County Commission - Regular Meeting

like to call to order to the county commission work session for December 1st. Uh sheriff, would you lead us in prayer? Dear heavenly father, thank you for your many, many blessings. Thank you for our family and friends. Uh thank you for allowing us to come to together tonight uh uh to take care of county business for the taxpayers of Dixon County and just uh bless our decisions, lead us to make the right ones uh for all impact. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Amen. Everyone stand for the pledge

allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mer, please. Yes, sir. Mr. Simpkins here. Mr. Ledger, here. Mr. Mane, here. Mr. Batty, here. Mr. Dawson, he's not here. Miss Spicer here. Mr. Buckner. Mr. Britt here. Mr. Penny here. Mr. Williams here. Mr. Grove here. Miss Gray here.

Good to see you all. I think Commissioner Dawson's feeling under the weather. We'll think about him on this cold night. First order of business is approval of the minutes of the November 3rd, 2025 work session. Open for a motion. Motion by Commissioner Petty. Second by Commissioner Spicer. Any questions or discussion hearing? None. All in favor vote by stating I. Opposed. Thank you. Next item is committee reports. I know we have appointments for a committee next, but is there any other committees to report tonight? Hearing none, next order business appointments, agriculture extension committee, Commissioner Simpkins.

Uh, yes. Um, like I say, my term is up in January and I asked Miss Becky Spicer to take that and she said she would. U, so I want to bring her name forward to put her on in my position. All right, that's a motion by Commissioner Simpkins. Have a second. Second by Commissioner Mawne. Any questions or discussion? I've stood up here for three years. I went along most of it, but Miss Becky, I don't know about Well, we can refer to this and refer to the next meeting if we could form a committee to study it.

I don't I don't want to be on it. I'm just Hey, if y'all for it, I'm for it. But if it's a mistake, I just want it on the record. I don't know. Does anybody else go to the record on this before we go any further? We have you now, Commissioner Grove. Thank you, Commissioner Spicer. You okay? You'll very good. We have a proper motion second. All in favor of stating I opposed. Apparently, it was done.

Congratulations. Um, under new business, I've left off I left off two things and I want to add those tonight before we get to the school's facility planning. The first one is 911 interlocal agreement. Shauna Aerson is and she's got a new name now, but uh she is the uh head of 911. The 911 board hires the director of that. So, she's hired by a county board. uh she is has been working uh under some unusual circumstances about how her pay and insurance and retirement is. We've been in discussions with the 911 board and our attorney has been with their attorney. Uh what we'd like to do is bring her in as a county employee. So she would receive anything a county employee gets, but we're to be reimbursed plus cost by 911 to pay for it. So the the the net effect basically to us is zero by bringing her under. This is already has a president. We do this with the 23rd judicial task force in this same way. So this would make sense for her. It would allow her to have a reasonable insurance cost uh where she's having to get it on her own now and uh her retirement where it's not funded on the side. So, I would like to I'd be glad to answer any questions, but I'd like to add that to these items so we can move that on to the December 15th meeting. Be glad to answer any questions first. If you don't have any questions, open the floor for a motion. Motion by Commissioner Brit, second by Commissioner Ledger. Any discussion hearing? None. All in favor stating I.

I.

Opposed. Thank you. Uh, I left something else off. I wish I had a good excuse, but I don't. So, I'll just tell you the truth. I left it off just like I did the first one. Uh the next one is u is uh a process we've been working with Harper Ridge Fire Department. Commissioner Batty's been involved with that. What we've looked at is trying to close some of the gaps we have between fire departments across the county. As I think you all are well aware over time, the goal is to have a fire department within five drivable miles of a fire station. uh one for the response time and two for the ISO rating to help lower people's insurance. Uh as we've worked across the county to look for different things we could do on that, uh it came to our attention a couple of years ago and we finally think we're at the position where we can move forward and that's going to be my recommendation tonight uh to work with Harpath Ridge. They own property at W basically at the big bin on Highway 49 at Wide Oak Flat. Uh they own an acre and a half there. What we're proposing to do with them is for them to give us that property and we build a fire station there much like the one we have at our airport and then in turn lease it back to them for a dollar a year for 50 years. Uh that will uh close the gap we have all the way from the Chetum County line to Charlotte. Everybody along 49 will be within five driving miles. Uh we met with the board of directors here in this about two weeks ago, three weeks ago uh to have that discussion. Their board of directors unanimously in favor of doing this. Uh I'm going to defer to this point to Rob Fiser where he can show you what design we're talking about and the cost on that. Where did you say the location?

