Board of County Commissioners Work Sessions - Regular Meeting

good morning everyone it's uh june 23rd at 11 a.m exactly 2026 we are going to start this lake county board of county commissioners work session with an overview and discussion of the colorado department of transportations regarding regional information and leadership overview cdot goals traffic and safety operations engineering and construction projects planning and communications And I'm not sure who's going to read this.

You guys? OK. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having us. So I'm Jason Smith. I'm the Regional Transportation Director, Region 3. As you know, we brought a full team here. We're going to present some slides, go through some stuff here for you today. We're going to take turns speaking. I don't know if you want us to do introductions now, or we can introduce ourselves as we speak. Sure, that'd be fun. as we go through as you as you start speaking that works um so yeah we bring up the slide deck and i'll kick us off and then i'll turn it over to the team so next time i have a quick question sorry uh kevin's asking if there's a virtual um there is yes it's on the county website there's a calendar on the home page and you should be able to click through on today

for this work session?

On the county website, on the calendar.

On the calendar, yeah.

Is that just a few hours? She won't be able to speak? No, she will.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry to interrupt. It's okay. Good question. Should we wait until she gets here?

I knew I had to start.

It's a while before she'll need to speak anyway. Has it locked up on you?

It is.

You want to sit here?

I'm going to join you guys in a comfortable chair. Please, you'll hurt your body.

I did not like your file.

Well, let me close it. It's in Teams. Oh, shoot. This is from the Teams.

Okay, shoot. It won't let me close anything. Let me see. I'm going to do my favorite activity where we turn it off.

Do you need to go into task manager and end the task, like force close it?

Oh, Bob. There it was, eh?

Thank you, Sandra. You're welcome.

So yeah, we're here to present kind of what CDOT does. There's a lot of different things and tasks that we work on. So some of our core functions as a department really are construction, multi-mobile services, and then some allocated programs. We're going to get into some of the details of each one of those. But everything we do is really core function around safety. CDOT's all about safety, mobility, and asset management. Next slide. So every year, we work in the governor's office, come up with what we call our wildly important goals, so very high level kind of strategies, goals, what we want to accomplish for the year. This year, we'll focus on fix our roads, advancing transportation safety, and increasingly increase transportation choices. For each one of those, like I said, we have strategies that we need to dive into, and we try to make certain accomplishments throughout the year. Next slide. So it kind of went through the agenda already. I'm going to turn it over to the team to go through each of these sections, talk about budget, capital group of projects, maintenance, communication. And then we're going to open it up for some topics, anything you guys want to discuss. So just a quick overview of the region. Region 3 is the largest region geographically in square miles. We're up in the northwest corner of the state. We have 15 counties in northwest Colorado. We work with over So a lot of cities, counties, every one of the cities and towns that we work with, all of them have unique issues with their transportation system, challenges. So we try to work with them individually, come up with the best solutions to some of their problems and you know it's a continual cycle trying to work on it with their development and changes within their communities and problems that they see. We have over five 13 mountain passes, 13 rest areas, 7 tunnels, and over 700 bridges, and over 15,000 culverts. Just to give you an idea of some of the assets, how many of them we maintain. We can talk about some of these in detail. We have about 600 positions in this region to help cover everything. That's engineering, maintenance, support unit duties. We don't have all those positions filled right now. Unfortunately, we're about a 10% vacancy. But we're way up from what we were about three to four years ago after the COVID. We were in that 30, 35% range. So we've recovered very well over the past few years of hiring. I've been very fortunate. We've got a lot of good hires. But what we're finding right now is we're a very young organization. Approximately 40% of our staff have less than two years. So we're in a training mode. So even though we fill positions, we have some struggles on trying to get everybody up to speed on all these teams and get experience. So we're working on that right now. Hopefully, we can retain these employees. And within the next five years, we'll have a good, strong, steady workforce. Next slide. Again, the region overview. We have two maintenance sections. You're part of the maintenance section two here. I brought some of the team to talk about the section and where we're at. So along the I-70 corridor is really maintenance section 2. Maintenance section 6 is up north. We have three engineering program areas. We have a west, a central, and an east program area. You're part of the east program area, which really is these counties up here, kind of a higher elevation. And we have a traffic management unit. Yeah. We brought Zane here. He's going to talk about them. They cover the entire region. So they're working on a lot of our traffic and operations safety problems. We also have a business office, civil rights office, planning environmental transit unit, materials unit, right-of-way, and utilities unit. Most of those support units all sit right in Grand Junction. That's our regional headquarters. That's where my office is at. So if you need to reach out to us, that's Zoom and our central hub. Next slide. So here I just wanted to provide your contact list, some names and positions. I know it's always hard to remember who you reach out to. So if you have the electronic version of this, you should be able to click on the names and it will give you contact information. So as you need to reach out, you don't know who you want to reach out to or not certain. You can always reach out to myself or Mark Rogers here. He's a great contact for us. He'll be speaking here in a minute. If you don't know him, but we'll get you in contact with the right person. whatever the topic is next slide oh at the top of that report um so district seven so we have a transportation commissioners uh you're part of district seven so barbara bowman is our transportation commissioner she represents us in denver they go where monthly they they vote on policy and budgets for us and they're a high level approval whenever we need any action taken She apologized. She said she was just up here last week bringing a tour through. She talked about your tourism, how great it is, and how robust Leadville is doing right now. So it's good. She has been up here. She's seen some of the roads, some of the issues. She said if you need anything from her, please reach out to her. She'd be happy to have a conversation. Next slide. I'm going to turn it over to Mark Rogers for a plan.

