull back the money from the counties and the municipalities? That's not what's driving the cost. That's not what is driving the increases in the budget. And then when you look at that in conjunction with the cost shifts that the state is making, and you mentioned the pensions, the SDAT, all these other things that the state is shifting onto us, the teacher pensions, the college professor pensions, and then, of course, the reduction in HUR. That's devastating, as you know, to local municipalities and to counties. The amount of aid that the state is projecting to give to local governments, I would argue, is far inadequate to what costs are being shifted onto the counties and onto municipalities. And so I think probably from our end, we're going to be going into this legislative session with you and then with our delegation trying to push back against those cuts to HUR and then trying to argue for more local determination or local choice. So thank you very much for that.

Just one thing for someone who might be watching this conversation, it might be easy to hear me or a county leader talking about aid to local governments and that sort of phrase. And are you guys just wards of the state? Are you just asking for cash so you can do cool stuff back home? And the context for that is really important. Maryland... Maryland invests so many services, delegates to the counties to deliver frontline services in a way that there are not very many states even close to us. There's nothing wrong with that system. The idea that local governance is a good way to get things done locally, I like that. I like that county governments are the ones in charge of public health inspections, environmental protection and maintaining roads and bridges I think that's a good system by and large but for the state to just mandate that the counties deliver all these services and we're the ones responsible for all those protections for our residents and to do it without help I mean you just have the property tax we have an income tax and most of the counties are bumping up against the ceiling there to do To do that without resources to make it happen is an upside-down system. So I don't want to say it's a bad thing that the counties are doing important stuff. I think that's a good system, but the state needs to live up to their end of that deal. When we say aid to local governments, that's not a very sexy-sounding umbrella, but the things that you do with the resources the state supports are essential.

Very much so, and very well said. Any of my colleagues have any thoughts?

I have one thing I want to mention. I know Commissioner Vigliotti mentioned the ADU issue. This is something we've been looking at. I serve on planning and zoning for the board here. One of the areas that's of concern, and of course we've seen this with the... similar but different. We've seen this with the power line issue as well. But with ADUs, if you're looking at, say, AgPres. So, for example, if you fit all the, I'll make this really simplistic for anybody watching, but if you fit all the typical criteria, the state is going to allow you to add an ADU on your property. The challenge, and we've reached out to the state, and we've got no real information or direction on this, is let's say you had a farm that's in AgPres, be it Rural Legacy, the MOUF program, the county program, and let's say you had two houses that were on that property when it was put into ag preservation, you extinguished your lots in perpetuity. So they're gone. And that was the whole point of the process. Well, if they meet the right criteria, the question is, can you add two ADUs on that property? And I think in the spirit of which that program, be it state, local, wherever, was created in the point of extinguishing those lot rights, I think that ADU usage goes completely counter and against the purpose of that. Because you're now allowing someone in theory to add, if you had two homes on that farm, four. and that goes you know we we've not been able to get any information we've had staff looking into it and such but i want to bring that to your attention because i know we're not unique in being carroll county in this and obviously as a state matter you know that that's going to affect anybody involved with mako

So first, absolutely, we'll dig into that and see if we can try and shake loose some more guidance, whether it's from MALPF or from whoever the right actors are. I will say intuitively, I agree with you that like the grand bargain of agricultural preservation has always been. yeah, a little bit of growth for the family homestead, and if that means another generation for a second unit or whatnot, but then stop growing, leave this stuff in active agriculture, either for the foreseeable future or in perpetuity. That's always was, everybody understood that to be the deal. The idea that, well, now we can put in a second unit on every half acre or whatever, just...

Rubs me the wrong way. And I don't know if this is, you know, unintended consequences that they were looking more at the typical housing situation and maybe this was not being considered at the time. But, you know, we've got local and state tax dollars. that everyone's paid in, that's being utilized for these programs. So to me, it takes away from that purpose. But then, you know, it's a challenge right now. We're not really certain. And I know planning and zoning here has been kind of scratching their heads, kind of debating it, as has staff. Because you really don't want to allow that because it's never been the intended purpose. And the original easements or contracts clearly state you have given up your lot rights per the agreement.

it wouldn't be the first time that the gang in Annapolis created a statewide policy principally thinking about a neighborhood in Baltimore or an area in Silver Spring as the way to guide a template for the entire state. And then it's a mismatch in Garrett County, Carroll County, Worcester County.

And I just want to bring it to your attention. I understand.

I just want to mention that now the specifics are helpful. I hadn't heard that exact angle and I appreciate it. Absolutely.

And I have a question, but before that, maybe a comment. MACO, it's been very interesting dealing with MACO, and we find out like you just gave the example, all counties are different. And Annapolis likes the thing like blueprint, one size fits all. And, and they made a bad mistake with that. But it's interesting at Mako, I was surprised at how much the small counties and the big counties can agree on some of the issues. But my question is, and if you want to comment on that, great. But my question is, last session seemed a little strange. It seemed like everybody was busier, a little more hectic. This session, after an election, It's going to be horrible. Not only all the issues you mentioned, but the fact that there are new people there. There are people who, oh my gosh, I got reelected. Now I can do what I really want. So how bad is next session going to be?

So on the first note, I don't want to miss an opportunity to say folks on the outside, like friends of mine around Annapolis, will sometimes say, I can't imagine how hard your job is to try and steer these 24 counties who are all over the map. And it must be like every vote at MAKO must be 16 to 8, right? I hear that all the time. And anybody, like you've sat on the MAKO legislative committee for a number of years, your counterparts over the years have and so forth. The number of issues over the course of an entire legislative session that end up being divisive and split big, small or red, blue, it happens occasionally, but it's kind of one hand kind of stuff. Generally speaking, it doesn't matter whether the motivation from a sponsor of a bill is deep blue or deep red. When Annapolis says, we're going to tell you how to do stuff, most folks are like, I got elected by my constituents in the county to try and guide things for my county. And I don't want you to tell me to do it the same way as Garrett and Baltimore County, because I'm not there. And they should do the same for themselves. That's bread and butter stuff for an organization like us. And the fact that our positions are guided by elected officials, it's not just, I have a very talented staff who work at MACO. We sit at the table and try and deliver, offer amendments to fix problems and testify on bills and all that stuff through the session. And I brought you a whole, you know, infographic and a page full of statistics.

And we don't always follow your recommendations.

Oh, that's right. Oh, absolutely right. Yes. But we've got a talented staff, but we're not the ones making the call. It's the local leaders who give us the direction of let's get that bill fixed because as it is, it's not ready for prime time. On the bigger issue for the coming session. There will be the wave of new legislators is always a wrinkle. The first year of every four year cycle is a bit of a twist. So some of those folks will come in and they may have some specific ideas they ran on during the campaign. They want to introduce those bills and so forth. They may find themselves being handed legislation by their committee chair or by their ranking member and be carrying that sort of stuff. But the numbers generally don't spike in year one out of four. They tend to spike in year two. That usually is now you've figured out where the bathrooms are and so forth now. Wait, there are professional bill drafters that will write anything I want for free? That really is a thing? That usually happens in year two rather than year one, blessedly. For this coming year, I think the fiscal circumstance is going to be so tough, it's going to be a very fine filter on what can actually get passed. What tends to happen in a typical session is the word gets out. Any bill with a $250,000 fiscal note, no matter how much you love the bill over the environmental committee, you gotta run it past the budget committee and make sure that they can accommodate hiring the six new staff people to run that program or whatever. Sometimes the filter is a quarter million or something like that. in a year like this coming year, it literally might be 75 cents. I mean, it may be almost impassable to make funding commitments and spending decisions that aren't part of the overall fiscal plan. That's not great for us. We'd love to get some things off the books. They made a weird change a couple of years ago to bill counties for half the cost of a wrongful conviction. if the state's attorney convicts somebody and they turn out dna evidence says that that person never should have been in jail and now we owe them a million bucks and now you know excuse me wicoma county is the first who had to cut a check for half of one of those settlements and worcester's in court over one of them right now that's bonkers policy i'd love to get that out of the plan but getting any five million dollar item out of the three billion dollar solution is really tough going So a roundabout way of saying, I think 27 is going to be awful because of the big fiscal mess. Our panic about the whole thing being awful, we'll put a pause in that and it'll get awful in other ways in 28. So my optimism isn't really high, it's just a matter of timing. Doom and gloom, thank you. On the long-term weather forecasts, rain and then storms.

Commissioner Krebs, anything? Oh, I do. Michael, I've known you for a long, long time. Indeed. One thing, sitting here in local government now, I'm proud to say that our delegation, I'd say 99% of the time, has aligned with what MACO and what our county has done.

That's true.