It's basically at the corner if you and I I'll get you more specific. Go out 49, you get to White Oak Flat and the big left-handed curve. You're probably about a quarter a mile on the left down there. Okay. And this property that the Harpath Ridge does own. And I got one for Mr. Bry.

All righty. Thank you. Um, this goes along with that 10-year plan that we've worked on almost 10 years. U, we're almost winding up with that one and going to start on phase two. Um, but this piece of property, uh, like I said, we come aware that, uh, Harbor Ridge owned this about two years ago. Uh, we did the five mile study, uh, from this location. And of course, ISO works off of the five road miles, uh, from a fire station. Um, and as of August of 25, uh, within five driving miles of this location, you're looking at just under,00 homes. that would be under the five mile umbrella. Um, and we've looked at a building plan. If you'll look on I I'm assuming it's page two, it's going to be a 40x 50 uh metal building. Uh, pretty much the same thing that we built out at the airport. Um, it's big enough to house um at least two, possibly three uh fire apparatus in there depending on what they want to uh uh to operate out of. Um, and with the construction uh we're looking at roughly, you know, $195,000 is what we're looking at for this project, being able to build this for them and uh get this into the county protected under fire coverage. And this is one of the largest sections that is without fire coverage as of now. And it gets Harper Ridge jurisdiction all the way up to the city limits of Charlotte covers all the way to the river uh to the Chetm County line upwards of the McGomery County line. Um I think it's is it old metal road or metal road that y'all station 2 is on?

Uh so it gets that coverage all the way that butts up to Cland Furnace. Um, and this is, like I said, we, this is a project that we've looked at for two or three years, and uh, I think it's, uh, one of the best fits for us at this time. I mean, that that spot on White Oak Flat is almost dead center of where we needed that five mile radius from that point. Commissioner Batty, did you have anything you want to comment on this? I'd like to make a motion to approve.

Okay. Well, we'll allow that at this point in time. Do we have a second? Second by Commissioner Mwane. We'll carry on the discussion on that. Have proper motion a second. U is there anything else that you have to add Mr. or Mr. Reagan on your your part? I don't unless anybody has any questions.

The funding uh as you all know we've closed out the books uh for the year. We hadn't got the final audit, but we know where we are in our funding and there should be funds available when we get the final audit in debt service. So, it's not going to require any we're we're having going to use excess funds to pay for this. Uh so, it's not not going to require additional funds or tax increase. It's just money that was saved in there that'll help take care of this debt. So, uh, it's, uh, one of those I appreciate the folks from Harpath Ridge and and again, I always make this speech, but you know, all of our safety people do such a great job in this county, but this county would not be as safe as it is if we didn't have volunteer fire and uh, they're putting a lot of time and effort into it and getting little reward out of it. But put us being in a situation where we can build a building to help them in turn help our community. I think it's it's one of those to me it just makes too much sense on that. But uh with that I'll be glad to answer any questions while Mr. Fisher or anyone else.

I got one. Mayor, you said right here on the bottom in that last line that you want to hire full-time staff to to man the building. That's not in this part. That's just this is just a piece that I pulled out of the plan. I would love to hire that, but it's not part of this plan. No. Well, I'm going to say this again. I've said it before. We've got a full-time fireman sitting down here in the city of Charlotte. Correct. We we we supply 40 hours of pay there, but we've been doing it with part-time employees. Yes.

Yeah. And and and my vision my vision's not changed. We need to staff out there. Charlotte needs to take care of Charlotte just like White Bluff takes care of White Bluff. Burns takes care of Burns. Dixon takes care of Dixon. I mean, I'm all for the building because that's a rural area, but I believe that our our manpower needs to shift to take care of the rural communities and let the cities take care of the cities. That's just my opinion on it.