Real quick, my name is Mark Rogers. I'm the regional planning manager for Region 3. I've been with CDOT now about 20 years. I just want to talk a little bit about the budget. We'll start on the right-hand side where it says the $1.6 billion budget. That is the bulk of our program. the revenue comes from their federal funding source and that's an 18 cent gallon per gallon tax that was set in the 90s and so it's been there for for a while hasn't changed and so a pretty steady funding source that is the bulk of our program about 35% of our revenue comes from the federal source and The next one is tax fund, and we'll talk more about that as we go on. Because that also helps out the counties in your road and development, your road and bridge department. And that's a $0.22 per gallon tax. And there's other funding fees. There's a faster fees in the vehicle registration and the retail delivery fees. Occasionally, we also get a general fund transfer. We were scheduled to get the $51 million transfer from general fund. And then we get some other state funds, aviation fuel, appropriation fuels, others that come into the bulk of our funding. And so that covers our asset management and our service treatment. And the bulk of our program falls under that. The other one is the fees and the investment offices that maintain those fees, the enterprise fees. This is a relatively new funding, but those are set aside to go to certain, either the Bridge and Tunnel Enterprise or other programs that are set aside for those enterprises and those fees. So that's our revenue side for a total of about a $2 billion budget for the year. So when we go on to the expense side, our largest expense is the capital construction for about almost $850 million. And this is, again, our asset management, which we'll talk about. That's taking care of the stuff we built. I always compare it to a house. You have your house, and then you have your roof, and your windows, your assets along there, your safety program. 10-year plan projects which are our big capital or capacity improvement projects and then the regional priority program are all in that capital construction. The other funding, the other large outlay of funding is the maintenance and operations and a lot of this deals with state funding so we're having a real prioritization of state funding now because only certain things can be used with state funds maintenance has to be mostly state funded but yet also to get those federal funds to get those grants we have to have state funds to match so we were very careful and very cautious of how we use state funds because there's such a high demand on that now the other outlay, the third largest outlay is the sub-allocated program. These are funds that come into CDOT and go right back out to local agencies, to other departments to run those programs. And CDOT, sometimes we take administrative free, but for most of the time we do it just as kind of our main process, our main job to help the local agencies. One of these is the MMOF projects that you guys have been running. I believe you had a couple of those. And so that's a good example of these sub-allocated programs. It just comes in to Seagot and goes right back out to the locals and we manage, we help you manage those projects. The next one's over, we do have a debt service. We bonded in 2019 and our debt service runs between 35 and about $50 million a year on debt service. So those are coverage and so that's, Those are our biggest outlays for our expenditures and our expenses proceed up. So again, we talked about the state HUTF. And again, we talked about the motor fuel taxes. And so this really impacts the counties as well because this is where the counties gets their revenue for their road and bridge. So again, we show the motor fuel tax stays pretty flat because we have The only way that that really changes a lot is if they raise the gas tax or otherwise. But otherwise, you look at the vehicle registration fees, we get in more vehicles and the little higher fees there, that does trend up. The faster collection fee, again, those trend up a little bit. The road usage fee, that's trending up. But the other two, the miscellaneous collection and the retail delivery fee those kind of actually retail delivery fee that's trending up as well as your Amazon packages and other shipments that come in so all of those trend up except for the motor fuel taxes and so when you look at the distribution that comes to that goes out before we really distribute to CDOT or the counties there is the off the top appropriations this goes to the State Patrol the Department of Revenue the port of entries and so those come off the top and then the remaining funds, CDOT gets about 60% of those funds and then the cities and the counties divide the remaining 20% a piece. So it usually goes 60-40 and the counties and the cities divide that 40%. So any questions about the HETF distributions and the funding that comes to you guys? This has been a hot topic for the counties. I know Gunnison County is doing some things on their side. Jackson County is kind of nervous about their funding sources. Again, because this is all based on these fees and these funds that come out. Moving on. So Region 3 covers 15 counties in the northwest corner or side, whatever you want, Colorado. Major to highways, interstate, US 24, US 40, 34, 82, 50, and 550. For our tenure plan overview, so we started the tenure plan in 2019, and we did eight years of that tenure plan, and then we developed a new tenure plan. We had a lot of projects that got done, but we had some projects go over between the two plans. We have a total of 45 proposed projects in this upcoming 10-year plan, 10 of which are brand new. We've been able to get a bunch of stuff done, but we also have some corridors that we're still working on. The 10-year plan is not really new money. It's money that's set aside for big capital construction projects that sometimes will have some capacity, but mostly are mobility-based projects. And so right now we're looking at about $33 million a year for the next 10 years coming into that 10-year plan. But these are dedicated. When we do our long-range plan, it's a 20-year plan, and the funds really aren't constrained. So then when we break it down to a 10-year plan, we start actually constraining, and we say, okay, really, what is a priority? And then we determine the priorities through that. And we can talk about some of the priorities as we go on to other slides. The next part, we want to talk a little bit about asset management. Again, we want to highlight the 10-year plan isn't the only fund out there. We also put a lot of money, a lot of funding to asset management, keeping the roads, bridges, culverts operating and on good repair. So every year, we look out another year. We tried to do a four-year asset management plan, but every year we look out one more year. Right here is our 28 through 31 plan. And these are the funds we're looking at. This is a statewide view. So you look at Colbert's, for example. In the Colbert program, there's $8.2 million for statewide. Region 3 gets about 15%. any asset program it varies but on average we get about 15% so it'd be about one and a half to two million dollars and what we get for culverts so so here's a map of our asset management and the good fair poor map for our service treatment and some projects that we're working on to improve and Jason will talk about this a little bit more yeah so what I explained there

