Commissioners Court - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. It is Wednesday, June 24, 2026 at 9.01 AM. And this special called Budget Workshop for fiscal year 2027 is now called to order. We have a quorum present. So just a reminder to everyone, we are having budget workshops today. from 9 to 5 and tomorrow 9 to 5, and then the next time we'll resume for budget workshops will be July 13th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., July 15th from 1 to 5 p.m., July 16th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and then again July 27th from 9 a.m. to 11, and July 30th from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Some of those later meetings are going to be – only attended if necessary. Hopefully, we can get through the bulk of our budget in early July.

Do we have a guest with us?

Yes. Penelope, this is my intern for the summer. Do you want to take a minute and just introduce yourself to the court?

I'm Penelope Costa. I'm from Bernie, Texas, and I am a junior going to my sophomore year at GSU University.

And why don't you tell them about your little debate?

And then I'm the president of the speech and debate team at Birmingham.

So she's going to, if you see her, she's going to be attending budget workshops, court, and some other departments. She just wants to get exposure to all forms of, all the different departments, learn what they do and kind of figure out what she wants to do. But she's got an interest in law. Is that it? And so she's going to be, you'll see her with general counsel as well.

Welcome. Welcome. I saw you yesterday.

So I know this is what everyone looks forward to every year. Not really. But we're going to spend the first part of today giving a little overall budget summary from me and Corinna. And then at 9.30, we're going to switch into the compensation committee. So some of the highlights of the budget before you are where my proposed budget includes using reserve balance of about $2.9 million. We require no reserve fund to cover our daily operations. So again, we're only going to tap into reserve balance for a couple of capital expenditures. The three big capital expenditures that require about 2.9 million reserve balance is $2 million for the purchase of a building that's up for sale across the street by Blanco, 400 Blanco, 600,000 to construct a storage building at Tupperwine, and then $300,000 for a countywide space needs study. So without those three items, we'd require no reserve balance. There are some other capital expenditures, probably about a million.

I did type this up. Yeah, would you mind?

Perfect.

So these are just a list of some capital expenditures. I'm calling them capital expenditures and for one-time expenditures because sometimes capital expenditures can be more than once a year. So they're not necessarily one for you. But these are some things that are included right now in the judge's requested budget. And so this equals about $4.9 million. And if all these were to stay in the budget, you would currently right now need about $2.9 million of your reserve fund to cover these. You would not need all $4.9 million to cover these. But that is included currently in the budget that y'all will, as we get to these different departments, you will review to see if you're going to keep these in the budget. That's what's in here currently.

So about $2 million our general operating is able to cover of $2 million of capital improvements or one-time purchases. So we're in a really good place. For the employees, I know this is what Y'all matters most to you. My proposed recommendations this year are increasing our TCDRS retirement from 195 to 200 and giving a 4% raise to the employees across the board for all employees. Again, these are just my proposals. It's up to the court to weed through what we want to do and not do.

It's actually a 4% increase to all three scales.

Correct.

Because some employees would get... Maybe if they're over right now, they might not get the 4%, but if they're exactly where they're supposed to be on the scale, they would get a 4%. If they moved over because of their longevity here, they would potentially get the C. Just wanted to clarify that in case somebody's listening. They didn't get exactly whatever it all ended up.

Correct.

That's how y'all scale work. But right now, you do have a 4% in there for all three scales.

And the impact to the budget for those two things, so the 5% retirement increase equates to about $250,000 to $300,000 in that range. I think it's $280,000 for the 5% increase to TC or DRS. Yes, I believe so. For the salaries, this includes moving everyone up naturally who progresses their, you know, comes to step one or A to B. This is all factored in. It's about 1.8 million. Is that?

No, there's 1.5 total.

Correct. 1.5 total. So a little less than that. We've already absorbed the 9% health insurance increase for the budget. So that's factored in as well. I have a question. Yes, sir.

So now that we've operated the scale for, what, two full years? Close.

The regular scale, you started October of 23. The law enforcement scale, you started July of 24. Okay. And the elected official scale, you started October of 24.

All right. So on this scale, of all the scales, if we do the proposed increase... How many have you run to see how many people will not get any type of an increase?

Actually, Clinton, I do look at that because a great thing that the court did when you implemented the scale, you did not ask anybody to go back to the scale if they were already making more than the scale because of just how they were able to get hired at the time of the policies that were in place at the time. So we've had several people who have not gotten an increase on the scale, even though the scale has increased the last two years because they were already making more. With 4% that the judge had requested that we put in the budget, you have one full-time employee that still would be making above where they would normally land on the scale because of how they got hired. You have two part-time employees that That would not. And both of those did a little research to figure out why. Both of those are part-time. And at one point, the court adjusted several years ago before this court, the court adjusted their hourly rates to give them more money because they were a part-time employee. One of those is the housing. The federal government reduced the amount of budget for housing. And so our director of indigent health works part-time for the county and part-time for bernie housing they were going to reduce that budget so the county said instead of you reducing salaries we're going to up your salary so you don't reduce so that's why she is still currently a little bit scale because the court at the time felt like they didn't want her to get a reduction of pay even though she was it wasn't our money that was going to reduce it they they increased her so yes i have researched that those are three one full-time two part-time

And explain again on the full-time person.

The one full-time person, when they came from a different department and were moved into IT, at the time, we had a different IT director at the time. He hired this particular person at the highest level that he had available in the office. And there were no rules in place at the time that said you could not do that. So when this court implemented the scale, this employee was well above what the scale said that that position should. And so, and of course, nobody's saying he makes too much money. It's just where he would land on the scale with his tenure and his position. And so you have one full-time that would still not get an increase based on the 4%.

So the scale is working. It's finally catching up to all employees. So as for some of the capital expenditures that are also included, currently have $1 million budgeted for her road. But we've added another 500,000 to try to use that as incentive to expedite the construction of that road, whether it be we fund part of the engineering study or contribute that to the project. But the district clerk has imaging and indexing files. We're adding 405,000 to the budget. Another ambulance at 369,000. About $300,000 in IT equipment. Another $177,000 in ambulance equipment. We're upgrading the Bosch video server equipment at $100,000. I'm sorry, I meant to put that's at the jail.

Sorry, at the jail.

I did not write that down. $70,000 for new voting equipment. Another $50,000 for the Herf Esser engineering study. Jail administrator vehicle at $43,000. Furniture for the new 498 jury room at $13,000. Human resources software at $13,000. $7,000 for treasurer's office for furniture. And then EMS has IQ-controlled medication software at $5,600. All right. So those are some of the bigger ticket items. The rest is just salaries and day-to-day expenses. equipment that each department uses. We've included a 5% increase across the board for all VFDs, 2.5% increase for all libraries. All the other allotments that we currently have scheduled are remaining the same. Corinna, what am I missing as highlights here?

That's really all that you plugged in. other than you met with nearly all department heads. Several said they didn't need to meet because they weren't requesting anything, but you've met with department heads.

And then there are several items that I didn't put in the budget because after talking to Corinna, we're going to try to encourage departments to purchase some of their 2027 requests now.

Sorry, I actually had already We'd already printed this after you and I spoke. So some of those items are on this list. So if the court chooses to allow these items, there's money budgeted in FY26 that some of these smaller, you know.

Like $13,000, $5,000. Correct.

If y'all choose to allow those charges, then it would be a simple budget adjustment in July. And these departments would be allowed to, if they can get the tangible items by July. By September 30th, which I can just tell you what I would recommend depending on what the court chooses. I would say the jail administrator vehicle, the 498th District Court jury room furniture, adult software for HR could be paid for and implemented by then, but that would be one. Furniture for the treasurer's office. If the EMS could get that medication software, I don't know what's all included in that. We certainly had funds for that.

What about the voting equipment?

Voting equipment, I did talk to Stacey, and she is not having a budget meeting until July based on schedule. And I spoke to her as late as last night. And that is going to depend on space at the new facility and different things. So while she probably could get some, there's other things that she's going to talk to you guys about in July that she needs, that she's getting me some information for, which are like some poll books, I believe. And so... I think there's like 32 she needs. So if that's the case, that would be a budget adjustment that's not included in the budget, FY27 budget right now, but it may be something that we bring forward for the court to consider in FY26 if funds are available. But most of these things you could not get, unfortunately, get the product or the service completed by September 30th. But the ones I called out you really probably could get the...

So we can get this 4.97 figure down a little bit by making the purchases now. So if there's other things that we see during this meeting, we'll just let Corinna know and we can try to take care of them sooner rather than later.

There may be some stuff that's absorbed in people's operating budgets as they sit in front of you and explain why they budgeted certain things in operating that If you choose to budget those, it may be something that they can do now. But it has to be at least $5,000 for one item in order to be capital. So that's what I look at for this little short list for the court.

Question, on the September 30th deadline, is that just contracted or it has to be delivered and installed?

So I call it delivered and installed because I want to be able to securely say that the county received that item in that fiscal year. and that we weren't trying to circumnavigate the procurement law or a fiscal year budget, because I feel like the court budgets something in a fiscal year, then everybody who has a budget needs to be good stewards, and they need to get that item in in that fiscal year.

And then besides this, the compensation committee will advise the court that there were 23 new hire requests. and some promotions. The promotions I built into the actual budget, the new hires, we've made recommendations to the court, but none of those are included in that figure because It'll be for the court to decide, but at least the raises were substantiated or the promotions were substantiated at compensation committee. So all those requests were included, but we can all go through those again as a court to make sure that no one has any objections. Do we have a comprehensive list of those? We'll be getting those from Juanita.

Juanita did bring something when you are ready to move to the compensation committee. Okay. And did we have a dollar amount attached to that? You just prepared something. Okay, perfect. From the compensation committee. I think this is what she just gave me.

I guess before we hand it over to the compensation committee. Oh, I have one more question. Yes, ma'am.

On the million dollars at 46, we put that in kind of a designated fund account. Are we going to put that other half a million in there as well?

So in this budget right now, there is another $500,000. In Department 10-700, just for people to understand, that's called transfers out. And so that's where general fund would transfer money out. So what's built in right now in the general fund is to move another $500,000 of fund balance over to the special projects fund, the capital projects fund for specifically Herff Road. So when we get, like in July, when we're talking about the special funds, you'll see that I've added General fund shows the $500,000 being spent to send it over, and that fund shows that we're receiving it and booking it towards the Herff Road project. So now that shows us $1.5 million. Okay, thank you.

So will it include the $50,000 for the study?

That's included right now in the general fund only. Okay. Because that would be something that the court does. The only thing I'm moving over... to the special projects fund would be the capital projects. And the study would take, but I would not consider that part of that because that's the engineering study that y'all would do before you move forward with that capital project. Because that 1.5 is really either a match or our contribution with tech stock for that road or with whoever we want.

And one additional highlight for the citizens, this is what matters to y'all. The other recommendation that I'm making in this budget is a half cent tax reduction. This would be the three or four years that we have pursued this. And so that all depends on a vote of the court, but that's my current recommendation. And what I've proposed can absorb a 5% or five half cent. Yeah. I five cent make a lot of people happy half a cent, half cent reduction. So

So just to clarify, we've only reduced the tax rate since I've been sitting on this court one time, and that was last year.

No.

You would probably have to ask James offhand because I have looked at so many numbers. Now, I don't know. Last year, y'all did reduce it. We did.

I'll go to your website. I'll report back.

The prior year. James does have to keep that step up there for one year.

Yeah, the prior year we didn't do anything, and then we had a half cent the other year.

Well, y'all have voted on the budget in the summer of 23, the summer of 24, and the summer of 25.

Yeah, so it went reduction, no reduction, reduction, and then this year. So that's three of four. Whatever. It doesn't matter. That's the proposal.

And sometimes it depends on your force to, based on the calculations. However, you cannot decide a tax rate until you have a budget. So just know that because the state does not want counties to set a tax rate and then prepare a budget based on the tax rate. It's the exact opposite. You prepare a budget and the tax rate can only be to support that budget.

Sure. And at what point will Mr. Hudson be coming by? I've been having conversations with him, so I kind of got his take on it. But I think it's really important to hear from him.

He will not be presenting anything until at least July for the tax rate. The appraisal district is required to certify to all taxing entities by July 25. They are required to submit the preliminary in April, which he did receive. But. they are required to certify to every taxing entity by July 25th. So we do have two budget meetings set up after the fact, or maybe even three, if needed, depending on when he gets that information. And he will use his truth in taxation software, which comes from the state. And he takes all the figures that we have in the budget, including the tax rate, I'm sorry, including the debt service, what's required to pay your debt for your two bonds and then your tax note. And it takes into account your sales tax that we project to collect. And all that helps sales tax. We can only collect sales tax to help offset property taxes. So as sales tax increases, it helps bring your property tax rate down. And he will do all those calculations with the software that the state provides.

And he's very conservative. We've met with him a little bit, and we got an idea. And so Corinne is pretty good about guesstimating what our revenue is going to be. And so we factored that in. And so this is what our initial, we'll probably get a little extra money of tax revenue to help offset this figure. But we shot lower rather than higher to make sure we didn't get too aggressive. As you'll notice, our budget books are slightly changed this year. Tried to eliminate a lot of the paper, and they're paginated sequentially. So now Corinna can say, refer to page 9, 89, whatever. And you can just jump right to that page instead of trying to find, flipping through different categories and department numbers.