Thank you. Any other questions? Have a proper motion second. The vote tonight is to move this on to the regular session on the 15th. There are other questions, comments. All in favor vote by stating I. opposed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Fischer. U last now we're actually back to the agenda here, facilities plan. Uh I know we've been a lot of discussion for a long time on schools facilities plans and I've had a lot of discussions with Dr. Sutherland and several of the board members on this. Uh, I'm really pleased at what's coming forward to us tonight because I think we finally maybe getting a point that I know y'all been asking for for several years now that we can map out a long-term plan with it does help the schools financially to get take care of some of the building needs moving forward. Uh it's um I asked them tonight if they would to keep it at a higher level because the no decision needs to be made tonight. Really, we just need the presentation so they can give you their input uh on where they want to go and of course open the floor for questions and then come back during December and possibly January to kind of iron this out and see where we need to be. it is December and January and possibly February and then if we go forward with this being something we tie in in February 1st of March but uh probably what we're talking about is a lot of money uh you know we have a lot of money set aside in debt service that's already been pretty much ready to put into this project we've been talking about it for a long time so I think we're about to that point I know there's funds the school want to put into it uh but I'm excited we can listen to a longer term plan kind of get where they're going get your feed feedback and input over either tonight over the next few weeks and then ask them to better define this as we go forward. So with

that long-winded introduction, uh Dr. Sullivan and please please come to us.

Mayor Ry County Commission, thanks for having me tonight and I am so thankful for members of my team and the school board being present here. I'm going to defer to Mr. Steve Haley, who is the vice chair of the school board. He would like to speak with you. But before that, I want to make sure that each of you received a folder. If you didn't, we'll get you one. There are many documents in there that will be referred to tonight. And uh if you have questions, we'll be glad to answer that. Again, this is a highlevel conversation. We won't get in the deep weeds. Uh, but we'll answer anything that you have to set this up for our next meeting uh, January, February. Mr. Haley,

thank you. Dr. Southern, mayor, county commissioners, thanks for giving me some time up here. I think you've allowed me to two hours. I'll try to keep it under that if at all possible. It had a two in it, but only a zero to follow. And I I'm on the 20 minute time frame.

It's um, it's always fun to talk until you get in these positions. So, what I want to try to do is is just what the mayor said is give you about a 30,000 foot view. Um, a lot of the school board members are here tonight and I really appreciate that. It's um uh they put a lot of work into this and this board started this endeavor months ago and it really wanted to get our first project well underway and see results from that. um as we did planning for the future. As you try to prepare documents to give county commissioners, it's it's so intense to try to identify every step. It's just impossible. So, we felt like that this view was probably the best way to go with it. So, you have a folder in front of you and inside that folder, you're going to have a few documents. Um I want you to look at the one with the photographs first. That that's um for the pictures taken from the current 177 fund. If you recall a year ago, year and a half ago, we you passed a resolution for 15 million for four major projects with some minor projects to fill in the gaps. Those four projects were to uh start the process of the um civ road property we purchased from the county for future transportation maintenance needs or school needs. Uh that was done um within a couple of months. We also um worked on the CT building at Creekwood which is in final stages. Uh our CT director is here tonight. If you want to speak to him after the meeting that can answer the level of that, but it should be ready to open very soon. The school of stuff is finishing some final touches inside. It's a very nice building. It's a very nice program. CT is up and coming and and we are going to try to focus on that and support them all we can. Um we'll be addressing that more in the future too with some of the planning. The um other project we worked on uh it it's very well spoken of in the community as a a ball field. Um we

referred to as a sports complex. It's it's more than a football field. It's more than a turf field. It all began when the drainage became an issue at that school many many years ago. Uh the actual track couldn't be used any longer. And so we we had a very comprehensive comprehensive plan uh by our architect L. Cook Martin and Mr. Corley have done a great job getting that plan going. Uh construction is well on its way. Unfortunately, rain called them uh right before they finish the paving. So, it's probably been in the spring before it's it's completed, but the uh field aspect is still ongoing. They were working today out there as far as that goes, too. So, you'll see a picture of that. If you haven't been out there, drop in the upper gates, step over and give it a peek. Uh new lighting lot of the complexes, too. So that that 177 funds we refer it to is well underway and I hope would be complete by springtime. Uh since that time we've also uh used the money that you approved out of our reserve funds for roofs roof projects at Steuart Burns Elementary, White Bluff Elementary uh referred to as a high wall at Dixon County High School. I think we've all seen the the wall that was felling from storms years ago over the auditorium that had be taken down and we went ahead and reroute the lower sections below it while that construction was going on. It just made sense to spend that money and do that project where the whole section will be done for the future, not just fixing a wall. So, that's been a big project and it's um uh getting toward it final stages also. and of course um the recent uh project we are approved and are getting worked on at Burns to alleviate some air issues out there. So all those come out of reserve funds and the heading under this topic falls under funding but a lot of times funding from the public standpoint you'll hear uh you're putting money into a football field or you're putting money into lights. This money we know comes from our reserve funds um excess fund, rainy day funds, whatever you want to call it from years past where sales tax revenues