Just kind of showing you an illustration of our road relating to our conditions. So in green, it's good condition. And then it goes to yellow, which is moderate, and down to pink. And then red is the poor roads. And unfortunately, we have more poor roads than we'd like. And we're trying to work on that. And on the right-hand side, you can see the circles represent areas where we do have projects in the near future. So trying to get them. And without that management in our pavement, Our model doesn't always put the money on the worst sections of roads. The model really shows you the benefit is to maintain your good roads. So it's kind of interesting. A lot of times we have these county meetings. It's like, well, this is our worst section of road. Why aren't you paving it? Well, our model isn't letting us, basically. It's not what we call a match. So there's challenges in the background with our assets and how we have to fund them and maintain them. Thank goodness for some of the 10-year plan money that we have received over the past few years, we're able to do more paving with that type of funding. So we're behind the scenes, Mark, myself, and our asset managers are always trying to look at our funding and how we can deliver these projects and these programs. Next slide. But I do want to talk a little bit about our assets and conditions that they're in. Just draw some awareness. So culverts, for example, we have roughly 15,000 culverts. Mark said we have about $2 million per year. On average, some of our culverts, we can line them, do a cheap fix. Some of them will have to be full of replacements, and some of them are pretty major culverts, like box culverts, and they might be running up to $10 million. So on average, we don't give it about three, four culverts done a year. With 15,000 of those culverts out there, we're not getting that many. We're in about a 500-year replacement cycle right now, which culverts only last you, if you're lucky, about 75 years. Through the math, it's like, well, something's got to give here. We're trying to do the best we can, but we're very worried. Most of our culverts, on average, are over 50 years old. So we're starting to see the interstate and our infrastructure getting at the age where a lot of these are needing repaired or replacement. And we just don't have the funds right now to get in there and do what we need to do. Same thing with traffic signals. Over 230 traffic signals in the region and more coming online. As we go, but we only get enough money to one to two replacements on traffic signals a year so very limited placement cycle there as well next slide. And then pay me 5000 lane miles or current allocations about $55 million that's going to be dropping and that's why 29 of the formulas changing region three and we're actually going to see a decrease in the funding that we get for pavement unfortunately. It's going to shift some of the money over towards the heavier corridors with that frame. They'll see a benefit in the increase in funds. But yeah, if you look at our cycle, we'd love to be paving every road that we have on that 12 to 15 year cycle. Right now, with the funding allocation we have, we're not able to keep up with that, unfortunately. So we are looking. We put in for grants. We put in for anything we can, any other types of funds. They pop up every once in a while. We were very fortunate last year. Commission had some extra funds at the end of the year. They gave us about $20 million in our region to deliver a few extra projects. So we're always looking to see what money we can get available and do an extra painting project here and there.

Do you know how much money it would cost to actually be on a 15-year cycle for all of our assets?

I think for my region, it would be probably roughly about $120 million. That's it?

I would expect it to be in the billion.

Get caught up, get everything in good shape to stay on that cycle would take a lot more. But if we were to right now kind of get there, that's about what it would be. Yeah, it's not as much as you know.

Yeah, that would be additional on top of what we already get. That's the problem. 120 million sounds small when we look at the $2 billion, but that would be on top of what we get.

Yeah, we'd see a huge increase. Over the years, as far as we're showing you, our budgets have stayed pretty flat. Well, as you know, inflation's been killing us since the COVID. So our buying power is going down so much. So we're trying to keep the number of projects for our staff. And we have to spread out between 15 counties. We're trying to spread the money out. So we see our projects shrinking in size, which becomes very inefficient. What we used to do a 20-mile overlay has become a 15 or 10-mile overlay. So we can get back and be way more efficient if we could see an increase in flooding. OK, next slide, please. With that, we'll skip on through the slides and go to central program. And I don't know if that's going to, or I mean to the east program, if that's Karen or John.

Hi, this is Karen. Can you see me and hear me OK?

Yeah, thank you. Well, we can't see you because we're looking at the screen.

Oh, OK. Can you see the screen? What's that? I'm sorry? Can you see our shared screen? I can't, but I have my own slides to show, so I'm good to go.

Can we pause for a second then? Are we sure that this is sharing? That's what I can do. Okay. Thanks, Anne.

She's going to share this, so I shouldn't share this. No, we need to share this.

Sorry, I'm struggling over here.

I can't see.

There we go. There's good.

And you can make up floating images smaller if you float over.

Hello, my name is Karen and I am the program engineer for the area. I apologize I can't be there as I'm currently out of town. The resident engineer for CDOT for the area is John Cronholm and he is present. I have two slides to cover with you today to talk about the capital improvement projects we've recently completed and what are planned for Lake County. This first slide focuses on our capital improvement projects. And rather than read through all of these, I'll focus on those in Lake County or adjacent to Lake County. As you may have seen, I guess what's not on here is some recent work done in Lake County. We were able to complete the Highway 82 resurfacing project last year, which turned out great and in fact was award winning. And that was done near Twin Lakes. So and then right now our current project in 2026 is also is on Highway 24 in Lake County. It connects to where the last paving project was right in downtown Leadville and goes on and extends on Highway 24 towards Tennessee Pass. That project includes paving. We're adding quite a few chain station improvements, five different chain stations, and those are broken down per sides of the road on tops and bottoms of different passes. It includes wall repair as well as culvert repair, and that work will extend through this calendar year in 2026. Looking at this list right here, I do want to highlight some funds that are planned for Highway 24 for the future. We are planning a project in 2029 on Highway 24, and this will be the last section to pave in recent years. I think as you guys know, we paved another project recently on 24 up through Red Cliff and I think ended right near the turnoff to Homestake Road. And now we're paving the section near Leadville, and that will extend to Tennessee Pass. And so the last major chunk on 24 between Leadville and Minton is this section we're planning in 2029. And that's from mile marker 156, again, near Homestake Road, extending up to Tennessee Pass around 166. So, what you see, and we're also what you see here. So, as we have 4 and a half 1M dollars planned, and that is for shoulder improvements on highway 24, and it's actually a little larger. We have 2 different types of money for shoulder improvements in that 2029 section. We have. 3.4 million in our 10-year plan for safety and shoulder improvements, and we have about 2.3 million of regional prioritization funding for that project as well. So really looking to incorporate quite a few safety improvements in that 2029 project. The other project on this list I want to highlight is the Red Cliff Bridge Rehabilitation. We have started design right now for that project and we're selecting our contractor to bring them in dorm design because it is a very complex bridge rehab. And so we're expecting that work to go in 2028. Still working through the exact scope of that. We're completing quite a bit of detailed inspections of the structure to make sure that we define the improvements to extend the life as long as possible right now. You can go to the next slide. So, this is an overview of all the asset management and program East, which is the East side of region 3 again. I'll focus in on the projects in Lake County as well as adjacent to Lake County. They all pass project that is wrapping up this year. In 2026, it's been ongoing since 2021. We still have a section we need to complete in the future that will be hopefully is partially funded right now. I'm hoping to do that work around 2030. Focusing in here on the campaign over servicing project, that's that 2029 project I was referring to. That will go from Tennessee Pass to around Homestake where the last project left off. And then you see here the U.S. 24 rural road resurfacing project. That's what's happening this year. We have actually more funds than that. It's a combination of resurfacing funds and 10-year plan rural road funding. So in combination, we're putting around a little over $10 million on Highway 24 in 2026 of just paving funds. And like I mentioned, there's freight funds for chain station improvements, wall improvements, culvert improvements, really trying to look at these sections of roadways holistically as we're making the improvements in Lake County and adjacent. So those are the projects I wanted to focus on in Lake County and adjacent. Thank you.

