Service Authority Board - Regular Meeting

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, to the Republic, which stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Are there any amendments to the agenda? Seeing none. At this time, we're open the floor to public comment. Please keep your comments limited to three minutes per person to give everyone a chance to speak. At that time, please state your name and the district in which you vote so it can be included in the public record. First to have up, Sherman Davis.

Thank you, Mr. Sheriff. Name is Sherman Davis, and I vote in the Diplomacy District. The book of Revelation chapter number three, the scripture says, behold, I stand at the door and knock. Any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and sup with him and he with me. The church at Laodicea, the church in the last age, where I think we are now, the Lord Jesus Christ is outside the church knocking to get in. I suppose that the sad part about that is they didn't even know it. And that's where we are today, kind of. We got our plans and our programs and our budgets, and we forget that the Lord needs to be there too. But it makes you think about our three great must, M-U-S-T, must. The must of life, and that is the must of, laid upon the Savior, the must that was laid upon the sinner, and the must that is laid upon the saint. The Bible says in Matthew chapter number 16, verse 21, from that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples how that he must go into Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed or must be killed and must raise again on the third day. The must of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of all the people that could be saved Jesus Christ never turned anybody away. There's only one man that he wouldn't save. I won't say he couldn't save, but in order to fulfill scriptures, he couldn't save this man. The only man that he wouldn't save was himself. And he went to the cross to bear our sin penalty. John 3 tells us that God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but the world through him might be saved. And then that's the must of the Savior, the must of the sinner. The Bible says you must be born again. We need salvation. We need the Lord. We need forgiveness. We need a new birth. We were born of corruptible seed, the Bible says. My father had corruptible seed. His father had corruptible seed. And all the way back to Adam, we've all been born of corruptible seed. And so we need the must of the new birth. And then there's the must that's laid upon the saint. The Bible says, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And the child of God, though, has been saved months ago, must share the message, must tell people, must preach in the church house, must preach in the school house, must preach in the club house, must preach in the house, our own house, must preach in the jail house. And of course, from house to house, we need to pray. Pray in a schoolhouse, pray in a courthouse, pray in a church house, or pray in your own house, and go to the Lord and ask him to do something that only he can do. The must, the must of the Savior to die on the cross, the must of the sinner to be born again, trust the Lord Jesus Christ, and the must for the saint to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Perfect. God bless you. Good Lord, take a liking to you. May all your lights be green.

next up i have it's daniel i'm not sure how sh should go okay i didn't want to say wrong before we go mr dines is sully able to hear us online yeah i already just checked it was it seemed like the video was coming through but maybe not the audio checking it take that

By the way, Mr. Sones is out of town, but he is online. Go ahead, my friend.

All right. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Dan Shago. I'm a Dahlgren district. I'm speaking tonight regarding the proposed data center development near Metrodic Creek. I would like to say just up front that I'm completely opposed to building this facility adjacent to neighborhoods. And while I appreciate the board's efforts to include C weighted decibel limits recently, The current mitigation proposal still contain critical engineering loopholes, environmental blind spots first. We know that data centers emit continuous low frequency rumbles from industrial chillers. And unlike high pitch sounds, these low frequency waves pass right through standard drywall, windows, and the proposed dirt berms. Second, the upper metodic creek itself, the geography of it, multiplies this danger. The flat, highly reflective water allows the low frequency waves to travel unfettered, turning the creek into a megaphone. Furthermore, the wet marsh soils will carry physical vibrations directly into our homes. Third, watershed protections are entirely insufficient. Paving hundreds of acres creates a massive concrete footprint. Heavy storms flush millions of gallons of water containing heavy metals, toxic sediment, and vehicular fluids directly into the creek's resource protection area, destroying fish habitats, suffocating the local ecosystem. In addition, routine testing of hundreds of diesel generators will pump heavy particulate exhaust into our skies. Finally, we know that data centers run 24-7, and county enforcement is entirely reactive. If a noise violation happens at 2 a.m., residents must call the sheriff, wait for a manual reading, and if a stormwater basin fails, the county won't know until the creek is already polluted. By the time a violation is recorded, our families and our environment will have already suffered. However, if this board chooses to override the community's will and move forward, it must protect us by mandating two binding non-negotiable proffers. First, continuous acoustic monitoring. Install permanent class one sound level meters at all property lines with real-time, publicly accessible cloud dashboards that text immediate alerts to county staff when DBC limits are breached. Two, smart watershed protection. Install automated water quality probes at all stormwater outfalls to continuously track turbidity, chemicals, and thermal pollution before runoff touches the creek. These data centers run 24-7. If the corporation is confident that their mitigations are actually going to do what they say they're going to do, then let's hold them accountable 24-7. automated continuous monitoring must be non-negotiable do not force our community to police a multi-billion dollar corporation protect our peace our health and our environment and i also have a technical memorandum that i wrote up so you can look at the different types of real-time acoustic and watershed outfall body things i got six copies of it so i don't know i was going to give one to whoever

the board basically who do i pass it to all right thank you for your attention appreciate it yeah i will bring in so i will add to that i usually don't when i go this point in time this was voted on last august i believe There's nothing that the board at this time, it's been voted for already. We did add a bunch of proffers in there. they do they do that and and the ponds that we had were very well checked out to make sure those things were going to retain there was plenty of meetings on that yes and they were public meetings where the company itself came to Mary Washington campus in Dahlgren two or three different times to meet with the public and hundreds of people from Dahlgren showed up and met with them one-on-one and that happened over the course of a year and a half you know yeah sorry Next I got up Dana Croce.

All right, Dana Croce, James Monroe District. Hello, good evening everyone and members of the board. Thank you for allowing me to speak today. Thank you, Daniel, for addressing all of my concerns as an engineer in this area. So many of the residents of St. Paul Road, Claydale, a lot of our other communities have asked me to speak on their behalf. Many people did not know at all about this. And so those are the communication issues that I wanted to address in this, as well as same sentiments as Dan. I am not in agreement with the Dahlgren West Data Center at all. I live on St. Paul's Road. Some of you may know me as either a neighbor or a co-worker. I've lived and worked here for 20 years, and like many of you, I raised my children here and chose my neighborhood specifically because it was surrounded by residential and agriculturally zoned land. because of that my children had a good childhood surrounded by nature and good people i'm here today on behalf of that nature and those good people with a shared concern that the dahlgren west data center going into our backyards will make the life my kids got to have impossible for future generations most of us in the county were most of us that i've talked to in the residence of st paul's road were unaware Part of my job actually used to be analyzing data centers. Like many people here, I used to work on base. I was the Aegis Head of Digital Engineering at the Missile Defense Agency before I retired last year. Part of my responsibilities, including evaluating and developing what was necessary to support our country's infrastructure, so I understand and sympathize with the struggle to balance the need for development versus protecting communities and wildlife. In addition, with that expertise, I also spent 20 years at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center working for the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff doing its first, second, and third order effects assessment for all of the impacts of a lot of our nation's military, including infrastructure. However, it is with this knowledge and expertise that leads me to believe that the data center dog and rest in this area will cause unpreventable impact that any reasonable person could call detrimental to the area and deeply unpopular with the community. It's important that new developments do not compromise the integrity and health of residential and wildlife areas. As Dan just addressed, low frequency noise unique to data centers may fall below the limits that we now have and is now being shown to be detrimental to the health of residents and wildlife at larger distances than anticipated. That area is not only home to bats, eagles, and the protected nest of the eastern box turtle, but has major historical and cultural significance. I was asked by a neighbor to bring up the fact that she and her family have lived on that land. And that's where her ancestors have lived and died. And that was historically granted to them as part of the adjacent land was historically granted to them as part of their emancipation. And the family still lives there. It would be in poor taste. I'm sorry, ma'am.

I give everybody three minutes. I can't give any more.

Okay. Thank you. I didn't realize that that's what that was. Thank you.

Doug Cross. I live in King George on St. Paul's Road, Dahlgren District. And they pretty much said everything I was going to say, but here's the deal. When you build this 350 feet from your back deck, the volume of stuff that we're going to have to put up with, the damage to the watershed behind us, we have box turtles, we got fish, we got deer. How are they going to prevent this from getting destroyed? It's a wetland between us and them. I mean, will you guys build it? How many guys? Raise your hands. How many would build this behind your house? Well, I can tell you that... You'll take it?

Yeah. As a matter of fact, the chair of the board lives in Claydale. He put it right behind his house. Really? Yes, sir.

I want it behind my house. I suppose this is where this is a done deal. Nobody can do anything about this at this point? At this point, no, sir. We never got notification of this. You can ask the other people that live on my street. We never heard a notification of it. This is the first time we heard about it yesterday. Have you watched any board meetings over the past year?

No, we don't go to board meetings.

We have jobs.

Yeah, I do too, sir. But I got a job too. But we never had notification of this. You have to take some sort of personal responsibility for listening to people. We do. We pay our taxes. Okay, great. So you can have a job. So I send you this. My friend, this is a volunteer position, pretty much. I serve the community, so thank you. My job, you don't have anything to do with that. All right. But this thing was, we did more public advertising for that one than about anything that we've done. We've had several public hearings. It's been advertised. They did site visits at Mary Washington where hundreds of people who live in Dahlgren came to it. Hundreds of people came twice.

Nobody visited our house. Nobody visited us and said, can we walk in your backyard and look at the wetlands?

How would you like for me to get the news out to you?

Knock on our door. Down our road. This is the road you're putting it on.

yeah it's st paul's road there were public hearing signs all down the highway you don't go 301 okay

Nobody drives on 301. Mr. Chairman, you may want to call on individual speakers so others can hear what's being said.

I would have this conversation with you right now, but I can't because they can't hear you in the public, so I can't do it. Madison Morgan.

Hey, good evening. Thank you all for having me tonight. I'm coming to you guys from Tri-County City Soil and Water Conservation District, reaching out to invite you guys to our 2026 producer kickoff. So this event's gonna be July 9th at the Fredericksburg National Stadium. Of course, it's open to all of our supervisors and the public. So especially a lot of you guys concerned about data centers, I say producer kickoff, but it'd be a great opportunity for you guys to come on out and see how you guys can get involved with your local Soil and Water Conservation District. It's a free event and you get some dinner on the district. So that's always fun. We might be having barbecue. But yeah, so we'd love to have you guys there. I've got some invitations up here if I could get them to Mr. Smalling and disperse them all out.

That'd be great.

Awesome. Thank you guys. And I'm happy to answer any questions later and you guys all have my contact.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Joshua Mills.

So my name is Joshua Mills. I live on St. Paul's Road as well. I'll just keep it brief. I was unaware. My property literally backs to the Peppermill Creek. And as I understand it, there could be the possibility of seepage from the new site there. And I am I'm concerned about the natural habitat there. I'm also concerned about the noise levels. So I'm a proponent of what Dan mentioned earlier. That's all I would say.

All right, is there anyone else that would like to speak? Go ahead, Terry. Ms. Morgan.

Terry Morgan, Shiloh District. I want to address the, and I'm assuming I have to do it at this point, the new ordinance for the trash and refuge disposals. I don't know who wrote it and I may agree with it wholeheartedly. However, I give them an A for effort, but It fails on lots of levels. What we're trying to do by doing this, we're going after both homeowners and businesses. I have no problems going after businesses for these things. However, to go after homeowners and businesses, it's like you're making an overall county HOA. And the writing is a little ambiguous, kind of in my eyes, it's very subjective. When you start using the words that one person has the judgment of it, and what they say is final and conclusive, and then they say substances which might endanger or might not endanger health, and all of that subjectivity goes to the landowner and if the items are not removed then it goes a lien against their property and then after that occurs because it's on their tax bill they could lose the property at that point You know, so I think this is a real overreach. I think that what needs to be done is it needs to be handled in ordinances and that's a better way to handle it. One of the things that I would say first and foremost, if we handled it for the businesses before we start going after homeowners, that, you know, we could even look at some of the tire companies that we have in the community. I'm just pointing that out because it's an easy hit. We have four tire companies. We have a third one that doesn't call itself tire companies, but it's, it's, collecting lots of tires. These tires are hazardous. They're non, you can't burn them. You got to take them to the dump, but they're just continuing to have them, hundreds and hundreds of tires. And some of these tire developments are not kept nicely. You know, the one on Ridge Road and Route 301 It's a dump. So if you want to refer to something as trash refuge and unhealthy, I would say a collection of hundreds of tires stacked up would be an example of that. And they're putting them into these containers. So if that company goes bankrupt, then what's going to happen? County's going to be stuck with that bill because they're bankrupt. And whoever that landowner that might buy that property or a business that we might want to come in on these main intersections, they don't want to pay to have that mess to clean up. But if we had ordinances that said that these things had to be cleaned up and followed it in that manner, that would be the best way to do it. Other thing we need to address would be before you go against homeowners, Some of these homeowners are on fixed salaries, they're elderly. Maybe we should get our churches and our community groups together to help those kind of places when they may not have transportation available to them or the finances to be able to take these things to the dump. I would think that the community would be more than happy or provide financial help to get churches, organizations to be collecting that.

Thank you. Is there anyone else?

James Shaw, James Monroe, District Columnist for the Northern Next Sentinel, Citizen Journalist, KGMedia.TOP. Not speaking in my capacity as EDA member. While looking through tonight's agenda, interesting that Mrs. Morgan kind of brought the topic up. uh you had all your usual items that keep the wheels of King George County Administrivia turning and in good order and I was about to give up hope and then I spotted it 06-11 almost the last item for tonight's business was someone trying to hide something proposed trash refuse litter debris ordinance so that brings us to a new hat Trash, refuse, litter, and debris spot or die. Some things just can't be condensed. I read through the proposed ordinance and realized there is a potential hazard for our gifted and Swiss Army knife functioning County Administrator Matt Smolnick. Matt, be careful here as the ordinance has the potential of turning you into the equivalent of an HOA Karen. Now, I know that's not the intention of the ordinance. However, some folks will probably read it like I did and come to a similar outlandish conclusion. In this county, we're quite independent, rural, tolerant, understanding men generally don't want to be a busybody regarding other people's business. So let's be wise and smart about this. County Attorney Stewart, I know when you presented this or present this tonight, you will again note the challenges of defining those loaded words as you did before when this first came up a number of weeks back. Good luck negotiating the potential landmines of 0611. May God bless the King George Renaissance. Thank you, Pastor Shaw.

Is there anyone else I'd like to speak? Is there anyone online? Okay, come on up, Ms. Payne.

Rose Payne, 15123. Hazelnut Lane. Hello, everybody. I'm totally confused because I'm late. I didn't even have an agenda. I had to walk two miles to get here because there's no parking. But it seems like we're talking about data centers tonight. How many have already been approved? I thought the only one that had not been approved was up in Seelston. Is that correct? I remember Mr. Veazes that they're all talking about and I thought that was the only one that would not use water. Isn't that correct?

It's correct. None of them will use water.

But I feel sorry for you people because I know when you're not told things because I've been in that same boat with the board. And I'm so grateful for Dwayne for answering me tonight because I didn't know where you were. And I was up at the Rivercomb building. But anyway, I think it's sad that these folks didn't know about it. And that's unfortunate. And maybe that's something we need to address. But you know, it is what it is. But I thank you for listening to me and I'm sure you're going to hear from me again. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I will say this, that Amy Salpal, who is over our communications with the public and things of that nature, has done a wonderful job on our website. And you can go to the website and you can put your email in there and you can check the box on everything that you'd like to be notified in the county. It's something that we did when we came on the board because when I sat in your chair, guess what? I didn't pay attention to board meetings for a minute. So when I started paying attention to board meetings, I was like, oh, this is going on, that's going on. And they gave me the same answers. Well, we put it up here, we put it there. And I go, well, what can we do more? So you have the ability to go onto the website, put your email address in. It will tell you every parks and recs. It'll tell you every agenda will be sent to you for service authority, for us, for anything. And you'll be notified directly. It's right there. It's very simple to sign up for. Amy, do you want to come up here and just explain to people how to do it real quick? Because some things we have to take a little bit of initiative as adults to go, what can I do to make sure that I know the things that I need to know? Not that someone always gives it to me because we put it out there, but you also have to take responsibility. What do I need to know? And I had to take responsibility for my life because I lived in King George my whole life and there were things going on and I didn't recognize my town. I'm going, what's going on here? So I had to get involved and I wasn't paying attention. That was me. Okay, for years, I've raised my family, I was coaching football, I was doing my thing. And after a while I was like, that's my responsibility in life is to make sure that I know when I need to know. I'd have to do that my own self. And that's a way that you can do it. Amy, can you tell them how to sign up for that, please?

Yes, there are two different options. If you go to King George County, va.gov slash alerts, that'll give you all the information about KG Alerts. We send out a notification via email with a link to the agenda center twice before each meeting and then also a text message that tells you when the meeting is and where the location is. So if you already have KG Alert, please look into your account and check your preferences. I believe it's community closings and events or something like that, that the category is. If you cannot get into your account, please feel free to reach out to our office 540-775-9181. And then in addition to that, what Mr. Davis is kind of alluding to is we have something through the website that will automatically send to you every time something is posted to our calendar and we have a public meeting calendar. So if you go to KingGeorgeCountyVA.gov slash notify me, you can sign up for email notifications and cell phone notifications or text messages. And this will tell you anytime a public meeting or event, depending on what preference you choose, is posted to our website. And then it's also updated when the agenda is posted as well. So that's a little bit of an overview. That one is a pretty simple one. I think that's the one you're alluding to. You just type in your email. There's no real login. And then you click what preferences you have. that you want to do so thank you very much before you leave can you also tell them about the gis site that tracks all of our in progress in in process projects yes unapproved that are in yes that is um on the home page of the website if you scroll down there's a quick link there that says county projects map also the url is king george county va dot gov slash projects map And this, if you zoom in, it's color coded based off of commercial development projects that are buy right, commercial development projects that are rezoning requests, and then you also have residential requests, same thing, buy right and rezoning requests. So it's color coded with dark green, light green, light blue, and dark blue, I believe. It also has a repository of past projects as well if you change the settings and filters. you can look at things that are completed as well in that. And GS is a great tool. If you want to look at other GIS tools, that's King George County, va.gov slash GIS. And they have a lot of different maps on there for you to look at.

Thank you. All right. Is there any other public comment? Go ahead.

I'm William Hutchinson. I am not from the Claydale area, but I am from King George. I wanted to ask in terms of, someone mentioned something before about the use of water in terms of data centers. It says something along the lines of some of them will not, certain ones will not be using an extensive amount of water or, I'm sorry, I am not normally, I have been in Richmond for school for the past while.

You want me to answer that for you? So we, when we came on, the Amazon deal that's out in Seelston was approved by the prior board. No one on this board approved it. The first day we came in, we rejected it. And the reason why we rejected it, one of the main things, because they have a straw that used to go to the Birchwood Power Plant, where the Birchwood Power Plant used to pump water. And we're not going to let them use water to cool their systems. I'm not going to let anyone use potable water to cool systems. When the Virginia Constitution is very clear that that is for our citizens, for their enjoyment, for the leisure, for their survival. So I've said no to that. Everyone on this board has said no to that. So yeah, that's what I mean. There will be no water used to cool any data center. Thank you, George.

On that, though, actually, speaking of GIS, I did some work and I made a brief map of the area and the soil types as well as some of the floodplains in that area and the parcels of land that will be used for it. Will there be anything done in terms of the... It's already sort of in the middle of an area that has floodplains spiking into it as well as other marshland and other wildlife... other marshland and whatnot would anything be done in order to mitigate the flood impacts or anything that might be done by the amount of the increase in permeable uh impermeable surface or anything along those lines um or is it just

State that one again, at least part of it.

I was just basically asking, is there anything, even though water will not be consumed by the data center, is there anything that is going to be done to help deal with the impact of the increase of the impermeable services in that area when you already have such things like really fine soil that doesn't take water well, very impermeable soil, and the fact that it's already on a major flood plain and a marsh?