and other revenues have come in in excess of what our budget operations are. I for one like the way this commission and the mayor have have budgeted our operation funds every year since I've been here. I think it's very conservative and I think it it it plays well for the schools. um when we don't take that excess fund and put towards onetime expenses as we didn't for several years, it does allow that fund to falsely grow and give an image that everything is wonderful and there's a lot of money sitting there when in fact a lot of these roofs need to be done. A lot of these projects like the sports complex and things like that need to be worked on. Uh I want to thank y'all for recognizing that and approving those excess funds. those funds are from past years and and I hope with sales tax remaining well for many years to come that that we will continue to have that ability to put that money towards other projects throughout the county that need to be done to maintain our buildings. Um inside that package also you're going to see what's very commonly referred to and lovingly thought of by some of the school board members as the green dot map. I think Miss Miss Teals probably posted that name and made it stick or we all really like it. But you've actually got four or five green dot maps in there. I want you to look at the one that has no lines in it. It is just a big old county map with a lot of green dots on it. Similar to this one right here. It'd been nice to get these on a projector. That's probably my fault, but the reality is timing wasn't going to allow for me to get into this as deep as I wanted to. Those green dots represent a student in our school system in the county. Obviously, many of them overlay each other, but the whole point of looking at the green dot map is to look at density. And this endeavor started um when we started talking months ago about how to plan for future schools. We kind of broke it down to three categories and and I told them then that the three

things I look at and I hope that they would get attached to would be occupancy, location, and condition. Any project that you want to do for a school building would need to pass those three tests. Do you need it for occupancy ratings? Do you need it for a location improvement? Or do you need it because of condition? And if we meet those three tight needs, I think it's an easy sale to the public, to the county commission, and to ourselves that that project is worthy of doing. Uh that being said, we took a meeting basically for each one of those subjects and went into depth, some of them three, four, and five hours to discuss. I'm going to try to minimize that into three, four, five minutes. But I do welcome you to contact myself or any board member or if y'all want to do something in the future, discuss any of these individually and how we've worked through that, feel free to to let us know. Um, occupancy is closely tied to location, but with occupancy, we have to look at how many kids are in a school. And I hear the comment, um, I'll use uh, Creekwood High School, for example, it you hear the comment, it's ready for,600 students, and it is. There was a study done several years ago by um the Lewis group commissioned by the board to look at all the schools and get the occupancy and the condition and all the information on these schools. They did a good job compiling a good report and making it very comprehensive and they will tell you themselves that they didn't make any information that didn't exist already. Most of it was within our schools. I just put it into a good format that that helped the board plan, think through and look ahead. But when you rate a school, you have to use the occupancy number based on number of classrooms, core requirements like cafeteria, library with the hallways,

those type things there all play a role. So you can have a school like White Bluff Elementary with 900 kids, but have a small cafeteria and even though it'll hold 900, it doesn't function for 900. But Creekwood, you know, is one of the newer schools and it was built for 1,600. Uh when you get about 80% of any of those numbers, you're getting full. Every classroom is not going to have 30 students in it or 25 students, high school, middle school, elementary rated differently, but they're not going to have the same number of students in every classroom every time of every day. You're going to have, especially in high school, some programs like the EMS program, it may have 15 students in it. It may have 12, but it may be in a classroom that was rated for 30. Uh, you you're not going to utilize the 1600 occupancy for that high school under likely any given situation other than we had to because of an emergency somewhere else. So when we look at the schools, um, occupancy is a number that's rated that school and it consistently is apples for apples for every school. So when you start getting to the 80% mark, you're already at a full level. As a board, we should be planning for the next school to offset that number. Um, that was considered this time and it was considered uh at a level from a location that I'll pick up on in a few minutes and take it from there. Also in your package you're going to see a graph shows got to come an orange sighting to it. Pitch color siding. That right there is is a table that takes that Lewis group's number and it puts what the rating is for each school. That's the rating for the maximum capacity which we just discussed. But it also breaks it down into an 80 and 70% category. Once you start getting at 70 and you start seeing that number grow at a fast pace,