Any questions at this point on projects? It's confusing. There's a lot. Karen talked about different types of funding, right? So we have roughly $30 different categories of funding that we're trying to always couple together for different projects, right? And qualify them for it. And so it's always a challenge in the background, delivering these projects and stretching them out as far as we can. But yeah, you see quite a few up in this area. You're part of the Intermountain TDR. I think you guys probably know. So you're tied together with the I-70 corridor, which is very challenging. You did see the Velpass project on there. It's our project right now. It's big. It's a big need. You know, so it's over $300 million project delivering it. So Mark talked about, you know, we have $33 million per year for a 10 year plan. Unfortunately, we've had to borrow into this next four years of that funding. So out of the 132 available, we've had to already borrow 50 million forward to complete what we have to date up on the pass. So it looks like a lot of money in the next four years. Unfortunately, that takes that 132 million down to about 82 million. And then that's divided up between the four TPRs in the region. So once we divide the money up to all these different needs and projects on these corridors, it doesn't go very far, unfortunately, right? And like I said, the cost of projects going up is a huge challenge for us.

With that, I'll now turn it over to Zane for his presentation on traffic. All right, yeah, I'm Zane Zolnovnichuk. I'm the Region 3 Traffic and Safety Engineer. Anything that is safety related, also any kind of infrastructure that is safety related, like traffic signals, signs, markings, that kind of stuff, that all kind of falls under my group. Some of the capital stuff that we have going around the region right now that would affect you guys most, we are doing a region-wide signal backplate and LED replacement project. At some point during this summer, you'll see a crew at each of the signals here in town. They're replacing the LED bulbs so that they have about a 10-year lifespan, so they'll have new bulbs for the next 10 years. And then we're also placing back plates around the heads to kind of increase visibility. That's one of the proven safety countermeasures that we're going to implement around the whole region to hopefully bring a little bit more visibility to signals. Next slide. And then here on the maintenance side of my group is sort of some of the summer maintenance activities that we'll be doing. We have an epoxy project and also a striping project in this area. The stencil project that does crosswalks and stuff has already been through here. I think it was through a couple weeks ago maybe, which was good timing kind of right at the beginning of the year. So hopefully they'll last through the summer pretty well. The next couple slides are just some statistics that you might find interesting. One of the things that was in the press towards the end of the year back in December, there was a lot of talk about CDOT's fatality trend and how it had kind of been coming down during COVID and then it spiked back up after COVID. And unfortunately, the state as a whole ended up last year with more fatalities than we'd had the previous year and so on. Breaking it down by our region, we were a little bit more fortunate in Region 3 that we have been on a downward trend for the last four years. Again, knocking on wood that maybe that continues, but that's kind of where we're at over here. One of the kind of strange things that happened this last year is just due to the warm weather, a lot of people were out on motorcycles out recreating a lot later in the year than they normally would be. we really saw a spike in motorcycle accidents like in November, October, November, even December, which is just something we've never seen before. So kind of some strange things out there with that. But yeah, here's another slide. It's the same kind of stuff, only focusing on serious injuries instead of fatalities. Pretty much mirrors the previous slide. One thing to point out about You know, these are numbers for the whole region, including local roadways. About 40 to 50% of the accidents occur on local roads, not state highways. Just kind of some information. One more slide, I think. Yeah, and this slide here, this just breaks down pedestrian accidents and bicycle accidents. So this is non-motorist accidents. And you can see, yeah, we had 10 fatalities in the region last year of those types. So those are obviously a focus for us. We're always focused on vulnerable users as much as we can be. Any questions on any of those slides or have some of the data?

Yeah, one quick question. highway workers, are they included in the non-motorist category or like city construction crews? Yes, they should be.

Yep. Okay, so real quick, we talked a little bit about local agency project, that sub-allocated program. Right now we have 52 total active projects, which is quite a lift for us in The previous 10 years, the sub-allocation program was very small. It bloomed up with MMOF and Revitalize Main Street and a lot of other funding came into the local agency program. We ramped up, so 52 total active projects when we used to have maybe 8 or 10 total. It's been quite a bunch. There's 4 in planning, 30 in design, and 18 in construction. And just wanted to kind of mention one of those, I know that Lake County had one to purchase some buses and I think that one's already gone through and been taken care of. There's another one that we're working on that I'm working with you guys on as far as the planning and the multi-modal and they submitted some reimbursements and we're working through that. I know that they got a big portion of the planning done and now they're looking at some design and some other things, but yeah, that's something that I don't know if you have any comments or discussion on that one, but otherwise I think any communication with your staff on that.

That's the roundabout?

Right, yeah, the different, um, the mobilities today that we're doing, what do you think?

Yeah.