And if somebody wants the actual budget workbook electronically, we can send it to you electronically. But I try to warn people, it's only good until you make the first change. Okay. And so but I do want to thank Clint because he's the one who was sorted it electronically and put the red page numbers on there. to help. And the reason you have less, less documents is that we didn't require as many backup documents because when you have a purchasing agent, you already have a purchasing policy that you've adopted that requires so many quotes or bids or anything. And so therefore they used to have to give them to me when purchasing was underneath me. So they gave them to me at budget time. That way, if the court said, yes, we knew. But even my budget book is a lot smaller this year and I have all the originals. plus the copies. This year, I just gave you our printed information. If when we get to something, if somebody's turned in a backup and you would like to see it, we can certainly make copies on three-hole punch paper so you can insert it. It was just a lot of paper that not everybody turned in the same information this year, so it's just a little bit different. We eventually want to go electronic anyway, so this is a way to start seeing how we can downsize.

Yeah, because it takes, you know, one binder costs about what? 80 bucks.

Just these, a box. Watch, these are renewed. And you see I have some like, because I'm pretty cheap. So I have like sticky notes because I used one that was two years old that we have more departments now than we used to. And this is an old binder of mine that one of my staff members took out all that fiscal year and re-put. So yeah, these big binders are quite expensive and the tabs were too. So I'm trying to conserve money by not buying them if we don't need them.

Okay.

Anything else you want to touch on before we shift the salary committee?

Not unless somebody has a question. I have questions. Yes, sir.

Okay, the space needs study for $300,000. I'd like to know more details about that, when that's going to happen. I'm not going to say no on the $2 million for another building, but I want to know very specific what we're getting ourselves into, buying another building for $2 million in addition to the Burdick Center that's not even – begun being renovated yet.

So both of those items are listed right now in Department 10401. So this afternoon, we have that on the schedule, and we'll discuss those specific items in that department. So this is just a list from the entire general fund of various departments. But both of those two things that you spoke of, Commissioner Carpenter, are in the 10401 budget. So when we get to that we'll go through detail, as well as anything else that the commissioners did request that may not be in here. And I do have that document for you guys as well.

And a lot of these are just guesstimate-like. Like one of the commissioners requested the space needs study, made some phone calls, if I'm not mistaken, and came up with the figure, correct? Like we don't have the actual quotes and what's it going to entail, but that's the ballpark he was given for the building. Commissioner Region and I have met with the property owner and just got a tour. It's a move-in ready building across the street. And that is just what we projected based on the average sales in the area. That's what it would be. So it's not like these are firm recommendations. but it's just recommendations by some commissioners that I put in. And again, we can cut what we want, but it's just, it's a no brainer to me with us buying Blanco, having space needs, and it's right across the street. So it just, it's an asset the county has that they can later sell. If we turn, find out our space needs, it's not going to work. We can always sell the asset. So again, these are just some proposals and y'all can vote how you wish.

And to- Commissioner Carpenter's point, just to follow up, we'll be doing an RFQ, I imagine, for the space needs firm.

You would have to.

It's already been approved to go out for the RFQ. Yes. And then it'll have to come back to the court once we get a, they settle on a firm and then have to negotiate the price.

I don't have any money in FY26. This is Sharon. Can y'all hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Yes. So I'm listening online. Yes. That will be going out in the next few weeks. But yeah, we will not have a firm price on that before the budget is probably adopted. So I would venture to guess your estimate's probably right. And so I'm just saying to note that we probably won't have a firm price negotiated. We might before the start of the fiscal year, but maybe not right before the budget needs adopted.

But we do have $50,000 in the current budget that we could use if we got things in place and the court approved it. We could start with up to $50,000 in this year's budget. Isn't that correct?

Okay. You do have current. Okay. But again, anything of this list that's in the commissioner's court budget, which is all five of y'all's budget, Department 401, you will go over that during that. that time, some of these items are in other departments, like the EMS sub is in the EMS department, IT is in the IT department. So y'all will go through all of this and get like a detail from those, either by the commissioners who requested it or by those department heads that requested it. So this is just a snapshot for y'all to know some of these bigger items that are embedded in here.

We figured it would be easier to reference a cheat sheet than try to figure out what was included in here. So we're just trying to be transparent with what the big-ticket items are. Any other questions before we invite the Compensation Committee to discuss new HEPA requests? All right. Juanita, are you good to go? We've got Cheryl here.

And then...

Did you hand me all of them?

So I'm sorry.

Judges general counsel are going to be with us later this afternoon.

She will be. Okay.

Thank you.

And so I guess I'll just hand it over to Juanita to kind of discuss what the process was with compensation committee and kind of discuss, uh, requests.

Can I just speak? I think we held four different meetings that different departments were allowed to sign up. I personally contacted every department. If they did not turn it in in their budget that they wanted a either some people turned it in their budget that they wanted a new personnel or they wanted certification pay or they wanted something, then we knew we needed to schedule them. The others that I wasn't sure of, I did contact. So each department had the opportunity to if they had staff, they had the opportunity to meet with the compensation committee. And we held four different compensation committees and met with about 15 or 16, maybe 17 departments. I mean, we met with the JPs once, but it was all four JPs. So that adds to the total. So we met with quite a few departments. And then I just wanted to say that. So those departments that we're requesting have the opportunity to meet with the commissioners, but certainly have the opportunity when they come to budget meetings to present to you guys what they presented to us. And I have a couple of additions when Juanita gets finished with this that I want to include in this conversation as well where I have talked to a couple of elected officials.

So we listed them in department order for easier. And then those positions that are requested to reclassify or to make any changes. Those job description drafts were submitted by the department heads. And once these are approved, then I will work on those and present them to court for approval. So in the engineers, you'll see that the request is listed in category C, and then the grade that corresponded to that position, if it's a position, And Clint and I decided 1A, but it could be up to, you know, 4A. And that's going to be on the discussion as to what level that, what step that position will end up. And exempt positions are up to six, according to policy on the step plan. And I also indicated the salary current in that position and whether it's exempt or not exempt. And the last column, the committee yes or no or recommendations, that was whether the committee is supporting this request or not.

And remember, the ultimate decision is on this court. Correct. The salary committee takes in all the information, vets it, and make some recommendations. So that's all these are, recommendations.

Seller committee cannot make any decisions.

Only the court. Juanita, do you have this in an Excel spreadsheet by any chance?

Electronically, I consider to, yes. Thank you.

Did you get a total of this entire ticket? I mean, I can add it, but I have to be careful in adding it because some of it is a difference goes from X to Y.

No, I didn't. Yeah, I see that. Probably because also we don't know the end result, what step they're going to end. Classification is pretty sure, we're pretty sure on, but this step we don't know. We don't know if it would be okay. Up to a four or six.

So is the court going to decide the step two? I mean, additionally?

What would happen is because your policy currently states that a non-exempt employee can be hired up to a step four and an exempt employee can be hired up to a step six, then whatever positions that you put into the budget, If it's a non-exempt, I would budget a step four because that's your policy states that you can hire up to a step four. If you allow a new hire that maybe is an exempt, I don't know if we have any on here. I haven't really read this. Then I would plug in a step six on the scale. That way there's funds available in accordance with the policy that has been adopted by the court. So the step one on here, it should probably will never be a step one. The only time I would suggest somebody do a step one based on how your step system has been adopted and your policy has been adopted is if you're hiring somebody brand new that just qualifies to get that job. If it requires three years of experience and somebody only has three years, maybe that department head or elected official would say, I'm going to start at a step one because they're so new. Or, you know, I just hired somebody to step two, but they have five years experience I'm going to hire. But most what we're seeing is I would say about 95% of the employees that are getting hired are getting hired at the highest level they're allowed to based on the court's policy. It's not 100% because different department heads and elected officials set their departments up that fits for them.

Right.

But that is what I'm seeing on the books. Juanita, you actually talk to these department heads. I don't. I'm seeing quite a few step ones, though. Oh, are you now?

Yes, some of them are step one, some are twos. But there's several departments that have not more than two. But there are some.

But we just adopted, the court just adopted the policy to go to a step four. So really would be, if you allow any new hires, it would be... It would benefit the court to go ahead and budget that in case it's allowed and in case they end up hiring somebody who would qualify to get that. Otherwise, you are looking for money that you may not have budgeted later or you're restricting that elected official department head and you have a policy that you didn't fund.

So for the promotions, when you said it's included in the budget numbers, you're using these step numbers for those? I'm not really sure.

There's actually no promotions. There's one in the first. No, there's no promotions that are already included in the budget. Oh, I thought that.

I thought you said, someone said that. I said that. I misunderstood. I thought they were. It's the step movement, right? The step movement is built in, isn't it?

All the steps are moved in, but not actually the promotions, because that would be up to them.

Like the promotions on here. Yeah, correct. Okay, so those aren't included. So is there also a list of the departments who have not filled everything that they're budgeted for in FY26? As I know, yesterday Mary Ellen came and said, oh, we're fully staffed.

It's ongoing because we brought in six new employees Monday. But like last month, I did 15 criminal background searches and then 15 in a month and quite some time. So it's just, it's going. It's like a flurry of activity lately. Retirees, people that get new jobs, they seek other different careers. So it is a constant movement, yes.

Well, I guess what I'm getting at, other than just the constant movement, is any department having trouble filling positions, for example, road and bridge?

Not lately. That's good to hear. They are very, very busy. Very busy. So there's still a couple of openings that he has, but they are moving. I think they're attracting pretty good, and some are coming in the first entry level, and some are not.

They've started to fill the new crew that was approved by the court of being filled, but they had to get the top organizational structure figured out, and now it's filling the lower ranks. Is that correct, Anil?

Yes, sir. Yes, in this fiscal year right now, you included five new employees in FY26 for Road and Bridge. So it was a crew leader to fill an open crew and then a crew leader, assistant crew leader into other positions to have a, you know, for one whole crew. So those now have been filled.

So we had some organizational tasks to do. take care of before we could get those in place. Any other department that we're going to be, because I think that was frustrating because when we looked at that and I saw that we had all this funds in, you know, the road and bridge fund that we could use for projects. So we didn't have enough manpower. That was a year ago. So we're still organizing that. And I understand that that's a necessity. Any other departments are we going to encounter this again this year? Have we gotten,

He also had retirees and people that left. But, no, I think his is moving very well, filling those positions. And the CDL program is fantastic. Bobby Walker is doing a great job. He's got 100% passing, so 100% of his students have done great.

Good to hear.

That, by the way, is saving the county. Roughly $5,000 per employee per CDL. What is saving? By us having our own CDL training.

It's only saving money because you don't require them to come in. If you require them to come in with a CDL, but we don't require them to come in a CDL. We train them to get a CDL. But that's how it's saving us money, by having someone to train them.

It's roughly $5,000 to go through the CDL class if you go to an outside firm where we're doing it in-house.

I did look at that several years ago because there was a county, and I thought maybe it was Comal that did it for a while. It could have been another county where they were paying for it. or the employee, and then the employee had to pay it back. They had to work so many years that they had to pay it back. And the court kind of tinkered with that thought for a while. And it was just kind of made more economical sense for us to have someone in house that could do other things, but also do this. And so that's what the county implemented at the time is to have somebody at Roden Bridge. Therefore, you're not already having to pay higher salaries because you're trying to get somebody from outside that already spent that $5,000 getting that CDL and coming here you know, expecting to get what CDL drivers could get outside of a government because government's not going to pay what the private sector pays. That's just, that has to be common knowledge. We have all the benefits in vacation days. And that, that's where it, that's where it makes sense. And I can tell you after being at County management and risk, which is the, our pools Juanita attended for the health health side, I attended for the property and liability side, but I can tell you that that is a, um, big, big ticket item because we have a neighbor County right now that, um, does not even cover the a hundred percent of the employee insurance covered nothing towards dependents, but doesn't even cover a hundred percent of the employee and didn't when my employee used to work there eight years ago, didn't even do it then. So, so we, our, our, our structure here, um, It's a big benefit for employees if they come here and they stay here and, you know, they have some longevity here. There's a way to progress.

It really is. One question, is this CDL training tied to what Road and Bridge is doing out at the Youth Ag and Equestrian Center with TPS?

Yes. So that's where they're actually doing some of the training out there. Is that right, Donnell? Yes, sir.

That's where we live out there and do the fellow apartments right now.

Yeah. which that is county property, and of course the junior livestock and 4-H and the folks have that leased, and that's a good partnership.

And if I could bring up two things that are not on this because on this that Juanita presented. With Judge McDaniel and briefly with Judge Cahoon, and there is a new position. They did some restructuring once we had two district courts. Judge Cahoon may have briefly presented discussed this last budget year, but I cannot remember, and I don't want to speak for her, but they have, um, uh, hired a judicial paralegal and they did not have that position in this budget. They had like an admin three, which is a generic administrative assistant position. Um, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean, it's not required judicial knowledge. Um, They brought a job description to court. They did not ask for any additional money this year. So they are making it work with the plan that you have this year. But in doing research currently, that job description is at a step is on the scale at a grade nine. And in doing the research, that should be at about an eleven. And so I'm just bringing that forward because they did not get to come to the compensation committee. I met with them separately, and this was a concern. Did some research. McDaniel did some research as well, not knowing, you know, if she would need to present that. And so I said I would present that since Juanita would be bringing forth the compensation committee's stuff today. So that would have normally come on this had they been able to come to compensation committee. So that would just be leaving that new job description, which I've already approved, the judicial paralegal from a grade nine to a grade 11. But they just didn't ask for more money this year because they were trying to fit within the budget that you guys set last year.