And I agree with you that the other counties might think similarly in the local community. local scheme of things but their representatives don't align with them and that's a problem because um it affects them too and somehow if they would just put themselves in the local shoes many of them go from the legislature to their local because they make more money doing that and then they realize oh look what i did but i look back on the issues that over 20 years all these things we we voted against our delegation is very aligned and one thing we do depend on from you from Mako is these letters and also from our local it's a lot of work you know putting the things how does it affect our county how does it they also have to put forth some solutions but on committees that I didn't serve on I always looked for Mako and look to our county to say what do you think about this how's this going to affect us how bad is it so I just want you know those I know it's a pain the letters but um It's not just, we can't just say, oh, we want local control. We need to say why. How is this hurting us? Because you're telling us what to do. And one size does not fit all. And I know years ago when I first ran for the school board in 1998, I ran on stop local mandates. And everybody said, what's unfunded mandates? Well, it's a word that means a lot because that's what it is. It's all the stuff you're telling counties what to do. And if it doesn't help them, why are we doing it and i always say you know look at the outcomes we talked about outcomes today of unemployment we look at our schools we look at our crime we get good outcomes you should be left alone when you get good outcomes give us the resources but let us figure out how to do it and that's that's what i think bothers me is because some of their things that they pass actually hurt us from being able to be able to be our best in carroll and maybe other counties as well and we pride ourselves on that but it actually holds us back And one of our biggest challenges, we're losing a lot of people to Pennsylvania. Because bottom line is, it's cheaper to live there. And people say, oh, well, you got this tax and that tax. But their property values are way less. That's why they're getting a bigger house. They want space. They want a house. They want their little green grass. And it's less money. So their tax bill is less. Maybe their rates with school tax might be a little higher. But what they're paying total is way less. And so we're seeing that. Then you've got traffic going there. Then we don't keep the income tax here. They work here, but they pay their taxes somewhere else. So we can create all these jobs we want, but if they're not going to live here and we don't have the type of housing here that they want, we don't collect a penny from them. We don't get property tax. We don't get sales tax locally. We don't get corporate income tax. We don't get property tax for people that don't live. in Carroll County. So that's a problem. It's the same in the state of Maryland. But we're not making those decisions. So I think we need to keep reminding our other colleagues we're digging ourselves faster and bigger in the hole the more they try to solve the problem. And you mentioned daycare. It's becoming a huge issue. And that's why people wanted pre-K. Because pre-K, it helps with daycare. I mean, you don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for kids to go to daycare. And our daycare in the state of Maryland is way higher than it is in Virginia. And my daughter lives in Loudoun County, and daycare is like a fraction. Nice daycare, because they have less rules. And I served on the committee that made a lot of those rules, and they just limit so many things that you don't even have home daycare anymore. And so they don't realize they've caused their own problems in many situations. And instead of just dealing with the The problem county or the problem issue, they make a rule for everybody that changes things. So I think the message needs to be solutions do come at the local level. And they mentioned about the ADUs. We have conflicting priorities on lots of these things. And I was down this year talking to some of my colleagues. I had some great conversations with some of the new committee chairs that I've worked with about affordable housing. what they're doing does not make housing affordable i don't care how many units you put we have we have units jammed townhouses little townhouses they're selling for 750 000 that's not affordable and their their definition of affordable is not a definition you can build a house for and you know we've got habitat for humanity and we've got our arc of carroll county with lots of free things and even what they're building is not affordable because of just it's so many different things i can't get into them all but they need to look at that and not just make it seem like it's such a simple thing. And one issue that came up last year, I served on a, I mean, what are the solutions? I'm always saying, what's the solutions? And we have a lot of them, but we don't talk about the solutions. And we have a lot of vacant homes. What are we doing with vacant homes? How do we turn them over? Our vacant home rate in Carroll County has doubled, which you don't realize, and it's not a problem yet, but look what happened to Baltimore City. How do we take those? They're on a piece of property already. They already got their permits. How do you encourage those to turn over And older homes cost way less to buy a resale than they do to build a new home. But it seems like they're just trying to figure out what sticks instead of how do we really solve these problems. I think the anecdotal, like talking about specific things helps them put it in perspective versus just don't tell us what to do, which it's easy. Don't tell us what to do, but here's why. Because we do have some of the solutions. We talked about ag, eroding the ag zone with these ADUs. And ADUs are fine in a certain way, but they tell us exactly what we have to do, and it conflicts with our priorities. So does solar on ag. We have so many solar projects now going on ag. Well, first of all, we value ag in Carroll. That's why we have one of the best programs in the nation. We value it because we need food, number one. And secondly, we can't build homes on ag anymore because they've limited how many homes you can build on ag. So they want housing, but they've limited where you can build them. But you can put solar panels on it, but you can't put food and you can't put housing that we say we need um up in like massachusetts they have solar panels on their rooftops everywhere they have them over parking lots but but it's cheaper to go on ag and that's why they're doing it and if you're a farmer and making a hundred dollars an acre you know renting your farm out or whatever and you can make 10 000 an acre or 20 000 what are you going to take i mean you can only be so idealistic so they've basically incentivized against what they're trying to do and it just doesn't make sense to me and telling the counties this is how you have to do it And you just shake your head, and you don't really. So the conflicting priorities, and then what are those solutions? And then how do we, I'm hoping that MAKO, some of these things come up, what are some of our other counties doing about these conflicting priorities? And how do we say, give us a goal that we need X, but let us figure out how to do it? Right. And that's problematic. The other issue with housing is they're not keeping up with school stuff. I mean, they're not putting the money in. I forget. I talked to the state director. A lot of the money that was put in years ago went to the big counties. And the rural counties really did not get as big of a piece. But yet our schools are aging as well. We're all losing enrollment everywhere. And every county, I think, except one is losing enrollment. So it does give us time to catch up. but you know when they tell us we got to do certain things i look and say where do we have school capacity because if you don't have school capacity where you want to build the schools then you've just messed up your schools or where do you have road capacity they've stopped giving us highway user money we we keep putting things in the same place and have all failing roads and people are going crazy because we haven't gotten the money from the state so they need to be reminded of some of their obligations have not necessarily um aligned with what they want us to do and it's like so i just um Everyone has their own perspective, and I know maybe the governor has his perspective, but his perspective is not necessarily what comes from maybe Harford County or Somerset County or Carroll County, and we need to keep reminding them of that. So the solutions come at the local level, and one thing that's missing this year because it's an election year is the summer work groups. And normally, you would take on some of these issues in the summer, like the housing. I talked to Delia Ampre, which that's one of his big issues. I brought up a couple issues to him. He's from Baltimore City. They have totally different issues than we do. And when I brought up some of the issues, he's like, wow, I didn't think of that. I didn't think of this. It's hard in a hearing in three minutes or whatever to say those things. So it's a shame that it happens to be the year of no summer work groups, because those are the kind of things they should be really sitting down in reaching out to how do we locally solve some of these issues. On the special session, I have one message. I mean, what a waste of time. We have got so many issues that are important. You just talked about electricity. We talked about NPRP. In two years, they've had all these bills, and they haven't passed one of them to solve the problem. And it's frustrating, because is that people's priorities, that we might pick up one congressional seat? Really, how's that going to affect anybody anywhere anytime so it's just a it's a virtue signaling exercise and it's it's a shame so I don't know how we message that as counties to them and just say hey can we focus on things that are important to our people and we do agree on many of those things So keep up the good work. I really do. I've always valued the work of Mako and the work that there are locals. And I know it does take time to educate people. But sometimes if those folks come in and they don't really get the local, you know, how is this actually happening on the ground? So keep up the good work. And I don't know if you're doing anything about ADUs at Mako. And then the solar on ag, what are our other counties doing about that? I mean, Baltimore City doesn't have ag. Big counties don't have ag. But our other ones do. and we have no control over it. So they're going everywhere and people are going crazy.

I appreciate that commissioner. I want to uplift one particular piece and just double down on it. Um, we, the local government community, the County community, we're at our best when we talk in terms of our services rather than your feelings, right? So when we say this mandate is going to divert money that Carroll County otherwise would have been able to use for a deputy or a program in citizen services or for a nurse at the health department, That's the way to communicate with delegates and senators trying to make policy. I'm a big believer that's the language to use. Not we assert local control or much better to talk about we have important things we need to do and this is going to take the resources away from that or the discretion away from that.

And the one thing on Blueprint, and I don't think people understand this, but on Blueprint when it was being discussed for years, There's a lot about equity. Everybody's on the same level. And unfortunately, I really believe that the only way they're going to get there is not just bringing them up to us, is by bringing us down. And Blueprint, if it had been done the way they wanted to do it a couple years ago, it would have hurt Carroll County. It would have brought us down. To me, having equity and bringing some down and bringing things up, that is not a goal. The goal should be bringing everybody up to the highest standard. And I really do believe some people don't like success because they figure, hey, how do you get the success? And one of the reasons we get success is for the reason that was mentioned by Commissioner Guerin. People who work, they make their kids show up for school, just those basic kinds of things. So don't hurt us because we are successful and tell us what to do. Give us the flexibility and the freedom that we are being successful.

on the blueprint i want to be super brief because that could be another 40 minutes but in 40 seconds let me say um as part of the original blueprint plan there was a scheduled review that's i guess being done now and is due to get published right at the end of this calendar year right right after the november election turns out um so we will have we'll potentially be armed with some analysis of what are we seeing results from the various programs that we've invested in through the blueprint and so forth, it's possible that that ends up being an analytical roadmap for this program is having the results, keep that, this other one, let's realign it or extend the timetable or whatever. They may need to save a billion dollars on education, of state funds on education as part of this reckoning. and to do so by saying we want to hold true to the central visions of the blueprint but maybe this particular thing we might have gotten wrong or maybe they learn from the waiver with the Carroll County Schools that maybe we have overweighted special populations of students at the expense of the non-special populations of students. I mean there's a variety of ways to come up with how you divide the same pie and maybe realigning that number can make this more implementable locally There's things that can be done on the education side that are short of just abandon the plan and flush it.

And that leads to me to a worry, and you're right, we could talk about Blueprint for hours. Hopefully they learn from the waiver, and I think that was part of the intention of granting it. But what scares me, MSDE, AIB, Kerwin, they all wanted this. I keep hearing how much we're improving because they've changed the parameters. It's Carroll County, whatever, they have 90 some percent graduation rate. Now it's like, what percentage did it improve? Not, you know, oh my gosh, Baltimore City doubled. Well, we can't double ours. So I'm worried that they're going to try to justify some of it with poor statistics. And I'm sure everybody's ready for that, too. But I think we need to be very cautious about that.

Commissioner Guerin, anything you want to add?

I just appreciate you being here year in and year out.

Thanks for having us. So do you want to do a picture before you take off? Sounds great.

I'd love to. sorry it's just me and i lack the honorable as you're pretty honorable i do my best she is more attractive i can't disagree at all

Thank you.

All right. Up next, we have a request for public hearing for proposed amendments to chapter one 50 forest conservation. Good morning to you both.

Good morning.

Good morning.

All right.

So good morning, commissioners. We were here before you on June 18 for a public hearing for requested proposed changes to Chapter 150, Forest Conservation. On June 23rd, the following Tuesday, we received an email from Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service that had an updated code which included items that weren't included in our recommended code for forest conservation. So we have since gone through their proposed code. We have a short presentation for you this morning to go through some amendments, which would be additions to our code and request to go back out to public hearing because we felt that these changes substantiated, you know, notice to the public so that if there were concerns, comments, we could take those into consideration.