Thank you. So, yeah, otherwise, yeah, we're just going along with the max. I think we're going to get just some things in design and look at on there and then get it ready to show. Okay, so maintenance.

Go on, Joe. My name is Joe Reza, I'm with Deputy Maintenance up here. As far as maintenance goes, our biggest thing is safety of the traveling public. That's our number one goal. And to provide that goal goes into environmental livability and infrastructure preservation. So our main task with the safety of the community on highway, incident response, guardrail, plowing, That's our main goal, and then past that, we already struck the question. Go to the next slide. Section 2, maintenance and repair. We do pavement patching, surface treatment, and roadside safety. Section 6 is on the right. That's on the north. But just on the left, there's statistics on what we've done in years past and how we do it. Like I said, funding's limited for us, so we try, on the maintenance side, with the money we do get, we try to pay more sections of our highway and our culverts to try to repair first, and then we just move down our priority list from there. Especially up here in the high country, it's more plowing than it is anything. This last winter was a fluke, but usually we plow nine months out of the year, so we have a very limited window in the summer where we can get things done. And then Lake County's even harder. for us is we have two maintenance barns out of Lake County, one in Leadville and one in Twin Lakes. And they haven't been fully staffed since I started. I think Twin Lakes was vacant for three years with no employees at it. We finally got one guy there. And then Leadville Patrol, I think they have four there now. So there's three there now. So we do have one more vacancy. two vacancies at Twin Lakes. So, personnel-wise, our lake county crews are always very short-handed and a lot of that comes with, this is an area where housing stipends go back and forth. So, on years we have the housing stipend, we can fill those vacancies easier. We have the down years where that stipend is lower, we go vacant. So we're just in the vacant era right now. Hopefully we can fill that and get more work done on the roads with the sculpture crew there.

How is the housing stipend determined?

Right now, it used to be a school district.

I don't know if they're still doing that or not. Jason, do you know? Yeah, they bring it down by county. And then they go in and really look at the cost for the entire county, which is a challenge, right? Some of the counties are very big, diverse. So then trying to figure out what that should be. Unfortunately, here, it didn't qualify for the higher stipend, where we have given our higher stipend, which is 970 corridor. Really? it's up to $2,000 is the max. But we've seen a huge increase. Unfortunately, what happened was a lot of our employees in some of these places that didn't have stipends migrated over to the I-70 corridor where they were getting a bigger stipend. So the stipends helped us in some places but hurt us in others.

I'm sorry, I'm not understanding. Who actually determines which counties get stipends?

So by that study, so we hired a consultant. They went out and they really looked at all the different costs of housing, what is it, the AMR? Who's the AMR or AMI? So the average median income and something else. So they look at the cost of living. They also look at what the income averages are. And they do a calculation, basically, and then they give a recommendation of what the state should pay.

And they do it every year?

I don't know if it goes every year, but the recommendation then goes to our executive. I don't know if it goes to commission or not, but it goes to the executive director.

Yeah, it goes into the budget. But they don't do it every year. I want to say it's a two-year cycle. I think we're coming up on the two-year cycle now. We're hoping it changes. We'll see some of these areas, you know, we're really starting to see costs increase. We'll qualify when they happen.

It's just wild because we are the number one ranked cost rent burden county in the state. So it's weird that a third party would come up with a different answer that justifies zero stipend.

We question their numbers, too. Yeah, that's enough. And some of it's on groceries, even. They go into grocery stores. Yeah, totally. But yeah, why they end up where they do is kind of interesting.

Okay, but that's an internal contracted two-year cycle that then gets built into the budget. Thank you. Appreciate it.

You can go to the next one. Okay. That's it for maintenance. Unless there's any questions, we'll make sure. Questions on maintenance? Turn it over to Chuck. Any questions?

Okay. Good morning, everyone. I'm Chuck Marsh. I'm one of two communications folks that we have. I've got a pretty awesome partner. Her name's Austin Deneen. She's based at Silverthorne. Her primary area is Glenwood Canyon all the way to the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnels and then 40 up to about Winter Park. So she gets the sporty wintertime part of the roadways and I get rest. We've got a pretty great working relationship. Our job basically is not just to inform people what's going on, but to educate them about what we at CDOT do. One of the big pushes that we do is try to let people on this side of the mountains know that we're not part of the Denver faceless entity that has their fingers in everybody's chili that the people that work in this region live in this region, that we are familiar with the roads that they're working on. You see that with the maintenance folks, they live in the areas that they take care of. So the first time I actually met with one of our maintenance folks, I knew this was the right spot for me because they said my road and I this. It wasn't a CDOT road, it wasn't a Region 3 road, it was my road. It's good to be able to try to push that narrative and let people know that we are invested even though we're not financially invested as much as we want to be. The people really are invested in the work that they do. So we'll go to cameras real quick. So in 2024 we had a contract with a company called Live View for 136 cameras. They were not doing a very good job on a lot of those anyways. A lot of the cameras whatever and so when the contract expired they basically came back and said hey we want you to pay 10 times what you were paying and we said no that's kind of being pretty poor stewards of you know our money so we decided to make them CDOT cameras with that we took a look at it and said okay we don't need all these cameras a lot of them were redundancies along the I-70 corridor anyway so we decided 69 of them were pretty critical to put back in So that's what we've been working on. It was a two-year program, so we're about a year and a half of it right now. We've got about 30 plus cameras that have been replaced. The problem with that is a lot of the cameras that we're not replacing are just because of infrastructure. There's no Wi-Fi or no fiber optics or anything like that. We just can't get out there without putting a lot more infrastructure and a lot more money to it. Eventually, we're gonna look at it again and see if there's more spaces that we need to put cameras, but for right now, yeah, we've got 69 on the list that are gonna go. Basically, what it does is it takes our out-of-pocket cost from 250 bucks a month per camera to 50 bucks a month per camera. So it really is a big cost saving for us to toughen up. Okay, question about camera? No, okay, all right. COtrip.org, this is our number one asset that we use. COtrip.org or the COtrip planner app. Basically, we push everything here. This is our, I call it near real time, a lot of other people call it real time, but in reality, it's the maintenance people or the other people that are on the ground that have to get to a scene for something happening and then call it in and let us know before we can actually put it up on the website. So, near real time. We looked at the census from 2020 that basically said there was three main languages that people are using to access this or that we need for people to access this. First was English, then Spanish, and believe it or not, the third most used one is Vietnamese. So we have English, Spanish, and Vietnamese on there. We're working on some more languages, but it's obviously a contract. But one of the great things and another reason that we try to push CO Trip is because people can go in there and they can plan a route and get push notifications for along the route if there's going to be an accident or if there's any road work going on. So it just makes it easier for people that are actually commuting to know what's going on. Yeah, any questions on CO Trip?