And what did you say it's currently called? It's a judicial paralegal.

No, but the position that y'all, the money y'all put in there was under administrative three. Administrative three. Okay. And so it's just a different, it's, they're different things. So that, I had not shared that with the committee, with any of the committee, because that was just that. And the other thing I want to discuss is that after one of our compensation committee meetings, um, the judge and I briefly met with the sheriff. Um, and then I met with the sheriff separately. And one of the concerns is that when the court, um, updated the policy, which was a great thing to be able to hire people at a step four instead of a step two, there are some positions within his office that he would like the court to consider being able to move them up to a step four. And it's based on the last eight, anybody that he's hired in the last eight years, because if those were hired in today's world right now with your policy, they would start out at a step four A because every step has two years in it, an A and a B. We call it A and a B. So I do have that here. He and I discussed it, and if this is something the court considers, it's about $25,000 for the sheriff's office budget, and it would be about $4,700 for the jail budget. So that is something, and I can get this to you. I did not print it out because, again, I've not given this to the committee. It's just something that I was going to present during this time for y'all to consider to add to this.

That's this afternoon?

No, that's really right now is just the compensation committee discussion.

Because we're talking to the sheriff at one o'clock.

Correct. And he can bring this back up with his own budget. But I just said I would present this portion during the compensation committee meeting. So

We were trying to streamline the conversation. So anything employee related could occur now. And then when the departments come up, they can focus on the nuts and bolts of their budget. That's what we were trying to do. But if you have questions, don't, excuse me, don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you. And then what's the next step and how do we deal with all this? Cause we just got it.

Correct. So, um, at some point the court will need to decide, um, positions that, um, if any, you want to include in the budget, um, any of these department heads that are going to meet with the commissioner's court, uh, will probably, if they don't know if you're going to approve, it may, may discuss the need like they did with the committee. Um, it's really however the court wants to, to, to, to decide this because right now, none of, you know, none of these are in the budget. So it is something you would have to include in your, in your budget. Um,

Okay. And I think that's a good plan because I would want to hear from the department head to tell me why he or she wants this position, what it's going to do, what difference, you know, everything.

And if you have questions that I don't know if any of them are in here, but we also can go through some of that to give you a brief overview before you talk to them if you have questions about why people requested stuff. And then that way you may have questions when they get in front of you if you want to do that.

Do you want to touch on just a quick summary of only the people appearing before us today? So that way we can narrow it down.

Before we get off of this, before we get into the final discussions, can you come up with the figures countywide to do for every employee what the sheriff is asking to be done in his department?

So you're looking at all employees who have been hired in the last eight years to go to a step, whatever, what that total would be, whatever the sheriff is asking to do.

Okay. Apply that to every other department. And what would that, what effect would that be?

So, yes, that is something that, um, Clint can, Clint can do on, on the, um, uh, I don't think I have time today commissioner. Um, but it's something that, uh, It would take a little bit, but yes, that's a total week we could give. Do you want that total this afternoon? Do you want that total tomorrow?

Whenever you can get it.

That is something we can give because, again, I want to make sure you understand the request. It's not for everyone. This is the list of employees. So it would be – and I don't want to speak for the sheriff, but I want to keep this rolling. In our conversation – the issue that he's coming up with is that before it was a step two, when it was a step, you could hire a step two, he hired person A at a step two. Well, the very next month, say we went to a step four, which is a great thing. It's something we've been working on to try to get, and the court graciously agreed to that. And I think it's helping getting people in here. However, he just hired some people at a step two. And a lot of these people, um, in the law enforcement world are seasoned and you have from five years to 30 years on this list. And so what he is wanting to do is to make something more equitable across the board in his department is to be able to, if he were hired these people today, if they left yesterday and he hired them next week, he could hire them out of four and they would instantly make more money.

So it was a timing issue.

It is, and instead of going back all the way, he only went back to those in the last eight years that would, could be at a step four now. Correct?

Can I, yeah, you give a, my thought process here? Yes. So you have a deeper understanding. I don't need to get a microphone. Yes, please.

And Al, is that, is that what we talked about? Okay.

It's good. So, so I appreciate everything the court has done. As far as putting a plan together and hiring people, I have been asking for lateral transfer considerations for folks that come to us with a number of experience, years of experience, certifications, whatever it is that they bring to the table. I've been asking for a number of years now, how do I compensate somebody to attract people to come work for us that want to come, that bring this to the table? And so the court has come up with a plan and I appreciate that. My, my concern is this. So we just hired Mark Diamond here at the courthouse. Mark Diamond's got 25 plus years experience in law enforcement. He come from the San Antonio airport police. Okay. Now I didn't hire him at a, Step four, because the month prior, I hired James, who was a police officer, 24 years, if I'm not mistaken, over 20 years from Chicago. He was a Texas boy who came back home and is now working for us. How can I look at James and say, I can only hire you to two, bring you on into two, and then allow Mark to be paid? at a four and I have three openings and I got several that are in the bullpen, so to speak, that come to us with a number of experience. What I proposed to Corinna was looking back, if I got a guy and I have several that came to us five years ago, we're 20 years. How am I going to look at that guy who's been with us five years now, who's now at a step three or at a step four, maybe, And I bring a brand new guy in and I pay him the same amount of money he was just starting at day one. And they both got relatively same amount of background. So I proposed to Corinna a plan that will take everybody to a place I believe that is fair with their backgrounds. And I can look everybody in the eye and say, you are being treated fairly across the board. I went back to eight years because of the step, but I don't think anybody that's got any increases has been with me for a year. But I have some that was there for the paperwork in front of me. Yeah, how many years is it? About six, I think, is the furthest, maybe.

I believe that's probably right, and that's COVID. So there's 13 in the sheriff's office and four in the jail. on this list.

And I understand what you're asking us to calculate.

Just to make sure, I'm not arguing what you're trying to do is right or wrong. What I am arguing is from my position sitting here, I can't offer this to you and not offer it to the DA, to Donnell, to the clerks, to everybody else in the county.

I understand that argument as well. But I have 150 13 people that work for me, and I have probably more turnaround than a lot of other folks. And in order to attract and keep and retain people, I need something to help do that now. And again, sir, I've been asking for this for several years, for at least three, probably four years, if not longer, to give me some type of way to tell somebody that their value that they bring to Kendall County is worth more than a guy that just graduated from the academy and is starting off on day one. And I've been asking for this for a long time. So now we're at a place where I have to look these guys in the face and they talk amongst themselves. And, you know, how can I pay Mark Diamond at step four when I've got several that have been with me and have been great employees and be fair to them as well. And so this is what we came up with. And I understand your position. I understand your argument. But again, if I'm the only one that comes up and argues this point and been asking for this point, and now you're willing to consider this point, but you're not going to do anything for me unless you do anything for everybody else, I can't help that others don't argue for their employees like I do. And so I'm here to ask if this is possible. We came up with a plan that the money's there. We can actually implement this now, this budget year, at a nominal cost. I think we came up with what would it cost to do it this year? Oh. For the rest of this budget year.

Yeah, it wasn't very much at all.

It was like $6,000 or $8,000.

I don't even know that it was going to be that much.

Maybe 14, I think. I don't know.

I don't think it was that much. But yeah. And the reason there would be money available, if there's something the court now, there's not money across the board. I'm going to tell you that. Y'all don't have that much money. There has been some open positions. So if it's something the court wanted to do, it would just be maybe doing a quick budget adjustment to move it around in a court order at a at a commissioner's court to do that. But yes, there are funds when the sheriff and I met, I did look at that because that was going to be something that they discussed. The other thing that we discussed, if I can throw this out here at the same time, is a system for merit pay that would not mess up the scale system that you have adopted. Um, committee. Some of us have spoken about this, but that's the other thing that was brought to me as a member of the committee and as the county auditor. It's kind of two different roles. My job is to bring you the information and for y'all to say yes or no.

And third was increasing the night differential FGO pay from 120, basically doubling it from 125 to 250 and 75 to 150, which was his original last budget. And now it was just closing the gap from

Correct. And that's on this form. That is on this form that the FTO additional pay and the not differential is on this because that came from the committee. But the there's nothing on here because we didn't really decide as a committee if we were going to kind of be behind this thought or not. But it was more of a me just bringing it to because I'm going to bring if somebody talked to me about I'm going to bring it to you guys because I think that's y'all y'all need to know this. And so one of the things was the, I need my progressive glasses. One of the things would be a sort of a merit-based pay, which I'll briefly discuss yesterday. And so we have several departments that are interested in that. And there are ways to do that that would not impact your annual, your scale. It would be on top of that, it would be a one-time thing. So if that's something the court's interested in, it would be budgeting a set amount of money and having a system for that to take place. And then some of these kind of issues that some of these elected officials and department heads have in their offices, you know, it can help some of those situations if that was instituted in some way, if the court would entertain that. Other people may bring that to y'all as they discuss their budgets with you. I'm just kind of throwing out any conversations that I've had outside of the committee with elected officials or departments. I'm just kind of putting it all on the table under this discussion. And I know it's a lot all at once.

Would y'all say though that the entire county is better paid today than they were four years ago. This is our fourth budget cycle. Two years ago, I think it was two years ago, we did a $1.85 million non-Sheriff Department raise across the board in just one swoop. Correct. We also increased the Sheriff's pay separately. I think that was $1.7 million-ish. And so... I want, we need people, we need them to feel valued. We also need them to recognize that the average Kendall County employee, non-emergency, non-sheriff department is 84,000 per year with benefits. And we go into the raises for everyone. Donnell's had an issue hiring because he can hire a 20-year-old maintainer, someone that can run a maintainer that makes the same as a high school kid coming out of completely not on the same planet as far as fairness when you're trying to hire someone. This is all important. We need to figure it out. Eventually, it needs to get back to being based on performance and And merit, but merit can't just be a one-time deal. They should be making more money every month than the person next to them that's not as valuable as far as their abilities.

Right, I think when you have a scale, there's great things about a scale because a scale, and Sheriff and I've had conversations pretty much since he came here and he's talked to the court about it and other people. The great thing about having a scale is people have kind of a goal in sight. They know if I stay here, For our scale, it's 15 steps. That equates to 30 years. Most of us have to be in the workforce, so these 30 years. Not everybody's going to stay at the same place 30 years, but it does give them an idea, okay, if I started a step one or a two or a four or six, depending on what the rules are at the time, if nothing ever changed, I'm going to make this. So that's the great thing about having a scale. The hard part about having a scale is, and it goes to what you're saying, Commissioner, really, is that... You can have two people that one shows up to work at eight o'clock and is out at five o'clock and they just do the bare minimum. You can have somebody that shows up rip roaring, ready to go at eight, that push pushes out all this stuff that goes above and beyond. And these are conversations this sheriff and I've had about some of his staff and that are willing to take on things. And they know when you have a scale. You're going to make the same. Now this person might make 50 and this person might make 55 just based on where they're on the scale, but they know they're going to always just get, if it's a 1% or a 2% or a 3%, they're going to get it. So that is the downfall of having a scale. If you implement a merit based system and you include it in their day to day hourly rate, then your scale doesn't work.

Exactly.

And so that's the right point.

I'm agreeing to have someone that's been with you for 20 years and they have one year of experience because they never got better at what they did. They never offered the county or our taxpayers any better performance than simply clocking in and working. Then you have somebody else that's been here for 20 years. They have 20 years of experience and they can kick butt and everything that they do. And they're worth a lot more to all of us because their customer service is absolutely dynamite. Their ability to jump in at any position in their department is at a high level. That's what I want. That's why I want an evaluation process. That's why I want our county to be looked at. And I'd rather have better people and less of them than more people and less performance. So... That's what I look at when I look at all the requests for new people and new buildings and new workstations and more computers. And, you know, those are the things that I'm looking at when I see the stuff that comes before us. Because in my personal business, you wouldn't be getting all this from me because I couldn't afford it. Why should our taxpayers do that? Just because we're the government.

Well, I don't disagree with a lot of the things you're saying, but in the county, it is a different operation in that we cannot control an elected official's office. And when we had the merit-based, I saw the good side of merit and I saw the bad side of merit. And that in some cases, there were... elected officials that were given a pool of money and they said well i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings so i'm going to give everybody the same some of them gave people some and because they liked them and not others and the others are the ones that were doing the work so how do you then on a merit-based based system control something that you lose control on And so I understand. But that was part of what in this one first class that we took about all of the evaluations is there are ways, checks and balances within these evaluations. So if you have a department head that's out there, it is. over studies for years that they've done these studies. If you have a department of 10 people and what was it? It was something like 30% are going to be average or actually it's going to be closer to 40 to 50% were average. And then you had like 10 to 15% exceptional and then the rest. And so If you have been in a department that is, as everybody that's up here at the 90 percentile range, you know that department is not doing the proper evaluations. So these are things that we learned in that class. But how do you then apply that to an elected official, which we have no control over?