I appreciate that. We usually don't do the give and take, but I can at least say if you go back to, I think it was August of 2025, we had a lot of discussions about different soil types. I mean, I know I've been a bear on solar farms and the water use. So to all the residents, if you go back and if you have a lot of time in your hands and maybe a long car ride, you can go all the way back to January of 2020 and look at every board meeting, service authority, board of supervisors, I think even school board meetings, on King George County official content to watch those meetings and see so right off the top of my head without being prepared I cannot give you that answer but all that information is there and if you also go to our old agenda meeting minutes you can find all the presentations that are available Plus, if you want to, they do have an office, and I forget that, I think it's Hilltop Park. It's near the motel down, right as you go down into Dahlgren. It's on your right. I forget the name. They have an office there, Dahlgren West, and they would be more than happy you go in and contact them, and they would meet with you and answer some of these questions. They're very willing to meet with the public because they had a lot of informational meetings.

Thank you. And one reason why they came in and put an office in is they saw how they felt like that we were steamrolled and passed deals. So they came in and put an office in the community. And they put the office in the community for the purpose of the community being able to reach them and talk to them whenever they wanted to go talk to them. So they're right down there at that plaza right before Hillcrest, around the right. It's right there. They're there every day. And the people, they have gone out of their way to meet with the community instead of meeting places from the library, like I said, to Mary Washington College where hundreds of people traveled through and they didn't just do a presentation like a forum they met with individuals one-on-one is what they did the entire time like they really went out of their way to make people comfortable and what they based it on was the conversations that they saw what this board wasn't going to be willing to tolerate so they came in already ready matt you wanted to add something to that

I heard a couple of things, floodplain wetlands. Commonwealth of Virginia adopted the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act standards in 1989. I had a conversation with a couple of gentlemen prior to this meeting with wetlands. Wetlands can be intermittent or perennial based on the flow. Is it part-time or year-round? Perennial streams have a 100-foot buffer, and that can be anything connected to a wetland. That can be the waterway itself, it can be soil type, and it can be fauna. So U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Norfolk office regulates this. The applicant would hire soil scientists, mark those wetlands confirmed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and flagged appropriately 100 feet from the edge of anything connected to those wetlands. So no activity can occur inside of those. As far as a floodplain, I don't believe that is in a flood zone. I know it is a wetland and those are the RPA features that are dictated by the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act. I just want to put that out there that these are state laws that have been in effect for almost 30 years or so, 40 years. Again, for information's public, I've been in the development world for 23 years. Post-development cannot exceed pre-development. So that's why stormwater calculations for both quantity and quality. Professional engineers do those calculations for nitrogen, phosphorus. And that's why you see these ponds. Those aren't just fancy ponds. Those are stormwater retention ponds that are engineered by professional engineers to hold the stormwater. And it has to be designed up to a 100-year event here in Virginia.

Mr. Smalley. So, hold on. They can't hear me in public, so I can't. You got to come to the microphone if you're going to speak. But Mr. Smolnick, there's a lot of interest in this, obviously, tonight. Could you tell folks where we are in this process? Because when the special exception comes through, a package is generated. There's a lot of engineering that goes into that, but it's not a site plan, right? It's not final... fully engineered water retention, impervious surface. Can you just, for the Dahlgren West Rowan facility, can you inform, where are we today? I don't believe I've seen a site plan approved yet.

That is correct. The only thing that's happened are entitlements that would happen to be approved by the board back in August of 2025. The next state requirement and local requirement would be to submit a site plan. Part of that site plan shows the location of every building, every square inch of asphalt sidewalk that has not yet been submitted. Those documents are reviewed by staff and a team of professional engineers to meet the state minimum standards for stormwater runoff, for buffers, and they will not be able to, and then on top of that, part of the site plan, there's an erosion and sediment control that plan that is part of that site plan for the silt fence and the the sediment basins for early construction and then the permanent set of it the permanent bmps for those facilities this is all we're if if this is a storybook uh you know a thousand page storybook we're probably on page 50 60 something like that so these are all parts of development in the Commonwealth of Virginia no different in King George County than any other locality in Virginia

Thank you. So if once one of those drawings, somebody saw that there was a retention pond that overlapped with the wetlands, that will have to change when it comes to community development.

Absolutely. Okay. Thank you.

I am Dan Dunham also on St. Paul's. I just it was I was Matt helped me out a lot right before the meeting explaining a lot of things just for all my neighbors. I found it on it's the August 19 2025 board meeting. They have all this information at the bottom of page four. It doesn't satisfy me but at least the information is there that I can read through. Thank you.

I'm Brianna Morgan. I guess I'm Dahlgren Voting District. I just moved here so August 2025 doesn't mean much to me. My question is like what's gonna happen with taxes for energy? My question is who approved this? Like you guys approved it? Did we not get like a vote or are we gonna get a vote before like it gets more major and construction starts because i'm like freaking out we bought our like forever home and i've got little kids and i don't want a data center in my backyard like i found this out on sunday and was spinning so like what are we going to do with the animals where are they going to go like the forest it's so sad and like i don't know are we going to get any more say from like here on out like what's going on where are we where do we go from here That's my question. Anybody?

Well, if you're asking if there's any way that we're going to stop it, it's already been voted on.

But by you guys? Like, what about us?

Well, like I said, there was hundreds and hundreds of people that came through. I didn't get any negative. I said hundreds.

Yeah, none of my neighbors knew. St. Paul's, like, I've lived there since October 1st, and nobody knew.

But with the people in fact never heard and 3, 0, 1, why don't grow all know how it all.

It was only a road that goes to the bridge.

What is the currently what is the each developer has to reach out to the residents and what what is the ratio around it that so so it's the Jason properties and I know the first speaker. Daniel, please forgive me for your last name sir. So you were on the adjacent property owner list that was verified that they did reach out to you the letter and we went through that with some of the gentlemen prior to and they know they recognize some of their neighbors who did receive notification of this public hearing and the notification is if the public the partial fronts are right away you have to post notice on that and it fronts 301 and there were the 36 by 48 inch signs are every 200 feet for the public hearings in accordance with local code for the Planning Commission public hearing. They were taken down in accordance with the law and then they were put back up for the Board of Supervisors public hearing.

Okay, so my last question because my time's running low.

And there were two additions. This was on the website and in the newspaper.

Well, so now that more people know, like can we be, if there's enough pushback, can we vote on it? Because this is both.

Mr. Chairman, if I may. Go ahead. So the Code of Virginia, correct me if I'm wrong Senator Stewart, the Code of Virginia, it dictates the governing body to vote on special exceptions, rezoning, anything that requires legislative review. The Board of Supervisors, the five elected officials, they are elected by the public. So each of you have representation up here on the Board of Supervisors. So, you know, the legislative process is already over. Everything from here on out is administrative. And if the county would try to hold something up, we would be held liable and we could be sued, meaning you all could be sued and we could enter into a long, costly legal battle if we tried to hold something up that already has its entitlement, such as Dahlgren West.

Rodney Rollins, Dowcon District. I only have one concern or one question is I just wonder if our utility electric companies can handle the amount of usage that's going to be taken from the general public for these data centers. I'm hearing stories throughout the country where there's brownouts, sometimes electric is lost for more than 24 to 48 hours. And I'm just wondering, is the board comfortable with the utilities that are furnishing the electricity to these data centers? Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.

Yeah, so I didn't quite catch your name. Rodney. So the answers to your question are in the historical documents. It's already been referenced. but uh they have uh power that's already been allocated to them for the data center but it was briefed uh a number of times and it's in if you go back and look at either watch the meetings or read the minutes or such like that you'll see all the answers I don't know about rumors and such, but if you go to the website, you can find the information. Thank you.

Hi, how are you doing? My name is Kevin Josker. I live off of Comorn Road in King George. My real thing isn't really about data centers. I'm here to listen about that. But an ex-meow in West purchased a few hundred acres of land. My concern is Comorn Road is not the safest road by any means. Has there been any look to fix, A, the outlets they're going towards, 218. 218 had a car go off just the other day again. I mean, it's so common. People are going over there. There's no real warning sign for people who don't know and are flying down it. It's wet. The other side coming out of that U-turn, a little horseshoe, it's just one of the most unsafe portions in the county. Allen West is looking to build 80 houses. I could argue that all day. I don't care for them. I don't care about that. But at the end of the day, things are inevitable. What are we looking at to make this a safer intersection, safer zone for everything? Because something's got to be done at this point. If we're going to add 80 extra houses, my wife and I are expecting a kid in the next couple weeks. We have to look at something to make people safer, slow it down, speed limit, some type of intersection, some type of stoplight. Is there any plan for that?

This is a good opportunity. Last meeting, we had VDOT here, and I asked them to look at putting it in our long-term plan to extend the deceleration lane onto Comorn Road. Previously, we've asked them, and they've done four different traffic studies to look at the speed limit as you come from three onto Comorn Road. And unfortunately, those studies don't support moving the speed limit sign. I'll continue to ask because I also use that road. And it's a racetrack through there. But one of the things that was found during those studies was the decel lane is too short for the amount of traffic that it processes. And the question is, how do we pay for it? And so there's some telefees that maybe we... What came out of that conversation was, VDOT, our VDOT lead believes that maybe we can use some tele-fees to support that. So I live down off of 218, so I cut through on ComWarrant. I agree with your safety concerns. We'll have to see. I don't think we've seen a project yet for rezoning. If it's by right, it's by right. I'm always looking at Cobb-Morn Road.

That's not a big deal. I can talk to him. My other additional thing is, could we look to add some deer crossing signs throughout it? I love calling King George to pick up a free deer to get in my freezer, but it's getting ridiculous how many actually get hit there a year. I love hunting back there, but If people fly through there, I don't think they realize those deer are hopping even in some of the horse fields they're hopping over. You'll see them sit all the time. Just some sort of sign to put there so they can see them. Maybe we could cut down some traffic incidents, help King George out, as well as I don't have to keep calling in for a deer.

On VDOT's list, and we've been talking about this, and there's even a plan to straighten out 218 in some places to where it's curvy and there's a lot of blind in and out spots and things like that because the developers are building houses and Things of that nature, you know. As far as the development goes, yeah, it's probably buy-write because we're not going to see it. That's what Alan buys.

Like I said, I can argue that all day. Yeah, Alan buys. That's what Alan buys. He loves building.

He does love to do that.

Yes.

Thank you. All right. Thank you, guys.

All right.

Are we going to close public comment this time? Unless I got anyone else who wants to speak. I already did that. They didn't have any.

Ladies and gentlemen, Howard Swenson. I'm over here in Dawson's Landing Drive. I'm going to appear real ignorant. It's not the first time in life. So I haven't followed all this on the voting and how long this has been going on. It seems like it's been quite a while and I missed the party. Okay. You just brought up an answer I was kind of curious on. The cooling mortar. How are they going to cool all these data centers? Air cooled. Not closed loop water. Okay. Yeah.

That's not what was said. Okay, right now it's going to be closed loop and they're looking to use gray water. So basically, they're using water that's been treated. It comes whenever we get done from our wastewater. They're paying us to take our wastewater and use it to cool with. right and that goes in a closed loop over and over and over again they have to treat it and then once it's treated then it goes back out but it's but it's not drinking water okay it goes back out where it probably would be better to have Mr. Hamilton answer that oh sure Mr. Hamilton

Good evening folks. To be clear, I'm not on the Board of Supervisors or the Board of Directors. I'm the General Manager of the Service Authority. I have spoken with the folks at Dahlgren West within the last two weeks. The current commitment is that we will provide potable water to that facility just like any warehouse, any hospital, any other building. So the statement that they're going to have no water is not 100% accurate. I don't want to correct anybody, but there is current discussions about providing them potable water. For cooling water, we will not provide them any water for cooling or humidification, which seems to be a new thing to worry about static electricity for data centers and things like that they have approached us and asked if they could use our gray water for cooling that is something i know they are evaluating the cost of if that happened they would take the discharge from our wastewater plant it would be piped to them at their expense no expense to anybody here and then they would use that to cool their data center equipment i'm not an expert on that by any stretch and then it would either be returned to us or there are potentially could have their own discharge okay there are some conversations about other things that may be beneficial that I'm not prepared to discuss now but right we will not be using water or groundwater for cooling and then they could do a closed loop system instead of using our gray water that's a separate proposal again that's up to them I'm confident to say that the state of Virginia will not issue them a withdrawal permit to use groundwater I hope that answers some of your questions.

Well, it does not answer them all, believe me, because military, nuclear power, closed-loop systems, I know all about it, and you can't tell me that when they return that, it's going to be any positive to it.

Well, I'm open to have a dialogue with anybody here about this, and I'm not an expert, and again, I'm not in an approving capacity here in any stretch. And I'm asking a question.

Sure. Don't know. need to find out still don't know okay as far as electrical they're going to provide their infrastructure to go up to their plants they're going to pay the regular power rates everybody else is right are we paying for the infrastructure to get up to their plants are they paying for their own yes sir done a little bit of work

on this particular issue they got a commitment from northern neck electric which is a electric cooperative the electric cooperatives have a different model than dominion power so with dominion power the data center folks would pay a portion but it is all all of the infrastructure cost is put back into the rates so that the general rate payers pay a portion of it as well that's dominion's model Northern ECHO Electric's model is the data center pays for everything so that none of the co-op rate payers have to pay for anything.

And who's accountable to making sure they follow through with that? The co-op does with regard to the electricity.

Okay. And they report back to you, to us, to who? They have to report to the SEC and the SEC audits what they're doing. So I can tell you that the Northern Act electrics model is that way, but that's not true with Dominion. Theirs is completely different.

No, my son has Dominion and he got a charged up bill like crazy. That's what you're thinking of.

You're thinking about the Dominion power model. Absolutely. That does spread out into all the rate payers.

Okay. And I wasn't a very involved citizen, so I get what I deserve on that, but I was wondering if you'd have another vote. Do you realize how many people are against these data centers that live in King George right now? If you were to take a vote, are you for or against? Not that it's going to change anything. We want your opinion. How many are against it? So I'm just saying, do you care how many people that live in King George are formally against this? whether they were involved when they should have been like I should have been whatever I should have been made more attention that's not going to change a damn thing but it makes you aware where the public stands you should know that thank you and finally the last question I have to be honest we're over three minutes I can't be okay last question if you could okay I understand you got a data center. Why do we have three in a county the size of King George? Can you answer me that? Why do we have three vice one? Why three?

Well, okay, so the dialogue is over because we're beyond three minutes. Okay. The reason that the reason that we have three is because the three were presented one of them was presented before we were on the board okay but we have no control over when or rather if they build correct right approving or not approving it doesn't matter you this is the thing about kind of living in a vacuum in a sense

that you're just just because that you're here today saying no that there were numerous people here and numerous emails received and yes there were in favor whether you believe or not it's still true the truth doesn't change whether you believe it or not and there were um i talked to many of my constituents and hundreds of people were were saying i we hated amazon but these people really went out of their way to make us happy these people went out and met us these people did this and there's a lot of people that yes and offered poppers

in all this please go back and watch the public hearing uh whenever it happened go back and watch it again because it's it's important that you're informed before you come up and bring you start bringing things up that's already been brought before the public and before the board yeah thank you all right is there anyone else come on up

Hey, my name is Kimberly Brown. I'm from the Eden Estates area. I just want to hear from the horse's mouth, because I've heard from other people, what's going to happen to our electricity bills and our water bills once this is all built up? Not just one, two, but three.

All right. So hopefully your water bill will go down because it can be people coming into the system. They're not using the water. And as Mr. Stewart just explained to you, because of the power that they're using, your electric bill isn't going to go up. They put the cost totally 100% on the data center to pay for the structure and pay for everything.

I just want to make sure.

Thank you so much. Yes.

All right.

my name is peter biffle and uh we've been in king george about 27 28 years we have a well so the conversation kind of seems to go to shift from they're not going to be using water to that that they're going to the fact that they're going to be using ground water

All right, clarify it for me, because I... Yes, what I said was, they will not be taking any water out of the river, and they will not be using any groundwater. In other words, any drinkable, usable water for fishing things that have wants to use air coolant. If they do use water, it will be water that goes through a treatment plant that went through your sewage, not you because you're on a well. It went through a sewage plant. It gets treated. It's not able to be pumped back out into the river because it's filthy. They will pay, the data center will pay what they call gray water, purple pipe to use that water to cool if they need it to cool their data center. It's not usable. Then it goes out, it gets treated again. That's how it works.

Okay.

Yeah. So it's not going to affect your well, my friend. All right. Thank you.

um i want to mention with the well when we're talking about mr hamilton talked about potable well that is a well on site to allow them to use the bathroom or like to have a kitchen it's not it is it is no the potable Yeah, from the county. The Dahlgren West is going to get it from the county, from the Dahlgren system. But that's what they're talking about. Potable water meetings, flushing your toilet, kitchen, not air cooling or any kind of water.