So I'll move through the PowerPoint briefly here. I apologize for the deja vu you might be experiencing seeing this. But of course, what we're talking about is related to our Forest Conservation Code Chapter 150. The purpose of that chapter being to conserve county forest resources, protect forests, trees, and sensitive areas during development, and to implement the State Forest Conservation Act at our local county level. So on May 14th, we presented the recommendations of the code changes to this board. On June 18th, it went to public hearing per your vote to do so. And as Janet mentioned, on June 23rd, we received notification from the Department of Natural Resources that essentially there was some additional, the code content changed slightly. We are here requesting approval from the board for another public hearing today and anticipate public hearing and adoption of code changes maybe at the end of the month per your approval. So to get into The additional changes, there's just really two to speak of that were significant. So multifamily housing, which they define as single structures that have at least 25 dwelling units. The idea would be that if you remove an acre of forest, they're gonna give you a break on the reforestation rate that you would be required to provide. So normally we're at a one to one reforestation rate for any development. They have incorporated a quarter to one of planted forest for every one acre removed or a half acre of retained forest for every one acre to remove. So essentially their rules give a break to a more dense housing as a multi housing situation. Secondly, and kind of less significantly, there are priorities in terms of where trees should be planted. One of those high priority areas is always stream buffers. This change simply incorporates the fact that the stream buffer is no longer defined simply as 50 feet from a stream. It is defined as 50 feet from an intermittent stream and 100 feet from a perennial stream. And that's the change there. So that's the sum total of the major changes that came about with that additional information that DNR provided. Are there any questions?

Thank you very much. Any questions or direction from the board?

Does this make it, well, I see for the multi-housing, it changes a little bit. But on the widths, does that make it easier for them to be able to reforest, to have the wider place to put stuff?

Yeah, on the widths, it's simply defining that there's a wider area. When you're next to a stream that flows all the time, which is a perennial stream, there's a wider area to accomplish that reforestation.

So that would help them have more places to plant.

It would. It would also, on the flip side, what it does is we're also incorporating that definition and increasing the stream buffer at their mandate, at the state's mandate. And that also, when you're building something, keeps development further away from that stream resource. You're supposed to avoid that 50 or 100 foot buffer.

So this puts us in line with, are we totally in line with them now?

With the state, by and large, we are in line with what the state act says, yes.

And are we finding that we're getting any more places to put some of these tree farms? Well.

I would say there isn't an abundance of locations to create banks. There is a lot of competition for vacant land right now, whether it be for farmland, for houses, for solar. um and just development in general that you know there are locations we're trying to identify some you know around the county especially areas located adjacent to streams So, you know, there are some there, but prioritizing like if we plant a tree bank there, a forest bank, it does lock that land up in perpetuity. And is that the best use of that resource? You know, right now it may seem like it, but, you know, we have to think. further out and look at where it is. If it is an area located next to a stream, sure. More than likely that area won't be able to be developed now or in the future. But if it is just an open field that's upland, there's a lot of potential for that area. So whether it's us looking to create a bank or a private developer, I think those options are probably weighed

One thing, we were just talking with Mako about cost of housing and all. If you all come across anecdotal information, and I guess our development community will let us know too, which of these things, they're all cost drivers, but it seems like reforestation is something that's become more of a cost driver. And that's right off the bat. You've got to do X for this amount of land. So you just up the cost of that piece of property. So any of these anecdotal things you hear from folks, we're trying to collect that information so we can talk about it. Because in Carroll County, we're one of the least forested. I think we're the least forested county on the Western Bank. And as you taught me, Jonathan, thank you. You taught me a lot. But we've got ag preservation. You can't have houses and ag preservation. That's why we were trying to figure out if we could put some of that stuff on some of our ag land that's not farmable or tillable, whatever. But these are things that cause development to be increased. Yeah.

yeah um you know with some the proposed changes that have come from us at the county one of those is increasing what would kind of trigger forest conservation to be applicable and more on the individual single lot building permit side and increasing that threshold from 20 000 to 40 000 through these code changes we have had builders residents inquire about when these code changes will take effect because we think you know they're kind of waiting and seeing if i hold out a little bit longer maybe i won't have to address forest conservation or it may not be as much as what it is now So I think, you know, from that perspective, from someone looking to build a house on an individual lot and can keep their disturbance under 40,000 square feet, you know, where the current code would have made forest conservation applicable, these changes will provide a little bit more grace.

So this is not mandated. This is just, it's a model. So we, it won't take effect until we pass it. Correct. Okay. Gotcha.

Any other questions, comments, or direction from the board?

I move the Board of County Commissioners direct staff to proceed to public hearing on the proposed changes to Chapter 150. Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you so much.

Make note that 4 to 1, Commissioner Tyler is not in the room at the moment.

Unanimously of those present.

It's hard for Chris to record the votes.

Sorry, Chris.

I see the MP chair. We're good.

Thank you.

All right, up next we have briefing discussion decision for letter of comment for the Mount Airy annexation number 47, Waters Hill Road.

I do have a public comment, if you want to hear that first or later.

Yeah, let's do that. You want to do the public comment? No, we can let- Why don't we do the presentation first and then- That's a good idea. We'll do that first. Okay.

Good morning. Good morning to you both. I'm here with Carlisle Flapp from our Division of Comprehensive Planning. We're here to talk about the Mount Airy annexation number 47. We were before you on June 18th with this item, requesting a letter of comment to the town. you had requested some additional information on kind of the history of the notification about the annexation as well as a breakdown of the comparison between the town and the county zoning districts I provided that to you in a memo and we're here to go back through the presentation as long as you're okay with that and then discuss a possible letter of comment to provide to the town they have not made any decision on this annexation yet and so your letter of comment would help inform that decision-making process brief brief run-through of the presentation be helpful thank you this is Mount Airy annexation number 47 Watersville Road elite baseball LLC

is the parcel layout. It's located along the north side of Watersville Road in the 13th Election District in the 4th Commissioner District. Parcel 3 on tax map 75. This is what the annexation plat looks like. The total area to be annexed is approximately 50.98 acres. The area to be annexed does not include Watersville Road. There is a discrepancy between the acreage derived from the meets and bounds description in the annexation packet and the acreage described in the petition and on Estat. The discrepancy was a total of nine acres of a difference. So we've included that in the comment letter that they should resolve that discrepancy when they move forward in the annexation process. There's another view of the ortho of the annexation area, again, noting the discrepancy. The petitioner is requesting the annexation to develop the property as an athletic complex. Approval and processing of the development project will be done by the town of Mount Airy. This is what the property currently looks like. These are both views from Watersville Road just south of the property, westbound view and an eastbound view. As you can see, it's an undeveloped property and it sits vacant. The annexation area is currently in the county's residential 40,000 zoning district. Adjoining properties within the county are zoned residential 40,000 and conservation. Outdoor recreational area and indoor recreational area are both conditional uses in the county's residential 40,000 zoning district. The town of Mount Airy has indicated its intent to place the annexation area in the residential one zoning district. Public and private recreational uses are permitted in the town's residential one zoning district. The uses within the residential 40,000 and residential one are not substantially different and therefore a zoning waiver is not being requested for this annexation. The annexation area is located within the town of Mount Airy's ultimate town boundary with a low density residential land use designation as part of the 2023 Mount Airy Comprehensive Master Plan. The proposed annexation request is consistent with the land use designation. Under the 2023 Carroll County Water and Sewer Master Plan, the property to be annexed is classified within the W3 priority water service area and the S3 priority sewer service area. Through the agency review process, We have two comments from Comprehensive Planning. We recommend the town give public notice by posting the property prior to the date of the public hearing and notifying all adjoining property owners. We also recommend the applicant resolve the nine acre annexation discrepancy prior to the annexation. The Carroll County Department of Emergency Management and Communications comments that this proposed annexation may necessitate a change to the assigned patrol area of the Mount Airy Police Department within the CAD system specifically regarding the portion of Watersville Road that abuts both the existing town limits as well as the property being annexed into the town limits. The Planning and Zoning Commission recommends that they concur with the staff's findings that we are not requiring a zoning waiver. There's consistency with the 2023 Mount Airy Comprehensive Master Plan. The area is located within the city's municipal growth area and the future annexation area. And given the lack of comments from the Carroll County agencies, it will not overburden county facilities. During our hearing at the Planning and Zoning Commission, the Planning and Zoning Commission concurs with the staff's findings. They also conveyed their support for the annexation. However, they expressed concerns about The difference between low density residential land use designation and the proposed use, as well as the proposed uses, potential to create light pollution and impact local traffic conditions and water quality. The town of Mount Airy held a public hearing on this annexation on June 10th. And they have scheduled another public hearing, a town council meeting actually, on July 13th. they have it as an agenda item to review state and county comments though I'm not sure that they will be voting on it during that meeting yeah they won't be voting on it during that meeting So if there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer any questions. We do have a staff-recommended motion for the board to approve, sign, and forward the comment letter to the town of Mount Airy regarding annexation number 47, Watersville Road Elite Baseball LLC.

Well, thank you very much for that presentation, as always. And Roberta, I believe we have some public comment.

Yes.

David Bowershock.

Good morning. Good morning. This is Krebs members of the commission. I'm here representing elite baseball, one of the applicants petitioners for the annexation. Your role And considering this annexation request is really a very limited one. Principally, it would be to determine whether you want to grant a five-year waiver of zoning. But that only comes up if the zoning being sought is significantly different from the zoning that it currently has with the county. As you've heard from the staff, it's not. The densities in those two districts are essentially the same. They're both residential use districts. In fact, the statutory language talks about use districts. The uses allowed, including this one in both districts, are the same. So there is no need for you to consider a five-year waiver. Annexation is again a limited issue before the county. We look forward to addressing some of the many concerns that people have raised about what this project could do in terms of impacts at the site plan stage of the game. We know if we can't satisfy adequate public facilities codes adequately, that it won't get approved. We're aware of that. There was a lot of thought and a lot of time spent by my clients in putting this idea together. And it wasn't until after they had really mulled this over for quite some time that they decided to pursue it. So this isn't a whimsical idea. Now, we have, I'll mention, already addressed most of the concerns that you have probably heard about and that have been raised at the town of Mount Airy already. We've tried to address them in our presentation materials. We've annotated objective sources and data to try and provide independent sources to verify what they're saying, what my clients are representing. Some in the community have heard that. But that's a discussion that will take place if and only if the annexation passes and we wind up with a site plan that proves to be worthy of the town's consideration and approval. So for that reason, I would ask you to follow the recommendation that Ms. Fallott, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, has made on behalf of the staff. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Roberta, do we have any other public comment here? No, sir. Chris, do we have anybody on the line for public comment?

Sorry. No, sir, I do not.

All right. Thank you very much. All right. I'll open up to my colleagues for any comments, questions, discussion, or direction.