All right.

It uses all the time.

Yeah, it's our favorite thing. Also, nobody calls it CO Trip. CO Trip.

CO Trip.

You just said that. CO Trip. If you want to talk to the layman,

I don't know, do you guys have a CO trip? No. I worked guest services at Arapahoe Basin for half a decade, and everyone who calls is like, what are the roads like, what are the roads like? It's CO trip, CO trip, go to CO trip, they'll tell you what's going on with the roads.

We always ask for help pushing it, and we do our best to try to push everything there. We do have, you know, our social media avenues where if there's something like, if I-70 is going to be closed for a significant period of time, we'll push a message up there saying, hey look, something big is going on, check Cougar Trip for updates and when it's going to be open again.

Yeah, that kind of wraps up our slide deck, but we have time if you want to open it up for any discussion, if there's stuff you want to talk about in particular, and get into some details.

I think we do want to talk about one of our highways. I just want to say, as a cyclist, I appreciate you guys paid in 24. It is the roughest road. And then that, I don't know how much that bathroom cost at the tough vent house, but man, that's nice. That's in budget.

Yeah.

So that's a gem. That's a gem. No, it's a nice facility. It's getting heavily used right now. It is? Yeah.

My jokes are out of the way now. I'll get to serious business.

I just have one question, and it's a process question. I went to a workshop before I understood much about this. Not that I understand it now. But to Matt's point, Highway 91 is a very dangerous highway in our county. I think we would all love to understand how we work with see that to create to implement traffic calming measures and safety measures on highway 91 because. We understand that, like part of that a state patrol, but how is it that we specifically can work with coach or co co see that. See that and our road and bridge and our sheriff to actually get the right data to implement some of those safety. Just help us understand what the process is.

So when you call it dangerous, what specific are you looking at that are dangerous?

Accidents. Plenty of very serious or fatal accidents. And dangerous driving behavior. Are you skeptical? No, no, no.

But it's important to really define what it is because there's only so much that CDOT focuses on the engineering side and what we can do on there. So I'm not skeptical at all. Sometimes the appearance of danger can be its own issue. But CDOT is very much, we work on the engineering side of it and then there's other issues as well.

If I could just interject, at the very least it would be nice to get a rumble strip down the center because Some of the people drive in the center and they're looking at their phones or doing other things. And I know there's head-on collisions all the time. Or just driving off the road. Yeah, and we have people that live out there that are on us because their yards are getting... Anyway, I don't know. If a rumble strip in the center line, if we could... How could we advocate for that?

Yeah. Rumble strips, I mean, they're... They're great. They're one of the most cost-effective countermeasures that we can put out there. Those same neighbors will probably complain once they're out there.

I'm just saying. Forget the neighbors. Just what is the process?

We want the county. When you ask for a ground description, be like, okay, tell them that you'll support us when they call you because of the noise, for sure.

I did not think of that. I live on 91, and it lights up about 5 a.m., The rumble strips will be an additional. Totally fine.

Forget the rumble strips. Forget about that.

I mean, the best thing overall, I mean, there's a couple different ways to go about it. The best thing overall is to be in tune through the TPR so you know what projects are coming. Because the best and easiest and most cost-effective way to install countermeasures, whether it's rumble strips, whether it's a little bit of shouldering, whether it's some guardrail here or there or wherever, is to be in tune with what's coming because that's that's by far the best way for us to implement especially over some larger distance like that if you're talking about the whole of 91 you know north of town or something like that it's through those bigger projects like that so that's that's really the best way to come up with something that's larger in scope the other thing is The other way is to just work with us more individually and express what concerns you have like that. Because outside of those bigger projects, we can do things out there of smaller scale. And there are various pots of money for some of that kind of stuff. But it's more difficult for us to focus when we have the whole region to look at. So it's bringing those concerns up. And I mean it's contacting myself and my staff and we can take a look at things and see if there's things that we can do outside of some of those bigger projects so.

And that's really the yeah it's also really helpful to know mileposts and okay here's a specific so that's why I asked you specifically is like they're a dangerous curve or is there one specific area or is it the entire roadway because.

They're like five.

That's what yeah and so and we understand that and so if there's specific areas. Yeah, you can say, hey, the milepost here, the milepost here, and then we can look at the traffic data and say, okay, this is the issue maybe causing it.

Okay.

Gunnison is going through an industry, Gunnison County, they want all of 135 Center Line and shoulder rumble strips, and they've already said we want it, and they've got the whole community pushing for it because of an incident that happened, and that's, you know, some... But they actually... Got the money for themselves, so we're working for it to help them.

But it's a small amount of money. The money is there, yes.

But again, that support to get that in is huge for CDOT to know that Dade County has our back on that.

Hey, guys. Our fire chief, Dan Daley, is here. He had his hand raised. I'm curious to see what he wanted to. Yeah, I just wanted to ask a question.

Do you collect statistics for accidents in those certain areas, mile marker seven to nine on Highway 91, that's where the majority of our head-on collisions happen.

Highway 82 and 24, a lot of T-bone accidents happen there.