The evaluations are still subjective. Yes. As a person doing the evaluation, it's human nature to be subjective. I mean, we are going to be subject, subjective. It depends on, I mean, this is what, what we're taught. Are they always done on the quarter? Are they always done here? And are they, did this person just like do something that was really bad and it's their time for their, their review doesn't mean they were bad the whole year or that they did something wrong the whole year. So, um, Yeah, there's goods and bads, and it's figuring out what this court, how this court wants to proceed, you know, with the scale or with merit or with some form of both that would include evaluations. At one point, the court wanted that, and they even stated in budget they were going to come back to, they wanted elected officials and department heads to come back to say yes or no on those pools. Well, once you've once the court has adopted the budget, you don't have the you don't really you can't really do that. You can do that before you adopt the budget because you do have the purse strings of the elected officials. You guys get to set those budgets. But once you set it, then then the county auditor has to enforce what you set. for that elected official, all elected officials. But once you've set it, you can't really say, oh, we're going to come back and make you do all this now that you've set it necessarily. So you do need to set whatever parameters you want in your salaries, in your scales, in your merits, whatever y'all want to include.

And that's where you compare our size county to other counties. And you compare different departments and the number of employees in the departments to the efficiency and how... how they're faring compared to other places. That's all you can do. There's, you can't step into someone's apartment and I'm not recommending that we go into someone's department, but you know, if you, like I said, that a 20 year employee with 20 years of experience versus a 20 year employee is one, that's why you have to hire more people when you don't have productive.

Correct.

That doesn't mean that anyone in this department is being in this county is being Picked on or picked apart, I'm just saying overall as a general rule, we have 300 and what is it, 50?

54.

And what did we have when we first got sworn in three and a half years ago? We've had about a 17% increase. So we've grown our county by 50, 40, 30, I don't know.

Probably at least, I would say. Yeah.

And our number one goal or our number one responsibility as elected commissioners and judges, public safety, number one, and provide the customer service to our local taxpayers. And so...

So to your point, I agree with you. We're not like a business. We have to live within our means, and that doesn't give government, to my mind, the right to just say, well, we want to spend more money, so let's just go get more money from the taxpayer. So I agree with that. And then having said the point about our department has, it's a good place to start with this evaluation because that's not just 14 or 15 people. Those, what, maybe 150? I haven't done the math. A couple hundred people that are reporting to them. So we can start there. And as far as elected officials, the elected officials took the scale that we gave them. And we're certainly not going to do anything to cram anything down anyone's throat. That's not how we operate. But I would like to have those conversations with elected officials. You can have objective metrics to say that there's a bias, of course. But Sharon has done a great job, for example, the request for qualifications. And It doesn't matter what company we knew, we had a very, very specific metric to meet, and we had to justify that ranking, and we had to make that available so that if anybody went to an open records request, they could even get that. So I think that the path that you want to take, I'm on board, as I told you yesterday. We'll just have to see. We don't know all the answers all the time, but I think we can get there, and it's a good start. But back to your point, I agree with you. You're the only one who's come, and you brought the data to us. We can ask Juanita to go and say, well, let's be fair. Let's look countywide and see if this situation exists anywhere else. But that's putting all the onus and the work on her. You've done the work. You've got the numbers and come to us. And so I think we need to take a hard look at what you're asking for. The other thing is, and I don't mean to say that one set of employees is more important, but you guys are out there with their life on the line every single day carrying a gun and protecting the public. And it is different. Thank you for recognizing that. And you can't have people who are inept out there carrying a gun.

Look, I've been involved in this now for 14 years, and you guys have a very difficult job, and there's no perfect system. There's no perfect way because you can't take out the human nature of things and what people do. The evaluation system is very subjective. If it's not done correctly... It's not worth the paper it's written on. I do evaluations. I've done evaluations for 14 years. I evaluate all my employees because I want to know where they stand and how they're performing. But it's worth nothing for them. They don't really care because there's nothing to it. There's no meaning behind it. There's nothing behind that piece of paper. I can't reward those that are going above and beyond and doing extra. And I need that. I need that to incentivize people to want to go out and do what they do. Whether it's a merit system, you know, I came to court every year. Tell me how to apply this. Tell me how I can tell my employees they can advance. And it was crickets every single time. There was no plan. The step plan, is it the best? It's something. It enables her to budget appropriately every year without any question based on what the court decides to do with the step as far as enhancements. But the merit side of things, if you go that route, I'm fine with that as long as it's done fairly across the board. With everybody. And that's the way it needs to be applied. And when you say you have no leverage over elected officials, you're right. You can't tell me what to do. I do not work for you. We can certainly have conversations. You can certainly call me up and ask questions. There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah.

Nothing at all. So I'm going to tell you history. It's been failure of the court. Why the systems haven't worked because they haven't overseen and looked and asked the right questions to the even elected officials. Why did you do it this way? You have the right to ask that question. You do. So, um, But you can't tell me how to do my day-to-day business.

And that's the system. Wouldn't you agree, since this court came into place, we've put a lot of things in that made your employees' lives better? Because I was told you were always asking for a pay chart. We got that. We basically quadrupled the CERT pay for all your employees. Yes. We come up with night and differential pay and FBO pay. And we've invested over $1.7 million just in law enforcement in the last two years. So you have to admit, when you talk about this court's failures, it wasn't this court.

Not this court. I just want to make sure. I said history. History showed court's failures. This court has not failed. We are extremely grateful for what we've gotten. It's been a slow go, and I understand that as well. It's like this situation right now. I'm asking, and I will ask the court to allow Corinna to do these enhancements for these lateral transfers. For this year's budget, the money's there. And then apply that next year. And then I'm done as far as people on the scale. My next thing is call it stipend, call it merit, call it whatever you want to. I need assistance in incentivizing my people. I got a deputy right now, today. Yesterday, he's in class all day. He's teaching jailers. to include Kerr County, Gillespie County, and I think somewhere else, to be transport deputies. And he's going to take them out this afternoon and tomorrow and go qualify them on pistols. Nobody else is doing that. I think he should get something for that. But the other guy that comes in today at 6 o'clock and goes home at 6 o'clock is going to get paid the same as he is. I have a lot of folks that do a lot of extra things, a lot of certifications, I'm sure they have the same in Road and Bridge, but I have so many employees. I have the most employees of the county. And then when you make a decision that affects the employees, it affects me more than anybody else. And so I am grateful for this court, for the things that y'all have done, for the enhancements, but I'm going to keep fighting for my people. I want to be competitive. My mindset is I don't want to be average like everybody else. I want people to look at Kendall County and say, look what they're doing. I want the sheriff's office to be the shining star of this region. And pay needs to be a part of that. And so that's my outlook on things, be it right or wrong. I think that's where I want to be with my office. And I can't do it without you. I think, I don't know, I think I'm the only one that has a strategic plan. I plan out years in advance to try to look ahead and see what the challenges are that I'm going to be facing, what the growth is going to bring. And so I put that out there. That means nothing, even though I put the effort forward. It means nothing if I don't get your support behind that.

And I can use... Can you also tell us, you know, we have the annual salaries and stuff on the request for new employees. Can you also tell us what the average benefits package is that goes with each employee across the board?

It's increasing because our insurance is increasing. Clint, are we at about 19, 20?

I see higher.

T-C-D-R-S. Okay. Maybe around 22%.

Yeah, that's going to depend on that. Just around 25%, right?

Probably a little high. If I were going to give just an average, I would say 23%. That's going to cover your retirement, your Social Security, Medicare.

If someone made $100,000 salary, did we get $123,000?

It would cost the county about $120,000, $325,000 for that person. But because you do match the 457, if they did that, which we don't have a lot of employees that do that, but if you did that, then that would cost us a little bit more. But the average you're going to pay your FICA, which Social Security, Medicare, your TCDRS match and your insurance.

And I think that's where we talked about we need to do federal educating when we onboard and say, this is your total package value because no one thinks of the benefits of the insurance to retirement when they sign on. They're just like looking at their check. And I think you're giving them a better perspective. It's actually 23% higher. It makes it more attractive and makes us more competitive, I think. But I think that starts with

Well, in the private sector, you're given a compensation package, and that is going to tell you, here's your pay. Here's what we're contributing if they are contributing to, say, a 457 or some type of retirement. Here's what we're going to pay towards your insurance. You are given a compensation package. I don't know about all publics, but I know governments – you're right. We, we tend to only focus. And, and for most, for most people, I'll be honest, it's what they're going to take home. That's what they, but it may be about at the time, but, but it is what you're going to, what you are getting that the County is covering, which again, I know several employees had reached out to me. What do you think the court's going to do? I have no idea what the court's going to do on insurance, you know? So I know, I know just the actions yesterday. Yes. It costs the County more money. Um, And for those people in September who have spouses or who have other coverages, they're not going to take less money home in September because that's when they would have taken less money home because they would not have received a raise if you even do a raise to the scale. So I know that that's an absorption the county picked up, which is a big benefit to however many people she said take insurance, about 200 whatever people, right? 300 people take insurance. I don't know.

how much work would it be after we do budget to give every individual employee a printout and says, here's your total compensation package and include in like your holidays, everything. And every year we start doing that after budget. And that would be a reminder every year. It's just not your salary. look at all the other perks you get, and in the end, you're actually making 23% more. I don't know. Is that something that you think would help?

Yeah, because when you look at the overall benefits, that would be done during a performance evaluation where here's what your salary is, here's what your benefits, here's how many you get two weeks of PTO time, you get two weeks of sick time, and another 14 or 17 days of holiday pay, which is 45 days approximately per year

off paid somehow but just try to make it a one pager and that could be something because i'd like to do our walking in separate pages i mean it's all presented separately during onboarding but one page would be good you know because i'd like to do our walking tour like we do after the budget's approved and go to every department and we can hand out those sheets there and maybe that'll help be the first step towards giving a better perspective of what how you how the employees are valued

I think it's a good idea. They're going to take that because everybody talks. I'm sure the road and bridge people here talk to the road and bridge people in Gillespie County and Kerr County, and they all know each other. And they'll compare all that.

So, Juanita, can you just make a note that let's shoot for that before our walking tour in September? Okay.

A good reminder of gratitude.

Yes. And just how lucky we all are here.

So let me just, in perspective wise, when I started 13 years ago, I had 75 employees. My deputies were all making the same across the board. There was no differentiation. So back to your statement, Judge, we have come a long way. We have come, we have made tremendous strides. So I'm grateful for that and thankful for this court for the efforts it's put forth. But there's still work to do.

And we've had a lot of conversations. It's slow and steady wins the race. We're trying to tackle what we can.

Well, we take bites, take little pieces at a time, take the low, low hanging fruit.

And, and, and I'm, with that yeah and so and i think what opened the door for you was the change of the policy i think that was one thing you've really been between you and i we've had a lot of conversations about the policy and we finally tweaked the policy to do the things that you were hoping to do and so now it's the next step of redigesting it and see how it works in practice so yeah so if i can just speak to the step four i have had conversations with very i don't can't speak for juanita as far as hr

But when they hire somebody, I have to look to see if there's money budgeted left, right? So I'm always in conversation with the department head, the elect official, and or Juanita. And now there's a form because you adopted the form, so I'm signing that form. But we've had several department heads have requested... some way to get to the step four. So I do, I don't want to, I don't want to, no one has done this. I will say that, or no one's given this to me, but I do want to say, I think this is a concern of quite a few departments. Um, just moving forward. I don't want, I don't want to call them out that that's for them to, to come to the court, but I've had conversations with them, um, in the last several months, knowing because a year ago we said, hey, we're going to try to update this policy. We're going to try to get it back to court to see what we can do, because there are certain jobs you have to look at the market. There's certain jobs you look at other public entities to try to see how are we faring. And then you have to look at what are we paying internally? Where are people on the scale here? And we are never going to be able to match some other public entities because we have our source of income is property taxes and the fines and fees collected through the judicial system, the engineer's office, the health office. And, and, and really that's it. That that's where you collect, where you collect your funds and fees that that is what supports your general fund. Some, you know, cities have a utility department. They have, they have other sources of income that Kendall County and counties in general don't have. So, um, I think when you're deciding what you want to do to the scale, when you're deciding your employees, and when you're deciding the other aspects, I would encourage you to take the information Juanita's put together based on the four days that the compensation committee spent speaking to these department heads and elected officials. And asking them the questions, or if y'all have questions about that, that we can answer now, it's hard. It's all y'all's decision. And that is the hard part because some people are going to be happy. Some people are not going to be happy because, um, I don't think there's ever been a court that I've been around that the court was able to grant every single request. It's just not something that any business can do. And while we're the government, we have a business side of we have to be able to operate. And that is through the money that is available.

Of the 23 requested, the salary committee tentatively... is recommending 11 of the hires. Is that correct, Juanita?

That's correct.

And we did an informal poll amongst us based on the facts. And you'll notice that in that last column on there. But we have compensation committees scheduled till 11. So ideally, if you're all comfortable, if there's anything we can address right now from the employee perspective on this sheet, it's less work we got to do later. Or if you don't want to do that, that's fine. But I just figured we need to start knocking some stuff off the list so we can stay on track with a lot of Corinna's schedule. And I know the sheriff is here. If we just want to address his right now or how... Judge, can I interrupt?