Yeah, I'll make some brief comments. I think there's a lot of people. There's a lot of interest in this, so it's worth mentioning that this comment letter, this is a standard procedure for the Board of County Commissioners. We've got to issue a comment letter regarding any sort of annexation. I think it's fair to say that, and I appreciate Ms. Daly and your staff for going back and sort of double-checking things, making sure the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. The letter is very objective. It's very matter-of-fact, lays out the facts as they are, The town will make a decision on this. I think their vote might be scheduled tentatively for some time in August with another hearing next week. As somebody who represents the majority of the people that will be affected by this, people that live within the town will be much less affected than people that live outside the town. The entire area is my district. I continue to have grave concerns about the impact of this proposed project and would argue very strongly that resident concerns have not been addressed. And that is my purview to say that as the person who represents all of them. So a lot of intense concern about this. A lot of people paying attention. They continue to pay attention. It'll be up to the town to decide. And then if they do, in fact, decide to move forward, a lot of serious issues needing to be addressed particularly that of traffic and congestion at an intersection that is already in my opinion extremely dangerous and this board for people who are watching closely will appreciate the fact that there is a renewed interest in trying to work with the Maryland State Highway Administration to get projects on the books. We've been doing a letter out to them for years with little effect, but now we've decided we're going to go a step further, provide our own funding to get studies going, to get engineering studies going, to get things up and running that really start to result in a sort of tangible improvements. in the county and maryland 27 is certainly uh high on that list i've explained that to people and that's something we'll be revisiting so um any any sort of development any sort of project along that corridor and there are several already proposed uh two different developments a couple different other things will have a huge impact on a road a stretch of road that everybody who represents people in that area agree is already uh under a lot of additional stress so But, again, I want to thank the staff for going back, making sure we checked everything out. Again, this is standard procedure, folks. The decision will be made by the Mount Airy Town Council here at an upcoming date, probably again in August. And that's all from me.

Thank you very much, Commissioner. Any other comments, discussion, or direction from the board?

Move the board approved, sign and forward the comment letter to the town of Mount Air regarding annexation number 47, Watersville Road, Elite Baseball, LLC.

We have a motion. Do we have a second?

Second.

All right. We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right.

Thank you, guys.

All right, up next, item number five, approval to purchase annual maintenance support and life cycle management for public safety radio systems. Good morning to you both. Good morning.

All right.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Department of Emergency Management and Communications requests your approval to continue the multi-year agreement with Motorola Solutions, Inc. for the annual maintenance support and lifecycle management for the Public Safety Astro 25 radio system per maintenance agreement USC7842 and SUA agreement. USC 3900 in the amount of $1,694,813.58. This amount is approved in the FY27 budget.

Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. This is our regular annual contract renewal. I take that back. It's not a contract renewal. It's a continuation of the existing contract. This is simply asking for your concurrence to be able to spend the money that is allocated in a fiscal year 27 budget for the county's emergency communication system, the public safety radio piece of it. Our emergency communication system includes a lot more than just that, but this is probably the biggest piece of it. This includes 24-7-365 support from Motorola, includes network event monitoring, remote technical support, network hardware repair, a remote security update service, onsite infrastructure response, annual preventative maintenance, network updates, and the ActiveEye platform, which is managed detection and response cybersecurity. um there are many agencies as you're probably aware that use this system everything from law enforcement firing ems and public works to the humane society recreation and parks the school system utilizes our system carroll community college does so there's a lot of capability here you may notice or have a question about westminster police department's piece of this there is a The same features that are included in our contract are included in Westminster Police Department's. The reason that this is set up this way, they have an enhanced utilization capability on our radio system. So they have their a couple of dispatch consoles at the Westminster Police Department. And this agreement allows Westminster Police Department and the larger system to be maintained at the same level. So we don't end up with the possibility of one system being at one upgrade level and the other system being at the other. It just continues to keep interoperable interoperability at the optimum level.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board? Move the Board of Commissioners approve the annual maintenance, support, and lifecycle management services for the Astro 25 radio system to Motorola Solutions, Inc. in the amount of $1,694,813.58 and authorize the Director of Emergency Management and Communications to approve the resulting monthly payments.

Second. We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any other discussion?

I just have a question. Does any of this qualify for 911 reimbursement?

No. No, Commissioner. This is all radio, so it doesn't touch the 911 portion of our system at all. Thank you.

Any other discussion? All right. We have a motion. We have a second. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much. All right.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Up next, item number six, approval to purchase, maintain, support, and upkeep for the Central Maryland Area Radio Communications Network, otherwise known as CMARC.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Department of Emergency Management and Communications requests your approval to renew the annual maintenance agreement with Motorola Solutions, Inc. for Carroll County's share of the cost for the maintenance support and upkeep of the CMARC regional radio system. Per service agreement, USC 39827 in the amount of $65,000. This amount is approved in the FY27 budget.

OK, commissioners, on June 15, 2006, the county entered into an agreement to contribute annually towards the cost of the CMARC regional radio system. So it is the Central Maryland Area Radio Communications Network. At that time, the CMARC system was born, for lack of a better term. It's really intended at that point in time to create or increase interoperability among the Central Maryland jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction has the same cost. So all seven jurisdictions that make up the central Maryland region have the same jurisdictional cost. The cost has not increased ever. And one thing I do want to note, the CMARC system technology has moved along. Right. So 2006, 20 years ago, it's no longer going to be supported by Motorola after calendar year 27 ends so the system is forecast to sunset after that point so at that point in time none of the jurisdictions will be responsible for paying for it anymore because it won't exist in its current form so i did want to make that note so next year our costs will be cut in half that's what's forecast to happen but this year they remain the same

thank you very much for that any comments questions or direction from the board the board of commissioners approved carroll county's payment share of c-mark maintenance support and upkeep to motorola solutions inc and the amount of 65 000 as well as authorized the director of emergency management and communications to execute the fy 20 27 maintenance support and upkeep agreement with motorola solutions for the c-mark regional radio system second we have a motion we have a second is there any discussion

Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much for that.

Thank you. One quick thing I do want to mention before you leave. Just want to say thank you to you and your staff for everything they were dealing with, with all the storms. It was mentioned in Priority Carol this morning, but I just want to thank you personally because I know that's an exceptional workload for you all to handle, and it's something I think people become too accustomed to just thinking it happens, but we know what goes on behind the scenes, so I just want to say thank you to you and the staff.

certainly thank you for the for the uh the note of appreciation i know our folks our folks are actually downstairs working in the county office building today i know that they appreciate uh hearing that um we like being taken for granted but we don't really want to be taken for granted i understand thank you for all the warnings you try to yes try to keep us up to date yes and it's constantly changing It is. Today is another day that everybody should be prepared for some heavy rain, potentially, potentially some wind, but really the flooding is potential for today. So but.

Valerie, one issue I brought up this morning, we all did praise you a lot because you deserve it. And preparedness is a big deal. It's a huge deal. But the biggest, the only criticism I heard, and it's not your fault, is BGE and the communication. Is it something that people don't know how to know what's going on with BGE? Because, I mean, there were long-term outlets outages because the trees were not being removed from the line. So the crews couldn't get in. And a lot of these are medically fragile people, and it was extremely hot. So that made a bad situation. So how would a person get more information? So they knew, is it going to be out for two days? Do I need to go somewhere? How would somebody like that get more information from BG? Or do they not know because of the trees that were down?

It's a combination of a lot of things. It's always a challenge for BG&E to know exactly how long it's going to take to restore a particular location. They do, my understanding, and I have seen it over the years, they do try to take the approach that they will try to restore the largest groups first. So if unfortunately you live in an area where you're the only person on that particular line and a tree comes down across it, it may take a little bit longer. It can take longer depending on what has happened to the line. If equipment needs to be brought in, if a new pole needs to be brought in, all of those things contribute to it. So it is very difficult for PG&E to provide a really reliable and targeted estimated time of restoration to any particular customer. The most effective way, and sometimes it gets, I know people get frustrated, it's very challenging sometimes, the most effective way is to continue to reach out to their 800 number, report the adage online, and it sounds obvious. sometimes people do not remember to actually report and that's one of the first questions we always ask and some people are like well yeah of course I reported it but we do need to ask because we've run into so many times over the years where people haven't reported their outage and if BG&E doesn't know that somebody's out they can't start fixing it so if a neighborhood is out and it used to be this way I'm not sure if it's still like this

you know, the more people that call in, then they know there's a lot of folks. But now they can, I think, tell themselves on their systems. But is it still important for every person to call in?

I believe that it's still important for everybody to call in. They do have those systems that they can see. They monitor their their systems remotely. They have all of that infrastructure, but it's still helpful to them to have that totality of information. The more information that they have, the better.

And then there were situations where people said they're it said they were online they were on but they weren't on so I guess they would have to keep report I guess what I'm trying to figure out it's difficult when you had to people had to leave their homes because it was going to be for they did say it could be for an extended period of time so many people be prepared so it could be till Tuesday evening it was several days so some people had to leave and then it said their electric was back on and then it really wasn't back on but it was it was abnormal for to be out so long I guess because it was such a lot of damage but for those medically fragile people and again it was extremely hot that you couldn't really stay home unless you had a nice cool basement right but for those folks is there anything else we can recommend

The biggest thing that we recommend is really to make sure that before a storm ever comes out, and you mentioned it, I believe, preparedness is a huge deal, especially for anybody who is dependent on medical equipment, who's dependent on refrigeration for medications, who is dependent on needing air conditioning for some medical condition. really big deal to get a battery backup for your medical device. Think about all of those things ahead of time. And like you said, have another backup plan to that. Make sure you have a neighbor that you can possibly go to um you have a good relationship with uh throughout the neighborhood so people can help uh rely on each other because in a large disaster this one really what it feels like it when it's your house um but it wasn't really a community-wide disaster as in you know we had a huge tornado come through and we're not going to have that um but in a situation like that it's The county can only do so much, right? We have 171,000 people. So we really do rely on the whole community working together to help each other out.

And I think in that situation, there were a lot of folks that did have neighbors or people within the community that had electricity, so they easily could have

stayed with them thank you but thank you I just want to thank you all because you really can't control that and neither can really BGE but no and it's a challenging situation when a storm comes through like that especially on a holiday weekend it was it was a it was very challenging time and then we had another one come through after that and it's difficult and they they have online maps correct and if you call

with a cell phone and you set your stuff up with a cell phone, they will send you texts, and they update them pretty well. Now, and I think that was the case this last time, you might not like what the text says, but, you know, and for us, if it says three hours, I don't fool with anything. If it says 24 hours, I go ahead and get the generators hooked up, you know, but it's frustrating.

yeah and it can be very frustrating you know we understand that but that's why we're very we're so proactively trying to make sure that people are prepared for situations like this thank you thank you very much thank you commissioners thank you all right up next item number seven pre-approval of fy28 continuum of care application development and matching funds the department of citizen services hello celine how are you

Hello, Debbie, how are you?