We have the statistics that we can provide you, I just need to be able to figure out who that is, and it might give you a bigger picture of what we're talking about.

So we have a comprehensive database, an instant document, that is based on all accident citations that are given out on scene. So our database is, I would say, it's probably the cleanest one statewide. Now, it does not necessarily include things that are not documented via some kind of citation or something like that. So if somebody runs off the road and somebody comes along and pulls them back on there's something minor that's not reflected in our database and so sometimes hearing some of that kind of information from somebody that's more familiar with local roads is definitely valuable. But yeah, that's kind of what we have. And how would I go about doing that? Because I'd love to be able to provide those statistics.

It sounds like Dan, maybe through us, let's connect so that we can figure out our process for advocating to CDOT with all of our local info. And that way we're not having lots of different conversations with CDOT, we're having a cohesive call for collaboration to get some of these. Does that sound okay to you?

Is there a training module or something that you guys have for local agencies to school them on the processes of making sure there's no lapses in reporting these kind of instances?

Oh, I don't know. No, there's really nothing like that. Nothing official. No.

Not through state troopers, then?

Is that your main... Well, it's through Department of Revenue. They're the collectors of all that stuff. And they process it, and when they're done with it, the reports roll to CDOT. CDOT then goes through and does kind of a cleansing process and then uploads them into our database. Cool.

Yeah. Okay, so can I just clarify, make sure I understand. So the two options that we have as a community to advocate to you all for some of those traffic calming measures or safety measures would be to be aware through our IMTPR of what larger projects are happening and be able to advocate there. But then for smaller things, working one-on-one with either Zane and or Mark or just you, Zane?

You can contact me, but I'd send it over to Traffic because they really are the safety experts on there. But then as far as finance and other things, yeah, then I can work with them and you on that.

So, Zane, specifically when we come to you with our request, what would you like that to look like? Do you want us to have already worked with our fire chief and our sheriff to say, this is the information we have, these are the requests we have, this is the advocacy we're bringing. Do you want us to have all of that ready before we reach out to you?

I would reach out sooner than that. I would reach out and say, hey, here's a concern that we've heard about or that we've observed, and we can take a look. of quickly kind of a cursory review and say you know we just we hear what you're saying but we don't see what you're saying or we can say you know what there is something here and you know if you can provide more information that helps us sort of better define a countermeasure then that's helpful so I would say not to be afraid to reach out we'll be honest with you what we find and what we think cool are you available this afternoon yeah anytime anytime

Okay, thank you, that was my only question.

So who is the Intermountain TPR rep from U3? That's me. Yeah, so I'll keep an eye on. And they have a meeting on July 17th, and so I encourage you to attend.

Yeah. And then by contacting Zane, he can also then have you linked in with Karen on the engineering team. There is a countermeasure, we do have a project, maybe we have an overlay or something coming up in the future. And we can start looking at, is that a possibility to to do it in that, within that project, right? Or we don't, is there any other way? We just need to start looking for funding, put it out there as a need, that kind of stuff. But really that communication from you guys, when you start saying this entire roadway's dangerous, you know, we always cringe because it's like, oh, pretty much all of them, you know, everybody feels different things. And these guys did a great job of starting to ask questions of what do you feel, what are you looking for? Is it those crossover center lines? Is it accesses, right? There's a lot of different things with our roadways. Is it speeds? Is that the primary issue? So are we looking at traffic calming? That gets hard on some of these corridors, especially pavement. It gets nicer. People want to drive faster. You know, trying to calm the traffic down on corridors is a huge challenge. Within an urban area, it's a little easier because there's mitigations that we can do to try to slow people down and correct some of those behaviors and bring awareness and focus on the road. But yeah, out in the middle of nowhere, it's very challenging for us to figure out some of that.

And we know you all aren't our only avenue. There's our state troopers. There's legislation. Don't worry.

You're not the only lever we want to pull. No, that's it. So yeah, we're just one entity, and we do what we can. But yeah, reach out. The more communication we have, the better. And understand your needs, and we can help you get where you want to be. Thank you.

What's been interesting with Gunnison County, one other thing is, it's actually been the bike community who's come out so strong for the shoulder, for the rumble strips. Especially, you know, you have to have the shoulder to ride on, but even those smaller rumble strips, just to kind of give a warning and kind of give a balance.

Yeah, that's a challenge itself. So if we don't have wide enough shoulders, it becomes dangerous because we don't want to put a rumble strip out there and then the bikers won't ride on the shoulder side. They want to push into the driver lane, right? So we have different standards. The shoulder has to be wide enough before we're going to go install that shoulder rumble strip also.

Fair enough.

Because, yeah, we've done that in places and it's actually pushed the bikers out onto the roadway and we can't do that. Interesting. So we have to evaluate what the runway template looks like and what the need is and what we can do. Cool.

You guys mentioned that Gunnison County was chipping in for their rumble strip project.

So what they did, actually they're not, but in the long term, so they got a $15 million grant to do some roundabouts and they were supposed to pay for the rumble strip as well. But because it's on State Highway 135, we already have the surface treatment project going on there. So we are chipping in through the 10-year plan. We're putting in $2 million to do some signings, some guardrail, and then the rumble strips center line and shoulder up and down the whole length of 135. What we really push them for is, hey, we need support. Because when you get these calls, You know, because from what I understood in 2004, when that road was originally widened, they were supposed to put in the rumble strips then, and they didn't because there were so many complaints specifically from the bike community. And then now it's like, no, okay, we see the need for it, we want it. So we kind of encouraged the commission to be open with the community and say, we are putting these in for this reason, for a safety reason, And they even put some housing right there next to it. But yeah, they got a $15 million grant. They're putting an additional $4 million to it. And so they're doing all that along there. We're just coming along behind it and putting in that bundle strips.

OK.

But yeah, in a way, they did pay for it. We're just kind of helping as well.