I certainly don't want to promote or not promote anybody's position, because I think Cheryl in our committee said at one time that every single person that came to the committee had valid reasons why they needed what they needed, why they were requesting what they were requesting to the committee for the court. But I can speak to everyone who is requesting a promotion or reclassification. I feel very confident that that the court should entertain those because we've either looked at the research. I've looked up salaries. These people, these employees now qualify based on the job descriptions that have been approved by the court. So the reclassifications, which is reclassifying a company. the compliance inspector from a step 8 to a 10, and compliance inspector 2 from a 10 to a 12, reclassifying the District clerk deputy three to a district clerk deputy four is in line with our county clerk's office, with other offices that have deputy clerks. That is in line, and this person that's in that position fully qualifies. The CDA legal clerk one to a two fully qualifies for that position. That's part of the scale. It's all built in. These just things have to get approved by court because they do impact the budget slightly. You know, it might be a 2% because they moved to the different scale. The promotion in the CDA's office from investigator crime analyst one to a two. This position fully qualifies. It follows the pattern of the job description. Other promotions, the certification. Oh, let me go back to that. The other reclassifying is in the road and bridge. reclassifying the Scientech 1 from a 6 to a 7, and that's based on the structure of the Road and Bridge Department and where different departments are listed on the scale. And that's something that the committee should have brought forward last year, in my opinion. And what that does is it allows us to create a Scientech 2 because the person that's in that position, no, I'm sorry, yeah, therefore somebody can be promoted to a Scientech 2 and they do qualify. Um, and then reclassifying the safety coordinator from an eight to a nine. It's something we looked at two years ago. We did a one, one bump, but really when you look at it, it probably really should be a nine. And the person that is in that position fully qualifies. And of course, all these are not based on the person. They're based on where we believe the position should be on the scale. So if you don't even entertain anything else, I would ask you to entertain these reclassifications because these department heads have done the work to read their job descriptions, to bring to the committee these changes. The committee has reviewed these. I believe the committee as a whole, I don't know if all five people, but like the judge said, we went around the room for every single thing. But the one thing I can speak on confidently is that these department heads and elected officials put the work in to make sure they could bring forward to the court these reclassifications or these promotions. The other thing that was that is not a new hire is that I would ask for y'all to at least consider today is the night differential pay in the sheriff's office and the FTO pay in the sheriff's office, because those are requests from two years ago. In our meeting with the sheriff and the judge last year, the judge asked the sheriff, would he consider, let's do half of it this year and let's reconsider the other half next year. The sheriff said, yes, he brought that forward again. So we would be asking for y'all to go ahead and consider that today. it's not a lot of money. And the last thing that was brought forward to us that's not a position is the certification pay to the firefighters.

Basically making it analogous to how we do certification pay for law enforcement, same kind of categories. They have a master, advanced, and everything. So now that we have full-time firefighters on board... I think it's only fair to treat them the same. And so my request is that we approve as recommended the recommendations of the Salary Committee when it comes to promotions as voted on, cert pay, And the increase to night differential pay as the sheriff and I talked about last year.

And FTO pay.

And FTO pay.

So you're asking for that right now, like this minute?

Because we ought to start knocking some stuff off.

No, I'm just asking. I understand you may need to talk to department heads if you choose about the employees they want. But the promotions, the way the policy is, I believe they have to come to court to ask, but there also has to be money budgeted. And so that's why we ask people to come to committee this year at budget if they had somebody who was ready to be promoted based on those already approved job descriptions. So those positions that are in here are just that. The employees that are in the current positions are ready to be promoted.

And so it's kind of like if we do it now, but we need to approve it.

Because the department head or elected official is ready to do those promotions. They cannot do them until October 1st because...

So to clarify, you're asking, you're strongly recommending these things and asking us to take that very seriously, the recommendations, and you're asking us to do it right this minute.

You're asking for two different things?

So I... Well... No, it's the same thing.

I guess... Obviously, you're not voting. You can't vote. I know. I would just hate to say yes to all this when I just got this piece of paper one hour ago.

We want to meet with the department heads.

And I want to hear from the department heads.

All I was asking for was for you all to consider the promotions. Correct. I just said not the employees.

Yeah, just the promotions.

These department heads have done the work to bring forward, based on job descriptions that the court's already approved, person A that had to work three years, they now qualify for the step two. But they can only do that if you allow them to budget the money. Otherwise, the court would be restricting what that employee.

Okay, so fair enough.

But you just went blah, blah, blah, blah. You ran through all this.

If you want to truly do just the promotions right now or the things you said, then we need to start right this minute. and go one by one so that I can follow you because you went through about seven things.

Okay.

Very quickly. Yes.

Can you tell us what the, so if we see an annual salary on here, so if there is an increase.

I did not create this, so I don't know.

Okay. Well, what we see.

I got this too, just a few minutes ago. So what we see. All I read was the people who were requesting promotions. Right. Which is who you were in the meeting with. when they requested them from us. That's all I was recommending because I felt like y'all wanted to talk to the department heads about the employees. You don't have to consider any of it now. But I just... If you were going to... We allowed an hour and a half time for y'all to go through whatever Juanita was going to... Yeah, in-depth. As much as possible. So that's why I allowed an hour and a half on it. So it's whatever y'all want to go through.

And we have 25 minutes left, right?

Yeah. So you don't have to entertain any of it right now. I just...

Well, let's go. Let's start. That's what I'm getting at. I mean, this is a good start. We've got 25 minutes. I want to go through line by line.

How about this? Can we night differential certification pay for law enforcement? It's going to add another $24,000 to the budget. And this was, again, I came to an agreement with the sheriff last year that we would start it and pick up the extra cost this year. So that is the first request I'd like to address. Are we okay with going from $125,000 to $250,000? You're just looking at that line. And then FTO pay $75,000 to $150,000 because it affects about 8 to 12 people in his department. And that's just a prior agreement. So lines 53 and 54? Yes.

And what amount is that?

24K is what I have in my memory from my discussion.

I'm not going to be able to tell you an amount on these promotions. Because we did not ask that in the committee meeting. We didn't ask any of that. And so Juanita did not prepare any of that.

Well, at some point, that's going to be reflected in the budget.

It would be. But I don't calculate any salaries until when y'all say this is what we're doing to the scale. This is who... what we're hiring, these are the promotions. Once you've even tentatively said yes, then we say this is the impact. But I can't do that even for July if I don't have a tenant to.

Okay, fair enough. But you're saying you think the night differential and the FTO pay is $45,000?

No, about $24,000 total is what I believe the increase would be. And I don't even think it's that. I think that's collectively.

I don't have it in front of me. Sheriff, how many people get night differential?

You know, because you're actually doubling the amount.

When 25, did you buy a D and it's $1,500 a person a year.

And so don't get me to lying. I don't know. It's like 28.

I think that's not too high. I wish I had my other binder.

That's 42,000. So that I, I, I have 14 on patrol. You have how many people?

14 on patrol. And then it may be more like 22.

So 22 times 1,500?

Again, that's not solid numbers. I don't know off the top of my head.

It's $33,000. But if you cut it in half, we're already paying half of that amount, and it's just double it. $16,500. Yeah. I had $24,000 in my head.

All right. Fair enough. You did the best you could. That's all you know.

Really, all I'm looking for is, and what y'all have done in the past, what other courts have done in the past, and of course y'all can do something differently, is I write down round one, there was like a yes mark. And then I calculate that and I can build that in the next time you guys meet. And then we kind of go over it again, round two, because I have to know exactly what you're planning to do before we have a public hearing as far as the employees. So that's all I'm trying to get is a start on potential in the budget. So I can start calculating that as you're moving forward in your budget.

I'm good with those two things. Okay.

Anyone oppose that? Okay. Now firefighter pay. We have a total of four full-time firefighters. Okay. Two firefighters would be getting $2,400 each or $1,200 each. We have one advanced firefighter. They would receive $3,600. And then one master firefighter would receive $4,800. So for a grand total of about $11,000, we can create a certification system for our firefighters just as we do for law enforcement.

It's $10,800. You have two firefighters. The firefighter that's advanced is your captain, and the firefighter that's a master is your fire marshal.

And then two basics are our new babies. So does anyone oppose that system?

No. Okay. I'm good with that one.

Next thing to address, you want to address the reclassification. Is it reclassifications you want to address?

In the county engineer's office, there are two reclassifications. And this is compliance inspector one. These are reclassifying where these jobs fall on the scale. So currently you have a one that's in a grade eight and a two that's in a grade 10. If you look at the scale and you look at the structure of the requirements of the job and where other requirements within that department are, then these should be on the scale at a 10 for Compliance Inspector 1 and a 12 for Compliance Inspector 2.

And what's that based on?

It's based on the requirements in the job description, and we did not really review all of those a year ago. We more reviewed new job descriptions and stuff, and now that there are – What we've encouraged, I guess, departments to do is to, and we worked with the sheriff last year to do it, is to have like a deputy one, a deputy two, a compliance one, a compliance two, or whatever it is in that department. Therefore, there is room for advancement. so that you don't have the turnover. You have some retention because people can advance once they qualify for the higher position. And then you also, if someone leaves and the court allows, you sometimes can get someone else in here more knowledgeable because they are a deputy two or a deputy three or deputy five. In this case, it would be the compliance one and two. So the job descriptions are different. Everything has been approved. It's just now reclassifying based on where they should fall on the scale.

I'm good with that one.

And then promoting the assistant county engineer, Clay Forrester, to a number four.

I'd like to table that one until we talk to that department. Everyone else in agreement?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Elections, promote deputy elections administrator one to a two.

So this already exists. It's just her Deputy Election Administrator 1 now qualifies for the Deputy 2 position.

Any objections? Okay. Emergency Management. This one I think we're going to have to circle back to because... That's not a promotion.

That's an ad, Judge.

Okay, my bad.

We need to go all the way down to District Clerk.

Nope, we got Kennel Tech. Part-time to full-time. So basically the kennel tech, we did a part-time kennel tech last year and they can't fill the job because it's part-time. People want full-time work and everything's been going very well since we've invested a little money in animal control that their adoptions are going through the roof. It's just a great situation. And so the committee's recommending that we give charity a full-time person to help with the kennels because we're getting more animals and they're actually being successful getting the adoption.

So didn't she ask for that last year?

And we kind of talked her to a part-time to try. It just was not successful.

First she asked for a full-time and the thought was we'll do part-time in general fund and part-time in donations. And then, um, I think Charity really wanted to try to keep donations, even though y'all control the donation fund. No department gets to control that. That's solely controlled by the court. She wanted to see if she could do it with part-time to save the donations to bring to y'all other things that maybe they could do. And in today's world, if you haven't been part-time for a long time, it's very difficult because you get no benefits. That's fine.

She asked, and we asked her to wait, and she waited. She did the best she could, right? Yeah.

So next up, this was one that was not recommended by the committee. Promote the systems administrator in IT to a new position called the IT infrastructure administrator that would jump them from a grade 15 to a 19. And based on our conversations with the IT staff, that this was based on the person, not the job duties. And so that's why we did not recommend that.

So I would be open to considering that, but I'd like to talk to the department head.

Okay. District clerk. Promote deputy clerk three to a four based on conversations Susan Jackson. This was easily warranted based on the duties that the person was doing and is moving into. So There's managerial position now. So that was fully recommended by the, and Susan's here. If she has anything she wants to, if I, did I summarize that properly? Okay. So I'm not opposed to that. Is there any opposition? I'm good with that one.

Good. Okay.

Okay. CDA promotion of legal clerk one to two that was fully supported just because the person meets all the requirements. Any opposition to that one? Okay. Promote investigator slash crime analysis one to two. Remind me what... I don't remember the details of that one, but that was fully recommended as well.

That is the current... employee qualifies to be the crime analyst to position now. And I'm not even sure if we had that on the scale, but the job descriptions were all done at one point and there was no one qualified for that at the time. But now that that position, I may be wrong, Nicole, but is that correct? And so that the person that is in that role right now actually qualifies for that other job description. So the committee Obviously, the department heads know who qualifies.

Any opposition to that one that say qualify?

And people do need to understand this is not adopted. Nothing gets adopted until I think September is when you're adopting the budget. But these are just what I will move forward with and Clint will move forward with adjusting to calculate for the court. We'll have a real number. Correct. Yes. I just wanted to clarify that.

I don't know if this is one we want to talk about now. EMS. So EMS has one truck that runs a 2472. And based on talking with leadership managers, The new hires are not wanting to work that schedule. Everyone wants to 4896. And so if we adopt it for that final truck, we're going to need two less employees. If we ran the number, had Clint run the numbers. And so it's actually less bodies, but just.

They're open right now. Those positions are open. So it's not like two people would lose their job. They can't seem to fill it because nobody wants to work that shift.

Okay. You all have been working on that, right? Some court members have been looking at that.

Yeah. And there's been public comments, kind of derogatory saying, well, we have, you know, ambulance workers working, you know, longer shifts. They're not always coherent and awake, but that's the national average. That's what they do is they work 48.

Well, that's, The public can say just about anything they want to, can't they? It doesn't mean it's true.