They're going to pay to hook themselves up to the service authority because they want to be a partner with King George and because they want to be have the same bills you do. They want to pay their own electric bill and they're going to pay their own water bill and that's what the service authority itself can actually make money because the next thing I'm going to hear from people is which one reason why is you need to lower my water bill. This is actions that are being taken place to lower water bills to pay down debt and it's the way to do it is to have the service authority make money for you. You have something there that's really just a cost Because you have to maintain it. You have to keep it up. It's an expense. It's a liability on a balance sheet. And if we have an opportunity to take that, this unusable water, let's sell it back to them. And they're going to pay to connect themselves to the service authority. You don't have to pay for that either. That was one of the propers that we asked for. You have to pay for that yourself. Okay, we'll pay the millions of dollars, whatever it takes to connect to that thing. So we've done as much as we can to take all these questions that are coming. We have answered the majority of these things throughout this process when we started because your concerns that you have right now were the exact same concerns I had. You know, one reason why when I came on and we voted, this board voted against the Amazon deal because the Amazon deal, there were zero proffers. They were pumping water directly out of the river and they had no plan except for you to pay for the power. That was their plan. And we said no. There's no way possible. If I could stop that one, I probably would. But I can't stop that one. Amazon can bill whenever they want to, but we rejected their performance agreement because there wasn't enough performance in it, as far as I'm concerned. And it was too much strain on King George. Now, what people aren't coming up here and talking about like the housing developments and they're talking about how that is the farmland how farmers today are getting older and just paying talk about farmers and farmers are having to sell their land off to pay taxes so one of our jobs also is how can i keep taxes low for the everyday farmers so people have owned their land like ms morgan here for generations how can they keep their land and not have to go well you know what we're gonna have to cut off 20 acres over here or cut off five just to pay taxes this year and that's At the same time, people want to pay teachers more. We're going to pay your police officers. We want to pay our fire department. We want to build good schools for our kids. And right now, the only source for that in this county is for me to come tap you on your shoulder and go, you're gonna have to give more. And there's people in this county who have lived here for generations. I know an 80 year old man who went back to detailing cars in order for him to pay his taxes because he can't afford the taxes on his property anymore. My job is to make sure those people can stay where they are. So yes, there are risks in anything that you do. But we have gone above and beyond to get rid and get rid of those risks because we, just like you, I did research. You go back and watch the meetings in February of 2024, you'll hear me do a 17-minute rant against data centers. And what I'm against them for, I'm against them coming to small towns and ripping us off. You know, Dahlgren West, and it's not all about the money. But at the same time, I don't make that money. What happens to Dalton West, when they pull their first permit, they have to cut King George like a check, like $5 million. That's teachers. We lose teachers every stinking year because we are fourth in the area, as you were saying, in our pay. We are, our infrastructure, we have watched buildings, the old middle school sat there and got wasted and then got torn down because King George didn't take care of it. The old courthouse, once again, a property that was never taken care of, not maintenance. Now you're looking at a building that it takes more to fix it than it does to rebuild it. And we've never done anything because King George is kind of, we step back, I don't like data centers. It's not my deal. I don't like them. I want deer to roam freely across the street. I don't like four-lane highways most of the time. I want two lanes, and I want curvy, windy roads, and I want to every now and then have to dodge a deer if I have to dodge a deer on the road because I want to know that they're there. But at the same time, how can I preserve it? So if I take one piece of property, is that piece of property, is that preserving hundreds of acres across King George? There's a townhouse community going in Dahlgren. that people didn't want. But in order to make that work, because they're going to litigation, we saved over 500 acres and a 57-acre pond that has now been protected. It can never be used for anything that was owned by the same developer. He was either going to develop that and put big million-dollar mansions all across it, right off the Indian Town Road, right off of where the railroad crosses, the trail right there. They're going to put hundreds of houses right there around that big beautiful pot lake that you see he goes okay well if you don't want to do that maybe we'll sell it to you so good people in the community got together and we wrote letters to our to our representatives to protect that land so a town housing development is going up with 78 town homes in it that's been around for seven years before i came on the board but what you understand is that we also saved over 500 acres of land that developers can never come here and touch, and we took it out of the developer's hands, and it's going to be used for the leisure of King George citizens, a place for King George citizens to go to, camp, and all those other things. That's the plan for it anyway. So there's more moving pieces than what you see. But are we willing to, you know, I've talked to data centers about having a residual income go into the county, and they gave us $500,000 in order for me to give grants to local farmers who need equipment in order to keep this town rule. So you got acres of land, a data center is going to go, and most people are never going to see this data center, by the way. That's one of the stipulations. If you read it, there's a living wall that goes around it that's the same color as everything. Most people want to, well, hardly even know it's back there. You won't even But that little spot of land right there, it's going to help keep other places in King George rural. And part of that is by keeping farmers' taxes low and keeping your taxes low. So you can enjoy life, enjoy the best you can. There's going to be parts of King George that are going to change. And as someone who grew up in their whole life, I don't want it to change. But a change is inevitable. It's coming for us. And my biggest thing is shutting down developers right now more than is shutting down anything else. So anyway, do you wanna speak again? No, you can't do it, I'm sorry. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. But look, the thing, number one, We don't care what you say. Trust me, I'm listening. And I hear what you're saying just because I can't do anything about it at this particular time. But you understand there's also people on the other side of the fence who are for this. I had people come to me and talk to me about it who were against it. And they're like, man, you know what? That sounds like a pretty good idea. But everyone, I get emails all the time about pay teachers, pay police, pay fire. We need a new school. We need this. And at the bottom it says, PS, keep my taxes low. And it's like, if you raise people's taxes, they're gonna go out, they're gonna get mad at you then too, right? So there has to be a stream of revenue. And right now, you see all that. I'm just going to keep going. So all the infrastructure that's going down Route 3, you see the water pipes and stuff being laid in because a lot of you haven't been there. That money was sat on for years with a grant that Mr. Stewart got for us. But Passport sat on that money as opposed to putting in infrastructure. The reason why we don't have certain business, because businesses bring in revenue, and they keep your taxes low. That's what they're for. It's because we don't have the infrastructure for it. Lowe's isn't coming here when they find that they got to fork out millions and millions of dollars to tie into a water system. They're going to come for people who are ready for opportunity. So right now, we're throwing in infrastructure and infrastructure everywhere. So when there comes something, a business that we like, no matter what it is, they actually have the means to actually come here and enjoy it. But until you build up that base, until you have the infrastructure in, those businesses aren't coming. None of them are coming. I don't want more houses. More rooftops isn't the answer. More rooftops is going to raise your taxes. The more people that live here, the more it costs for you to maintain it. The more deputies we need, more firefighters we need, more teachers we need, the more buildings we need, more school buses we need. Every time a new house is built, that's taxed. It takes about $5,000 of King George money, $5,000 to $6,000 to put one kid in school. So you pay your house tax. I don't know what it is. Don't want to know. But if you got three kids living in your house, we're already negative. That's $15,000. That's not including what it costs us for fire. That's not including what it costs us for police. That's not including what it costs for roads and common water and things like that. It's not including any of those things because people are moving over by common water. The traffic's now bad, right? Developers will build. Developers will do what developers do. But at the same time, there has to be something to get us through this storm, or I can just say, okay, taxes go up 10 cent on everything that you own. And you're going to go, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to pay more money. And I don't want you to either. We all talk about the kids. We care about the kids. I do too. I care about the fact that if my kids were leaving King George, I want houses to go down. And I don't want to dump a bunch of debt on my kids so that they can't afford to stay here and live here and pay their taxes either. And that's the whole point. What we're trying to do is get rid of debt so our future does have a chance at something. But thank you. Does anyone else want to speak? This has been a very unusual, but the fact that we don't do interactions like this, this is called a town hall. And I just told Ken, so this counts as our town hall this month. Okay. And it's okay. No, it's totally okay. But the whole point is I'm willing to change the shift. And I've even had people look at me going, Bill, you got that? I'm going, no. The community wants to come talk to me. No board has a dialogue like this. And we stopped our meeting today to have a dialogue and answer your questions here the best we possibly can. I wish that everyone here would have heard about this last year, okay? I do speaking in my public life and I talk about people all the time and it's not a put down. But, you know, I always look at people and say, what do you need to know for life, is what I say. And my niece one time looked at me and said, I need to know that my mom and dad love me. And her mom goes, but you do know that. She goes, yeah, but I need to know it. And I looked at her and go, it's your job. If there's something in life you need to know, you have to make sure you know it. Don't let something else get in the way of it. We're doing the best we can. You know what? I've been thinking about starting a county podcast. is King George news. Anyone want a county podcast? And every time a developer comes in town, I'll sit them down before we ever vote on it. You need to sit there and talk to them and talk to them. And then you know what? I'll still have people come here and go, I never heard anything about this. What are you talking about? It's just, you will, you will. But I understand that because I was just like you for two years before I ran, I had no idea. It's just King George, King George is gonna take care of itself. And I realized there was a bunch of people that had never lived in King George, didn't know anything about King George. who were ready to sell my county. And then for some reason, they all become realtors. I don't know what's going on afterwards. But I appreciate the dialogue. And I thank you guys for coming. And I hope there's no animosity. I'm trying to be as forthright. I'm very open. I'm very honest. And I'm just going to tell you how I feel, just like you are with me. And I'm very happy that you're doing that. I'm more willing to sit down and talk to anybody. My advice to any of you is to stop by Dahlgren's West office. And those guys are so friendly over there. I promise you will be welcome. And I promise you they will answer every single question that you have to your comfort level. And if they do not, you reach out to me and I'll make sure that they do. I promise you that. Okay. And everyone on this board, I think, feels the exact same way.

Can I close public comment now?

All right. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you coming out.

So do we need reports from members of the board? You got something you want to say, Mr. Stroud?

Yeah, I've got a lot.

Unfortunately, but I'd like to thank everybody coming out. Believe it or not, we do like interaction. It's just, you know, it's painful whenever we're getting this months late. and and this should have happened last year so but we we like interaction and and communicating um and reaching out to us so uh i attended the king george high school uh graduation and wanted to congratulate the staff the students and uh everybody that participated in that because the job well done um i want to place it on a record as I previously brought it up that I proposed to change the frequency of the land use applications to once every five years instead of every year renewal right now it's every year the current frequency greatly increases the workload unnecessarily and from my understanding you know we have we have one employee I know there's one employee that's pretty much dedicated to doing that over the last three years the average applications per year has been 1,286. So if an application took one hour to process then that's like 160 days of work just processing applications. So what I recommend is that we convert all the applications for 2026 to five-year approvals and then we only uh require applications for new applications uh need to be submitted this year and all the ones that were submitted for 2026 are gonna be good for another four years and then we save hundreds of hours of man hours on the staff processing these things so some of our neighboring counties it's every five years and i don't know why we're doing it every year but we can definitely reduce a lot of staff time and and really for the residents to submit them and i'm one of them uh you know you've got to submit one for every parcel so it's time consuming it's a pain of a butt and if you miss it then you're just out for a whole year until you can resubmit and we have constituents now i do that are paying more taxes there's there's corn and soybeans on their land and they're not getting uh land use exemption because they missed the window so uh that's my recommendation and i'd like to some point we have a motion on this we can vote it um hey did you date this morning thank you please Thank you. I think I can delay the rest of my comments into another meeting since we've kind of went on tonight. Thank you.

Yeah, Lee. I'll just keep it short. Thank everybody for coming out. I know it's been an interesting evening thus far, so I'm just going to leave it at that and let everybody move on here.

At a couple point to make sure I wrote them down so I could get all of them that now one thing and we've received a couple of emails from rock bunch and visualize and rise and I wanted to make sure that on a future board meeting we can get to have an MOU to refresh the MOU with both of those organizations to support them in the rough bunch of the finalization so if everybody's OK with that.

OK with that. I'm sorry Mister so into UK with that.

All right. He fell asleep. One thing that you guys, and I'm more than willing any time to come and talk to you. I got cards here, but so you don't come up and get them, you know, because they're We've got a meeting going on, but please find my information online. It's right on the county website. I'm more than willing to meet with you. If you watch the old meetings, I've asked lots of questions of developers. As Ms. Payne can even tell you, I ask a lot of questions of developers to make sure that the citizens are taking because even though I represent Shiloh, I believe I represent everybody else because the vote that I make affects all of you. So I would ask you to please go back and watch the meetings going back, I mean, going back to 2020 if you want, but certain highlighted meetings about the data centers. year for GEV. It was in February. It was August. Was it 19th? 2025 for Dahlgren West. And for Amazon, if you want to watch the very, very important, there are three meetings that are vital to it, September 5th, 2023, December 19th, 2023, and I think it was January 4th or 2nd of 2024. Those are the meetings you want to watch. That would explain how the board is taking care of you and asking the questions. January 2nd. It was January 2nd of 2024. Please watch them. They are all online. Right, Mr. Dines? It's King George County Official Content is the YouTube channel. You can watch it at any time, especially if you have a lot of time on your hands, maybe in your car. When you're going somewhere, please watch it. It's better than us up here pontificating to you all night long about exactly the questions you're asking because a lot of that information is there. And then you can just come and chat with us afterwards if you'd like. One thing, I was at the VACO Board of Directors meeting. VACO is the Virginia Association of County Officials. I am on their board. I actually spoke to a Prince William supervisor, and it's somebody who votes for all the data centers, to be honest. And I asked this particular supervisor, what would you do differently, knowing what you know now? And that supervisor said to me, the number one thing they would do if they could start it all over again is more communication, public transparency, and more public input. And that's what we've tried to do. Obviously, we need to be a little better about that. I was hearing from you guys, but that was the one advice that, you know, the Prince William, the ones where all the data centers are, that is the advice that they gave me. So that's something we need to follow in the future. I know Mr. Stroud was on our call last night with the George Washington Regional Commission where we actually discussed the dollar 25 tax rate. And one of the things I wanted to bring up and maybe bring this in one of the next couple board meetings, We came to a concession, and the George Washington Regional Commission is two representatives from each of the localities of Planner District 16. So that's Fredericksburg, Caroline, Spotsylvania, and Stafford County. And we all came into an agreement in 2019, like a gentleman's agreement, that we would do rural data centers. And at that time, it was one building, not a campus, which it is now. And a lot of us would like to revisit that because it's not one... It's a whole campus and there's a lot of tax revenue that other localities get that we do not get. And there's a lot of infrastructure costs. Fredericksburg brought that up. The infrastructure that is brought in for these data centers, there has to be maintenance. so if even if they build the infrastructure who takes care of the maintenance a lot of this infrastructure is being put in we wouldn't have needed it in some areas if not so what the discussion that we're going to bring back to the august meeting is to to come to some like idea to come back to our boards and then discuss it a little bit more so it's like a fact-finding mission so i would like to have it on the agenda in the next couple of meetings so that we could we can chat about it and maybe whether we agree or not agree to go back and and give maybe our recommendations of things to look at and it's not being crazy like raising up so because the one argument is they'll all run away I don't believe that I think that's a scare tactic but I would like to have it on a future agenda can we discuss it more yes sir Mr. Smolik Mr. Sells are you there All right. Thank you, Mr. Jones. And then lastly, I want to bring this. I have one more thing, but I wanted to. I could bring it up later, but I want to ask the chair. I have a comment to make during the time about when we're discussing about the bylaw. So if you will make sure I recognize that I can speak about this during that time.

I recognize that.

All right. Thank you very much.

Mr. Metz.

Oh, Mr. Solins, are you able to speak? We just heard something. Good. Yep, we are hearing you loud and clear. Good. All right, so hopefully we got his audio fixed and resolved. I agree with Mr. Stroud there on the land use. I talked to a lot of constituents about using those land use provisions, because we want to protect agricultural land. So one way to do that is through land use. I love the idea of having it be a multi, you put in one year. Yeah, you still have to put it in at some point in the future, again, just to make sure that we're being, that somebody's not changing that land use. At I would ask at the same time, how would you guys feel about taking a look at the elderly tax allocation? We have a limit on the amount of income and the dollar value of their possessions. Right now, it's listed at $60,000, and I don't know if we have any property left in the county at $60,000 after our last reassessment. I wouldn't approve an ordinance until we understand what the impacts are, but that's definitely an area that I think we should take a look at with given inflation over the last number of years. Is it like keeping them at the same? Well, or raising them at something, inflate them so that it's according to what we've always had in our ordinance. That ordinance has not changed in some time. And so people that maybe were able to qualify under the elderly exemption years ago, no longer do. So if that would be another ordinance, I would love to talk about that. Mr. Smolik.

Yeah, Mr. Chairman, if you like, I can get our Commissioner Reverend Regina Puckett to present something on the board. This is really her area. I know we talked about some veterans and some elderly, but I will relay this to Ms. Puckett.

And those would also be ordinance changes once we've come to realize what those numbers should be. Okay, thank you. Yeah, that was it. Thank you. All right.

I've talked enough tonight myself, so thank you for being here. Thank you for coming out. and uh we i appreciate your involvement in this and hopefully going forward we stay more involved i know that i had to get involved this is what made me get involved so it was was doing this myself and make sure i could see it and i had no one to blame but me but anyway um thank you for being here thank you for participating your county at this time i will close um report to the board and we'll move on to the consent agenda motion to approve the consent agenda as presented Second. I have a motion properly seconded. Is there any further discussion? I will call Ms. Bender.

Aye.

Mr. Metz.

Aye.

Mr. Stroud. Aye. Mr. Sullins. Chair votes aye. Motion passes. I have constitutional officers. No. He's retired for the day, I think. You look like you just ate a Thanksgiving meal. I'm just saying. I'm just like laid back.

all right so this time i will pass this off to uh miss bender and board of directors thank you very much chair i want to make sure everybody please stay and listen there is a public comment in the service authority if a secondary public comment if you'd like to speak and then there's one at the end also for the board of supervisors so if you're while you're there listening if you have another public comment please stay for the whole meeting even though there is a closed session for the board of directors sorry about that But first thing we have on our agenda is the consent agenda. Can I have a motion?

Make a motion that we approve the consent agenda as presented. Second.

I have a motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? All those in favor by roll call vote. Mr. Robotham?

Aye.

Mr. Metz? Aye. Mr. Davis? Aye. Mr. Sullins online? Aye. Chair votes aye motion carries thank you you always have those moments gonna get a good laugh and next up we have Mr. Dan Hamilton who you heard from earlier as our general manager approval of the proposed FY27 budget this is the second time hearing it we did go through it by our last meeting Mr. Hamilton

Yes ma'am, so unless there's any questions or other input, I want to present the same budget that I presented at the previous meeting, I believe it was Monday the 18th of May. The total revenues will be $9,470,344. um the total expenditures of course is a balanced budget so it would be um nine million four hundred seventy thousand one hundred and forty four dollars in expenses um this represents no rating on the budget itself in terms of revenues the increase from the prior year's budget is based on my calculation of growth based on my judgment of what i expect to be processed and then constructed and tap fees paid over the next 12 months well from july 1 to june 30. um I did for the recommendation of Mr. Rob Altham, I adjusted the amount of money I had in the safety and equipment budget item by $15,000. So that item is changed from $10,000 to $25,000 as an expense category. I squeezed that money up for electricity, which I still... Sorry, I'm sorry. And also some contracts. So the numbers stay the same. Budget stays the same. I'm recommending approval.

We have any questions. All right do I have a motion for approval. The exact amount and the fund it.

We've got it here.

I make a motion we adopt the FY 2026, 2027. Oh, here we go. Recommend we adopt resolution for the appropriation of the FY 2026, 2027 King George County Service Authority operating budget. That's a long one.

Adopt first and then do the appropriation second.

Recommend we adopt the FY2026-2027 budget in the total amount of $9,470,144. Do I have to put a fund in there? No. Okay. That's it. All right.

Do I have a second?

Second.

The motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? All right we'll be right we'll call the Mister Robotham I Mister Matt I Mister Davis I Mister songs. Chairman time motion passes second we have to do a secondary motion correct covers that all secondary.

Recommend we adopt the resolution for the appropriation of the FY2026-2027 King George County Service Authority Operating Budget as presented.

Second.

I have a motion promptly seconded. Any discussion? By roll call vote, Mr. Robotham?

Aye.

Mr. Metz?

Aye.

Mr. Davis?

Aye.

Mr. Sullins? Chair votes aye. Motion carries. Next up is the approval of the Embodiment Environmental Services Contract Renewal Letter. Mr. Hamilton? Aye.

Mike all right. Once again this was presented at the meeting there's no changes, no input from the public or any other stakeholders. I'm recommending we have the renewal of their contract. The only change would be that it would be effective July 1, 2026. Leave it for a 5 year term. It does come with a 5% increase in years staying the same.

Any questions? Do I have a motion? I'm just trying to find the exact cost.

Motion right.

Bring that information apologize it would be we approve it based on the agreement number contract itself.

As far as I understand it less Ms. Cobb says you've got to have the actual contract amount the way the contract read Mister Saudi and I negotiated that it kept it level for 3 years. and then upon mutual agreement you could do a 5 year extension with a 5% increase. I think the motion just needs to be renewal for a 5 year term at a 5% increase.

Thank you, sir.

Somebody want to tackle that?

Yeah, so I make a motion that we approve the contract renewal for non-professional services agreement number one zero two zero two zero two two dash fourteen hundred with for a five-year term with a one-time five percent increase flat five percent five percent per year it's five to one percent yeah it goes up five percent and then it's steady for the level we have a motion properly seconded any further discussion

Okay, by roll call vote, Mr. Robotham. Aye. Mr. Mett. Aye. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mr. Sullins. Chair votes aye, motion carries. And just for the public that are here that maybe you've never been here before, Imboden is the operator of our water and wastewater. We have a general manager and we have a maintenance department and staff, but we have an operator who has a class one license and is responsible legally to operate our water and wastewater system. And that is Imboden Environmental and they are recognized by the Department of Environmental Quality. So the next one is the change order items for the courthouse hop yard interconnection project. Mr. Bryce.

Good afternoon Madam Chair and members of the board. I'm here tonight to present change order number two for the King George hop yard to courthouse interconnect project. This change order includes multiple items. First being the new three inch pipe to replace the oversized force main along the new courthouse. Reducing the size of this pipe will prevent blockage due to insufficient flows and eliminate need for reoccurring flushing in this line. The second item is a properties water connection that needs to be connected to the new water line on the western side of Camorran Road and Route 3 intersection. The third is a properties sewer connection on the new sewer force main on the western side of Camorran and Route 3 intersection. These last two updated connections will prevent long-term maintenance items and issues. The last item is converting three of the six construction entrances along the Route 3 pipeline to prevent engine or Route 3 to permit entrances to VDOT standards. These entrances will be key to accessing and maintaining the new water and wastewater transmission lines and valving. These additional services are eligible to be funded by ARPA on the wastewater side. the water connections will be paid for through the operating budget. Staff recommended action is to authorize the service authority general manager to execute change order number two to the agreement with WC Spratt in the amount of $111,945 with $12,900 funded through the general fund and $99,045 funded through the ARPA grants.

staff recommends moving on this action to prevent any costly delays in construction any questions i get the questions i wanted since we have a lot of people in the public the arpa funds were came from covid this is money that senator stewart helped us get from the majority department of health and from the uh our state house to fund some projects and so we did a major project going from hop yard and decommissioning Perkins Corner wastewater plant, which is a plant that has some issues. So this money is what's left over from the ARPA fund. So I just wanted to explain that to the public. So who has, Mr. Robotham, you have some questions? Does anybody have any questions?