Good morning, Commissioners.

Before you start, I want to thank you and all the people in your department and some people at the state level. I reported a problem with a veteran. And it is a problem. And they are, everybody's checking, everybody's working as hard as they can. They haven't gotten, like BGE, they didn't get the answer we wanted yet, but they're going to. And I just want to thank everybody.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Okay. So, commissioners, again, thank you. I'm Celine Steckle, the Director of Citizen Services, but also serve as the co-chair of our Circle of Caring Commission. which is our continuum of care with homeless services here in Carroll. And I'm joined today by Debbie Standifird, our grants manager, and also Carly Long, who is our COC coordinator. As you noted, we're here before you seeking approval to develop an application for the FY28 continuum of care and matching funds. The county serves on average between 500 and 600 homeless individuals each year with chronic homeless, unaccompanied youth, and adults over 62 requiring more intensive services and resources and supports. The Continued Care Notice of Funding Opportunity, the NOFO, is a national competitively ranked application that provides funding each year to assist Carroll County in providing homeless services and housing. We have long utilized COC grants along with state and local funding to provide a continuum of housing and supportive services. We've come before you over the past year to update you on HUD's new priorities and goals that include changes. to the COC NOFA and new eligible projects. Although court injunctions halted changes to the last NOFO, the FY28 NOFO has been released with similar shifts in eligible projects. Our COC was very proactive, and we used this past year to review the shifting eligible projects that HUD had been proposing to have robust conversations to see how we could pivot our homeless services so that we could match HUD's new priorities while ensuring currently served individuals were not displaced during the transition of the programs. The current NOFO provides an opportunity for us in Carroll County, and we're pretty excited to note that we could double our HUD COC funding for homeless programs and services if awarded the competitive bonus funding. HUD notes that they are restoring the COC program to its original goals of reducing homelessness and optimizing self-sufficiency by focusing on meaningful outcomes, expanding competition, prioritizing treatment, economic independence, and emphasizing law and order. They plan to accomplish this through many goals, but several that are most important are investment in transitional housing and supportive services only projects, increase in competition, and increase in equitable bonus funding, which is important for us because it used to be a random distribution. HUD is now shifting money away from larger jurisdictions to smaller COCs who align with their goals. They're also offering a competitive bonus larger than we have seen in the past 25 years. Carroll County is well positioned with our alignment with HUD's goals and has an opportunity to double the amount of funding, as I noted, to support homeless services here in Carroll. The competition is split into two tiers for funding and eligible project types. Tier one is for renewal projects only, while tier two is a competitive tier with bonus funding available. Supportive services is an expanded resource under this competition. However, there is a required local match of 25% for supportive services. In order for us to move forward with our application, we would like you to consider two contributions to this application match. One includes a project which our COC has identified as a need for several years, and that would be to develop a drop-in center for homeless individuals in the remaining space at the Cove. We have talked about this as an idea before you in the past, but this space would then serve as a hub for supportive services to be offered on-site. Peer supports, financial education, housing counseling, health screenings, substance use behavioral health assessments, housing stability, case management services, and many other things could be offered in this space. The location would also serve as an overflow shelter on extreme temperature days, alleviating the use of the senior center, which requires daily setup and teardown cleaning when it's operational. The Cove is the ideal location for this drop-in center. As federal funding is already tied to this building, with the obligation for the building to be used for homeless services because of the family shelter also being co-located there. Our COC has a history of operating a drop-in center, which had been developed during the COVID time, and it was housed at a local church. It was operated by HSP. However, we did not have access as a COC to operational funding to continue the drop-in center after COVID. In a two-year span, that drop-in center served 184 individuals. It only offered minor supportive services, though, due to it being during COVID, and also the primary purpose of that was for disease prevention for homeless individuals. The other request that we are asking is for cash match to the projects. The board has always contributed a cash match to the COC for citizen services and HSP projects. In FY27, the budgeted match is $50,000. approximately $50,000, but we anticipate needing an additional cash match for FY28 for the supportive services projects. The exact match will not be known until projects are submitted and the Circle of Caring ranks those projects, but should not exceed an additional $100,000. We will come back before you in mid-August for approval with finalized cash match numbers required.

Say that a few more times.

It's a mouthful. But as I said, we are very excited about this competition because it does provide an opportunity also for other supportive service providers to access funding to help provide the supports that in some cases we've not been able to fund appropriately. So we have a lot of partners at the table. We're looking forward to seeing the letters that come in from the partners and the projects that they're proposing. We have an idea of what some may be, but we're looking forward to seeing how we can build this system.

thank you very much any questions comments or direction from the board i just have one quick question i was reading through the briefing paper here and i know it was uh the fy 27 match is what fifty thousand thirty seven dollars and you're saying you're not expecting it to exceed an additional hundred thousand so we'd be looking at 150 and change that correct okay i just wanted to put that out there for the public anybody that's watching the meeting or following up later um with that I move the Board of County Commissioners direct staff to develop the continuum of care application commit the space at the Cove as an in-kind match to the project and consider increasing the cash match when found when final projects are presented we have a motion we have a second second we have a motion we have a second is there any further discussion

I just want to mention, and I'm not going to read them off, but if you look at the shift in HUD's policy priorities, I mean, sometimes people say, what difference does it make at the local level who their president is? And forget the politics of the big stuff, but this is the kind of thing that our current presidents policies align with our policies. And when you look at the list of what they were a year ago, the policy priorities and that where they are today, first of all, we're eligible for double the money because our priorities align and our priorities. I think we're successful with what we do. So, you know, we don't talk about these local things, but just the things that that this administration has prioritized aligns with us much better than what it used to be and we're getting more resources for it and we'll get better outcomes as well so it's not just the front page of the newspaper what you read these kinds of things matter to us and we appreciate that so i'm glad we're eligible for more and it's aligning with the things that we we care about and want to do and think are successful and that's good well said all right we have a motion we have a second is there any further discussion

Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. Up next, item number eight, contract award for reentry of medicated assisted treatment program RFP number 26F-5-25-26. Very technical item number.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Department of Citizen Services requests your approval to award a contract for the re-entry medicated assistant treatment program to Potomac Healthcare Foundation in the amount of $324,187. The Department of Citizen Services solicited proposals on the county's e-procurement platform public purchase and received two responses. An evaluation committee was formed to conduct technical and financial review of the proposal submitted. The committee evaluated all proposals based on criteria detailed in the RFP. The highest ranked firm for this project is Potomac Healthcare Foundation. The amount is approved in the FY27 adopted budget.

I wanted Vicky to share some detail about because it is the current vendor that is the recommended awardee and so we wanted to share some detail about how that process has worked in the past how we expanded a little bit of the service deliverables that we wanted in the in the RFP we issued and then how that's going to impact the services at the detention center

Good morning, Commissioner. Good morning. So, yes, we are very pleased to be able to continue the relationship. This came about when the MAT program was required to be started. So, of course, when you first start, you kind of have no idea how this is going to look. But it's been a great partnership. It's worked well. It's always been evolving to the needs. The staff has been great. So since its inception, just a little bit about this piece of the MAT program. Participants that are eligible and in the MAP program are required to participate in various types of counseling. That's part of the requirements of the overall program. Also, as part of this, those that are eligible, when they are either looking to transition to anything that the court deems they're eligible for outside treatment, or if they're in the process of being released, then that staff works with them, works to do the warm handoff, if you will, work on kind of putting services together for them, continuation of services, also if they need help with applications for treatment centers if they need assistance with medicaid anything like that they are part of that process to kind of help that the benefit of i guess the warm handoff is those that are eligible in the program are offered it. They are not required to take it. So just to give you a little bit of background, we have from last year, FY25, roughly 300 participants throughout the course of the year. It doesn't mean the whole time we're in and out of the program. And approximately 75% of those took advantage of those services for the reentry services. We're still obviously compiling numbers since June just ended, but we're seeing the similar trends. We're seeing a similar number of participants. So the fact that at least 75% or more are taking advantage of that is a great thing. um so yes it's always changing and i was going to say the but the staff does a great job they they work with all of the individuals in the program to really make sure they get those benefits that they can to help you know kind of ease that transition in those multiple ways and i don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about anything in addition so i i did just want to note that we one of the things we realize obviously from all the the work that we do with the health department

um and is that it's those first few weeks when someone is released from detention that are most critical if there was an addiction issue and substance use issue because those are the most likely weeks that someone will overdose as they're released so to have that warm hand warm hand off to ensure that they remain in treatment and they continue those services is so crucial and so that's why i think this program has been really beneficial and we're excited to be able to continue this work so if there's any questions

Any questions, comments, or direction from the board? Move the Board of Commissioners award a contract for the reentry medicated assistance treatment program to Potomac Healthcare Foundation in the amount of $324,187. Second. We have a motion, we have a second. Is there any other discussion?

I have one question. Sorry. You said 75% or more are taking advantage of the program. Is that of the total population or those who are eligible? Those are eligible. OK. And one personal point of privilege. I got pulled over last night by one of your deputies. OK. Wait a minute. I already told these. It was 11 o'clock at night. I was very tired. And I usually drive too slow. I thought, hmm, am I getting a ticket for this? Anyway, he was following me. I finally pulled over. And I want to thank him. I did not have my lights on in the rear. they got turned and you know when he came up to me I said you know every time they come up to a car they only knew they're walking up to you know and you don't think about that luckily I was a grateful person that he turned my lights on I could see the front they weren't on the back so I appreciate them looking out for the safety of us because every time they pull up to somebody they don't know what they're coming up with so thank whoever it was I know his face I don't remember his name but I uh I was very grateful thank you thank you Commissioner

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Up next, we have term contract renewal for operation of Carroll Transit System.

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Department of Public Works, requests your approval to renew the term contract for the operation of the Carroll Transit System at a cost of $3,114,800 for FY27 to Ride With Us Incorporated. The Department of Public Works solicited the proposals for the operation of the Carroll Transit System last year with Ride With Us being the only respondent. This project is grant funded and has been approved by budget.

Good morning, commissioners. This is for your approval of the second year of our five-year contract with Ride With Us. We had one out to bid last year. They were our only respondent. So we are continuing with that service. This is for our public transit and our veteran service. So this is a total cost for both services to Ride With Us.

Any comments, question, or direction from the board?

I move the Board of Commissioners approve the renewal of a term contract for the Carroll Transit System to ride with us, LLC, in the amount of $3,114,800. We have a motion.