And that goes in line with how we run our fire. So they'd be working similar because they work hand in hand with the fire guys. That's a good one.

The majority of them want to work that shift.

Yep.

So we'll go all the way down to road and bridge for the next.

Okay. Thank you.

This one's a little bit different.

Okay. Recla, create a sign tech to position to promote an employee. So basically a lot of the departments have shifted through making sure they have clerks one, two, and three, or road and bridge guys, one, two, and three. It just making every department uniform across the board. So there's room for advancement for people who, meet the criteria going above and beyond and have a way to promote. And so that's why we are creating the Scientech 2 position. It's currently being filled by someone or we have someone tentatively working in the Scientech position, but it's not their primary job because Toby left. So someone's filling in. And so this is a way to attract.

This is another add-on, another employee. No, it's just going to fill it. The person moving into that, are we replacing that person? No.

So right now we only have a Scientech 1 position. So if Donnell were to advertise, that's all he could advertise. He's just asking for another position titled Scientech 2. It's still only going to be one body, but he would hire a Scientech 2 instead of a Scientech 1. So he's not wanting a new body. It's just he needs the step in that job. so that he could hire a Scientech 2 instead of a Scientech.

So do those two things go together, create Scientech 2 and reclassify Scientech 1?

Yeah. So right now, there's only a Scientech 1. And currently, it is a Step 6. He would like for you all to consider letting him have a Scientech 2 job description and a place on the scale, which would be a 9. But when we were looking at that, that means that the Syntec 1, which would stay in open position on the scale, would need to be a 7. So we're trying to clean up the scale if the court allows these changes instead of bringing them back when you have an open position later. It's still only one body. It's just Syntec 1 would be an open position, but on the scale would be a 7. If you ever included more employees and you needed two or three Syntecs, you would already have it built in.

And we have a lot of, like the CDA's office has a bunch of those where they have the positions created. It's just they don't fill them because it's based on what their needs are. And at the time, they already have the job descriptions approved and it's basically plug and play.

And everything we're going over right now is not adding any more bodies. It's not adding any more bodies, what we're talking about right now.

We're cleaning up the scale, yes.

You're cleaning up the scale, and you're allowing the department head's elected officials to promote employees that now qualify for promotions. It's just in this case, there wasn't even a job description for assigned tech, too, because it was never considered. But it probably should have been, but it's just finally we are trying to help the department heads.

Just the wording seems... it looks like we're adding, we're creating a position to promote someone into it, then that would vacate another, but that's not. No, that's not the case.

It would be open. It would just be on the scale to show that's where a one is.

Where a one would fall. And the cleanup is reclassifying Scientech one from a six to a seven because Scientech two we feel is a nine. And so the progression should be from a seven to a nine, not a six to a nine. And so that's kind of standard how a lot of the ones and twos and threes, it's usually a two-step jump. So we're just trying to be consistent there. So does anyone have problems with how we're addressing Scientech one and two? I'm good with it.

Okay. The replace road maintenance two with a three is Rodenbridge would like to do away with one road maintenance two position and make that a road maintenance three position. not adding another position. They just need one of their twos to now be a three for qualifications, heavy equipment. So that is not adding a position. They have an extra two, but they really need it to be a three. They need the higher level. And so that's all we're asking is, If somebody has, you know, if he had five row maintenance ones and five row maintenance two and two row maintenance three, I am not going to let him tell Juanita he needs to hire a three if y'all didn't let him have a three at the budget. So that's all he's doing is he needs the higher level position.

Basically, what he's doing is what our sheriff's trying to do. And some of these positions.

Correct. Make a step progression. Yes. Yes, that's exactly correct.

Any opposition?

No.

Okay. Reclass, let's do the safety coordinator first. Reclassify the safety coordinator from an eight to nine. That is the person that runs safety coordinator also does the CDL training. And so with that additional responsibility, we continually go back to, it's probably not in the right place because of how much that job requires above and beyond safety.

Some of that is reclassifying Scientech 1 and 2. You then have to adjust the other position. That's where that one came into play. It's once you reclassify anything in a department, sometimes there's one or two others that would need to be classified based on requirements. And so that's where the safety coordinator fell.

Any opposition to that? And lastly... The way the administrative specialists were set up at Roden Bridge, they only had a one and a two, but countywide, we do have an admin one, two, and three. We just want to have an admin three position at Roden Bridge so he's able to have a progression for the employees at the position. So that's what that request is.

And the current person would, there's only one admin there, but the current person in that job now would

Qualified.

Does more than qualify and would be an admin three instead of a two.

So does anyone have any objections to that one? Okay.

So there's a promotion.

Promotion, yes. Yes.

It's just a promotion. And then if I may, Judge and Commissioners, I spoke to the court about the judicial paralegal. Yes. That is currently... When y'all adopted the job description, we plugged it in at a nine because that's where the budget allowed. But in reality, it should be 11. So I would be asking the court to consider that change in scale from a classification nine to a classification 11.

Any objections?

I'm good with it. And that's a promotion. Right. No, it's really just the position. So that would be the only, I believe, current scale changes.

So do we want to consider Sheriff's request in this as well now, or do we want to wait until 1 o'clock?

Let's let them try to get more information on the other employees as well so we can kind of have a comprehensive conversation.

I will probably just have to, at the 1st July meeting, we would bring back, um, at that point, you, everybody on this list, um, you will not speak with everybody on this list by the first meeting. Um, But in the second meeting in July, you would have spoken with everyone on this list. And so then I think you go back to having another discussion about personnel and new hires. Once you, you know, y'all may make a decision as you on each of these, as you talk to these different department heads and elected officials, you don't have to wait till the end. You can make a decision while they're, you know, presenting in front of you.

But my apologies, maybe I'm not understanding. My question was, do we want to talk about sheriff's request now or wait till one o'clock when he comes up? Oh,

Well, I think we need to wait because I want to keep everyone on their perspective of their times. The judges are here and they're slated for 11. So I want to make sure we get them in and out and that we address the sheriff during his time slot, if that's fair.

Is that okay? And one other question too, do you and Clint understand what his, the parameters were for the 4,700 that he was asking to bring everybody up to the, Policy change. I mean, do you understand? So you did the numbers.

Sheriff and I are the ones who met. So I have this right here. Right. So it's 4777 for the jail and 25,097 for the sheriff's office. Would you say 47 what? It's $4,777 for the jail budget and $25,097 for the sheriff's office budget. That would be the increase based on today's scale.

But Commissioner Chapman asked if we looked at it. countywide. I was just asking if you understood the parameters.

Who's going to do all that work to look at it countywide? And in fact, a lot of people have done a lot of work just the way they wanted to reclassify and whatnot on this.

Correct. The department has the elected officials did a lot of work before coming to the committee. And then the committee, not only did we meet with each of these, we met after we met with each of them to go over the process. And then some of us met with these department heads again to get clarifications and obviously Juanita put this this this together um so yeah it was it's it's it's been a lot and and the department heads did it some of them uh talked to the judge and I when he when he met with each of the department heads and then they came to came to the committee and then they'll they'll come back in front of y'all to to uh request what they need in their departments but but yes Clint and I will come up with a Figure based on current scale, not the 4% that the judge has included in the budget right now, because right now there is a 4% increase to all three scales. That's the elected official scale, the law enforcement scale, and the original employee scale. There's a 4% increase budgeted in there. And then we will take this, look at the last eight years. We will come up with a figure. But I probably, we probably, I don't know that we'll have this when you talk to the sheriff.

Probably not. This afternoon. And just one final question for everyone's knowledge. Who serves on the compensation committee?

It is Judge Salarzyk, Commissioner McCall, Juanita Espino, the HR director, Cheryl Despain, the county treasurer, and myself, the county auditor.

Thank you.

I just have one comment on these. I do believe these are a lot of these are clean up and they need to be done. Do not have an objection with these. I do caution the court that we cannot continually promote people and end up with a county of all chiefs and no Indians. Business-wise, that won't work. You cannot have all I paid employees and no worker bees at an entry level. It will cost the court or this county dearly if we migrate to that position. So just a word of caution.

100%. You're right on. I think we were mindful of that, making sure that things were not for the person. It was based on meeting the criteria. And so we believe that the people presented cases that were for the

the position of the person and the one that was for the person we rejected well i can tell you um i i said these words in a compensation committee i'm probably the one person that's not scared to ask the questions because i'm going to sit up in front of you and none of this impacts me but i'm i'm one person that's going to have to sit up here and explain what people requested so i asked the hard questions in the compensation committee because the idea behind the compensation committee is to not necessarily it's to give an opportunity for the department heads to speak to, yes, two members of the commissioner's court and the three of us to then bring what they're requesting without them having to do that in detail if they didn't want to. But I ask department heads, you know, is this for the person? Are you doing this because the person, you don't want the person to leave because that's not what the county can do. While we would all love to do that, we can't always do that because The money can only go so far, and that is the responsibility of the Commissioner's Court to set the budget, certainly. But I do think that your elected officials, your department heads, did a lot of work in coming to the Compensation Committee and preparing the documents needed for us to request to you. So I do thank you for those considerations.

Okay. All right. Yes, we're going to take a five-minute recess break, and then we'll resume with Judge Cahoon and Judge McDaniels.

and get you all out of here.

Did you help to coordinate your outfits? No, we didn't.

That's usually something that Judge McDaniel and I do.

We come in and we're in the exact same outfit. Not today. Not today, thank you.

Twinning.

Everyone, page 26, I believe, in your binders.

Yes, we are going to start with Judge Cahoon, the 451st judge's budget, which is Department 435.

Can you remind us, given a quick synopsis of what the major things to focus on and what's changed?

So currently in Judge Cahoon's budget, there are no requested changes for the operating expenses. So if you look at the current budget, as well as the requested FY27 budget, they are the same.

Within a thousand bucks, that's no difference.

And that is not in operating. So what we've already plugged in would be anybody that gets longevity, we've already calculated that into the longevity budget. Obviously, we don't do the benefits until the court decides what they're going to do with the scale. But that's where you're going to see it's not even $1,000. And that is based on your longevity.

I have not asked for anything. That's the anticipation that the county employees are going to get a bit of a COLA because my assistant didn't get any COLA last year. So I'm just waiting to see that. But outside of that, I've asked for no additional funds in my 435 budget.

During the preliminary announcements, I recommended a 4% increase for the employee.

And with that, I have not asked for anything additional. My anticipation and my hope is that we will spend some of that with the decision on the space needs. And I'm spending all of that kind of capital on looking for how we can afford to house the 498th in sufficient quarters along with our associate judges and our new, well, filling our position that we have that we're moving into the paralegal position. So because of that, and I understood that and I'm appreciative of that. So thank you for that. So I have not asked for anything additional in this. I think I can still continue to live within the means that the court has provided last year for that.

Your budget's okay addressing the court systems budget? Sure. 37, is there any changes? It looks like there's probably about 35,000 in changes. Can we just highlight? What the reason is for those?

Well, we have, let me look at those. I can address those.

So operating, I will tell you, it's $15,000 this year. It was currently $15,000. I did need to adjust the budget by $2,500. So that's why you see a little bit of decrease this year. It looks like an increase. But that operating budget, the operating line item within, it's on page 28. That's what we're looking at, page 28. Thank you. Which is the court systems budget. This is where the two district judges have shared expenses, which would be the courtrooms, the jury rooms, and the general miscellaneous of the court systems, not for any particular judge, but for the court system that the county is required to provide money for. So the operating would be anything that would be needed within the courtrooms, or the jury rooms for the jurors, not necessarily furniture, we're going to speak to that, but the general operating expenses, just like it is across the board in every other department. So if there would be a new table or maybe another, say, laptop that's needed in the courtroom or something like that, all that money would come out of there because they would not be capital expenditures at $5,000 or more.

The one thing that we have been discussing, Judge McDaniel and I, are the jury rooms. In both the jury rooms, my my jury room with the furniture is sufficient to seat the 12 plus 2. Her jury room is not big enough for the 12 plus 2, and it does not have a table that fits the 12 plus 2 because it's not big enough, and we're going to have to coordinate some special table to see if we can't get enough jurors in there because we don't have room for the jurors in a 12-person jury to sit in that jury room. But you guys know that because we've talked about that. Plus, some of the bathrooms in there haven't been even contemplated to look at. They're in terrible shape. Not to mention, I think it was one jury that we ended up having to move the jury into your jury room because the bathroom was overflowing or was leaking, and so it was out of commission. During a jury trial, which isn't the first time that we've had that happen. So the bathrooms are going to need to have some looking at, but it goes with the entirety of the second floor. The continued lack of the ballistics and the space for the clerk's office on the second floor. The second floor and the bailiffs that are busting at the seams in that room that we have and the bailiffs that had no attention to it. The bathrooms in the jury room, the jury room that's too small. The lack of an office for the associate judge Morris's assistant. The lack of an office now because I'm kicking out the probation department out of the second floor. We don't have enough space. for the probation office to have their stuff when we're doing probation. Yes, sir.

The assistant judge, you said? Associate judges, yes. How often is that judge here?

They're here mostly every day.

Okay.

They do court, and they do it either by Zoom. We are their host county, which is required underneath the family code. And as the host county, we are required to give them an office space and they do their work. They are required, much like we are required to be in a courthouse when they do their work. So they are here most every single day if they're not in another county when they have hearings that are in person in the other counties.