I'm just going to make a comment. Maybe this is a toss back to the gentleman that I replaced on this board. We never really like change orders. But yesterday, I called Mr. Young and talked through a couple of these. And just for the public's information and transparency, every time you get into a project, you find stuff. And one of these changes, the biggest one, is actually money we're gonna spend now through ARPA money we had held back for things we find in projects. And what it does is it offsets us having to do future maintenance work, right? So we are actually preserving, we're cutting down on what we would know would be future, every month you'd have to go out there and do work to make sure that we flush those lines. Anybody, like the neighborhood I live in, when the lines don't get flushed, sediment builds up, nothing good comes of that. And so we talked through each of these individually, and I think you've done a good job of working out the best way to proceed forward to make sure that what we get left with on this infrastructure is sustainable at the best price we've got. So thanks for doing that, Mr. Young. Thank you.

Any other questions on this one?

LaVita or Laverne, do you have a...

No, $12,000 is from the service authority operating, not general fund.

Okay, service authority operating budget. That's my mistake. Okay.

Do I have a motion?

Make a motion. We authorize service authority general manager to execute change order 2 to the agreement with WC Spread, Inc. in the amount of $111,945. Second.

From the operations. From the operations. Do we have to break it down?

Break down the amount. How much is going to... 12,000. 12,000 operations. Is it just 12,000? 99,045. Can't wait.

Bigger one. sorry they give us the wording that we're supposed to use for these motions and sometimes we have an old version uh okay so let me restate the motion authorize the service authority general manager to execute change order two agreement with wc spread inc in the amount of one hundred eleven thousand nine hundred and forty five dollars with twelve thousand nine hundred dollars funded through the operating budget operating account fund and ninety nine thousand forty five dollars funded through the arpa grants

I'm second second motion properly saying any further discussion. I recall the Mister Robotham I. Women is just on you have a question. Well you're going to bring this up later. One of the problems with the service authority, it's a regulatory agency. It has to respond to DEQ and regulations. And regulations, as our folks in the audience have spoken, they really worry about the wetlands and the environmental impact and the health impact. And DEQ can't wait around for a month to make a decision. This is a decision we need to make because we do have to allocate these funds by November 1st. This is all money from the COVID fund. The money is, if you don't spend these funds by November 1st, it goes back to the federal government. There is no second chance. Hey, wait a minute. We have to do another meeting. I know this is something that we don't like to do. I know a couple of weeks ago, I did speak to you about that this was coming. So I thought that would... you know smooth the smooth not smooth it over but uh have that discussion she knew about but it's something that we have to do because if we wait around two weeks we there's wc spread i know soon we'll be packing up and they have to do some of this work so mr songs do you have another question on that i tried to give an answer to that Well, Mr. Sullins, I actually, Mr. Hamilton and I had a discussion with DEQ in the last couple of weeks and one of the things they want to is a commitment from the board to be more uh timely as i'll put it because this is a regulatory body and this service authority is under the regulatory body of the department of environmental quality and the virginia department of health i understand your concern on this one the other the other problem specifically is wc spratt is almost done and the decommissioning of the perkins corner wastewater plant has to be done by consent order by january 1st of 2027 So unfortunately, due to stuff in the past, time is of the essence. I wish we had more time. But I appreciate your concerns, Mr. Sullivan. We do try to do what, you know, have this, you know, to have that second by the apple. Anyway, we had a motion, discussion. I'll call for a vote. Mr. Robotham?

Aye.

Mr. Metz? Aye. Mr. Davis?

Aye.

Mr. Sullivan? Aye. All right, Chair votes aye, motion carries. Thank you, Mr. Young. Thank you. All right, Mr. Hamilton, general manager's report.

Yes, ma'am. I'm going to attempt to be extremely brief. I know we're way behind schedule. I was late this afternoon in sending this board report. I apologize for sending the written version. I'm just going to highlight a couple of things. One is that I've already mentioned this evening, I did have a meeting with Rowan, who is now the property owner of the Dahlgren West or Dahlgren Innovation Hub. data center property we provided them with a tour of the dogren wastewater plant last uh last wednesday the 27th of may conversation about the use of recycled wastewater as a possibility for cooling their structure as i said earlier we will be providing potable water but no water for cooling or humidification and they are well aware of that they did tell me that they are committed to the green project and that their private equity ownership wants a net water positive I hope that's true. I'm committed to being transparent. If anybody has questions, please feel free to reach out and I'll answer them as clearly as I can. In terms of our existing projects, as you've just learned, the current SPRAP project is about 86% complete as of the last billing. 90% of the time has elapsed. We have added a few things to the scope of work and we're going to need to add another 30 or 45 days of time for them in terms of the contract. The project with ACE Environmental to make the upgrades to the Hopyard Wastewater Plant to upgrade some of our stations and decommission the Perkins Corridor Wastewater Treatment Plant is about 73% complete based on the most recent building and 72% of the time has elapsed. Mr. Davis, you asked about the Arnold's Corner Well project. I told you we were having a contractor who was giving us some trouble about returning in a timely fashion. They were sent a cure letter on May 21st. They responded within the 10-day time period they were given, and they indicated they were going to remobilize by June 8th and that they predict they'll be done by August 28th. There are going to be some subsequent discussions about whether or not that's an appropriate timeline, but they are supposed to remobilize next week. um two maintenance and operation items i want to point out we had two sewer leaks on the route 3 fourth lane project it's being completed by spratt we assumed when those leaks occurred that it was related to work that they had done on that same day and once they were excavated we determined that there was a failed ductile iron fitting that was heavily damaged by corrosion from hydrogen sulfide gas and sewage So that's work they did to make that repair. Actually twice in the space of 12 hours, two different fittings failed. Then it's going to be an upcoming change order to compensate them for that because it was not their responsibility for the failure. It would have made no sense to have them stop work once they excavated it and call in another contractor to do the work. So I know that's going to make you unhappy, Mr. Sullivan. So I'd be happy to discuss that with you in detail. We also identified another fairly serious leak in the Dahlgren system about a week and a half ago. There was a connection to the Walnut Hill pump station that we were not aware of, that some water was leaking through the storage tank there and out into the distribution system that isn't, is not supposed to be connected or part of our current operating system there. And that may well be the source of some of the disparity that we've had. I'll report back to that later. And last but not least, I do want to just say that we reached a milestone in terms of this interconnection project. Last week, we opened the interconnection between the greater courthouse system and the circle system. I think that put approximately six fire hydrants in service that have been sitting on the side of the road for six months with plastic bags over top of them. um and improves the water quality the storage capacity and the general liability of the service to the circle system and eventually will mean we can abandon the other wells there and reduce our expenses to operate them which is part of what comes from combining these systems and gaining more customers i think that concludes my report unless anybody has any questions i also want to mention that we have gotten all those well permits in by the deadline of june 3rd We did. Four groundwater withdrawal permits were submitted by Stantec at the end of last week and $36,000 in permit application fees. And those permits are due to be renewed by January 3rd. We expect a dialogue and conversation with DEQ over the next few months. That's why we have Stantec.

When we talked about this last, there might have been one well that we thought they were not going to renew. Are we now good to go on all of them? I thought there was one well that they may be asked to decommission or return.

There are a couple of wells that are either currently abandoned or there's one that's going to need to be upgraded that I intend to put in the CIP plan, but there's none that they've demanded that we abandon at this time, other than things that have already been in play.

Yeah, there'll be a lot of give and take between DEQ on these permits.

There will be conditions.

Yeah, 15 year permits.

There were audits that were due that weren't done in the past and some geophysical data we're going to need to collect but we'll we'll provide detail mr solmes did you have a question that is fair thank you do you have a question for mr hamilton on this topic

Mr. Hamilton, do you have any?

I just apologize. I shouldn't, I did not mean to offend him or otherwise disparage him. I just know he doesn't like change orders. And this is unfortunate, but I think it sounds like he understands. And I'm sorry, Mr. Sullins, I'm having trouble understanding you on the on the phone, but glad to brief you at any time when you're ready.

All right. Last thing is the secondary public comment. Comments will be limited to three minutes per person to afford everyone an opportunity to speak. Speak. Please provide your full name and district when submitting your public comment so that it could be properly included in the public record. And this is just for the service authority. So this is your time. If you're on the service that I have a question or you're concerned to bring up, please come to the podium and ask your question or give public comment. He's not here. We have some folks in the audience who come every meeting and give public comment. Anna Marie, I'm sure you've seen her online. She always comes and asks us to take care of the service authority and the debt. So if she's not here tonight, we get worried about her because she's here every week. And the Moncurets come a lot. Miss Morgan comes a lot. So we get worried when they're not here. Do we have anybody online, Mr. Dines? You want to come up? Come right on.

Mr. Hamilton, my name is Josh Mills again. I'm on St. Paul's. Did you say, and just point of clarification, did you say that you met with Dahlgren West and that the wastewater might be an option for cooling? Is that what you said? Yes. What are other options for cooling?

The only options that I believe are available to them are that they either use recycled gray water from our wastewater discharge. In other words, we've treated it to discharge it into the river. Instead of it being discharged into the river, it would be pumped to them at their expense based on their installation of piping and equipment and maintenance. And then they could use that to cool their data center property. It's not for domestic use. and then that would either be returned back to our plant in a condition better than when we delivered it to them so it would be ready for discharge under our permit they would pay for that or they could get their own discharge permit the other option would be a closed loop system which I believe somebody else already mentioned. They would need a one-time fill up of potable water either from us or they could truck it in or whatever. And then for 10 years it would circulate through the data center and it's basically like a geothermal process, I believe, for heat exchange. How that addresses their humidification, I don't know. Once again, we will not and I don't believe could not provide them potable water for anything but domestic use. And as I said, I know they have stated emphatically that they are committed to a green facility. I'm not trying to advocate or not advocate. I'm just conveying information. Rooftop stormwater, recycling, all kinds of things like that. This is all an ongoing dialogue. All I can tell you is they bought the property.

These details will come out in the sites planning that is going to happen in the future? Pardon me? These details will come out in the sites planning that's going to happen in the future?

I believe that since they've just recently purchased the property, their objective was to bring in their own consulting engineering firm to do a concept study essentially to say, roughly on an order of magnitude, what's it going to cost to pipe gray water up there and use it for cooling versus a closed-loop system. That's all I can...

But those are the only two options that are being... I'm aware of. There's a couple others. So when this came to us, of course, it was air cooling. I understand that there's only probably a few months right where they would have to where the cooling becomes really really important because most time it's cooler whatnot but it's air cooling but they can also use cooling gel which another thing it's just a gel system that is kind of like the the water in a loop or the gel that they use to do it They will do it. We fight them on it. Sometimes, it's like a 15% increase, but they make so much money off of it. I'm not worried about the 50%. Those are usually the options that people use. Air cooling, they can have doors that air flows through them the way they set them up, and it just takes care of it. Those are the options. Okay.

And the company that bought it is very environment. They value themselves as being for the environment. And the MOU, I know as a board, we made sure, and I know I pushed it tremendously because I was still general manager of the service authority and in negotiations with them, their MOU was public because I know there are some data centers that don't like it to be public. And we've told all the ones, not Amazon, but the others that have come after, Green Energy Ventures, your MOU is public. And Green Energy Ventures is in the process of doing an MOU with the service authority, but Dogger West is public. It has been decided on, but there is a new owner, and they met with Mr. Hamilton this last past week to discuss, you know, they wanted to look at it just so they could figure out how they were going to cool their particular site based on the condition of our plant.

Can I add one more thing? Go ahead.

Mr. Smolnick pulled up their profits they proffered away the ability to use any well water for cool they are absolutely prohibited from doing okay thank you just to be clear when I said there were only two options I meant involving the service authority and water and groundwater I'm sure there's other technology and secondarily for those of you that might be interested Again, I can't comment on the approval process, but Rowan, I don't know their exact full title of the company. They're the company that has recently built a data center in Frederick, Maryland. And so if you wanted to get a sense of how they're handling things, you know, upstream on the Potomac, but you might follow the news with respect to that. That's just a suggestion.

And also remember the Dahlgren West, you have these three data centers, Dahlgren West, is the potomac watershed and the other two projects are the rappahannock watershed so two different watersheds thank you thank you would anybody else like to come up and give public comment yes sir uh question mr hamilton you know uh multi-million dollar

organizations building infrastructure is going to have triple redundancy they're not going to just say hey just gray water or rainwater runoff they're going to have all three so it doesn't make sense to me anything that's multi-million or billion dollars is going to have triple redundancy you know that and i know that now what their main objective is maybe the gray water a rainwater runoff where they get it off the top of their buildings, whatever, collection ponds, whatever. But they're also going to have well water. Am I incorrect?

They have to get a permit. Madam Chair, again, I just read the proper. They are prohibited Period. Full stop from using well water to cool that place. Typically, they're going to air cool it. It's not a grand scheme of things. It may seem like a tall building, but they typically use water cooled when they stack those servers way up high in the air. They proffered away in writing, and they signed it to the board. They gave up any right to use well water, period. This is Dahlgren West? Yes, sir. Dahlgren West, yes. What about the other two? I don't have them in front of me. AWS is different. I don't have them in front of me. I can tell you about Dahlgren West. That was the question that you asked. Correct.

They are prohibited by their own hand from using well water. So is Green Energy. End of story. So is Green Energy. That's one thing that we, if you watch the meetings, you'll see every board member up here telling them that that is not a possibility, that if you're going to do that, it's a no. We came in and we rejected Amazons. Just to give you history, the board before us voted a yes on their last meeting before we took office. But according to our bylaws, we could step in and re-vote on it. And we'll get into all the history of that. And Ms. Bender helped us out on that. And that was the main thing, was there's a straw in the Rappahannock River. You're wanting two million gallons to do whatever and to sell it to another data center, whatever they want to do with it. And we're like, no. You're not taking our water and taking it somewhere else. That's the end of it. But that's the one that we're fighting. We're not going to let them do it. The other two, they have proffered it out. In writing, as part of this agreement, you will not use the river, you will not use water in the ground to cool your systems.

my question still remains and i'll follow up with you is just engineering principles are going to have redundancy because anything that costs that much money and they go down because one thing fails it ain't going to happen so i'll be following it and i'm sure you guys will update me and howie i could hook you up with mr over from dahlgren west so you can have that one-on-one conversation with him or hobie mitchell from the green energy project amazon not so much but the other two well i appreciate it folks thank you

And it's difficult to notice something. How is my neighbor? So he'll come and talk to me anyway about this project. And also too earlier, I want to make a statement. You asked us how close we are. How is it my house are in a crow's fly from Dahlgren West? We're not exactly there, but we're closer to the battery energy storage that's affiliated with Dahlgren West than we are, but we are actually affected. Let me show you, the creek actually starts near our property in the backwoods, you know what I mean? Close between Eden Drive, you know that new Eden View? in Dawson's Landing, that's where Machida Creek starts. So I am very concerned because it's literally in my backyard is where it starts. So I get your comments and you can watch a lot of questions, especially for green energy ventures, I bugged them a lot about the shallow wells up there and making sure that they were responsible in any way, construction, no matter what, if they damaged those shallow wells, they would compensate those landowners. And it was a stickler about, you know, arbitration and that because I didn't want to force people on the service authority. I wanted them to put those people whole because a lot of houses up there are older houses that are in shallow wells in the Silston area. So this board had different ways. I mean, One of the biggest things was the water intake. And I was very adamant about it. I still don't like a corporation getting a water intake. I speak about it at the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Committee. I'm on it at the Rappahannock River Basin. I mean, people hear me boo in the face saying a corporation should not own the water because you can have all the money in the world, but when it's lining your coffin, it doesn't help you because you don't have water. And I've said that many times. But does anybody else like to give public comment? Anybody online? All right, we will close public comment. And I please, I implore you guys to stay on. We will try to keep the closed session very short. Please stay because it's very nice to hear from the public. And so that you can see a full board meeting. A lot of people leave after the thing that affects them the most. Please stay so you're here because you have another chance to speak on the board topics, not board of directors, board of supervisor. After our meeting, you'll see it at the end of the agenda. So please stay. I know if you can't, but I'm just encouraging it. And Lee, can you give the motion?

Sure, just one quick thing before I make this motion. I would like to give back to Mr. Hamilton's general manager's report, just the shameless plug for the staffing for the King George County Service Authority. We have multiple maintenance positions as well as pump truck operator positions that are coming up available or are available right now. If you're interested or have somebody know somebody that would be interested, please reach out to Mr. Hamilton so he can point you to the right place so you can go apply.

We're happy to employ people that live in King George County to work in King George County. If you've got the skill set, please get us a resume.

And leave it for you to do the motion. Mr. Sullins, I will call you wherever we're going for the closed session to bring you in on it.

And with that, I move that the King George County Service Authority Board of Directors convene and close meeting pursuant to Section 2.2, TAC 3711, Sub A, Sub 1 of the Code of Virginia for the discussion, consideration, and evaluation of the performance of engineering services and related contractual and professional service matters. I invite the General Manager and the County Attorney and the County Engineer, Mr. Bryce Young, as needed because their presence is deemed necessary and or their presence will reasonably aid the Board in its consideration of one or more of the topics to be discussed pursuant to Virginia Code Section 2.2, TAC 3712 . Do I have a second?

Second. Motion properly seconded. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Mr. Solms? We are in closed session. If anybody would like one of my cards, it's right here while we're in closed session. Thank you. Yeah, I don't have the... Chris, you ran away. There you are. You recovered. All right. We're going to move the motion back. I'm waiting for a motion.

I move that the King George County Board of Directors return to the public meeting. Second.

Motion probably second. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All right, next one.

I move that the King George County Board of Directors certified by vote that only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and no action was taken pursuant to section 2.2 to act 3712 Delta.

Do I have a second?

Second.

A motion properly seconded. Any discussion? We will now certify by roll call vote. Mr. Robotham?

Aye.

Mr. Metz? So certified. Mr. Davis?

So certified.

Mr. Solins? Thank you. Chair, so certified. We are back in open meeting. Do I have a motion for adjournment?

I make a motion that we adjourn the Board of Directors to Tuesday, June 16th, June 16th, 2026 at 530 in the multipurpose boardroom of the Sheriff's Office located at 10445 Government Center Boulevard, King George, Virginia, 22485.

Do I have a second?

Second.

We have a motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Mr. Solins? Chair votes aye motion carries the Board of Directors meeting is over and now turn it back to Mr. Davis for the Board of Supervisors.

Thank you ma'am. Next up we have a public hearing. Public hearing concerning the middle school turn lane. The King George County Board of Supervisors now hold a public hearing that has been properly advertised to receive public input. regarding the middle school turn lane phase two of the presentation by Bryce Young upon completion upon this we'll go we'll come to the public for public comment on this matter alone and then we'll bring the matter back to the board for consideration Good afternoon Mr.

Chair and members of the board uh as you mentioned we have a little presentation Chris are we ready While he's getting that together, this is the middle school turn lane that will be on Route 206 by the middle school to allow people coming from the Dahlgren Way on Route 206 to turn left into the middle school instead of holding up all the traffic going to Route 3. all right here we go and my clicker doesn't work but my laser pointer does so that's a good thing uh let's go to the next slide please next slide a quick little agenda here we're going to go over the project we'll have some design pictures we'll have uh overview of the project schedule the project estimate then i'll answer any questions we'll go on to public comment next slide here is the uh project right through here we will this is the demolition plan we will be demolishing a small sliver along the uh this is the western edge of route 206 and a small slither across it where some storm water crosses next slide here is the construction plan we will be milling and repaving the road up through for the length of the whole project as well as a full depth widening of the asphalt through this portion next slide and this is some grading and striping this will show you the striping with the middle school turn lane right through here and some regrading for stormwater purposes on the edge of the road next slide all right this is project schedule currently we are right here we kind of move some things around a little bit but these are internal items that are milestones that we have to meet as we go through the schedule big thing many people will be interested in is it will be advertised in February of 2027 and construction should be done by august 15th of 2027. here's the budget these numbers are breakdown of the total cost of each portion we have engineering right away and the construction portion numbers below this are vdot's responsibility as well as our responsibility and this is current estimate here that's really important any questions i can answer for anybody and before we do that i have a couple little items i'd like to mention traffic will be or traffic control will be used to maintain traffic flow throughout the whole project there will not be any road closures that will stop anybody from traveling on that road uh details about the right-of-way process can be provided to anyone who has questions please reach out to me i'm open book with this and comments will be accepted for 10 days after this meeting any questions hey sir we'll have a public hearing in a second but yeah

We can. And I can bring him back. It's okay. It's okay. But it's just that when you speak, they can't hear you on the recording. So we need it for public record at the mic. But when he gets done, we'll field it. Does any members of the board have any questions for Mr. Young? We've been looking at this for a while.