Do we have a second? Second.

Second. Second? All right.

We have a motion to move a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed? Motion carries 4-0 because Commissioner Gordon is not in a seat. Right, Roberta? All right.

Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you.

Up next, item number 10, Spending Authority Energy Management Control Services.

Morning, Commissioners.

Morning.

Morning.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Facilities requests your approval to encumber funds for energy management control services for various county-owned buildings to Johnson Controls per term contract number 12143 in the amount of $638,677. This will encumber funds for FY27, and the amount is approved in the FY27 budget.

Commissioners, Johnson Controls has been supplementing Division of Facilities Preventive Maintenance Program for over 20 years, providing essential support for all the government infrastructures. They deliver expert maintenance and service on their critical large-scale assets, which include, but not... everything, chillers, boilers, cooling towers, heating, cooling pumps, all the HVAC controls across the 26 county buildings that's currently on the BAS building automation system, including six libraries and also the college. The contract enhances the efficiency, ensures dependability, functionality, and extends the equipment lifespan just to have the routine maintenance and the expertise looking at these large asset items. When you have a unit that's running at top efficiency, you're going to have cost savings. So that's the main goal in this program and to support the large assets that we can't handle within facilities.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board?

I move the Board of Commissioners approve the Energy Management Control Service to Johnson Controls per term contract number 12143 in the amount of $638,677. Second. We have a motion.

We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries 4-0. All right. Up next, I thank you. Up next, item number 11, contract award for Hawksville Road Storm Drainage Improvement, RFB number 80F82526.

Good morning.

Good morning.

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Division of Engineering, requests your approval to award the contract for Houcksville Road storm drainage improvement to Stamballs Incorporated in the amount of $218,225. The project consists of removing existing inlets and storm drain pipes, installing new inlets and storm drain pipes, constructing new trapezoidal road waterways with optional berms and driveway tie-ins, and removing trees as part of clearing and grubbing. This project was advertised on the county's e-procurement platform public purchase and received one response. This amount is within the FY27 adopted budget.

This project includes the installation of approximately 391 feet of storm drain pipe and other drainage facilities along Hawksville Road just west of the Hampstead Bypass to address drainage complaints we received from the residents in those areas. We've been working with the residents for some time now to secure the necessary right-of-way and easements to complete this project. We expect to complete this work late summer, early fall before the weather turns cool and we get a chance to get some grass growing.

Any comments, question, or direction from the board?

I love when procurement gets to talk about trapezoidal waterways. I just love that.

Was that a motion? Was that a motion, Commissioner? No, no. It was an affirmation of trapezoidal contingencies. Wow. I'm not sure I can top that. Do we have any direction from the board?

I move the Board of Commissioners award the contract for Hoaxville Road storm drainage improvement to Stanbaugh's, incorporating the amount of $218,225. Second.

We have a motion, we have a second. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much. Thank you. All right, up next, item number 12, contract award for engineering design and construction related services for two minor bridge structure replacements. Bridge number CL-235X on Stem Road and bridge number CL-240X on McKinstry's Mill Road.

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Division of Engineering, requests your approval to award a contract for engineering design and construction-related services for two minor bridge structure replacements, replacement of bridge number CL-235X on Stem Road and replacement of bridge number CL-240X on McKintry's Mill Road to Wallace Montgomery & Associates, LLP, in the amount of $793,750, The Division of Engineering solicited proposals on the county's e-procurement platform public purchase and received eight responses. An evaluation committee was formed to conduct technical and financial review of the proposals submitted. The committee evaluated all proposals based on criteria detailed in the RFP. The highest ranked firm for this project is Wallace Montgomery and Associates LLP. The amount is approved in the FY27 adopted budget.

As was mentioned, this project is design replacement structures for both STEM and McKinstry's Mill structures. McKinstry's Mill structure was built in 1930 and is currently an 18-foot-long concrete structure. STEM Road was built in 1960 and is currently a 19-foot-long steel beam structure. But with both these structures being only 1.4 miles apart, it was decided to combine the design for these two structures. The close proximity will allow the designers to combine site visits, evaluations, reducing travel time, and expense, and anticipated that we'll have similar design for both these structures. Wallace Montgomery has performed this work for us in the past.

Well, will you get state or federal money for any of the design? And then will you get it for the construction?

No, both of these are minor structures that are under 20 feet. They're not eligible for any federal dollars. We're hoping that we can get this 19 foot long one to 20 foot. Um, so that just like we did for Cape Horn, that once it's done, then it can go on our, our federal registry and we will then be eligible. So, but we'll see if the NR allow us to open up the waterway anymore.

And I'm sorry, please. Mr. LaNouche, you and Mr. Brown know exactly what issue I'm going to raise, rural water supply. Are we continuing to take a look at these types of projects to see if they're eligible?

We will, especially McKinstry's. The structure only sits a few feet above the water, and there's not much water there. They're very short, so there's not a lot of waterway. But we will look at both of these as part of the design. one of the challenges we run into is they need a pool of water to drop the rural water supply in. But DNR and those folks don't allow don't like us to modify the stream bed at all. A lot of our designs recently, we're not even removing abutments, we're leaving abutments, so we're not in the stream as much. So we we have competing interests and whatever we can, we will address this. Thank you.

Any other comments, questions or direction from the board?

If the Board of Commissioners were to contract for engineering design and construction related services for 2 minor bridge structure replacements replacement of bridge number CL 2, 3, 5, X on stem road and replacement of bridge number CL 2, 4, 0, X on McKinstry's Mill Road to Wallace Montgomery and Associates LLP in the amount of $793,750. Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any other discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor. Aye.

All those opposed.

Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

All right. Up next, item number 13, a contract award for county office building IT renovations.

Good morning. Good morning.

Good morning, everybody.

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Division of Building Construction, request your approval to award a contract for renovations for the Department of Technology Services in the county office building to Keller Brothers Incorporated in the amount of $89,174. This purchase will be made through a Frederick County contract that was competitively bid, and this purchase is within the FY27 budget.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the Board? Move the Board of Commissioners approve the contract for renovations of the Department of Technology Services to Keller Brothers, Inc. in the amount of $89,174. Second. We have a motion.

We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Up next, item number 14, change order for construction, testing, and inspection services for the State's Attorney's Office Building.

In June of 2025, a purchase order was issued to ruling associates for testing and inspection services at the site of the new state's attorney office building. Since that time, a change order has been issued in the amount of $23,181, which exceeds the 10% threshold. In accordance with resolution number 1162-2022, the board approval is needed and required to authorize these additional expenses. The additional costs are attributable to additional testing and inspection services that were required. The change order is within the FY27 budget as well.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board?

Move the Board of Commissioners approve the additional costs to Ruling Associates, Inc. in the amount of $23,181. We have a motion.

Do we have a second? Second. We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries 4-0. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Up next, item number 15, contract award for the purchase of replacement grinders for the Piney Run Wastewater Pumping Station.

Good morning.

Good morning. Good morning.

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Division of Utilities, request your approval to award a contract for the purchase of two replacement grinders for the Piney Wastewater Pumping Station to JWC Environmental in the amount of $76,807.59. This award will be made through a single source procurement. The bid amount is within the FY27 adopted budget.

Good morning again. As outlined in our briefing paper, the two wastewater grinders at the Piney Run Pumping Station have reached the end of their useful service life and are in need of replacement. Both were installed in the early 2010s. One has failed and is beyond repair, and the second is nearing the end of its expected service life. Replacing the grinders now is the most cost-effective approach and avoids the increased operational and environmental risk associated with an unexpected failure. Once the new grinders arrive, my staff will install the equipment. Any questions for me?

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board?

Move the Board of Commissioners award a contract for the purchase of two replacement grinders for the Piney Wastewater Pumping Station to JWC Environmental in the amount of $76,807.59.

have a motion do we have a second second we have a motion we have a second is there any further discussion so for those listening you guys will install it with this is just the purchase that's correct any other discussion hearing none all those in favor aye all those opposed motion carries unanimously all right up next item number 16 contract award for the construction of the liberty water tank booster pump station

The Office of Procurement, in cooperation with the Division of Utilities, request your approval to award a contract for the construction of the Liberty Water Tank Booster Pump Station to Combro Contracting Incorporated in the amount of $2,429,375. These improvements were advertised for bid on public purchase, and three bids were received. These are summarized below, and this amount is within the adopted FY27 budget.

So, Commissioners, this has been a four- or five-year project in the works, and we're very excited to have reached this point right now. So there are two main components of this project. The first is obviously the construction of the new water booster pump station within the base of the Liberty Water Storage Bank. And the second part of the project is to connect that booster tank to the high elevation zone, which means we'll have to run about 2,400 feet of pipe under Johnsville Road from the water storage tank to the intersection with Bartholo Road at the high school. The engineer's estimate for this project was $3.803 million, and the low bid submitted by Conbro Contracting was $2.429 million, or approximately 37% below the engineer's estimate. And just as general background, the engineers' estimates are typically conservative and reflect current market conditions, material pricing, and construction risk. The competitive bidding process resulted in a substantially lower cost than we anticipated, and this is an excellent outcome for our water customers. Combro Contracting is an experienced utilities contractor and is currently working on a pump upgrade project for us at the Freedom Water Treatment Plant. Their work to date has been very high quality, and I fully expect that work to continue with this project. With that, I'd be happy to do one of two things, answer any additional questions you have, or if necessary, give you more background information on why the booster pump station is needed for the service area.

I have a question. On the booster, does that mean certain people that are in higher levels don't have the water pressure? You said it's redundant, but is it helpful as well?

for people in higher elevations what it does it basically gives us a a new means of getting water to the higher out the western part of the district it's called the high elevation zone the the the the east side of the the service area the top of the water tanks is at a lower elevation the high zone they're about 20 or 30 feet higher in elevation so we need to pump water from the low low zone into the high zone

But do they have less pressure now? I mean, will they notice a difference?

No. It'll be virtually the same. It's just a much more efficient means of getting, of us getting water to the high elevation.

No question. Because I always have good pressure. So I appreciate that. It must be on the east side or whatever. So I will move that the Board of Commissioners award a contract for the construction of the Liberty Water Tank Booster Pump Station to Combro Contracting, incorporated in the amount of $2,429,375. We have a motion. We have a motion.

We have a second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Up next, item number 17, Spending Authority for Solid Waste Facilities Environmental Monitoring Services, Maryland Environmental Service.