And that was part of the renovation down the office space that we added space for them last budget.

For one of the judges. We added space for Judge Falkenberg and his assistant. Used to be that the associate judge was Judge Kimball, who is the AG judge, not the CPS judge, which is Judge Falkenberg. Judge Kimball got appointed and then elected to fill Judge DuBose's office up in Medina County. And Judge Morris... who took her position has made us her host county. And so where we didn't used to have to fill that position, now we have had to find that space for that judge.

That happened since we talked about the renovations and put all that into place.

That happened because we put that into place. We needed another office because we had the 498th coming and we knew that we were going to need that. Yes, that was one of the reasons of why we have done that. But now we are filling the position that we have. That's the paralegal that y'all graciously gave us to the 11th. That position now needs an office space because we have the 498th and now we have Judge McDaniel and her coordinator that is two more offices, meaning that we were one office shy. And because of that office shy, I had to ask Chief Lang in his office that they need to not be in here at this juncture. we are tight and that is taking out by the way all of the meeting rooms that we had and now we just have those three rooms in the library to host everybody that comes in here and they used to be that the victims department would use that from the da's office when they would have a jury trial but they can't do that anymore So that we've just told them that those are having to be used because if I'm in jury, she's generally in office and then we have other people using those three rooms or vice versa. I invite any of you all to come down here when we are having jury trials and come up down to the second floor and see it. You are all invited to come and look and see how tight it is in there when we are both running and doing docket. So for budget, for the 451st, I'm not asking for anything in addition to what I had last year. For the 437 court system budget, Ms. Spear just talked to you about we're not asking for anything more in our legal budget. I think we kept that the same. We are trying to continue to keep it at what we've had and not go significantly over on our court systems. We think we're running a tight ship. We do continue to ask for you to notice the safety issues, notice the space constraints that your two district judges and the clerks are suffering from, and let's look at how we can get that resolved. We will continue to work for the county and the commissioners at trying to run on a tight budget.

So to address a couple things, and I don't know if you had heard, we actually have allocated $300,000 to do with space needs. I understand that. So with the goal of seeing how we can create a justice center.

But I still also understand, well, the justice center is lovely. I would love that. Commissioner Wieschen, but as I spoke beforehand, even if that were to get passed, we've got five years before that's going to get bid and built and we don't have the space for five years. And so part of my concern continues to be when we take it one building at a time and we take something off of that list. I understand and I am pleased to not understand that frustration in my tone that I know you can hear. as lack of things and lack of appreciation for the looking forward to that. But I do need us to understand that we don't have the space for five years.

Commissioner Carpenter posed the question to you. Yes, sir. What's your solution? I mean, we all know that there's a space need, but what do you see as a temporary fix.

My temporary fix is trying to see if there's a way to make this courthouse and to refab it into something that could fit a bigger courtroom for the 498. If we could get a courtroom that could fit the 498 and the jury room and continue to have this smaller courtroom and another office space. We could probably use two more offices. I think that could get us to the five years. But the problem is, is where are we going to put that bigger courtroom? And we have to talk about how that fits in. You guys, when you created the 498, you worked with Representative Charles Clare. And in that budget, we do talk about having a court and the ability to have it outside of the county or off of another system. Do I think that that's a great idea? No. I think they should be together. But is it a temporary Band-Aid? Maybe. But I think what would be great is if we could somehow turn this courtroom into a secure area and that we could then make another part of this office a second big courtroom that matches and mirrors the 451st. But that's a space needs analysis. Yes.

Combined with the space needs. One of the other things that we're proposing is there's a building across the street that's come available. If we move people out of this building into that new one, that's moving ready. Some of this may happen, but it's just a matter of there's a lot of moving parts, but that could be the first step to get people out of this building to. re-look at the configuration.

And that's news, Judge, to me, and I think that's wonderful. That's the first I'm hearing of that.

I believe I mentioned to you that Judge and I were looking at a solution, and I wasn't at liberty to say anything, and so I guess you didn't remember.

No, I remember that. Commissioner, that you said there was a solution, but you didn't tell me what it was. I wasn't at liberty to tell you. And so the first time I've heard about a new building coming on is right here at this exact moment.

Thank you for adding that.

It's a move-in ready building. And so this is, again, we can talk about this moving forward, but there are two things that we're putting in place that I believe will alleviate or get you on the right track to having an answer. The space needs study, which takes time. But also, if we acquire the building, reshuffling could create space. And so this is not going to happen tonight, but within the next six to eight months, we'll have a very good idea if everyone supports the proposal.

And I appreciate that. That was the first that I've heard of that. And so that's good news to hear. And I look forward to hearing more of it.

Thank you. But we are hearing.

And I have no doubt that you are. But I do need to continue to tell you that it is at maximum capacity.

There's one thing I want to bring up, two immediate needs. Did you put in a ticket to facilities for the bathroom problem?

Yeah, we've talked to them repeatedly, I believe, about it.

We've put in a ticket when they're overflowing in the bathroom. Is there something we can do behind the scenes with facilities to help?

Well, part of the issue is that it's pretty dated, and so it probably needs a full remodel, which is what we need to really talk about.

But again, that has been, Jason and I have talked about, we've been doing different stages of the floors in this building. We're working on Ms. Jackson's security wall right now. your bathrooms are on the list. It's just, it wasn't, you know, priority wise, they were kind of shuffled down because Ms. Jackson and Denise's requests are significant for security. So we are watching what you're- That was my other question.

That is something that we could look at immediately. So you talked about I guess, bulletproof glass or security, whatever. So you do have those?

Yes, we're on work. I believe that Judge Stolarczyk has been made aware of that. And so his answers, I mean, I know he's been looking at it and working on it. I do. I do know that.

Do we have the money in fiscal year 26 to address that? Are we bumping that to 2017?

I believe the things that we just talked about were put into the budget for it right now. It's just a matter of, can Jason get it all done? And I will have to ask him when he gets here. I don't know, but a lot of these are kind of complicated with a lot of moving parts.

I would like to respond to something you asked, Commissioner Carpenter, regarding our proposed solutions. one of the things that, um, I believe I've been informed of is that we have money in our budget to get a new jury table, right? My concern is, uh, the jury room. Um, I don't know if you've been down there, but with 12 people plus two, it's even with a smaller table that's designed to hold 12 people. Um, if that wall is going to end up getting bumped out, um, which is probably what inevitably needs to happen because 14 people in that room is going to be like sardines. I don't want to put the cart before the horse and redo the jury room furniture if the walls are going to be moved.

I don't know if that's making sense. We put the money because I have that included in the budget. We'll keep it there. But again, circumstances may change where you not need it, but at least it's budgeted because it's not budgeted. It's harder to come up with the funds later to do it if the wall doesn't go. But I have that in there.

It could be that we get the space needs analysis back and it has a great idea of how to accommodate everything. And then we are going to I don't know, move the $4.98 downstairs. I don't know what they might say. And so then we might not want to spend the big money until we at least get the space needs analysis back and figure out where we are going because we need to figure out how it all looks. You're right, Commissioner Carpenter. I am not an architect. I do not know. I never played with Legos. It's just was no, it just was not my thing. And so I don't know how the space works out. That's why I do what I do. And I don't do that.

Do we, and then this may be something that commissioner Chapman can help answer, but is there even the, The ability within this courthouse to give you what you're asking for. Is that even a possibility? In this courthouse? In this courthouse.

I absolutely think that there is the ability to do that. Where? I believe, and... I have an idea, but it's not going to be... Go ahead.

You go first. I want to hear yours.

Well, the hard part would be we need to have Ms. Maxwell in here and Ms... Ms. Jackson in here to talk about how that would go. But I believe that the footprint of the district clerks, the county clerk's office is the same footprint as the 451st courtroom. And I believe that if you moved tax people, if you were able to find some place to subsume the non-court related functions outside of that area, then we could have room. But the problem becomes, Commissioner Carpenter, is it would need to be built out, correct? Part of it would need to be built out because we don't have on the first floor, we don't have the holding cell. So we're going to have to do something about the holding cell. And it's going to take some building to do that. And I don't know how it looks to take to subsume the other offices to give our county clerk enough space because she's got space needs too. But if it was just court functions, clerks and courts and DA's office, I think you could fit it all. And the bonus of that would be that then you could lock the doors and you could make it all locked down and having to come through metal detectors. So when you're coming upstairs, that there's not the safety issues that we are facing as well through the courthouse. But again, I'm not an architect. And so this is just me looking at war plans. And I don't know, which is why I'm very excited about the space needs analysis, which is what I think we really need, which we are going to do. I know. And I'm very excited and appreciative, right?

We're very appreciative. One thing I did want to also add when we're talking about the space needs, right? and I'm sure Judge Cahoon has addressed this before. So in addition to the associate judges, the two courtrooms are also utilized for visiting judges. So, for example, on the calendar next week, Judge Emerson and Judge Harl, I believe, are handling various matters, in addition to Judge Cahoon presiding in the 451st and me presiding in the 498th. That's a lot of judges without a lot of courtrooms. So ideally, I think, in talking about her idea, is that one of the courtrooms could always be available for these visiting judges or for the CPS judge or for the AG judge or for a juvenile proceeding, which has to be done apart from the adult or civil proceedings. So it's a different, it's just a suggestion that I would have to put in the back of your mind that it's not just about Judge Cahoon and myself and the two associate judges. There's these other judges that come pretty much on a weekly basis to handle various matters.

The smaller courtroom has all, the smaller courtroom, and I'm sorry to call your courtroom the smaller courtroom. The 498th courtroom used to always serve that function. We always had that extra courtroom, but we don't have the extra. We need the extra courtroom, and this space needs study should enable us to figure out a way that we can make this building be able to accommodate us for the Until we can get to the next level.

So it's a two-phase, something in the short term. So if we were able to purchase the building and move people out of here, we would need, space needs people to come in and say, like the architect is doing now, reconfigure everything. Could we do anything for plumbing and the security issues? Can we fast-roll that? Like if Jason can't handle it, can we get an outside plumber to come in?

I don't think it's... We were led to believe it's just cosmetic, not a problem that's ongoing right now. But again, we can talk to Melissa. When is Jason scheduled to come in?

Sounds like it's not cosmetic if it's

Well, let's talk to Jason tomorrow so he'll be here and then we can ping him about that and figure out what's cosmetic versus what's essential.

And if you need either Judge McDaniel or myself here, just tell Ms. Spear or somebody to get us and we'd be happy to come and sit here and answer any questions when he's up here if you need us.

So you're saying it's continually functional issues with the toilet?

It's functional issues with the toilets and cosmetic issues.

I guess, you know, one of the things that I'm sure you're aware of commissioner is that the jury room is that's, um, those are Kendall County citizens who are coming to serve. Um, and, uh, the facilities, I'm going to, I'm just going to say it as politely as I can. They're subpar. Uh, it's, they need to be the grout. I know that, um, before I came, I know that they made an effort to try to, um, clean the grout, for example, or I know Lily did, there is no cleaning the grout that's going to solve this situation that we have. So from my... I know there's been some water issues, but I would say that it's primarily aesthetic.

Sorry. Okay, because I want to make sure everyone gets their comments in while you're here. First, we'll go with you, Commissioner Chapman, then Commissioner Carpenter.

I guess as a question... Is a historic courthouse not usable for some of these? And is this room not usable for some of these smaller, like CPS or whatever? Because that's a matter of scheduling, because more times than not, this courtroom is vacant. And more times than not, the courtroom across the street is totally vacant.

Yes, sir. That is exactly what we are having to do at this juncture. We're having to walk the judge. Judge Falkenberg is having to walk across the street to go to there. I will caution that that's not real great because of the safety concerns when you're working with CPS and taking people's children. It was one thing a while back with a couple of months ago. With some yelling and maybe it was more than a couple of months ago, but there's been the he has to go over across the street and utilize that. That is exactly what we are doing to accommodate now because it's the only way we can do it. And so we're having to schedule things around when Judge Van Stavern or this room is being used because we're on the bench and so we're having to find places.

So you're using this room too?

Yes, ma'am. We absolutely are.

Commissioner Carpenter, do you have something else to add? I want to hear what you had to say. Okay. All right.

That wasn't going to be popular.

Yeah, it's not going to be popular, but I just want everyone to keep an open mind because we're trying to shuffle things while we find a final home for everybody. The only other big space that's occupied, Nicole, I'm just throwing this out. Don't get mad. This is an idea.

Well, I came in here.

It's the district attorney's office. If we buy the building across the street, it could field her whole department and then open up that for a courtroom on the third floor. Again, you want creative ideas, I'm just trying to throw them out there. I'm not saying this is a good one, bad one, but thinking outside the box like that is how we solve this problem. And it could only be temporary that they moved over there. I don't know. And I know people don't want to walk across the street, but it's convenient.

If I'm guessing what building you're talking about, because I have not had conversations.

Yes, that's building.

And that's part of us not being able to talk about it because it's real estate we're trying to purchase.

And I know that that is a concern and I can raise that in private, but just...

trying to come up with who are the large people we can move out that could create courtroom space and offices without... Part of the problem, the better thing would be to keep the district attorney's office in the same building with the court system. And the reason why is because they can all be behind the safety perimeter. So... We still have the problem that I don't feel like saying on the safety issues that we have coming up to the courtrooms because we can't lock down the whole building.