Bryce, how long did they think this construction was going to take? I will say it's about three months.

okay so will impact the start of school the 2028 the construction should finish by august 15th oh august okay thank you and uh i'd like to ask miss capitan if there's anything i'm missing she's a representative from vdot all right i got the thumbs up any other questions all right thank you mr young thank you

i may i may call you back up if they ask a question i can't answer but absolutely i'll leave quicker all right all right so now i'm gonna i'm gonna close the public no no i'm gonna i'm gonna open the floor for public comment i have um ann kleckner is that right did i say that right i was only close because brian

told me that but i wasn't the new guy i wasn't i wasn't a clockner yeah your old hat by now i am ann clockner and i'm the executive director at legal aid works we serve king george county thank you for the opportunity to come here tonight uh we are

as a presentation do you have a presentation for the board about legal aid are you speaking to the public hearing on the term on the budget that's the one I signed up for yeah we're not on that public I'm sorry you signed up on the public hearing but we have two public hearings so this is the first one is the turn lane okay you want to save it for the second yeah the second one and that's the one I signed yes ma'am okay yes I'm sorry I'll be the next one does anyone else want to speak towards the middle school turn lane Sorry, Ian.

James Shaw, James Monroe District. As one who travels that particular section of road and my wife who travels it frequently at inopportune times, thank you for finally getting this in the works to get done. We will very much appreciate the through traffic. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there anyone else? Has there been anyone online? Any correspondence? All right seeing none I will close public comment at this time and close the public hearing and bring this back to the board to discuss. Do we have any discussion from the board? I think this is the first time they were trying to do this was back when did they first start this?

It was part of the middle school renovation renovation project so it the original was in 2021 correct matt i can't remember everything from my past yeah i know the original was in 2021 and it just and it just about doubled because it was put off until now and what the cost is going to be so that is correct and the original project was proposed in 27 i think it was 2017 with the middle school expansion and renovation that's right so do we want to take action on this tonight

I believe you have to wait. I'm looking at the VDOT representative. I think you have to obtain comments, keep the comments open for 10 days. Is that correct? 10 calendar days. All right, no action tonight then.

I make a motion that we move delay action on an item 0602 to the next meeting we need a motion do we need you don't think so I just want to make sure we get it on and again I apologize but they didn't brief me on this beforehand but I think in these situations there's a public comment period where comment can come into the board and maybe Bryce or the person from DDOT can explain that better I don't even know that they need.

I was going to say, there was no ask for an action. So I think you just need 10 days. That'll close out your public hearing requirement. We're getting a nod yes in the back. Okay. Okay. Okay, so that wasn't on the microphone, but the public has 10 days.

10 more days to comment. There will be a drop box available in the Rivercom building and a comment sheet available there if anybody wants to comment in writing, didn't want to stand up and speak. And I do not believe there's any action required from you all. This is a public hearing. Just having the public hearing should suffice for the requirement. Thank you. All right.

Thank you. Thank you. So next up, we have another public hearing. The King George County Board of Supervisors will now hold a public hearing that has been promptly advertised to receive public input regarding the King George County FY27 budget. Mr. Matthew J. Smolnick. After hearing him, we would then hear from the public comments and then move it back to the board for consideration. Mr. Smolnick.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll ask Mr. Dines to pull up my presentation. All right, so Matt Smolnick, your County Administrator here for the public hearing for the FY27 operating budget. I wanna show the slide for everybody here in the room, everybody watching online. The public process has been, we start this back, the very first public was November 17th of 2025. We held a work session, I believe it was in this very room, to talk about the upcoming FY27 budget. just a timeline of you know the internal processes that go on in King George County and any other county when we're compiling the data for the upcoming fiscal year budget. My initial budget presentation made at a board meeting April 7. work session on april 10 that was all day work session we had in the revercombe building i stood here at this podium on april 22nd provided a balanced budget to the board of supervisors and tonight we have a budget public hearing and per state code i think it's 15 to 2506 you have to wait at least seven days from your public hearing until the board takes action so no action will be needed by the board or cannot take and be taken by the board tonight you do have to wait seven days So tentatively, I'm looking at an approval and appropriation on June 16th of 2026. Next slide. So the FY27 proposed budget totals $146,683,998. Please note that this does not include the Service Authority budget that was approved earlier in this meeting, and one penny on the real estate tax rates equivalent to $517,330. Next slide. So a couple of things that are different from last year's budget. November 17, I mentioned the work session. This was, I've been here for, this is my second budget, but we did not do this my first year, but this is something we did to have all the departments and agencies coming from the Board of Supervisors to talk about some of the challenges some of what you may expect to see in the FY27 budget. So we got an early jump on this back in November of 25. As we all know, this was a reassessment year, a large increase, about 21% from the last reassessment. The appeals process is currently ongoing with the Commissioner of Revenue. So the equalized tax rate, since the revenues, since the real estate numbers went up, by state code you you have to equalize your rate so we were at 68 cents a hundred um 56 cents 100 would bring in the same revenue so that's what we call the equalized tax rate so with this particular budget uh we are proposing a two cent real estate tax rate increase on paper you're going to see it looks lower but it is actually a two cent increase over the current value of 68 cents per hundred and then meals tax the board previously approved a two percent increase of the the meals tax this is for prepared food it's a pass-through tax from the consumers that it gets collected by the locality and you've seen this before you know big Motorola maintenance contract that was a heavy lift of just a little over a million dollars that we did not have last year that we had to account for this particular year next slide please So expenditures by functional area. When you look at this, and I want to tip my hat to Dr. Boyd for bringing this to my attention. So when you look at schools, $72 million, and the number runs off the page a little bit, 72004916. I just want the public to know that $72 million of local money is not going to fund the schools. So Dr. Boyd provided a breakdown. You'll see the majority of that is state. State budget has not yet been adopted. These are the projected numbers that we're using right now. We may need to come back and amend our budget based on what the state eventually does. All localities are going through, go ahead and adopting and passing a budget with the understanding they may have to come back and adopt, revise it. But you will see the local match here. That's the county's contribution, $28,139,082. So just want to put that out there for the record. And this is broken up public safety all the way down to some law enforcement grants. Next slide. So local sources of funding, you'll notice that general properties taxes, that makes it the lion's share. So property taxes from homeowners, from businesses, and I know we had a discussion earlier about bringing some businesses into the community, and we are taking those steps, We need to get the infrastructure in first. But the goal is to balance, to rebalance the scales between residential and commercial. The more businesses we can bring in here, the less burden it is on the taxpayers. I'm one of them myself. So you look at this other local taxes, non-revenue receipts, write down, just give a breakdown of where this money's coming from at the local level. Next slide. So we've talked about this and I think this is going to be on the agenda a little later on tonight. Over the past couple years, King George has used the unassigned fund balance to cover reoccurring expenditures with the balancing of the annual budget. You can see FY24 1.8 million, then 2.136 last year. This year we're down to $832,517. We'll talk about this in a little bit. I've got a slide on this. We do have a very, very healthy fund balance, but I believe it was Mr. Metz asked that we bring this up for discussion to look at our policy. Anything over 15% can be available by the Board of Supervisors, should be used for non-recurring expenses. Also with the FY27 budget, At the request of the board, we've had some in-depth conversations with Davenport and then they came here with a follow-up presentation. So 2023 series bonds, this is what we borrowed for company two and the preschool. So those bonds were sold and the county took ownership of that money and put it in interest earning accounts. Interest has been earned on these bonds. In accordance with law, you can refund yourself that interest. We worked with Davenport, our financial consultant, and realized that there's a little over 2.5 million. The FY27 budget includes a one-time revenue influx of $2.5 million from the interest earned. I want to make this $2.5 million, that's not going to be available next year. Then 832,000, we're borrowing from the general fund balance. I just want to get this on the record that next year, we would be starting about 3.3 in the hole. This is done because there are some additional revenue here and this board has worked hard to try to keep the taxes low for the citizens. But I just want to state that this is a one-time fix for this particular year and we will address this. Next year is going to be a brand new budget. We're looking at refinancing some bonds and other ways to cut down on some of our debt service. But this is what we've come up for this particular year. Next slide, please. Mr. Dines, next slide please. So it's advancing on your computer, but not on the projector. So scroll up a little bit more. We're too far in the presentation. Keep scrolling up. There we go. If we start presentation from that slide, we should be good to go. We start the slideshow so it's just a little bit bigger for the audience in the room, please. There we go. So that's the slide I just talked about. So see if we can advance that, Mr. Dines, please. Here we go. So tax rates for FY27, 58 cents for real estate, 58 cents for mobile home. Again, equalized rate was 56 cents. So if somebody looks at a budget right now and sees 68 cents on paper, you're going from 68 cents to 58 cents. My taxes are going down by 10 cents. Actually, they're going up by two pennies. so um just want to make that clear and if there's any question with you know how that's you know i'll be happy to talk to you i've talked to the board at multiple meetings about this but um if anybody has any questions i'll be happy to answer them personal property machinery tools remain the same meals tax we already talked about that going from four percent to six percent and transient occupancy tax remains at five percent next slide So where do we stand with the region? So I got King George County highlighted here, and you'll see there are Spotsylvania and King George both went through a reassessment. So right now we are tied for the lowest tax rate in the county, in the area. Us and Caroline are, you know, both have a 58 cent tax rate. I mean, look up next on the list, then you got Richmond County, Westmoreland, Then you jump up to Spotsy, Fredericksburg, Prince William, and then finally Stafford County. So a very low real estate tax rate compared to everybody in the Fredericksburg area and going down the northern neck. Next slide. So what does the historic tax rate look like? So I've looked at, and you'll see the bottom here for the seven fiscal years, FY19, FY26, the tax rate to support county operations and school operations, less the courthouse has only increased by four pennies. So you'll see an FY22 a three percent increase this was specifically for the construction of a new courthouse. FY24 there was a four cent increase and there's a two percent uh a two cent increase uh with FY28 but you can see the trend of the the tax rate from FY19 all the way up through FY27. Next slide. So what does the 27 budget include? So it does include step increases for sheriff's office employees, step increases for fire rescue emergency services employees, certification pay for fire rescue emergency services employees the comprehensive plan update uh one percent coal and a two percent merit for county library and social services employees five percent cola for school employees plus a step nine decompression adding up one new full-time county employee in january 2027 we'll talk about that a bit that was a grant writer and funding of eight non-mandated outside agencies next slide So these were the positions that were requested. I had 21 new positions requested to me to the county administrator. We look at the annual salary plus the benefits and we get a cost. uh try to you know understand and balance the needs of the community versus the the the tax rate to the citizens and where is that balance and what we came up with is a part-time or i'm sorry a grant writer that would come on midway through the fiscal year of january 1 of 2027 That is the only position that is included in this budget. All the other EMS, IT, library, circuit court, law clerk, engineering, couple parks and rec, DSS, treasurer and administration were not funded as part of this year. Now the board will need to, whenever the appropriate time comes, we did transfer one individual from the administration office to finance. The board, as you know, has to approve all FTE equivalents. or FTE positions within the county. So whenever the appropriate time comes in seven plus days, part of your motion will be to approve this transfer from administration to finance, but just one new position mid-year. And a grant writer, we talked about this a lot, that's an easy position to determine ROI. If salary and benefits on an annual basis is $84,000, they bring in $300,000 year one, they just pay for themselves three and a half, four times over. so that's an easy one to understand an roi um you know there are some jobs you you can't put an roi on it it's just it's services to the citizens but there's you know the the grant writer is a pretty easy one to determine next slide please so funding recommendations for outside agencies there are certain agencies that we are required to be part of and fund this is a list of the the outside agencies that are we are not required to fund them. However, looking at these, I made my recommendations to the Board of Supervisors, those that are highlighted in yellow, in powerhouses, so domestic violence, regional food banks, and I believe it was Mr. Sullins talked about the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank, That serves as almost a distribution center for a local food bank, Love Thy Neighbor. When you see Fredericksburg, they are supporting our local food banks also. Recommending them, Love Thy Neighbor, a local food bank here across the street, Mental Health America, Fredericksburg, Rappahannock Community Against Sexual Assault, Thurman Brisbane Homeless Shelter, Bay Consortium Workforce Development Board, and then Legal Aid Works. I believe we have a representative here tonight to speak on the budget, but I do recommend the funding of those not necessarily the requested amount for all of them, but I am recommending funding from King George County to those outside agencies. Next slide, please. So total taxable assets, we just went through a reassessment. So if you look at this graph, you can see kind of clusters. Every four years, if you look at FY19 through FY22, all those 2.7 to $2.9 billion worth of taxable assets. That's the organic growth throughout those years. And then you have a reassessment. We're coming in due to changing markets. Assessment comes in or a reassessment company and says, here's what the value of the properties are now. So that's why you see a big jump between FY22 and 23. Then again, you see four years of pretty steady growth. And then you see a large increase. We all know the... If you've ever tried to buy a house here in King George County, as I did a couple of years ago, it's... It's a tough market to be in, and it is an expensive market. Reassessments, we've talked about those and those appeals process are ongoing. There was a very laid out process for people who had concerns with their reassessments. So there is due process for those through meeting with the assessor, going through the Board of Equalization and finally the Circuit Court. But the way it stands right now with the reassessment, almost $5.2 billion worth of taxable assets. Next slide. So the historic county budgets. Now this is the overall budget. There's a difference between the overall budget and the general fund. Historic county budget, you can see the trend line here. And I went through this in depth, you know, why this budget increased year over year. I went through that, I believe, on April 22nd. Year by year, every single position that was added, the health care increases. I'm not going to go through that again, but We are consumers at a county. Whenever you look at the consumer price index going up, we are not immune to increasing fuel prices, increase anything. Healthcare goes up. We pay that also just as the Smolnick family would if we were on a private outing with my family. So historic county budgets have gone up. Things have gotten more expensive. Next slide. So the general fund, this is more, this is really what the board of supervisors has control over. And when I say control, they can really dictate this. The general, the overall balance, there are certain things, state aid, federal aid, they do not have a say in it. State code gives them the authority to look at the general fund. And I had some other slides on this. When you look at I didn't include it here, but just for the public, I'm glad you all stayed to listen to this. When you look at a $146 million budget, when you look at salaries and benefits for county employees and teachers, and then our debt service, you're at $105 million already. Then you got to start keeping the lights on, that's another $5 million. It doesn't take long to add, there's not a big piece of the pie where we can really, unless you start laying off teachers and laying off county employees, there's not much of the pie that the Board of Supervisors has unless they want to make some of those drastic changes. I think we are a growing community. I just wanted to highlight, it's not $146 million, the five members in front of you have and it's a very small portion of that pie. Next slide. So we talked about unassigned fund balance. So unassigned fund balance, the policy is to keep 15% of your overall budget. So budgets, you know, 145, even $150 million. So you should be keeping 22 million in your unassigned fund balance. We're at $48 million right now. Very, very healthy fund balance. Again, that is typically used for unforeseen expenses, if there's a serious decline in the economy, economic development projects, things of that nature. Or we can go ahead and use this. In February of 26, we had a great work session where the Board of Supervisors prioritized, I think it was 19 major capital projects. And some of the workings and some of the conversations we've had with Davenport are, how can we utilize some of these excess funds? For example, the RFP is on the street right now for a new CTE building here for career technical education for our high school seniors. That's not going to be a cheap building. And then we're going to have to operate that every year. How nice would it be to utilize a majority of this? We've got some plans. I'm not ready. We're still working on them. But if we can build something like that, if we have somebody help us out, build that particular facility and not borrow any money, not to incur any more debt, that's a perfect plan right there. So this is a very healthy fund balance for the county. We're in very good position. And this is one thing that The companies look at who provide the Fitch, Moody, and Poor's for the ratings. We're AA plus rating, so this helps us out. But there are funds there for some major capital projects. Next slide, I'm getting near the end. I think Mr. Sons asked me to look at and let's show how much money was returned at the end of every year going back to the unassigned fund balance. You'll see $712,000 up to $6.5 million. You look at this, you're like, well, why is this? Is there some fat built into the budget? There could be. Is this some of your departments not going out spending money? I've been here a little over two years now, For instance, for this particular fiscal year, I've already shut the budget down. Unless it's anything for Sheriff, Chief Moody, fire rescue, for gasoline, any extraneous expenses need my approval. We did that for a couple of reasons. That's to end this end of the year shopping spree. Hey, I've got money, let me go spend it. That's not going to happen. Also, it puts a burden on my finance staff when they're trying to close out the year and here comes June 30th and they get 400 receipts for all these extraneous purchases. It just puts too much work on them trying to close out the end of the year. Obviously, we don't know where this fiscal year is going to end, but the 4.175 million came from the most recent audit that was provided by Mr. Grossnickel. We are returning a healthy amount. A large portion of this does come from the schools, but there is money there. We may be able to, I think, tighten the belts a little bit more next year's budget. We've tightened down quite a bit. If you saw some of my other presentations, this year over year increase, I think from last year to this year, it's the smallest increase we've had in nine years, or second smallest increase we've had in nine years with a budget. And that's tough with a growing county, growing teachers, growing police force. It's hard to, there's only so many areas you can cut, but we are doing our very best to keep the tax rate low and provide the services needed for our citizens. I think I may have one more. That may be my last slide, Mr. Dines. That is my last slide. So, again, I've made this presentation on the budget, I think, four or five times. I think I can say it in my sleep, but in summary, two-cent real estate tax rate increase for the citizens, don't be fooled, the 58 cents is a two-cent rate, even though it looks different on paper. That is due to the equalized rate. I'll be happy to answer any questions from the board at this time or from the public after the public hearing.

Question from the board.

It's not a question. I got called, contacted today by Thurman Brisbane and they wanted to express their thanks to the Board of Supervisors in King George County for supporting the homeless shelter where some of our residents go to try to get ahead in life and have a home to stay and help. So they just wanted to express their thank you for supporting the Brisbane homeless shelter.

Am I mistaken, the local employees, you changed it from a 2% COLA with a 1% performance to a 1% and 2%?

That is correct. To reward your high performers and those who are just skating by, they'll get their 1%. But this is something we talked about, so I did flip that. Yes, initially, I think it was a 2% and there was a 2% and 1%, but I flipped it to a 1% COLA and 2% merit.

okay i just wanted to make sure that we clarify that was different than we saw last time i want to make sure that we convey i think that comes off as a big negative right because you know people look around and they're like well this you know school systems teachers five percent um this allows us if you're really excelling at your job recognized by your peers you're going to be able to make more I know we're struggling to get above that 3% total, but long-term, I hope that performance-based allows us to have a big percentage of those people that work for us that are good at what they do, that we can retain those people. Because if we can continue to invest in the people that do the best jobs, hopefully that makes it a better place to work for everybody. I think it comes off very negative lots of times because people see it as a smaller number, a potential smaller number. And we've got to be very clear with our staff what the expectations are. So there's no surprises. My only concern is the first year you do this, those expectations are always not real clear. So we have to be kind of understanding with the staff to make sure that we are able to retain our good staff. churn ends up costing us more in the long run, right? Getting rid of low performance, good. But if we create a whole lot of churn because we do this this way, then that ends up costing us as well. So just keep your job to keep tabs on that. Sounds like this is your recommendation. So thanks for clarifying that.

Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Metz. I concur with that, Mr. Stroud.

Yes, sir. So there's a couple things that I would hope to clear up. Somebody made a comment in a previous meeting about all the revenue that Dahlgren Naval Base brings to the county. Could you clarify that up for us? So anything inside the gates, we don't collect anything.