Make sure my cohort in crime is here. Yeah.

Good morning again.

Morning, gentlemen.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Solid Waste requests Board of Commissioners approval of an FY27 environmental monitoring program work under work order with Maryland Environmental Service in the amount of $347,734.60. Work includes permit and regulatory required environmental monitoring at northern landfill and foreclosed landfills. Funds are included in the approved FY27 SWEF operating budget. No additional funding will be necessary.

Commissioners, good morning. MES has performed routine and on-call environmental monitoring services for Carroll County for our waste facilities since 1996 through an intergovernmental agreement. As was stated, northern landfill and foreclosed landfills are included in that project, Hoods Mill, John Owings, Bark Hill, and Hodges. MES also provides support services related to these monitoring systems should they be required, and they have been in the past, and they've performed very well. The fiscal 27 environmental monitoring program to perform is budgeted at $347,734.60. It's a 2.3% increase from fiscal 26, primarily just a general program cost increases.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board? Move the Board of Commissioners approve a work order with Maryland Environmental Service in the amount of $347,734.60 for FY2027 Environmental Monitoring Services at Northern Hood's Mill, John Owings, Bark Hill, and Hodges Landfills.

Second.

We have a motion.

We have a second. Is there any discussion?

Sorry, this is my first time to hear all these things, but I'd question about the monitoring. I just, I happened to go see the Hodges landfill that just has some of our ball fields on top. And I saw that the little things that come up out of the grounds at the monitor.

They're gas vents. If they're the white ones, they're gas vents.

And I've never really driven back in there before. I just know the thing is sort of sinking in. But is there any kind of issue with the gas that comes out of those? What happens with that information? Considering we use it for ball fields.

The vetting process itself is just really to relieve the gas, whatever gas pressure might be in the landfill itself. It is just vented to the atmosphere. It's not tested.

So it's not a harmful gas?

Depends on point of view. It's more harmful in quantity than it is that we're seeing out of that facility, which is why the state allows us to just vet it. Gotcha.

I was just looking at that and thinking, hey, this would be much better suited for maybe some solar panels and get some flat land that keeps caving in for these ball fields. But thank you for answering. I will move that the Board of Commissioners approve a work order with Maryland Environmental Service in the amount of $347,734.60. for FY27 environmental monitoring services at Northern, Hoods Mill, John Owings, Barkill, and Hodges Landfills.

We have a motion. Do we have a second?

Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much. All right. Up next, item number 18, contract renewal for solid waste engineering services through Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Solid Waste requests your approval to renew the yearly solid waste engineering services contract with the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority in the amount of $260,568.38. Services provided are for landfill gas system operations, monitoring, and maintenance. Funds for this scope of work are approved in the FY2027 budget.

Okay, and commissioners, in fiscal 23, what was the Bureau of Solid Waste, now the division, engaged Stearns, Conrad, and Schmidt, otherwise known as SCS Engineers, through the Northeast Authority to provide gas system operations, maintenance, and monitoring and reporting for Northern Landfill, Hood's Mill, and John Owings Landfills. These are three landfills that have active landfill gas extraction systems rather than the vents. that you saw at Hodges. So these are systems that have to be much more closely monitored and maintained. SCS has performed this work for Carroll County for over 10 years. They are a recognized technical expert in the field of landfill gas management. And therefore, we respectfully request the board approval to renew the contract for fiscal 27 in the amount of $273,533.88. Any comments, questions, or direction from the board?

If the Board of Commissioners renew the Solid Waste Engineering Services Contract for the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority for FY 2027 in the amount of $273,533.88. Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye. All those opposed?

Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Up next, item number 19, Contract Renewal for Recovered Materials Operations and Transfer.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation of the Division of Solid Waste requests your approval to renew the yearly recovered materials operation and transfer contract with the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority in the FY27 budgeted amount of $935,480. Funds are approved in the FY2027 Solid Waste Enterprise Fund operating budget. Balsam LLC performs the scope of work under the authority contract.

Through Carroll County's membership in the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, the contract was consummated in 2020 for loading and transfer of single-stream recyclables, otherwise known as recovered materials, with Balsam LLC. These recyclables are delivered to Carroll County's northern landfill and are loaded and hauled by Balsam to the Waste Management Recycle America sorting facility in Elkridge, Maryland. From there, they're marketed to manufacturers or other end users. The contract was for an initial three-year term with five one-year renewals at the county's sole discretion. The contract ends June 30 of 2028, and we will be rebid in early 27. The fiscal 27 budget service charge is approximately $66.82 per ton, again, just for loading and transfer of that material. And we anticipate approximately 14,000 tons transferred for processing. Therefore, we respectfully request approval to renew the contract for fiscal 27 at an estimated cost of $934,480.

Any comments questions or direction from the board move the Board of Commissioners renew the recoverable materials loading and transfer contract with balsam LLC through the Northeast Maryland waste disposal authority for fiscal year 2027 and grant spending authority in the amount of 935,480 dollars.

We have a motion to second is there any discussion. Hearing none all those in favor aye aye all those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. All right. Up next, item number 20, contract renewal for Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Solid Waste requests your approval to renew the yearly contract with Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority in the amount of $195,000. The Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority is an agency that provides waste management contract and project management, planning, and financing services, among other benefits for its member jurisdictions.

Carroll County has been a member in the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, which we'll hereafter call just the authority, since the early 1990s. Through Carroll County's membership, authority staff basically serve as what we call a force multiplier. They procure, maintain, and manage agreements for the county's solid waste master plan project, transfer and disposition of waste and recyclables, some of which we're discussing today, our electronics recycling program, household hazardous waste programs, landfill gas operations and many others. They also provide professional consulting services, contract management and specialized legal services to the county on an as needed basis. This membership is renewed annually and sufficient funds are included in the fiscal 27 approved budget.

Any comments, questions, or direction from the board? The Board of Commissioners renew the contract for the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority in the amount of $195,000. Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you both very much. Up next, item number 21, contract renewal for processing and recycling of recovered materials through the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority. It's just a little off.

Sorry about that. The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Solid Waste Requests Spending Authority for processing and recycling of recovered materials through the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority. The FY27 budgeted amount for this service is $1,208,000. $1,480 funds for the scope of work are approved in the FY27 Solid Waste Enterprise Fund operating budget. Under this agreement, Waste Management Recycle America is to process and market recyclables delivered from the Northern Landfill Transfer Station to their Elkridge, Maryland facility. The county's contract is held with the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, who in turn holds a service agreement with WMRA.

Okay, through the county's membership with the authority, we hold a contract with Waste Management Recycle America for processing and recycling of recovered materials. So this is the end user or the end location of where the prior contract with Balsam halls of material too. This work was rebid in late 2025 and a contract signed in 26. The contract terms for five years with three one-year renewals and we're entering year two of this contract term. Fiscal 27 budget forecast is for recycling approximately 14,000 tons of single stream material at a net processing charge of $86.32 per ton. Therefore, we respectfully request board approval to continue the use of the authority contract with WMRA Elkridge with a fiscal 2027 budget cost of $1,208,480.

Any comments question or direction from the board with the Board of Commissioners approve an agreement with the Northeast Maryland waste disposal authority for processing recycling recovered materials through WM recycle American grant FY 27 spending of earth authorization the amount of 1,000,208,480 dollars under this contract second.

We have a motion we have a second is there any discussion.

I have one question what is the cost per ton of waste versus the recycle.

to transfer away or inbound into the landfill?

Well, I guess, do you use a combined? I mean, when you go charging a contractor for trash, what would that be?

The trash coming in the door is $70 on up, depending on what the per ton, depending on what the category is. Recycling is $55 a ton coming in, because we don't want to set the bar too high, the fee too high, so we're pushing people away from recycling. So unfortunately, it doesn't quite cover the cost on the recycling side. But those are the values coming in.

But are they actually recycling it? Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I just knew on the plastics, I knew they're not recycling as much as the others.

There are stipulations in the contract with the vendor for, let's say, percentages of what they have to recycle, but they really have to go through an auditing process to ensure that what they're doing, what they say they're doing, they're doing. We would not go any other way. Thank you.

Any other comments, questions, or discussion? Well, we have a motion. We have a second. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And item number 22, spending authority for ongoing scrap tire recycling.

The Office of Procurement and Cooperation with the Division of Solid Waste requests your approval to spend up to but not to exceed $105,000 for ongoing scrap tire recycling to Austin Contracting, Inc. Austin Contracting, Inc. is contracted through the authority to perform these services. This amount is approved in the FY27 budget.

Through Carroll County's membership, again, in the authority, the contract was consummated in May 2022 with Austin Contracting for recycling of scrap tires delivered to authority member jurisdictions. At Northern Landfill for fiscal 27, we project to recycle approximately 600 tons of scrap tires at a cost of $175 a ton for a total cost of $105,000. Any comments, questions, or direction from the boards?

Move the Board of Commissioners approve ongoing scrap tire recycling to Austin Contracting Inc. in the amount of $105,000. Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously.

Thank you very much for that. And I do have one really quick question about this. Do we know when the next tire date is? I've had a few people asking.

When the state of Maryland decides that they're going to do one. Okay. The state funds them through MES usually, and they have not funded one for three years. I think it's about the time.

I was going to say I thought it had been a little while. It's been a while.

Whether it's ag tires or regular tires, they haven't done one in a while. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

All right. We'll move into the public comment section of the agenda. Roberta, do we have anybody here for public comment? No, sir. Chris, do we have anybody on the line for public comment?

Yes, sir, we have one caller waiting. They could use star six to unmute. Please identify yourself.