you should be planning what you're going to do, whether it's reszone, combined schools, how you going to make it work uh when you're in that 70 range, but at 80, you're you're essentially getting full. You're going to still we have a couple schools that are that are over 80% and they make it work every day. It's just not ideal. Uh by far and large, our county as a whole is probably in the mid60s somewhere as far as occupancy. So, um, countywide, we're in pretty good shape as far as the space. It's utilization of that space. Uh, in this bracket also, you'll see your high schools separated from your elementary, separated from your m your middle. And I do that more from my own thinking. And I do apologize to the board. They haven't seen this yet. It was it was done last night. It was taken from some information that I did back when we built the burn school. But uh you'll be getting a copy of this. But it it shows the the breakdown in elementary, middle, and high schools and shows what our occupancy is and at 80% how closely those correlate with each other. That will give you give you the direction in the future if you have to add space. Does it need to be in the elementary division, middle, or high school? The board did discuss any future expansion will likely go into an elementary on the south, west, south, or west side of the county. in that cluster somewhere and it was based on numbers that that we had received and worked with. But this kind of proves that number a little bit more because it puts it into a category. So that number is for you to take look at. It's data that we use to try to help plan what we're doing for occupancy and location. Back to our green dot maps. There's one for just the high school zones. This one for just the high school zones. I start looking at schools from a high school down as opposed to elementary up because at the end of the day, your kids

going to wind up into a high school. If you have high school capacity, then you can build middle school and elementary into them. Your high school is your most expensive build you'll do as a school system. and building a system that forces a high school that might not be needed would probably in my opinion be one of the the least cost-effective ways of planning future. This will be in the long range planning that will come out from the board later on. But we all started at the high schools. Our high school capacity looking at your graph shows us having capacity in our high schools of 950 kids per grade across the county. I'm going to refer one last chart to you. The white chart. This white chart is the one that shows how many kids are in each grade. The first one shows what schools are in. The white one shows what grades they're in. So, looking at 12th grade, there's 511 students enrolled as of November 11th in Nixon County Schools in the 12th grade. falls within the capacity. The high schools are going to have four grades, 9, 10, 11, and 12. Your your numbers for the high schools. Having our setup we have right now will take us into the future many years. Uh we use a ninth grade annex at the high school in Nixon, which creates capacity of 600. Uh which gets us to the point where our high schools occupancy wise are in good shape. If you keep it to that level right there, that should cover our high schools for many years down the road. From the high school level, there's also a chart that shows the middle schools. Across the top, it'll say um all middle schools 256.

You'll see the same county map with the same green dots except you see four colored areas. Some of those colors get pretty close together, but you'll see four different shaded areas. That is our middle school zones. Burns and Dixon Middle feed into the Dixon High School, the lower half the county. White Bluff, Charlotte feed to Creekwood, northern part of the county. When you start merging those numbers together along with the chart that shows how many is in each school capacity, number of kids per grade, you'll start seeing the correlation of what space do you have. When you go back to your school chart, it's going to point real close to Charlotte having 400 plus kids with a capacity of 450. That is probably where this conversation will come to with the board over the next month or so is what to do in Charlotte. Uh been discussion over the past about a Creekwood Middle School. The problem from my standpoint with the Creekwood Middle School is you build one middle school to feed one high school and you can't reach far enough out to bring another middle school into that high school. You limit the use of Creekwood down the road. So you can adjust that by zoning, but I think the two middle schools feeding one school creates a better high school and gives you more flexibility down the road. That complication of two middles into a high. Looking back at the chart is really going to get magnified when you throw the elementaryaries on top of that too. Your last chart with the color coding next to the last chart will say all elementary. It's going to show you eight elementary zones tied in with your chart with the school numbers will show you how they feed into a middle school.