That's a big misconception. There's 10,000 people a day here, all these high-tech facilities. We don't collect anything on that. That's why we looked at the meals tax. A lot of those doggone workers go outside the gates at lunchtime. When they go outside those gates and go across the street to buy lunch, that's when they're spending money. That's when we earn money.

so so that that is a big misconception thank you mr stroud but yeah anything inside those gates we don't collect anything on so people want to bring businesses here and all the services there's a lot of companies that we have here and a lot of money that's made by companies that are here that are services companies okay we're not making money on that the county doesn't make money on that you saw the majority of the money right now is coming from where your pockets Okay, so whenever people say bring the businesses and bring the businesses, it's not any business. Okay, just any business isn't the answer. You want businesses that are going to be benefit to the people, things that the people want, right? You want somewhere to eat, you want somewhere to shop that also brings money to the county. But if a business doesn't bring money to the county, And there's one other thing with that. People say, well, we need businesses that employ people. Well, that's cool. We do want businesses that employ people. But whenever those people live in Fredericksburg, or Maryland, or some other county, what are you bringing? You're not bringing anything but traffic. Unless they happen to eat breakfast or lunch. So, Those are misconceptions, and that's why I asked that question. It's very important because there's so much out there. People think, oh, bring in businesses or the businesses we have, the services companies, they aren't bringing money in here. It's very limited money that they bring. If it's not real estate taxes and limited equipment taxes, and then that doesn't last. the other thing is to point out is on one of the slides and i didn't ask a question during there it may have been easier but it's the 15 so uh mr smolding addressed that in a previous meeting and uh i supported mr metz and readdressing how much of the money because our fiscal policy that's a very old policy and it needs to be looked at i believe um and that um that 15% number may not be a right number, but also understand that whenever you're spending the money, even though you can't use the money for right now, according to policy, not that it could change, that the money is not used for reoccurring expenditures or one-time capital expenditures, understand that it's a big budget, you saw the big budget, so it's easy enough for finance to use existing money for those things that you can't use it for and just use that money for something else but so i made a spoke a long time on 5 may you can go back and listen to it um several times i said it i went over this but it's to not take more money out of constituents pockets whenever there's 48 million dollars sitting in the account thank you sir yes sir thank you matt

So this time I'm going to open the floor up to public comment. The comment is specifically towards the budget. Comments limited to three minutes per person. Give everyone a chance to speak. Just state your name and district once you vote so it can be in the public record. Do I have anyone who wants to speak towards the budget? Yes, ma'am. You're up. Can we bring the microphone to you? I can do that too. I've already made you get up once.

i am so grateful to come and speak to you tonight because there's no guarantee that you're going to fund us we are the non-mandated outside agencies that mr smolnick just talked about we understand all too well the tough choices that are needed to work with a tight budget we do that you do that and we just appreciate it when you take the time to notice what we do for your citizens our five attorney office has served the five counties of planning district 16 including King George since 1973 We represent low income people who need an attorney in civil legal matters, such as representing domestic violence survivors who need a protective order, people who need spousal and child support, and people needing resolution of landlord tenant and foreclosure matters. We're the only organization providing this service. In your county, there are 2,092 eligible low income persons who could qualify for our services. we help county governments by taking the strain off your social services safety net by lifting clients out of poverty with enforceable court orders of child and spousal support that the clients would not otherwise have won without our legal representation we help the county court system run efficiently by helping those who can't afford an attorney because those litigants who represent themselves slow the system down considerably and we assist local law enforcement by obtaining enforceable civil protective orders for domestic violence victims. We leverage your financial support to provide legal services that benefit your constituents. When you total the amount of real measurable financial help we give the residents of your county That's an excellent return on your investment. In the last fiscal year, the three offices of our agency obtained over $420,000 for our clients throughout the 17 counties that we serve. I always bring brochures with me so that you can provide good constituent services by referring appropriate residents of this county to our office every meeting that i come to here you make sure that there's a pledge of allegiance you're pledging allegiance to the last three words of that pledge which is justice for all and when you take that pledge seriously and you support us you're putting your support behind that pledge and we never take that for granted and we will always come here for these meetings to make sure that you know how much we appreciate that

thank you and one reason why we do we do with you guys because we appreciate you to appreciate what you do for our community thank you you're having well someone to speak towards the budget I wanted to know if you could put the PowerPoint that you had go ahead and put that as a link because the last two the the seventh and the 22nd i printed off but that one wasn't available to be printed no that that powerpoint got done about 5 12 this afternoon so it will be a link yes ma'am always wait until the last second what you do over there all right anyone else i'd like to speak towards the budget any correspondence anyone online all right so this time i will close public comment and i will close the public hearing and i'll bring it back to the board is there anything we need to discuss so we do what like to move on we have can't make a decision today anyway i think we we hashed it out with mr smotic as he went along so i think that we're good all right move on then is this the uh the action item zero six zero four Do you have? All right. So we got up next the 2% bonus for constitutional officers and employees. Board report. Member and Ms. LaVita Cobb.

Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the board. I'm here this evening. I am bringing to you all the one time 2% bonus for constitutional officers and employees. So during the 2026 session, the General Assembly approved a one time 2% salary bonus for constitutional officers, regional jail superintendents and their compensation board funded deputies employees based on salary amounts as of June 1st, 2026. The bonus funding is one time in nature and will not be incorporated into each office's base salary funding. To facilitate the timely closing of FY26 budgets and reimbursement of the bonus amount, the bonuses for constitutional officers and the employees must be paid in June and local government certifications must be completed by June 12, 2026. Reimbursement will then be included in the June 2026 payroll and the expense reimbursement will be received in early July. The total reimbursement amount is estimated at $54,215.88. The county's only financial responsibility associated with the bonuses will be the employer FICA expense estimated at $4,147.50. So this evening I am asking the board to appropriate $58,364 from the general fund fund balance for the one time 2% bonus for constitutional officers and employees to be allocated per department as indicated below on the agenda and paid out on June 12, 2026. $58,364

Mr. Stewart, can I just say so moved? So moved.

I just wanted to clarify this to make sure, because it says constitutional officers, and I just want to make sure that this 2% bonus does not, it has nothing to do with the board. If I don't say that, there'll be people on Facebook saying the board just gave themselves a raise. All right, we did not, and this does not affect us. So I got, I'm not getting a 2%. And that's okay. I give it back to you if I did.

And also for clarification, this is a state mandate. We have no control over it.

Yeah. Any questions from Ms. Kahn? And just to clarify, you said this, but I just want to repeat it. This is state money, the $58,360. That's our FICA.

So, yeah, so the state portion is $54,215.88. The county is only responsible for the FICA and the Medicare, which is $4,147.50. But for accounting purposes, we have to appropriate the entire amount

and go ahead and pay that out and then we'll reimburse that money from the state right so so the only new money i i i under well yes okay so thank thank you for clarifying that we give you permission for the full amount but the state effectively reimburses us most of that the four thousand one hundred forty seven dollars fifty cents is the small portion that comes out of our that is correct yes sir i just wanted to correct it is not a mandate

That is a gift from the state. Well, thank you. If you choose to give it to the constitutional officers.

All right. Can you state your last part again so Ms. Bender can say so moved?

The recommended action is to appropriate $58,364 from the general fund fund balance for the one time 2% bonus for constitutional officers and employees to be allocated per department as indicated below and paid out on June 12th, 2026. So moved.

Second. Motion properly seconded. Is there any further discussion? By roll call. Mr. Stroud? Aye. Ms. Bender? Aye. Mr. Metz? Aye. Mr. Sullins? Aye. Chair votes aye, motion passes.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, next step. Looks like you're back on the horn. We have 0605, King George Bylaws.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the board. We've talked about this a few times. The most recent bylaws and rules of procedure were adopted January 6 of 2026. On the page 2 of 25, item 2B, the position of the chair of the board shall rotate on an annual basis upon a method determined by the board. That is the point up for discussion. The board requested that we put this on the agenda. So I will turn it over to the board for your all's discussion and await further direction.

all right and miss bender i know you had a comment to make so i want to let you go first thank you so much and i'm just going to read what i had prepared for my public comment so in january of 2026 this board adopted an amendment to the bylaw to codify a district-based rotation for the board chair position i put forward the motion to codify rotation and supervisor sullivan that's voted in favor along with me when we sit on this board we have the elected representatives are of our respective districts or in mr sullen's case at large This is not about whether a certain individual has earned the respect to lead from the sitting board members. Each supervisor has already won the vote of approval that matters. They've been approved by majority of their constituents. That is the respect I'm looking to earn. From 2026 to 2024, this board operated under a gentleman's agreement in which each district was represented as chair once every five years. In 2025, Shiloh... Is it not working? Okay. in 2025 Shiloh was due the board chair position because I was serving as interim head of the service authority pro bono help to the county the board skipped Shiloh's turn with me as board of supervisors chair once that service authority role was filled Shiloh should have been next in the rotation this is why I nominated myself at our first meeting to be in that rotation board chair cannot be a popularity contest because that creates a situation where a supervisor is trying to please the other board members rather than the citizens Furthermore, there has been absolutely no issue in the past when both Supervisor Kupka and myself each held the position of Chair of the Board of Service Authority and the Supervisor simultaneously. I appreciate Supervisor Metz speaking up at the last meeting to agree once again that the Board of Chair should rotate. We do not necessarily need to codify the rotation but there needs to be an understood order to ensure each district is represented fairly once every five years. Otherwise rotation could be simply back and forth between two or three districts and this could set up a bad power dynamic. I have, as other past board members did too, experienced situations where the board chair simply refused to add items to the agenda for discussion. I appreciate members of this board saying that wouldn't happen with this board, but we need to have bylaws that work with any board, not just the current one. I'm sure you can imagine a situation where a future board could be compromised in a way that would not be as accommodating. There needs to be checks on power. Additionally, part of having an item on the agenda, rather than just being brought up to discuss, is the opportunity for all board members to prepare by educating themselves and engaging with their citizens. there is also the opportunity to allow for presentations to the board and importantly having an item on the agenda allows for public input and full transparency it is true that it is possible for a board member to serve four years and not get the opportunity to be chair but again this is not about us as individuals but about fairness to the citizens of the districts we represent If one district is kept from holding the chair at length, that can lead to that area of the county suffering unfair consequences, especially if they cannot get items on the agenda. It is also possible that a newly elected member becomes board chair, but that role of leading meetings, setting the agenda, and representing the county as needed can be learned effectively quickly, especially with a vice chair who has that experience. A set rotation is the best option for the citizens of King George, and I'm asking that Shiloh be brought back into the rotation, and I'm putting my name up for the chair of 2027 right here at the meeting. And then we resume the previous rotation as held by this board beginning 10 years ago, except with Shiloh hereafter coming after at large. Otherwise, Shiloh will not have held this chair for almost 10 years. Thank you.

Oh, yeah, I've got comments. understand that what Ms. Bender just said, and she just made the argument, the counter argument to her argument by saying that if that was adopted, then a board member could be elected, serve four years and never get the opportunity to represent their district as chair. Specifically, what she's saying by nominating herself for next year, I will have served, if she was elected next year, I will have served four years and never had the opportunity to be chair. Because next year is four years, so I would have to run again next year and be re-elected to have the opportunity to serve as chair. That's why that system is flawed. So, And that's why we're having this change to the bylaws. That way we can ensure that a supervisor has the opportunity to serve as chair during a four-year term.

That's... Yeah, thank you for doing that. That was actually... We've talked about this a couple of times and we kind of get to going around and I think you laid that out very well, Supervisor Bender. So I think what we're looking at on the wall is, on the screen here, that is the bylaws as currently adopted, correct? With a highlight on to be there. I can tell you as a supervisor, my intention is to always vote for rotating the chair. We can talk about what we do with the vice chair and the other positions we all fill on other boards. I had always worried about that position about, hey, what if somebody coming in, it was their first up? Honestly, when you run for this position, you better somewhat be qualified to sit on a board and understand a few minor things. I've always asked people that I'm voting for, you know for local stuff you know what what's your experience with robert's rules and and serving on boards so um i think you actually alleviated one of my concerns with fixing a rotation um i guess i'm i like what's written there i mean i it also allows for the unexpected to pop up and us to be able to deal with that as a board um I don't have words to modify what's written up there for action. So I guess I can tell you what my intent is, and then I can tell you that I'm also okay with the bill of bylaws that we've updated this year.

That's it. Thank you, Mr. Sullins. Thank you, sir.

Mr. Chair, I just want a clarification on B. The business initiative, we're going to rotate. So basically it would be, I'm going to throw it out there, the rotation would be whoever wins the popularity contest. That's my opinion for that year. Because it would rotate because if it goes to somebody else, and I have nothing against Mr. Stroud, it rotates to go to somebody else. That's rotation. So it's kind of loose. So I want to clarify that it's just rotation. It has to be a different person.

I think that's, I don't think Mr. Sullivan's one being chair of a popularity contest would be my first thing I'd say. I think that's a little bit shot towards that. And over the past couple of years, I think that he was chosen because he's qualified to do the job. So I don't think it's a popularity contest. This isn't high school presidency that we're voting for. That's a popularity concept. The biggest concern for me is the new person coming on the board. I don't care who you are, you can say you can learn quickly. When you first get on the board, you're talking to a bunch of different employees. When I go talk, and you go talk to the head of finance, or you talk to the head of this or head of that, and you come stepping in, if you get a little bit of resistance, and when we first came on the board, we got resistance from employees. And so I started feeling kind of about some of the other supervisors going, yeah, well, I looked into that, but they said there's nothing we can do. And there were things that we could do but the employees can protect themselves from you especially if you don't know what you're doing in the county like we've been doing this she's been you know doing finance for 20 years and if I start coming to ask her questions I'm gonna go oh okay and just put my head down but sometimes you gotta be a kid and just go why why not why can't we do that why isn't this possible you know because that's just the way it is doesn't work for me so you would get run over a little bit when you first got elected and then you get thrown into people who Mr. Smart, when he gets a place where he's been in the county and working in the county minister for 20 some years. So his fourth to fifth year in there, if he's not a good person, and we've had this in the past with bad county administrators, and I don't believe that's you, but we've had bad county administrators who have steamrolled people. I wasn't the first person, he wasn't the first person to come on this board to say, we're going to find out where the wasteful spending is. Ruby did that. And Ruby said, I looked for it, couldn't find it. and that's because she got resistance from employees because they were all protecting they were all guarding each other that's what was going on they had this head department they had the little meetings and they were like just don't give them that don't tell them that don't answer that and this is all the stuff you found that after the fact so some people had to go but if you came in brand new you would get run over but i think it really comes down to the fact that you serve a four-year term and there's somebody that would be come on to the board who couldn't just be who couldn't be chair but couldn't even be considered to be chair. But he knows the day one he wins the election, that for the next four years, he can't even be considered to be the chair and represent. That's where I'm at. Do I think it should rotate? 100% think it should rotate. I think it should rotate every year. But I don't want to be bound to that because you go through a tough time and you get some person who's really, really good. Do I want to bind myself to go, well, You get a good governor for four years and he only gets four years, Mr. Stewart, and you got to get rid of him and get someone to come in and raise taxes on you. I don't know. But I do think it should rotate. But I think it should rotate every year based upon the vote of the board itself to choose who the next person is who's going to represent not just the county, but you're representing the board itself when you go out into the public and everywhere that you go. And so I do think it should be voted on. i don't plan on being chair over the next couple years of this being done i've done it and i lost about seventy five thousand dollars last year being chairs part of my username because i'm in sales and i close loans for a living so if you don't answer the phone you don't make money so i spend a lot of time on this board but at the end of the day that's the end of it i do think it should rotate as mrs bender said earlier today She doesn't just represent Shiloh. She represents all of King George, and all of us represent. As I talked to Ms. Morgan in the park the other day, she looked at me and said, you represent Shiloh, too. I go, that's exactly right. I do represent Shiloh. I represent Dahlgren. I represent everybody. I take calls from people in Shiloh. I take calls from people in James Madison. People call me. They know me. They call me. So we do represent all of them. And I think that we work together as a good team, and I think that we're smart enough to choose our to choose who's going to lead the board and i appreciate you put you're putting your hat in there for next year i i didn't expect uh and i expect you to do that but in the day you know my my consist my thought on this is it's someone that be should be elected and chosen by the board it shouldn't just be something that is mandated that you have to do this is the next district it's going to get this next district going to get it and that's just you know my personal opinion on it it's not a i always say it's not a little league soccer where everybody gets a trophy Anyone else want to speak? This is not, no. I'm sure we'll talk later. We need a motion. Can we work on that writing there to say that it will rotate as that chair is chosen and accepted by the board?

Chairman, the situation you all are in now is you said you were going to rotate on an annual basis upon a method determined by the board, and you've never chosen a method. So right now you're kind of just in limbo. If you want to just elect a chair every year from the board, then you just strike B. Go back to A, which says the chair shall be elected at the annual meeting for a term of one year at the commencement of the organizational meeting at the following year and that covers it.

I make a motion that we strike subparagraph 2B2B from King George Board of Supervisors bylaws and rules of procedure. I didn't say part four. Let's see what that number was. Part three. Okay, part three B2B of the King George Board of Supervisors bylaws, rules and procedures.

motion probably second is there any further discussion yeah let me ask a question here so if we strike two b two b bravo to bravo what you're saying is there's no reason to have it rotate yeah i have i have your i have no i have no problem with putting verbiage into a that we voted

be voted on by the board and will rotate i have no problem with there being a rotation in the then we would have we could if we keep it we need to change the word wording in there then that to be elected i mean because that's what it says the only the only difference is saying that it's going to rotate meaning that whoever's the chair for the previous year, it's got to change to somebody else.

Yes, right. So before I yield my time here, so I guess I make a motion to amend the motion to include the words in two alpha Trying to think how I should word this here. Chair shall be elected at the annual meeting at the term of one year, comma, the board shall rotate, comma, ending at the commencement of the organizational meeting of the following year.

So the only thing I would say, Mr. Chairman, is you put yourself back in the same position again, because you haven't defined what rotate means. That's the only thing.

How about, okay, let me make a polite amendment to my amendment. How about we say, I don't figure how you put, it's like a term limit of one.

I think we can simplify it then. I amend my motion to, on part 3, 2B, or B2B, after the word basis take away take off you just put a period there and then that says that the position of shared board shall rotate on annual basis you still you're still you're still voting on it you're still doing it the first meeting and mr chairman that it's your call i mean it's your call if that's what you want to do but again you haven't defined how you're going to rotate it and that is a

going to rotate and you want to say that you need to define how the rotation occurs. Otherwise you just need to say we're going to elect the chairman at the which is the first my first motion and you you all who you want to be chair. Because you're going to do that anyway, you still have to be a formula.

You still have to vote on it. Okay.

We're having a hard time understanding you. It sounds robotic. Go back to the first motion.

And we have a second. No. Just so the public can understand, what you're suggesting is to strike the words and to be the position of the chair of the board shall rotate on an annual basis upon a method determined by the board. Strike that line. Correct.

That is the motion that is on the floor and has been seconded.

Any other discussion? All right, by vote, Ms. Bender?

I want to clarify that it's written, nay.

Mr. Metz? Nay. Mr. Sullins? What was that? Okay, thank you. All right. Mr. Stroud's aye. Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you. All right. We have discussion item 06-06 tax sponsorship grant application for FY26-27. Ms. Amy Southall. Got a little red button on.

Oh, there we go. Good evening members of the board. Thank you for having me. So a little overview of where this money comes from and the grant process. So as you know, the tourism fund is a completely separate fund. It is, I believe it's 3% of the 5% tax collected. So three of the five that is collected from occupancy tax from our lodging. So any of the hotels in Dahlgren, any of our Airbnbs and our bed and breakfasts. And the state code says that of that 5%, that 3% has to be used on marketing to get more visitors to come to our locality. So that is where the tourism fund comes from. In the tourism fund you'll see in the budget that was presented there is a line item where we allocated fifteen thousand dollars towards our grant sponsorship process and of that each year we ask for anybody who has a tourism initiative to apply for the grant funding and this would help cover any of their marketing costs for those tourism initiatives. this for the upcoming fiscal year so fiscal year 26 and 27 we had two applications we had Oktoberfest who has applied previously so you'll see that in the board report that I also attached their application from last year the tourism advisory committee met in April and agreed to recommend the same amount that was recommended to be given to Oktoberfest as last year and that would be two thousand dollars for outdoor marketing signs two thousand dollars for portable directional sign stands five hundred dollars for print marketing materials and four hundred and fifty dollars for live music as well as a waiver for their tent permit from community development this totals in a four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars and this would be awarded fifty percent up front that is two thousand four hundred and seventy five dollars and fifty percent after my office has received their after action report. And that includes a numerous amount of different things, but mostly the most important thing is the receipts of how they spent that grant dollars. So that is the first application. I can either stop there and take any questions or I can move on to the second application. And then we do have the second application. The applicants are here to answer any questions. I do not see Mr. Perrello with Oktoberfest. He may have had something else pop up.