I know, but it's like we can't tackle all these in one giant bolt because it's just not doable. But this is a way to get a courtroom because that's all I was looking at. So yeah, under that, think about it.

And that's part of the space needs assessment. People brighter than we are to figure out who should move and how it could work. That's I completely and wholeheartedly agree.

Or what else we could do with this building.

Yeah. How else we could fit the Lego pieces in on, on, on everything that we have. How do they all get together? That's,

And not everyone's going to be happy with all this, but we have to work as a team to solve this because if the needs are a big issue, we got to think outside the box. So that's why I said it was not going to be popular, but whatever. Didn't affect me. So just kidding, Nicole. Catherine, is there anything else you'd like to, because you haven't had a chance to address your budget. I know the 13,000 is included. Is there anything you'd like to address about your thing in particular?

Well, I, there may be some changes based on, I know that Corinna and I had gone through just based on me now being in office and seeing what our actual needs are. So for example, I think our postage budget went up, things like that.

All those little things were.

Overall, I would say, you know, things, I think things are going great. You know, I would say that A suggestion based on, I don't know, something you said, Commissioner McCall, made me think. Again, I'm no architect like Judge Cahoon needs either. But maybe even on the second floor where all those windows are, those could be additional spaces to add an office. I don't know. I don't know what the office needs are. But if we're trying to cram more people in there, that might be another idea. Overall, I am very grateful for... the assistance that the court has provided regarding the staffing needs that we have. One thing I would like to mention as far as long-term planning, in many counties they have, as you may or may not know, there's been a substantial increase in self-represented litigants, particularly in family law cases, right? That is substantial, and it is across the state of Texas and probably nationally. We applied for and did not get a grant from the state bar which would have given us a paraprofessional, a paralegal or someone, because what is happening is someone wants to get a divorce or change the custody situation involving their children, and they go to an AI resource and file bad pleadings. They don't file everything that needs to be filed in order for us to hear the case. I can't give them legal advice. She can't give them legal advice. Our coordinators can't give them legal advice, so they're stuck. So what we would like to at least plan for in the future is someone to assist these folks, not providing legal advice, but providing information regarding, there's like Texas Law Help online, which a lot of folks use, making sure that they have the proper affidavits or verifications, so at least we can get these matters moved on. As I'm sure you're all well aware, the law changed, I guess, effective this year under Senate Bill 293, which requires us to move cases within a more strict timeframe. And it becomes very challenging when one or both parties are self-represented and are filing improper pleadings or petitions. So one thing I know that we would like to think about in the future is adding an additional person to assist specifically within the family law realm, whether that is... going to be grant funded or not, that's something that I'd like to look to in the future.

And what's the title again of that person?

That would be something we would have to figure out on how we would want to play that title.

But like a paralegal? Yes.

So like in Bexar County, it's called the Domestic Relations Office.

They have people in Galveston County. It's just an office that you go to before you are allowed to get to the judge, somebody who looks at your pleadings and then signs off on it and says, okay, it's ready to go to the judge. And they don't call it a paralegal. They call it something different. But we would find out some names and some way best to have that done for that.

It's a liaison to get the right paperwork in place so you can proceed. Because if we just set it for status, these folks are coming down, and then we look at it and we're like, Well, this is wrong. So you just took off of work for your whole day. You don't have enough money to hire an attorney. And now we're having to make you come back another day. And it's inefficient. And it wastes your time. Yes.

And the one thing we had thought about with the grant, it wasn't going to be a full time. It was going to be a part time. And we thought about ways that that person could sit in the library in that space. there's the computers in the library and then there's this little space and we could put a desk and the person would sit in the library and just be there to help the SRLs, the self-represented litigants to come in and then they could help them with maybe getting it filed on the Odyssey or how do we do this? It could be more well-rounded who just was there. It's like a

almost, and the legal help desk. You have the computer in case they need to research something. Right.

It's a great idea. Right, right there. What was the salary on that? We were going to pay them hourly. I thought we were going to do...

I think the grant that we had applied for would have paid them up to... I was going to say $20,000 for a certain amount. Yeah, they were just going to, and we would, we thought we would have them there.

You know, we could go through the bar and get, you know, maybe a budding lawyer who just wanted a little part-time gig to meet more people or was looking for the experience or even a third, a third year law student who would come in and get a part-time work through there and get, get paid who could help with that. That was our, our thought process you know help desk hours one to four on monday and wednesday or you know something along their lines depending on how much the budget was and then to see how many times the people were coming when was it how okay how many people did you serve today and then continuing to educate the people that we have this and then the then having the people use it i think it would take

couple months just to get people to know that it was even there and an option but then i think it could it could ramp up and even be more successful i think uh and i haven't we went to a family law seminar and in collin county i think the way they have it structured is so you come let's say on the first wednesday of the month and you get your paperwork in order and then you can come back thursday and get everything handled right so it would get everything more um instead of uh coming on a Wednesday and then waiting several more months, it could be, it could really improve the efficiency and, and not in non-contested matters primarily. Right.

And you could even set those help desk hours to be towards the end of the day or over lunchtime or in the morning so that people could come before, during lunch or after work and, and get some assistance. It's just a way to be more proactive and assist and help, and help more constituents. Yeah. Make us more efficient. And make our citizenry less exasperated when they have to come to the courts. Karuna has something urgent.

So that's your long-term wish. That's just giving us an advance of what you're thinking about.

I have one more long-term thing, but do you have something immediate? I do, because I think I have an option for the court if it's something you want to consider. So one thing the commissioner's court has an opportunity that they are allowed to do, and we certainly do have this, and that's the county law library. And that is funded mostly by civil proceedings. And so that money is collected. We have a general, I'm sorry, that is fund 20 in our budget. We have a fund balance of about 120,000 currently. Do we still have that? I'm so sorry.

No, that's really good. We did use that for the library redo. If you guys remember, when we redid the library, we stole out of that. Well, didn't steal, but we took out of that fund.

And that's considered a special or dedicated fund. So there are rules associated with that. It's not general fund money. It's not county tax dollars. It's not that. And so as I'm sitting here, I'm thinking, I bet this position... part-time or whatever, could be supported by this. And so I did a little quick search and it can because one of the provisions is establishing resources for county residents who are representing themselves in legal matter. Oh, let's say exactly. So that is one of the parameters that we can use. And if you collect this fee, and we do through the county and district clerk's office, it can only be used to support the law library system. So it would be for computers, it would be for the remodel that Judge Cahoon mentioned, it could be for other things, but it certainly could, $120,000 is not going to pay for a full-time person for very long.

No, but if we budgeted $10,000 to $15,000 for part-time, could that replenish for the next year?

I don't believe $10,000 or $15,000 is going to get you a part-time

Judge, I think you're probably looking at closer to... Well, this could be an hourly person that they would test it out to see what...

I still don't think 10 or 15 is going to do it because that would be a full-time at $30,000. You're not...

Do we get another bite coming back to see you if we would have time to run some numbers and see where we were and then we'd have Ms. Speer work up some, we could work up what we thought. I'd get together with St. Mary's Law School to see what we would, if we could get somebody down here and what we thought and then we could bring that back to you. Maybe we could augment with general fund if we didn't have enough in that. We would need to put a desk in there where there's no desk over there. So we would need a little bit of furniture for that space. But that could come out of the fund too.

Yeah, if you can get creative and you try like a test period here to figure out what will work and not. Because I love the law student idea. You get a third year paying them 20 bucks an hour. that could be more than it because you may not have a lot of interest in there may be ebbs and flows and so rather than make it a full part-time position let's just give you some money over there 10 hours a week or you know nine hours a week three hours three times a day three times a week three hours a day something just to see how it goes and get uh so if we give you 30 minutes at one of the upcoming courts think we can that sounds great that sounds great we'll get together and we'll we'll

But I'll let her crunch numbers because I don't do numbers. And then we can figure it out. I'm the cruncher. We can figure that out.

Vote for a desk. And then let's focus on this using this special fund for this. That way, let's see how it goes.

I mean, to date, we haven't really even used any. I think it said $200. And so we probably... just needed to get, to get something.

Didn't we deplete that pretty good? We did. When we did the remodel. We, we, we, we took, I think we ended up, we took a lot out of that.

We did. We, we, we used quite a bit of it, but now it's, you know, we have projected about 25, 27,000 to come in this fiscal year and the next fiscal year. So it starts replenishing itself. And we, we really, we've used $206 both years. So we're, we're buying a book that's going back in there every, every year. But because there's computers and there's other things, we, we no longer really have to, to use that fund for things. But if you're collecting it, you do need to use it specifically for, I'm going to call it that room. And that could be a personnel. So I'm glad. A lot of people.

And a lot of people do Austin, Travis County has obviously a really big law library and they have, they have a lawyer who, And that's what she does is she helps people all day in the family civil building and getting their stuff together. And that's that's her job. And she's great. I've called her for things beforehand. But the bigger counties do that. Right. But maybe a smaller county such as ourself could have part time of that.

When do you think you could come back? Corinna, where could you squeeze them in?

I haven't scheduled anybody for the July meetings yet.

So you'll put her on the list?

There are several departments we aren't meeting with today and tomorrow, so they will automatically come back on that July 13th date, I believe is the next one. So I would just, if the judges are ready by then, then...

Sure, we can get together and get that done in three weeks.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. One more long-term thing, county court at law, isn't that still out there? And have you all thought about that? And that's got to be incorporated in the space.

I think when we do the space needs and when we start talking about the building, if we're doing that route, when we start taking the space needs, we have to talk about another question. not only the 498th, but just to be proactive, I think we would need to talk about another one.

So we want to have the county court law, do we not?

I think we're going to need that. I mean, the way that that came up was that was when we were talking about how to split the 451st up, and we had those meetings that Judge Talarczyk served on as well, but that was from the OCA, and the OCA said that our numbers were such that we would probably need to have that county, I think they said it off the cuff. And I think that they, once they said it and my eyes got really big because I said, I don't know how we would fit that. And they're like, just the numbers are what the numbers are. And that was where that came from was the OCA. When we were talking about how to split the work between the 451st and the 498th, And because that was said and that sat in my head, and I think it's probably right because it would be beneficial to have that county court at law as somebody who did all the misdemeanors and helped as well.

Okay.

That's a long term.

I want to make sure everybody knew that was still on the radar.

Thank you, ladies.

Thank you. Appreciate each and every one of you.

We're going to be meeting with animal control, detention, and sheriff beginning at 1. We have 45 minutes slotted for them. Is there any final housekeeping? I'd like to break for lunch to give everyone a few extra minutes if we can.

Judge, one thing. Can we lock that door so we can leave all this stuff here? Absolutely. Okay, thank you.

So with that, it's 11.50 a.m. on this Wednesday, June 24, 2026, and we're in recess for this budget workshop for 11.50. Good morning, everyone. It is, or afternoon, it is 1.09 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24th, and we're resuming our special session, budget workshops, with Department 408, Animal Patrol, which is page 17, in your binder. And, Charity, just for your knowledge, we kind of briefed the court, and it was the consensus at this point is the part-time to full-time position is as support. Thank you. Were there any major highlights? I can't remember. I don't have notes on this one.

She specifically didn't ask for anything. We did have to increase cell phones based on the number of cell phones. And then I reduced internet services based on the cost of internet. So her overall operating budget.

Did it go down?

It did go down because there's $26,000 in capital right now. capital expenditures that is not budgeted for next year. So the overall operating with no capital items did decrease from one year to the next.

But the change of the full-time employee is not in here at this point?

No additional salaries are in here right now. So just the operating budget. Okay.

Anyone have any questions for Charity? Hers is pretty straightforward.

Yeah.

How's everything going?

It's going good. Like I was saying, we are very full. We've got lots and lots of dogs right now. So luckily we have a really good volunteer team going. So we've been having a lot of volunteers and doing a lot of adoption events, trying to get animals out, but we are pretty full. Which is not a good news.

So the court knows that there's still... Primarily, or what's the percentages of owner turn-ins versus, you know, strays?

Yeah, we're still getting the majority is owner surrenders.

People just not being able to keep their pets. Is it the economy trying to feed them veterinary care?

Yeah, I think it's partly that. A lot of people are moving, you know, it's life changes, moving, divorce, all sorts of different reasons why they are bringing their pets. Their life is changing in some way. health, stuff like that.

Does anyone have questions for Charity? Otherwise, we can let her on her way.

All right. Thanks for what you do. Thank you. Have a good day.

Next up is detention. Robert, you're up.

This is page 47. I increased utilities just based on what would be needed in the budget. The only thing that Captain Green has requested is additional and contract services, the vehicle that we spoke about earlier, that the money is potentially there this fiscal year if that's something you're going to approve, and then He has $103,000 for the upgrade Bosch video service that's on your capital. So those really are your only changes to this budget.

And so the upgrade to the Bosch system is $103,000. That's built into the budget that I presented this morning. And the proposal is, if the court agrees, the $43,000 vehicle To go ahead and acquire it this budget year. Is there any objections to that? We can find the money for Captain Green?

Is there any downside?

No, it's always cheaper to buy it now versus wait another six months potentially.