Sometimes it's not as simple as saying this elementary is full. Let's add on to it. When you add on to it, you tinker with the numbers that feed into the middle that feed into the high. As a general rule, if you have a high school for 15,600 kids, two middle schools with 800 will take care of one high school. Two elementaryaries take care of one middle school. So if you have a middle school with 800 75800 capacity, two 75800 elementaryaries will feed into that middle school and be balanced. The reason being there's six grades in elementary, there's three in middle. So you can take two elementaryaries to feed into one middle school. Two middleles feed into one high school. That is a general layout that we look at is how can you shift the schools to make that work. The I'm going dig out of that one pretty quick because that gets into a lot of conversation. But thinking about from that aspect and you'll see how the zoning aspect plays in what we're studying and what we'll present. what we present will be based on the feasibility and how that will work. With that being said, I want to look at the last aspect of condition. Condition, we look at our location. We feel like our high schools are there for a long time. Creekwood's roughly 25 years old. Dixon hitting 55 years old. We've done a lot of work in Dixon since I've been on the board. More so in the last 10, 12 years. a lot of work that you don't see. Mechanical upgrades, roofing upgrades, sections at a time with reserve money. No real major projects that we have, you know, capitalized 10 or 15 million at a time on, but over the years, our

maintenance director has has worked on sections with reserve funds to fix sections of roof. We did a a big mechanical interior job 8 10 years ago on classroom wing and you may remember your kids being there talking about the sitting tile out for a year. So replacing all that piping. We did a big gym project. We did a heating and air project. We've done a lot of things that add up to a lot of work on that school. Um that tied into the high wall project we're doing now leaves us with a lot of roof left to do, but we feel like that school is going to be there for a while. So the money we're putting in there will help maintain that school for many, many years to come. Our high schools are in decent shape. The location is where they're at, and that's what we'll build around. Our elementaryaries, for the most part, barring a couple of them, are 25, 30 years old. Um, Dixon Elementary has got some age to it. It's in relatively good shape. Uh, its size is small. You'll see some uh recognitions on that coming at another level, probably not in this project. But after we looked at all this together, we felt like that middle school level, you got White Bluff, Dixon, and Charlotte are all very aging buildings that need a lot of capital improvements. So I think what this board is going to put together over the next month will focus largely on some remodeling, replacing, remodeling where it's costefficient. Mr. Coraloo along with Al Cook and Martin have already started studying some of that. We asked them to do that after the last meeting and um believe he tells me maybe in January to get some ideas back on the remodeling versus what would need to be replaced in them. At one time we talked about that new school there which took the old school down. U you'll see in that plan when it comes out also that taking the old school down creates a domino effect only in the Dixon into that new school in the south. So, uh, we're going to put that together and give you something a little more in depth later on, but it's going to focus

largely on remodel and some bigger projects that that we're hoping to to get approved with some of your money. Also using some buyers tied in with it to get it all done. It's a lot of information in a very short period of time. Well, you went over 20 minutes, but you never bored me. Thank you. I can probably do another 20. It's just may start boring me at that point. All right. Even when so I tell the people they waste my time just entertain me. You didn't waste my time and you entertain me. There's so there there's so much involved. I would encourage any of you if you ever want to speak about some details on this talk to your board member, contact me. Um their heart's in this and that's a good thing.

Do you mind open up just for a few questions? I don't cut this off. I know he kind of hit broad and wide but either from uh Mr. Haylor or Dr. Sutherland. Any questions? this time when you're talking about number projects or anything.

The board hasn't approved a final project or numbers. I I think what you're going to see them look towards is a remodeling in general plan with several projects similar to that 15 million 177 fund that took in four projects. I can't say what'll be a final approval, but I expected to have multi levels to it to focus mostly on middle school and some bigger projects on other buildings. And I expect I hope we'll have that probably in the next four to six weeks by by middle late January anyway.

Well, from our standpoint and I know we talked about this morning, so I just want to reiterate it. If we followed this process where you're going now, would we do you think we'd have everything complete from schoolboard approval to what the county commission does that we could have this in front of us to finalize it by our March regular meeting in March? I think I could take a break and do that because I was really concerned we'd have to have it in January. Madam Chair, do you feel like we can make that? I think a better target be February for that. But this bunch has worked three and four times a month towards getting this done meeting once a week at least.