Mr. Metz has a question. Just a quick question. The portable directional signs, are those the digital signs?

So I believe when they were asking about that, and their application is linked, but from my memory, I believe that that is for like A-frame signs directing people through parking and other things. Last year they had a very similar ask. where they were asking for those type of items where it was used to say parking is this way. So it's kind of seen as a safety feature. They also may or may not be using those as well for, since they're like A-frame to be putting them and asking businesses as well, I'm not sure. But I believe they're talking about like the plastic A-frame where you can change the slot out of what like poster is inside of it. so they can put that out at the event.

Okay, I was just 2000 for signs. And I know we have a couple of safety and we got a grant for another one. And I was just saying, if we have assets, we could loan them in lieu of the 2000. I would also be supportive of that, but that's all I had.

Any other questions?

Okay, so that one is St. Paul. And then our newest applicant, this is Ride for Valor and Run for Valor from Valor Ranch. um this is a new application it is two separate events one which is the ride for valor is happening on october 10th and then the run for valor is happening on november 14th the tourism advisory committee met in april discussed asked questions since the new applicant those questions were then shared with the applicant and then they came to our may meeting and answered any questions and at that time the committee voted to recommend that Roller Ranch would receive for both events. So in total, $3,000 for social media and radio marketing, $2,000 for outdoor marketing signs, $1,000 for print marketing materials, and also a waive for any fees associated with tent permits for either event from pre-development. This is there in their fourth year of operation. So based on whether the grant is set up, this would be a total of $6,000, but because they're in their fourth year, they would get 60% upfront upon award. And that is $3,600. And then they would receive 40% after my office receives their after action report with their receipts among other things. And that would be $2,400. Any questions? The applicants are here to answer any questions you may have for either of those events.

No questions.

Is that it?

That is all.

You did great. Thank you. All right, next up, 06-07 Financial Policy Update.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So Ms. Cobb and I are here. So this is a kind of alluded to this during my budget presentation, the financial policies of the county. I was requested to bring this item back for discussion by the Board of Supervisors. So we have attached the current financial policies. And I think the discussion was you know, really homing in on this 15%. Is that the right number? Does that need to go higher or does, you know, wording need to change and what anything in excess of the stated minimum can be used for? So, you know, there's not too many recommendations from staff other than it's on the agenda. Here's the policies for you all and, you know, we will wait, you know, any instruction from the Board of Supervisors how and if you do want to change your policies.

Yeah. Sully knows that he's breaking up a little bit from his connection tonight. So he just sent me this. He asked me to read this for the financial policy discussion. He'd like to make a motion. So I'll just do this for him, right? Make a motion we commit to holding an off-site late summer timeframe to address three items. Number one, financial policies regarding general fund balance. That's what we're doing right here. Two, cooperative budgeting between King George and the county school system for bulk ordering as a means of cost savings. again kind of financial policy and then number three merit-based raises for school system employees and then he he would like to make sure that in this action we invite the school board to those last two weeks there's a motion i would like to just add one thing onto that motion before you know ask if

Consideration.

I think we're supposed to vote that one, yes or no, then we can add something on it and make a separate motion.

Would that be okay? Can I get a clarification on the first part? Is she saying that we hold off on this until we do these things?

It was a discussion item anyway on the agenda, I believe. This was not an action item. This was a discussion topic.

Yes, you're right. We don't have to do that today. I'll second.

I can add to move her discussion item that wanted to consider we look at maybe raising the limit for procurement. So I mean I don't think I'm I wasn't prepared to say this but I was thinking about it is special the service authority side. There are certain items we have a certain threshold that you get on the board that we maybe need to raise that threshold because that was done a long time ago and cost and prices are a little higher with the threshold. I forget what the threshold is now.

Yeah, so I think I definitely would be happy to include that in that motion that we, in addition, comprehensive financial policies, including procurement limits.

Motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? We need a roll call on this.

I think we're just talking about all of this. Yeah, I think it's just guidance from me and what I'll do, Board, and I heard Solly say, or Mr. Sollen say, you know, late summer, I will start looking at potential venues for you all. And, you know, I think with these discussions, this is something that If the board feels comfortable, it can be a discussion, you know, Dr. Boyd and myself can lead this discussion instead of getting a moderator as we did last time. I feel comfortable with these topics. So I'll start working on the venues and working on some late summer dates for the board of supervisors.

So we don't necessarily need a motion right now.

I don't think you need a motion.

We've given you what we need, what we wanted. I added it to my list, yes, sir. I think that sounds good.

Yeah, sounds like consensus.

Yeah, okay. if there's anything else that you guys want to bring back up just email out this message mr smart we'll go from there chief ear 608 company 2 update i'm looking forward to hearing this my friend

Well, Mr. Chairman and members of the board, it's good to be with you this evening. And I too am excited to be here in front of you. I got a couple updates on projects for you. I have a lot of slides. I want to be brief. I know you've been in here a long time. I know the meeting has gone for several hours. But I also want to be thorough. So if at any time you ask me to stop, we'll stop and certainly answer any questions that you have. uh so this one why go why good if you have a question as he's going along please just ask your question okay and as long as we get these linked afterwards absolutely the public has been asking about this too yes and and i will uh i was going to address that uh supervisor medicine at the end a little bit of an incline here um We will be also putting this on our fire rescue website as well. So next slide, please. So this journey has begun quite a while ago. I was intimately involved from the inception of it. Back in 2011, we started searching for land. We have three fire stations that cover our 185 square miles in our county, and this is the replacement not adding a new station, but a replacement of an existing fire and rescue station that sits off Dahlgren Road. If you know anything about the current station, we're right on Dahlgren Road as you're going into the main gate on the left-hand side, and that station is grossly outdated. It is undersized, and it was never designed for a 24-7 operation. So that led us to the journey of replacing that station. We looked at 14 different parcels of land in the Dahlgren area. And of those 14, we conducted three phase one environmental site assessment studies on various parcels. Out of the 14, this one that we purchased was the best one out of the 14. And I'll tell you a little bit why here in the next few slides. We purchased 3.15 acres from Oakland Baptist Church. That property was never advertised, was never marketed. And in many aspects, it was relationship driven. We purchased that, the board approved it on April 19th, purchase agreement of 2023. On April 20th, the deed was recorded at the clerk of the circuit court's office. The amount that was purchased was $340,000. This is a premium site, premium land, and if you know anything about land values for three acres of pretty much commercially-type zoned land in Dahlgren, that's a steal. The new site location is 1.2 miles from the current station, and there's a strategic importance of that that I'll cover here shortly as well. We hired MW Studios as our architectural and engineering firm. We've also had applied for two consecutive years for the DoD defense community infrastructure grant programs. We were denied for the two years that we applied for it. We were trying to get out to get some grant monies that we could try to show a connection of military value with Dahlgren naval base, but DOD did not think that it met those requirements. Next slide, please. So I want to talk a little bit about the design lens. And this is how we as a design team, the lens in which we're looking through when we're designing the station. And I'd like to refer to it as the three E's. And that is, is it effective? Is it efficient? And is it economical? And that's the way we're looking at it as we're designing this station. We're looking at, is it mission ready? Is safety of importance? Operational capability, we were looking at maintenance, durability. We're assessing things versus cost versus value added. If it doesn't have value added, we cut it. We're also looking at scalability, cost of ownership, and also designing it energy smart. In the green, the map there on the right-hand side, this station has a primary first-due district of about 48 square miles in the Dahlgren area, but also responds to the entire 185 square miles throughout the county. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is... This is the parcel. It's 8-71B. And here's Windsor Drive. Here's the intersection right here to Windsor and 301, or 218 and 301. This is Oakland Baptist Church. This is their office complex where the roof had collapsed. This is Four Seasons Daycare. Next slide, please. Okay, this is just aerial footage of that same parcel of land. And one thing, I'll go ahead and talk about how strategically it is important to the mission in which we serve the community. This site, and this is the reason why I say it was probably the best site out of the other 14 that we have looked at. This site, by having this station here at this location, we are accessing an existing VDOT intersection, okay? That light is already there, it's established. When we build this station, we'll have access and control to that light. When we respond to a call and we need to hang a left, that light will turn green for us and we can control that light. Once we get to that intersection, we can go north or southbound on 301. We can go straight down Windsor Drive. We can access T-Totem and Pumpkin Neck and Ridge Road, that area much more conveniently. If we look at hanging a right and we can access Dahlgren Road, we have better access to Dahlgren Road. We can go across to Owens. We can come up the backside of Owens if the traffic on Route 301 North is completely backed up. We can come up that side. We have a lot of projects that are happening, that are going to be happening in this area. And if anybody knows the landscape of this area, You know that most of the growth is starting to occur that's north of that, north of this location. You also know that you're coming down a hill. So we have the high ground. We're not having to work our way up like we're currently when trying to climb the grade coming up the hill off of Dahlgren Road. We know that Dahlgren West, we talked about, had a very robust conversation earlier about Dahlgren West data centers. That's going to be to the left, south of this station, much more closer to this station. We know that going straight across on Owens, you have Walnut Hill that's going to be coming on board. That's, I believe, about 180 townhomes and 20 single-family dwellings, if I'm not mistaken. We have some other projects that are occurring. Oh, also the battery energy storage facility that's going adjacent to Dahlgren West. Next slide, please. Okay, this is just another image of that same parcel of property. Our property line will come up close to Four Seasons Daycare. Next slide. And that's just another image. And just to highlight the address, that's going to be the new station address. That address was provided to us by GIS. So when we build the station, that will be the address. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is just a site layout of the station. And one of the agreements that we had when we purchased the land from the church is that they wanted to ensure that that driveway that they currently had which was about right here, that they would still be able to have a right of way and access coming off of Windsor, coming into their parking lot. And so that was one of the agreements that we had to have with the church. So by doing such, making it, having that come right to the end of their parking lot, they will have that. Also, this building right here has a Windsor Drive address so they will be able to maintain that Windsor Drive address to their office and administrative building. Next slide please. So this is the project schedule and we're coming very close. They're expecting the site plan approval this month with the documents to the county for final review next month in July. to receive a site permit at the end of July, receive a building permit in August, bid documents delivered to the county at the end of August, bid it out in September, a notice to proceed in January of 2027 with construction starting and then the completed construction of the station in April of 2028. Next slide please. Okay, so this is an overview of the floor plan and I'll go through it a little bit more in a couple more slides, but the highlights are is that it's a four-bay drive-through station. It'll include a watch office, a day room, kitchen area, a physical fitness gym, partial private bunking. There'll be a personal protective equipment gear storage room, medical supply, pharmacy areas, decontamination rooms, self-contained breathing apparatus fill station room, a personal protective gear washer, and also a training mezzanine. And just to Just to add, you know, one of the things when we're talking about Dahlgren West, you know, right now our county and our department does not have a ladder truck, but we need one. And one of the things in that is a proffer that they have agreed to for $3 million for a ladder truck. That ladder truck, when it's purchased, is going to go in this station. The other thing that I'll highlight is this gear washer right here. That money for that gear washer is right around $25,000, and that money is coming from the battery energy storage. That was part of their siting agreement when that was approved. Next slide, please. So this is just a blow up of the floor plan for the living area. And as you can see, this is going to be the main entrance, the front entrance. And as you come through, it'll be a little lobby area. This is a watch office. There's a couple, two offices right here, a restroom. And then this is going to be an open kitchen, training room slash TV room slash pantry, et cetera. Here's your physical fitness room. There's some various decon rooms, medical storage, ice machine. Through this door right here is going to be where the bunk rooms are. There's going to be four separate bathroom and showers. Right now it's being designed to sleep, we can sleep 12 with expandable up to 14. and that's going to help us out especially when we have these events like let's say it's a another ice storm for a whole week where we need to increase and bring some additional people in or you know we haven't been impacted in recent years and by a pretty serious hurricane but if that happened if we had any special weather events it allows us to be able to do that our current station doesn't allow us to do that so it also allows us to put the but have female bunking separate than male bunking. Right now, that bunking is together and there's some vulnerability with doing that. Next slide, please. Here's just the overview of the apparatus bays. Not much to that, but it'll be four drive-through bays. Next slide. And this is the storage decontamination, the personal protective equipment SCBA on the other end of the station. Mr. Moot, does that have doors on both sides? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Doors on both sides. And that's important too, Mr. Chairman, because see, you can deploy in both directions. So that's important from a strategic standpoint. Next slide, please. So here's our rendering. This is what we're looking at. The building's 15,900 square feet as designed. And it's certainly a very attractive building, which will serve the mission for many, many years to come. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. You've been there. That's exactly right. Next slide. This is just an overview of this common kitchen day room. I wish we had more renderings of other rooms, but we don't. Next slide.

I've been asking a lot of these questions. I appreciate this. A lot of people don't hear what goes on in the background. It takes a lot to build a fire station.

Absolutely.

And you have to work out these details. I think, thanks for, I mean, you got a lot of data here. I'm sure we'll probably have the public send us a lot of comments now that you've actually started to release it. But yeah, from the last update we got, excellent work.

Yeah. But it's required a good team, and I'll touch on that team here shortly. And one of the things, right here beside, this is the gym, physical fitness room. And so we kind of designed that where there could be some partial but semi-privacy. And if you needed to, you know, make sure that, you know, a firefighter, you hadn't heard from them in a while, that, you know, you can peek around there and make sure he's still, everything's still okay. Next slide. And so this is just a layout that we've been kind of, all these are still draft, but this is a layout of the gym. We're looking at treadmill, stair stepper, some free weights, two treadmills, and enough equipment there that can, you know, people can Right now, we use some of our donated funds where we allow our crews and we purchase an annual membership to go to Anytime Fitness. We don't have any of this nowhere near at our current station. I think we may have two dumbbells and that's about it. But they go there as the day allows. And we want our firefighters and our paramedics to be fit. And because if they're fit, they can do their jobs better. And they can, you know, certainly reduces work-related injuries, reduces sick call-outs, et cetera. Next slide. All right, so let me talk about this, because I know this is where the rubber meets the road. I want to leave names out, but as I said at the beginning of the presentation, we applied for the Defense Community Infrastructure Grant Program. So by doing that, we had to provide very detailed anticipated cost, which we did with a previous architectural company. And when we did that, we had to submit this in 2023 from the previous company we were using. Now, it's not on many occasions that somebody like me comes up at a podium and says that you're going to save money. However, if you look at what was projected for this same building in 2023 to where we're at today, there's quite a difference. Millions of dollars saved of projected cost. Now, I also want to be a realist, and that is... That's a total projected cost. We're expecting the bids to come in much lower. However, this is what we don't know. We don't know what's going to happen to the economy between now and then. And our economy is very fragile and it's very volatile. And today, fuel prices may be where they're at, but we can't anticipate what they're going to be in fall. So raw materials could increase. Supply and demand could increase. But that gives somewhere that you can better target from where we were to where we're at today. Again, that doesn't include unforeseen conditions. And those prices, they don't include the $340,000 we bought the land for back in 2023. Those prices do include running the offsite utilities from down the hill near Wawa all the way up about where Arby's and the credit union is, all the way up to running water and sewer to that site. You could save, if it was a pad ready site and you had water and sewer that could handle your capacity there, there's roughly probably close to a million dollars in that. But those prices include that offsite utility projections.

Chief, if I were to rephrase what you just said, and Mr. Hamilton's not here, but... In the past, maybe we didn't do it this way. The borrowing that will occur for the infrastructure, the water sewer infrastructure, will be borne by this project, not by service authority, so that there's no impact to the service authority customers today because of the infrastructure we're putting in here.

That's a correct statement.

Thank you.

Yes.

That was a good piece to add to this. Thanks for bringing that up.

And we have to, unless something changes, the other piece of this is that in that price, we too, as a county project, we have to pay meter hookup fees. Unless something's changed from, we pay the same fees to the service authority for water and sewer connection fees. Next slide. This is just a little 360 going around the building.

Motion for someone to add maybe 10.30 or so on here.

I make a motion to extend the meeting to 10.30 p.m. Second.

Motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Mr. Solins? Aye. Aye. All right, motion passes. Thank you.

So I'll just let this...

While that one's cycling through, kind of the important stuff, what was that timeline again out for bid later this year? uh instructions and then so bid was i won't tell you wrong i believe it was september and in january construction notice to proceed in an april 2028 completion okay so about an 18 to 24 month construction period correct thanks it was in real small print and yeah we don't have the charts yes no thank you for the government

I do have a quick question. This almost looks like the one in Newtown that we visited a couple years ago, isn't it? There's some similarities, yes.

There's some similarities to that. We definitely had some, that was a very beneficial field trip, looking at other stations. That's the first time I met Mr. Smallman there. All right, next slide, please. All right, so I don't want to close it out without recognizing the design team. And we have a very robust design team, as you can see. And again, we're looking at value engineering principles, what makes sense, and also directing the project within a budget. And I want to thank all these people that are on the screen. including Mr. Supervisor Stroud. Been very instrumental in helping us, a lot of creative suggestions that helped us get this project to where it's at today. Next slide. Next slide. Any questions that the board may have? Do we have any questions?

I think you did a thorough job. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. And you're up again. I got one more on the fuel depot. Yep. 0609 overview of the company one fuel depot.