Yes, good morning. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Thank you. Good morning, Commissioners. Catherine Adelaide, one of nine members of the Carroll County Republican Central Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I really appreciate the technology and also thank you, Chris, for checking in to see if I had comment on any of the other items, which I did not for today, but appreciate that. Thank you for your Priority Carol comments. I really appreciate those. Hold on. I didn't set my timer here. Somebody will have to cut me off. And I personally will be celebrating the 250th birthday of our country for the full year. I watched the president, the fireworks. We had some hail. And I just think our country deserves for us to keep commemorating and remembering it for the entire year until next year. So I do appreciate all the celebrations that went on and fight all the storms okay on to Central Committee news our last meeting was held Thursday June 25th thank you I'm sorry yeah June 25th thank you vice president chair Krista for stepping up to the plate and running the meeting for us she will continue in her term for a second term on the Central Committee congratulations we have no meeting in July our next meeting will be August 6th at 630 at the Senior Center And our big news for the central committee right now is carnivals, which was mentioned previously by the commissioners. We're just finishing up Winfield. I will be there tomorrow night. I hope you'll come visit me. Saturday was our last night. And then Reese will begin on the 20th. Hampstead will begin on the 27th. So we have promotional materials, pro-life materials. We're promoting our general election candidates. We'll have signs. So we do encourage everybody to come out and visit us and put signs up in your yards. Okay, next, the election, election integrity, of course. First, I just want to give a big shout out and a great thank you to all the candidates that ran. Without candidates, voters can't vote. Without candidates, the Board of Elections, they don't have a lot of work to do. So I really appreciate everybody who ran, and I want to encourage you, obviously, congratulations to the winners, but those who did not win, please stay in the process, for example, My current treasurer at Carroll County, Right to Life, Peggy Neville, ran for central committee, and she didn't make that, but she's doing a great job. So there's so many volunteer opportunities. So I really encourage all of our candidates to continue to volunteer. Let's see. Early voting was way too long. Poll watching, we needed more poll watchers. There was, as usual, a huge problem with the electioneering line. The voter turnout could have been better. I'll be graceful about that. I was just thrilled to see all of our candidate signs, though. I just can't. It was a sea of signs, and it just shows the American system of democracy and our participation in it. So I love the signs. So politics is a full contact sport. If you can't take a little competition, then take a cab or volunteer somewhere else. But anyway, it's a great process. I will be making a final election integrity report for the central committee by next month.

Please finish your comments.

The Carroll County elections. The Carroll County elections are officially certified now, so there's an end to that process. We have Carroll County Right to Life on July 16th at 7 p.m. at the Senior Center. And thank you and have a great weekend.

You as well. Thank you very much. Chris, do we have anybody else on the line for public comment?

That's all I have, sir.

All right, we will now move into the administrative session, admin open for our session today. And I would like to bring something up today. I've mentioned it to all of my colleagues prior to today because I don't like catching people off guard, but I'd like to request that we take a position on the special legislative session that seems that is going to occur in August on congressional redistricting. And I would like the board to consider a motion in opposition to not only the session, but to the redistricting itself. As everybody knows, it's certainly out of cycle with the census. I don't believe that it is the right time to do this. uh... there hasn't been enough notice there hasn't been enough time for debate about this about uh... whether to send it to referendum uh... the understand enough time to understand the ramifications in the consequences it could arise out of this and to be uh... absolutely blunt about it this is a purely politically motivated uh... estimate here you're negating uh... legitimate census driven representation for citizens uh... the argument that other states are doing this out of cycle is not sufficient and we cannot seek to claim the mantle of democracy while simultaneously undermining it with something like this. So I'd like to open up the floor to my colleagues for discussion about whether taking a position against this might be something that they are interested in.

Well, I for one, absolutely. Thank you, Commissioner Vigliotti, for mentioning it. It's worth weighing in. So I appreciate the, I would like that opportunity.

I agree and exactly what you just said if you wrote it down it's perfect what you said and I don't know if we need to add it's up to us you know that there's so many more pressing items that need to be attended to that our constituents probably would like us to have had some certain some more certainty on to spend time waste time bringing people together for this I just think is a is a total political theater

Very well said.

Commissioners, any... Can we remind them also that we're not a democracy, we're a republic?

Good point. Very good point. And I will agree with all the comments made by my colleagues. I'll be exceptionally brief on that. But yes, I think given all the circumstances this state is facing and the people that live here are facing economically and everything else, I think this is completely off base.

Thank you very much for that as well. So hearing that, I would like to make a motion for the Carroll County Board of Commissioners to oppose the special legislative session on congressional redistricting, as well as opposing the act of redistricting out of cycle. Second. We have a motion. We have a second. Is there any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, everybody. Does anybody else have anything for admin open today?

All right.

Hearing none, we'll move into agenda review. You've got the wonderful Shelby filling in for Wanda this week.

And we get to say good morning to her still.

That's right. That's right. All right. So first up, we have our first week of agenda review for the week of Monday, July 13th. Monday, July 13th, 2026, Transit Advisory Council with Commissioner Kyler. Tuesday, July 14th, Employee Service Award Breakfast. I believe, Roberta, that's Pleasant Valley this year, I think, right? I believe so.

I don't think it's at the community college this year.

I will be attending that.

I will make sure you know exactly where it is.

And that is a typo. It's 7.30 in the morning. It caught me off guard for a second. I will be in attendance to that as well.

It's a breakfast all day kind of situation.

Yep. Breakfast or dinner. All right. Wednesday, July 15th, emergency services advisory council meeting with Commissioner Guerin. Thursday, July 16th, open session for the Board of County Commissioners, 8 o'clock a.m. Closed admin followed by open session at 9 o'clock a.m. Item number one, Priority Carroll. Item number two, renewal of memorandum of understanding between county commissioners of Carroll County and Maryland Classified Employees Association Incorporated through the MCEA Chapter 550. Item number three, approval of use for not-in-Carroll funding committed for opioid issues for fiscal year 2027. Item number four, contract renewal for after-school program for Carroll County Middle Schools. Item number five, spending authority for independent financial auditing services. Item number six, did I say that wrong? Item number five. I'm sorry, I missed item number five, spending authority for independent financial auditing services. Item number six, change order for request for additional work for associate first, excuse me, change order for request for additional work associated with the replacement of water service laterals on White Cedar Court. Item number seven, change order request for additional work associated with the replacement of water service laterals on Pitch Pine Court. Item number eight, contract award for purchase of replacement pumps for the Raincliff Wastewater Pumping Station. Item number nine, change order for Dustin for State's Attorney Construction Contract. Dustin? Dustin. Is that the? I think it's the company. Okay, all right. I just wanted to double check because it's a name that's just kind of there, you know. Item number 10, spending authority for household hazardous waste event services. Item number 11, spending authority for services at the residential recycling drop-off area. Item number 12, approval to purchase commercial insurance policies for station personnel and assets. Item number 13, approval to purchase third-party claims for administration services. Item number 14, approval to purchase excess workers' compensation policy for the county employees. Item number 15, approval to purchase excess cyber liability, followed by public comment, admin open, and agenda review. And then that afternoon, vet talk at the Masonic Home in Westminster with Commissioner Kyler. Friday, July 17th, shows nothing on the formal calendar. July 18th, shows nothing on the formal calendar. And Sunday, July 19th, Commissioner Guerin has the podcast. Are there any changes or alterations for the first week?

Just note that if we had not moved all these things to next week, we'd still be here for like another hour.

Very good point, Commissioner. Very good point.

Is it that time of year that we're doing it? Is that why it's so many things?

It's a jump off, and then we rely for a holiday last week, too. All right, we'll move into our second week of agenda review. That is the week of July 20th. So Monday, July 20th shows nothing on the formal calendar. Tuesday, July 21st, Chamber of Commerce breakfast. I will be hosting that at the Tawny Town branch for the Chamber of Commerce.

Taxpayers are paying for me to listen to you.

I'm sorry for your suffering. 9 o'clock a.m. Planning and Zoning Commission with Commissioner Gordon. Wednesday, July 22nd, MAKO Legislative Initiatives Subcommittee Virtual Meeting with Commissioner Kyler. And then also the MAKO Legislative Committee Meeting with Commissioner Kyler as well.

I'm going to have one thing if I could just jump in.

Oh, please, yes.

um shelby if you could just check with uh planning and zoning i do believe 5 p.m that evening we've had an additional meeting so i want to make sure we get that on the agenda and i will be in attendance are they still doing nine or it's five instead of nine it'll be five i believe it'll be five five in the evening for that one so we'll have nine a.m on the 21st and i believe the 20 seconds that follow-up evening meeting which would be so there's a nine and there's a five yes okay 9 a.m on the tuesday on the tuesday and wednesday should be at 5 p.m all right thank you very much for that catch commissioner gordon that just came up last night so five not six right it should be five p.m start at six don't think oh maybe it's i'm sorry maybe it is six p.m no just we'll double double double check great idea thanks for letting us know absolutely

All right. Thursday, July 23rd, 8 o'clock a.m., county commissioners closed admin, followed by open session at 9 o'clock a.m. Item number one, approval to purchase courthouse security upgrades 2.0 for the circuit court, followed by item number two, priority Carol. And obviously we are letting the judge go first because he has a long day of adjudication to proceed with. item number three carroll county water and sewer master plan spring 2026 amendment cycle request for public hearing item number four 2025 carroll county planning annual report with the department of planning and land management item number five grant approval to submit application and acceptance of award it but it does not say what that is for unless i'm missing that just any award we want it's good any award right there'll be more detail i'm sure okay all right i don't know off the top of my head sorry No, no, that's all right. I just wanted to make note of that. Item number six, exercise option to purchase the David A. Yingling property for a county easement. Item number seven, Maryland Housing Certainty Act complete application. I guess we will be completing the application is my understanding. Right. Okay. And that will be followed by public comment, administrative session open, and agenda review. Friday, July 24th, Shelter Systems 50th anniversary. At Shelter Systems in Westminster, Commissioners Kyler and Gordon will be attending. Saturday, July 25th, shows nothing on the formal calendar. And Sunday, July 26th, Commissioner Krebs has the podcast. Are there any changes or alterations for our second week, the week of July 20th?

July 21st, I'll be at the Planning Commission meeting, and I guess it's the 16th. I had it done. But I don't know. Whatever the 16th is. OK. Verify that time. Just those two dates.

Thank you very much, Commissioner. I apologize.

Oh, OK. We'll make sure everyone knows when the next evening Planning Commission meeting is.

I just got an email from Planning. And it is the 15th at 6 PM, July.

15th of July at 6 PM, Chris, right?

That is correct. Thank you.

It's also the day before the 21st.

It's the 15th, not the 22nd.

Yes, 15th. Yes. That was my error.

The 21st is the morning. That's their normal morning.

Correct. That's still.

This is an unusual one.

This is a secondary one, yes.

Well, all right. Is there anything else for the good of the order today?

Yeah, I'd like to do a brief comment. Sure. You talked quickly and correctly and got us through the meeting well.

Thank you very much, Commissioner. Second. Thank you to everybody for your hard work and your participation.

Can I make that as a motion?

If you want to. It's totally your prerogative, Commissioner.

I thought he was going to get you a proclamation.

As your motion to adjourn. I'd rather not.

All right. Hearing nothing else of substance, is there a motion to adjourn?

So moved.

We have a motion. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you.