Well, again, I don't want to limit you that, but I know if we get into a borrowing and we I know we had discussion, I had it with several commissioners for the meeting. We will need time because this is very strategic, very long term for us. So again, I'm know y'all understand this, but we we're not going to have a regular meeting and approve it or a work meeting, regular session. We probably need to make sure we understand it completely during January and March and or January and February and then kind of aim for March. That'd be a level I'm comfortable with. And again, it'd be up to the commission here if they want to go on that timeline or longer. It's we got really won't be the will of commission on that. But

we've come a long way in the past 30 days working about four months hard on this. But the last 30 days, I think we've come a long way. And I feel like by our January meeting, we will come almost to completion as far as maybe a few minor things left. So I would think you would get it by February. Uh weather dependent, I think I think we'll make that one no problem. Um, so, um, you typically y'all meet near the end of the month in January.

We meet the fourth Thursday for the official meeting. We've had work sessions. We have a work session Thursday night. If you'all want to come out, we welcome you for that. They're usually not about three or four hours, so they're not too bad. The um um the chair can call those work sessions at will and I think she'll put that together for what we need to get it out. and she can also call special meeting if we needed to approve something prior to that. But if we meet the fourth Thursday of January, it fall on your work session for February and your vote meeting for February. So March, I think would be very realistic. Okay. Do you think so chair? Yes. Because it's your schedule.

We'll talk on that. We'll we'll kind of with y'all we'll get something that we call kind of is a template that we can all kind of agree on timing because we don't want to catch ourselves going the other direction. like y'all and us once once we get past March, we're focused on the next year's budget. And I know it, you know, I'd like to get it this settled before because we're going to get refocused on something new as we move forward. So certainly my mind too. So I appreciate you saying that. J questions. Yes, sir. Just one.

I think I know the answer to this, but I know we've had a new administration and a new board and is it is it the intent that y'all are going to hire an architectural firm and we're going to draw plans specifications and we're going to publicly bid and and competitively bid these projects and not do the sears and the guaranteed maximum price design builds. That's what I hear from the community a lot is that they want this money to be, you know, and I understand some of these projects are complex and I understand the process in bidding. you can pre-qualify those contractors. I just kind of want to harp on that that I hope that's the board's intent because that's what I would like to see.

And that's a really good question to to address. And yes, that one is my intent, but it is the board's intent. And I want to to state that by saying that when I say it's a board intent, we have two board members that weren't here whenever that decision was made. The board being an entity and a standalone, it survives even me or any board member. But the the board voted year ago, last fall to to hire L Cook Martin as our architect and consultant firm and they have an hourly or per job type rate. They if we we can use them as professional service, but we also approve them to be our architect. They've done our consulting work since that time. We also um use OOLG at their will and OG did the Creekwood building and do some of the some of the other jobs for us too. But uh the board did vote to go that route to use that architect firm and without absent the board voting to remove that that would be our firm. the roofs were done with the um RFQS and they qualified the biders and they did a bidding process and I think I hope I can speak for the board. We've had good results out of that. If you were there for the other processes, it was a lot different. Um Mr. L did a good job with Luke Martin on that and I think we had good results and good savings from that. So that is the intent and it actually has been a board action.

Thank you. Does that answer that? Okay. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate

Southern board member Haley Chairman Brogden, all the other board members and staff. Thank you for being here tonight. We appreciate this because we know uh we know the importance of education and we know importance of getting these buildings like we need to take care of a long-term issue. So, I appreciate the work y'all are putting into this and informing us tonight. Uh under other business uh the commissioners have on their desk copies of the annual financial report from the fee officers for the period of June 30, 2025. The period end in June 30, 2005. This is required by TCA section 5-8-505 and TCA section 67-5-1902. So those are on your table and if you have a real hard financial question, call Don Hall. Any other other business? Any announcements? Somebody's having a function or something. It's Christmas time. Come on.

I just wanted you to make sure I was still invited. Announce. We're on record now. I got invited. You always invited. Right. Oh, I want to be there. Thank you. Anyone else have anything? It was a good time last year. Thank you. Uh, anybody else? Pardon?

You got a chance. No, that's true.

Deb, do you have a taser? I need to settle this crowd down over here and I want to be the one to use it. Well, if there's no other announcements, we will be before the next meeting at uh 6:30, we'll have our Christmas event uh here before the meeting starts 7:00. You're all welcome. All of you here are welcome, but don't bring anybody else because I don't have that much food, but I can feed who's here tonight. So, all right. If there's no announcements, the next work session meeting will be on Monday, January 5th, 2026 at 7 p.m. in the Beaverdale Bey Jr.