This one's not as glamorous, but, uh, as a pretty important project. And just while Chris is pulling the presentation up, I just want to mention real quick about the strategic importance of looking and understanding the importance of fuel as a critical infrastructure in our county. Right now, up until we had this up and running, next slide please. How our department would fuel ambulances, fire trucks, how the sheriff's office would fuel their patrol cars, how the schools would fuel their school buses, is we have cards and we go to our third party vendors. We go to Sheetz, we go to Fast Mart, we go to Wawa, And that's how we would fuel our vehicles. And that works well 95% of the time until it doesn't work well. And there was a couple pinnacle moments throughout my tenure of being with King George. And that is one time happened in 2012. In 2012, we had a national diesel fuel crisis. And it got to be where you couldn't get diesel fuel anywhere. Stations were shutting down and you couldn't get it. And so we put a request in to the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and said, hey, our stations are running out of fuel. And they said, Chief Moody, we'll be happy to bring you some fuel to King George. Where would you like us to put it? And we said, well, we don't have anywhere to put it. They said, well, we can't bring you a gas station. So I said, well, that kind of makes sense. So they could bring the fuel and bolt delivery, but you had to have a place to put it. And guess what? We didn't have a place to put it. Fast forward to 2021. I think we all remember this. This was fresh in our minds. We had the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack. And that morning they said, look, there's no emergency, nobody panic. And by that afternoon, the governor declared a state of emergency and everybody panicked. And all of a sudden, we started seeing our gasoline at all of our third party, all of our vendors start running short. And you started hearing about, hey, this place doesn't have any gas. You need to go to that place. They have gas. And then everybody would go there. Then they would run out. But we ran into the same problem. We've also had isolated incidences during weather events. I've had our ambulances all the way backed up to company one in the sheets in line waiting for fuel, waiting in line to get fuel. And there's people there that are hoarding fuel. And we need fuel to respond to medical emergencies and car crashes and fires. And we're at the back of the line. And we hope they get fuel when we get up to the pump. So there got to be a real need. And I've been... I have been coming to the board and the planning commission and adding CIP projects and I said look we need to we got to do something about this and we need to we need to we need to take our have our understanding that fuel is a critical infrastructure and we're going to have we need to have something a way we can control it. Next slide please. So in 2022 We finally got some funding and we had approved in the capital improvement program $200,000. So we did what the government does best. We put it out to bid. Bid number one came back at $484,015.32. Vendor two came back at $599,400. So then that left us to this, three options. And option one was we could abandon the project, turn the money back in. Say, hey, we don't have enough money, we can't afford it. Number two, I could have went to the county administrator and said, hey, this is the difference we're at. Should we go to the board and ask for the remaining difference in money? Three, $400,000 difference. Or option three, we could say, what can we do to meet the need and possibly look at doing something ourselves. And I remember I went to Mr. Smolnick's office and I said, Matt, I said, I don't know where they're coming up with $500,000 and $600,000 for these projects. I said, you know, we started looking at piecing out, looked at concrete, look at pumps, look at some site work. We looked at putting a awning structure to protect it. I said, I'm not coming up with that much money. I'm coming up with 200. I'm coming up with what our budget was. And I understand that vendors want to make money, but that was way over what we were projecting. Next slide, please. So after having that conversation with Mr. Smolnick, I asked him, I said, let us run with the project. I think we can do it. If I didn't think we couldn't do it, I wouldn't have brought it to you. And he said, yeah, chief, if you can do it and you're within budget, he said, let's make it happen. I said, well, I think we can do it. And we can meet the procurement laws, the building code and the fire code, et cetera. So in November of 2024, we began construction. This is right on the back of company one. So you can see we started the site work, started digging. Next slide. There's the concrete pad poured all reinforced concrete, impact balusters put in, spill containment protection put in, electrical, all the electrical was run. All this is also backed up by our generator. So if the electricity goes out, our generator kicks in, it powers these pumps. Next slide. So we had our good friends from McDaniels, used their rotator tow boom. We had to get the tanks, one of the logistical challenges was the tanks were delivered up here on the trailer. It was our responsibility, we had to get the tanks off the trailer and put on the pad site. So that's the way we did it. Next slide. Then we started putting awning up. Next slide. There's the tanks. On the left is your diesel tank. It's a 2,000 gallon tank. On the right is a gasoline tank. That's 1,000 gallons. We have to leave a little bit of air gap when we fill it up. So the diesel tank can roughly hold about 1,850 gallons. Gasoline tank can hold about 800, 850 gallons. On the right, that picture right there, that's a light pole. That light pole has, as we pull a truck up, that light pole has a motion sensor on it and light comes on. So automatically when you pull up at nighttime, it gets lit up. Next slide. This is a little bit about the fuel tanks. They're made by EnviroSafe. They're three layers of fire, ballistic, and impact protection from any type of gunfire. They meet the underwriter laboratory standards. They are a tank within a tank, so they have its own built-in spill protection. And most importantly, it's made in the USA. Next slide. So this is our fuel management system and also our security. So we have a variety of different things that it requires to come up and get fuel. You have to enter your employee ID number, you have to enter your last four year social, the vehicle, you have to enter the mileage, and then with all that, those individual identifiers, then you select what pump you want to use. If for some reason we ever thought there was any kind of mischief or a security breach, We could always go back and take a look at the camera. We have a camera pointing right in that direction where it's under constant 24-7 video surveillance. Next slide. Some of the safety items, just like any gas station, we have to have multiple shutoffs, emergency shutoffs. On the back of the fuel management pod, pillar is one right there, and then over right adjacent to the fuel depot, we have a fire extinguisher, we have another emergency shutoff. On the right, this picture, because you have an awning over top of it, both your diesel, your diesel tank and your gasoline tank, they have to be vented through the awning up through the roof line. Next slide. We have spill cleanup protection just like they do at any gas station. Inside that bucket right there, there's oil dry and there's hazmat fuel booms. We also had a little money for some bird control. Got a couple owls up so the birds don't build a nest. Next slide. So to complete a project finished in December 2025, And we're using it today. Next slide. Other departments that can use it during an emergency situation, we have codes that we can identify and track these if for some reason, you know, the gas stations ran out of fuel for school buses. We could have schools come there and use that fuel in an emergency. We can track that. We could send them a bill if we had to. General Property, Sheriff's Office, County Administration, Parks and Rec, Social Services. Next slide. When we want to pull a fuel management report, this is how it's tracked. I can look at it by how many gallons per day for the whole month. On the left right here, I know it's hard to see, this is for the whole month for the entire month of March. I can look for the, during the month, how many gallons of, in the blue here is gasoline, How much diesel? Diesel I think was 1400 something that month gallons. So we carry roughly about a month's supply of diesel fuel in these tanks and about two months supply of gasoline. So I want to take a look at individual users, how much and what day and what type of fuel they use by individual. I can come over and pull that report. It'll tell me that. Next slide. Now here's probably one of the best slides of the whole presentation. So the final project costs come in at $140,519.07. That's a $59,480.93 savings that we put back into the capital budget. That's a huge savings from where the vendors came in. from taking the vendor, if we went with either one of the vendors that bid the project, from vendor one that was almost $344,000, vendor two was almost $459,000 difference from their bid price. So it was a good project. Next slide. And we couldn't have done it without these people right here on the board. This is the team that helped me and helped get this project together. Just like any project, it takes a good team. And these were the people that I want to give a special thanks to. The county wouldn't have saved the money without these people being involved. Next slide. Any questions?

Excellent story. Thanks for sharing. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'd like to also thank you. I came over and got a really detailed tour of it. but for those that you know paying attention there that was a huge hundreds of thousands of dollars that were saved simply by diligence and and people investing their time going a little above and beyond and that's huge um very huge whenever we just roll out of or in the middle in the middle of a budget season and uh fighting for dollars that was a huge savings and some of these things whenever we started out i can tell you it wasn't um some of the conversations initially weren't comfortable. I know some of the things I said may have been interpreted very well, but I'm really proud of where you guys are today with both projects and the time that your team has spent into it. I've sat in your building and went over stuff and really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate you.

All right, next up we have 06-10B.School Addition, Kindred Elementary School, bus access loop.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So these are just for discussion tonight. Talk to Mr. Solins on this. So these are some of the master list of the roads. These are two of the additions for King George Elementary School and then Seelston Elementary School. They were never brought into the state system. The resolutions and the sketches are in front of you right now. These are just for action or for discussion. We can bring them back next month for action or next meeting for action.

um but pretty pretty basic conditions just as we do for for secondary roads in neighborhoods all right any questions for mr smarnick on that we'll run out of questions it's getting close to 10 o'clock that's where you should probably controversial stuff that you're you're trying to sneak by us right here yeah um all right 06-11 proposed trash use litter debris ordinance thank you mr chairman um

guess it was last meeting of the meeting before you all asked me to draft a trash ordinance and so that's what i did this is the one that mrs morgan liked so much but she left before i got to present it um this one is nearly identical to the one in westmoreland and i tell you that only because she had some concerns that it may be too vague or something It does give the county administrator the opportunity to send someone a letter and say you've got a pile of trash there, clean it up or we're going to clean it up for you and it does become a lien against the property. This is the more inexpensive way to do it versus having to go through the nuisance, the general nuisance statute where you would pay me to go to court and have the judge force someone to do it. Simpler, easier way. This too is for discussion. This is what you all asked me to do. So look at it. Think about it. If you don't like it, throw it in the trash. If you want me to make some changes, I'm happy to make some changes. These kinds of things are never popular. That's all I can tell you. Until somebody's got a pile of it across from them and they want somebody to do something about it.

You definitely don't want to be an HOA. At the same time, I don't think anyone wants to live next to a neighbor who is piling up washing machines or cars or whatever in their front yard and then you're trying to sell your house or just whatever you're trying to do.

This is not going to cover washing machines and cars. This is trash and litter and stuff. Typically, in my experience, 90% of the time,

you send people a letter and say you've got a pile of trash there that needs to be cleaned up and if you don't we're going to do it and charge you for it they clean it up and you don't have to do anything else well i also find that just the county just send them someone hey we noticed this pile of trash can you do something about it it usually gets taken care of but most people are considered most people take care of it that's right mr chair i do have a question yes ma'am um

I guess a couple questions is to clarify because I don't want it to be like if a neighbor doesn't like another neighbor and what what your version of trash could be somebody's treasure you know what I mean like to clarify what what do you mean by excessive trash or anything so I guess that would be a question and then is it for just for the residents but is it also businesses because it could be a business this is for litter trash refuse such as that or hazardous substances that are appear

on property regardless of whether it's a resident or business the business gets complicated if you have a business that does a certain business and they're grandfathered and they've been doing it for 50 years it gets much more complicated or they're keeping stuff for certain purposes oftentimes you have to get deq involved but it still could apply this gives a great deal of latitude to the county administrator to determine if it's trash refuse They always have the ability to go to court too. They want to say, no, we don't believe that's right. And I'm going to have a judge overrule the county administrator. Again, this is a simple way to do it. And typically when you send that letter, people just clean it up. It would be complaint driven because Matt's not driving all around the county to see who's got piles of trash in their yard. So it's always going to come from a neighbor or somebody who drives back and forth across there. I mean, all of our enforcement is complaint driven, right? So that's just the way it works.

Any other, you got a question? Process, so this is just up for discussion. This is our first view of it. If we really wanted to proceed, it would have to, it's ordinance, it would have to go for public.

You all would determine the language, then we'd authorize us to advertise for public care and have to have public care.

Public care, yeah, thank you.

Mr. So do you have any questions? All right.

That's how I'm gonna hear it anyway. Go ahead. Two things. One, there's no in there, there's nowhere for like, to allow for an appeals process or a board like we have. And I don't know, that's just overly complicated, but that would help me to give you some of Ms. Morgan's concerns, I think, if there was a process like that.

I don't think you're going to alleviate Ms. Morgan's concerns. You mean like an HOA board or something?

Well, just like what we have with the zoning. We have a zoning board of appeals, and somebody can go there, and it ends up going to court or having attorneys come in if it can't be resolved.

you know so and they can do the same thing here i guess they could like you said take it to court you know so we could all add something like that this tracks the code and the code didn't didn't provide and because for that and because we're a dylan rule state i'm always reluctant to add things in that aren't necessarily implied and again the other process is to send them a letter and get an injunction or take them to court Most people just clean up the trash and if they don't, I haven't seen many occasions where the county actually goes in. Well, I don't like trash, so I like it.

And there's a place on Port Conway. If you come off of 301 and you head on Port Conway, there's a big field on the left that goes down to James Madison's house. The woods on the right, there's a little nook right there. And people just throw stuff out there. And we may need to add washing machines and dryers to this. But they put trash there, and then they do the same thing in Doge. I asked you that time and talked to you about having to clean that up. I mean, you know, we have people that are so pitiful. Rather than take stuff to the landfill, you know, in a darker night, they'll come and throw their trash out. So I'm on it. Thank you showing you the comments. It's been there.

Jumping on what Mr. Stroud said. What is the mechanism? Say you have a property. You have land and somebody dumps the trash on your property. You know, is there a mechanism for that?

Yes, ma'am. It's called littering and you call the sheriff and sheriff can prosecute him in littering. Um, carries up to a $2500 fine and 12 months in jail can be difficult to enforce, and it's not very not cases that a lot of people want to pursue, but that is your, you got to try to prove it.

Well, where I was coming in, Matt's going to explain it. It's like, what if I own a property and I don't know that somebody is dumping and send me a letter saying you have trash in your property. I didn't know because somebody dumped it there.

They typically, they typically go clean it up. The instances that I've seen the most is where a landowner rents to a tenant and the tenant, has got a pile of trash out there that gets to be monumental and the landowner doesn't know so you send a letter to the registered landowner not the tenant and you say you've got this trash piling up and if you don't do it we're going to have to clean it up and charge you that's first they've heard of it and they typically go take care but but that person who is the subject of people dumping on their land could potentially be subject to this ordinance as well if that's your question

Follow-up, Ms. Bender's question. Today, if we have this issue, County Administrator prevented from sending a letter saying please clean up the trash?

County Administrator has discretion to send the letter.

They can send a letter, it's not, it just doesn't have the teeth because we don't have an ordinance that backs out.

Right, the Virginia code allows you to do this, but you have to adopt an ordinance in order to do it. Does that make sense? Well, you can send a letter telling somebody to clean it up, but you don't have the authority to go in and do it and make it a lien on the property.

That letter doesn't include language that you have here about the cost being back on the landowner.

Correct. You could send them a letter and say, if you don't clean it up, we're going to take you to court and make you clean it up. Got you.

All right. Anything else? All right.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So for the county administrator's report, I had a discussion with Chair Solins, I believe maybe with Mr. Metz. So whenever you look at the consent agenda, so I'm just going to scroll up here for tonight's consent agenda. So there are issue of warrants against, and it's broken out EDA fund, general fund, library fund, parks and rec fund, and tourism fund. and then at the end there's a warrant information the detailed description of purchase as listed in the issues of issuance of warrants above so this was a request by I believe there's a previous board member to have a more detailed summary of what specifically was bought. Those 060101 through 0105 talk about how they were spent. This goes into a little bit more detail. Now, with this, I think this month was 27 or 31 pages long. Sometimes they're 50, 60 pages long. And I believe Mr. Metz saw one of them and it's like, well, there's we have inadvertently published the address of, I think they were jurors. So now we go through line by line, if it's 40 pages, 20 pages, 60 pages, we go through line by line to see if there's any personal information and we redact it. Really, it's duplicative information for the Board of Supervisors. That's already presented in the specific warrants for those specific funds listed above. The question that was asked of me, I said, I'll put it on my county administrator's report, Does the Board of Supervisors want to continue the policy of having the warrant information, you know, those reports run, staff going line by line and redacting any personal information, or the individual warrants for like the EDA fund, general fund, do those suffice for the Board with the understanding that if there are specific questions on, there was a specific purchase for $37,000, what was that for? We can obviously pull those, but it's, you know, the way I see it, I mean, it is duplicate work on staff. It does take staff time. And if the board of supervisors is comfortable without it, we can not include it. This is not, we're not for the public. We're not trying to hide things. Everything is published in these additional, the first set of warrants. And then anybody is more than welcome to ask anything of any expenditure of public funds, but just looking for efficiency with my staff. And I just want to get some feedback from the board.

Thank you.

I can't press a button after 10 o'clock.

Yeah, so as we went through the budget workups, you guys saw earlier tonight, all of the briefings and department heads briefings and everything. As we went through that, maybe being the new guy, but I was really pressured like, where are we spending hours that are duplicative of other work? And I see the warrants that we get in, like tonight, 6101, 2, 3, and 4, and 5, all the details are there that I need. There's enough there to say I have one or two questions. Those questions are rarely answered by the detail, because it's not really detailed. It's one extra line in 601.06. And even after attempting to redact, we still occasionally miss something. Publishing the private names and locations of jurors is not a good idea. Two things, I feel like we're spending money that's duplicative and we're all trying to look for every dime we can get so that we don't have to raise taxes. It's not information that's providing more detail when we do have questions not preventing us from asking those questions anyway and the relationship between the board and the administrator is pretty good right now and i don't think i think this came about maybe before mr small neck was here as administrator i value our relationship i think it's good i think it's healthy and so um that's one i would definitely recommend it it helped when we needed it i think we're done with that need and now we can strike it from our knees thank you miss bender

i know you've been through you've seen multiple ways warrants have gone so just what you're feeling about it i i agree with that i i think that it's probably a little overkill at this point and you know we can always ask mr smallman he's very open for us to ask questions especially if i can ask questions we can then ask mr smallman and i know there's also concern with the new rules about what we have others online for ada compliance this could be a problem too with these big

we're going to have to have a much more a different kind of approach correct Mr. Smolnik and how we put stuff on the internet that is correct the reports that AS 400 runs are not ADA compliant so we're going to need to figure out how to make them ADA compliant and sometimes if you've got a 60-page document with a bunch of little numbers that's going to add a lot more time for staff this is a federal mandate correct that is in some is a state is one state there's one state and one federal I think state is next year And then federal is the year after. I think that's the way it is. I'm getting thumbs up from this cell phone. Mr. Sills, do you have anything to add?

Probably can't hear me. Yeah, it's really hard to understand you here in the room. I apologize. Okay, thank you. Thanks for interpreting that.

All right.

So this is somewhere this might be on a future agenda.

Well, we can put it on a future agenda or just, you know, just looking from this is if the board wants it, this is an easy strike. We just, you know, we'll save the staff time. I just need direction from the board. Do you guys want to continue this practice or are you okay eliminating the detail from, I would say, you know. As long as

we're able to get that information if we want to get that information. That's the biggest thing. And it's really, I think it's up to, you know, when we came on, there was just a lot of questions and a lot of mystery, just things going on and we trying to track the money and it was just very, things were being hidden from us. I do, I do trust you in nature, but it's really up to you, I guess, and the staff to keep building that relationship with us and keep it going no matter who's on the board. That's right. Down the line and just make sure that there's just transparency because everything we did was to over-transparency. We want everyone to see everything like we were seeing. I don't need another stack of papers this high. I don't know if I'm up on my desk, but...

yeah that's a lot of paper yeah so i'm just going to cut down on staff time as long as the information's there for us to see it then i'm i'm good with that okay and i guess that's what we're saying too right so it's consensus from the board you know from this day forward we will we will not put it in the in the um the agenda packet but the information will be available for the board and for the public and this can always be changed back if you want to go back to the future absolutely understood thank you And then the second item, Mr. Dines, could you please pull up the 909 flow chart? So getting on our additions and removal of roads from the VDOT system, there is a process outlined in state code for the abandonment of right of way. And there are, I think the only one we have to abandon is the old right of way for the middle school that was demolished. So this is just a, yeah, it's up, and there is a process, and this is just for information for the board. We just can't adopt a resolution and be done with it. There are some different routes you can post notice, and if you do receive comments, do we want to hold a public hearing or whatnot? So this is just for the board's information. Whenever... hopefully the next meeting or two i will have that abandonment we can start this process but this is really just for the board's information it's just not as simple as adding it in uh just like um you would with am 4.3 sketches it's a little bit more complex so i don't think i haven't gone through this yet while in my tenure here at king george um probably you know ms bender may be the only one i'm not sure they're very rare when you abandon right away so that's really all this process is just for your information

question all right well at that time i'll open the floor up to uh secondary public comment if you do wish to speak three minutes at the time please state your name your full name just in just what you vote so we properly recording in the public record all right good evening miles hastings james madison district

I'd spoken to you a month or two ago about the formation of agricultural and forestal districts. I took a little field trip to Fauquier County. I found a map online, so I went out to see some of my compatriots there in Fauquier to get their viewpoint on the ag and forestal districts, what benefit it's been to them, if any. The point that I got from them was like I had heard Mr. Stroud here on YouTube this evening saying about the manpower required to do the land use forms. Under that ag district set up by the Code of Virginia, which is different than A1 zoning, of course, it allows you to have zoning districts from four to 10 year periods. And that's what the farmers were saying that he cut down on the amount of paperwork and thus to the counties. And I spoke to Regina Puckett about it, told her a little bit about it. The commissioner revenue there in Fauquier's guide by the name of Eric Maybach, they said he's very helpful. He could answer any questions. What was the other thing? There's also an ag development person for Fauquier County. His name is Jacob Fravel. I have his phone number if anybody's interested in that. The farmers didn't see a whole lot of benefit directly. It seemed like it was more for the county. Another thing was because of the length of time, it increased the amount of rollback taxes that you could collect from developers if they chose to before this contract was out. So there may be some benefit there. One other comment I heard from them was on conservation easements. They had been noticing that a lot of parcels were being bought up by large landholders that didn't have any real agricultural interest. And people that had worked areas for years were being put off the land because they'd rather run a bush hog and have open space, which nothing wrong with open space, but does it really satisfy what the state of Virginia tries to do through these agricultural and forest districts because we are taxpayers and businesses so but if I can answer any questions I'll be glad to thank you no anyone online no correspondence all right can I get a motion

I'll make a motion to adjourn the Board of Supervisors to Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at 5.30 p.m. in the multi-purpose boardroom of the Sheriff's Office, located at 10445 Government Center Boulevard, King George, Virginia.

Motion properly seconded. Any further discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Chair votes aye. We are ended. Thank you.