A couple different projects. And it's kind of changed over the years. But yeah, it was a great collaboration, right, with the locals up there, the county, of trying to figure out what they want, they've got some big projects going on. Again, they're willing to take the complaints and kind of work with our group of like, hey, this is for the betterment of the safety of the public, so we're willing to do this. Because I guarantee, you put in rubble strips, there will be complaints, and it's a big one. I'll take that.

Could you have a question?

No, I think most of the ones I had written down got answered throughout the presentation.

I did notice this up here, so apparently you've been thinking about some finance and other things.

We were trying to understand what on earth was happening.

Yeah, good luck. Can you understand? Yeah, I'll give you my crack and you tell me about it.

Well, you can see halfway down on the HB 261430, could not understand, so I just drew these big blobs of like, oh, here's some funding buckets.

I don't know.

So I got three quarters of the way through understanding it.

Yeah, like I said, I'll give you my card, and if you give it, we can talk. We can draw pictures together. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on. A lot of questions being asked.

I've got a couple oddball questions, just out of curiosity.

One is the The wires on I-70, are those, do they really stop traffic and entangle people when they start to cross over? What? The cable rail, right around what you're talking about, the cables that are in the center of the comedian? Yeah, and then I got another oddball question I'll just ask.

Yeah, it's not full guard rail, they're just cables that are tensioned.

Oh, got it. Sorry, I thought they were like trip wires.

No, they're hard.

They work pretty well. They're effective, even though they're so low. Even though they're so low. And I mean, the standard has changed a little bit over the years, and I think they're a little bit higher now if you see a new installation. But they're very effective at sort of grabbing a vehicle around the tires and then directing them very parallel towards the board. So they kind of deflect much better than just a steel guard rail does. So from a safety standpoint, they are pretty good.

cost-effective to replace cheaper to put in a little cheaper to replace but man we see them have a lot a lot right so it's challenges for us to get the parts to get everybody out there and fix them especially winter season is always hard right our guys are plowing snow and so you know we'd like to get out there sooner than later but uh it's a big challenge yeah that's one of the challenges is it's a little more fragile than just a standard guard rail so

Like in wintertime with plowing and stuff like that, they can be damaged.

Yeah, where a guard rail barely gets hit, it's still functional. Those things, when they get hit, it pretty much loosens the tension in them, and they're not effective anymore.

Okay, second left field question. The new project down, I call it Kerman's Corner on I-70. What do you guys think? Yeah. How are you going to, since there's going to be so much bridge, is that going to ice up, or is that what's... What's the plan to mitigate that?

They're looking at that. You know, it's very similar to what we have going with Tandy's. Their grades are a little steeper than ours. Yes. That's region one. We don't have to handle that one, thank goodness. We don't have to pay for it either, so that's good. So, yeah, they're looking into that with their maintenance team, trying to figure out what equipment, what changes they're going to have to make to their maintenance operations and products that they're going to put on, you know, because the way they're coming over the top of traffic, they didn't have that before, so the pretty nervous um we kind of deal with some of that in Glenwood Canyon and haven't figured out so our team's working with them as well but um you know they haven't they got it completely figured out at this point so I think there'll be some trial and error once it's built I was really trying to understand what works best do they use you know salt sands do they use more chemicals for the icing materials you know what product is going to help them because they ice up different whenever they're it's a bridge structure versus an on-grade kind of pavement seems really dangerous

You know, I do have one that is kind of like a high level and I drive around the nation quite a bit and, uh, man, Colorado roads are just historically bad. It's always kind of blamed on the mountain climate. You know, like I always say, like, you can close your eyes driving across the nation and you know when you get back to Colorado. and it's always blamed on the mountain climate but other mountain regions you know like in utah or california don't seem to have the same you know problems that we have so it's kind of a two-part question is is is it basically just a funding issue we just don't get enough from the state to stay on top of it and or do we have um are we using like any outdated methods of paving, or is there something other states are doing that's different than what we're doing as to why a lot of the mountain regions and other states seem to have a little bit of a better, more consistent product?

No, I'll jump in and start trying to answer them. My team can jump in then if they have more to add, but you kind of answered the first part of the question, right? So there's multiple things there. So there's the funding side of it, but then there's also, you know, the challenges of the terrain where we're at, right? So you start looking at other states around us, we're all a little different. We very often compare ourselves to Utah, right? So it's kind of similar in many ways. But you look at their funding, their general fund supports them. They raise their gas taxes. They pay for their roads, honestly. If you look at their funding versus ours per lane mile, there's a big difference. Their budget this year is about $5 billion versus the rest of the two for us. Wow. So you get what you pay for, kind of thing, right? So. But it also goes, so if you compare us to, say, more of a drier climate, Arizona, some of these that don't have the grades, the challenges, you know, comparable flooding, well, their pavement lasts longer. So it's a compounding issue, right? So part of ours, we don't see the pavement life, you know, because of the freeze-thaw conditions, because of the chain conditions. I mean, within five years, you know, we'd like to see our pavement on the I-70 last a while, but anywhere from a chain station up the hill, You fill those ruts. It's not the pavement at that point. It's just those tire chains wearing down. And so we have to get back in there and do rehabs way sooner. So states that don't have those issues don't have to deal with that kind of stuff, drainage, slides. We see a substantial amount of roadways that are slipping. And we can't get them stabilized. We're constantly having to repair them, that kind of stuff. Even our culprits, a lot of them, they get put in place. All it takes is a minor change. You know, on one end of the cold with the other, and all of a sudden you lose that conduit across the road and it's plugged up because it's up in the mountains or something. So we have a lot of challenges other states don't, and also we don't have the funding. So I think you see it, you feel it, right? Unfortunately, you know, like I said, our team, they're proud of us. Like Chuck was saying, you know, it drives them crazy to get out there and just, you know, this is all the money we have to patch this or to only overlay this section. saw that yeah for the good fair poor it's like it breaks our heart to stay here to say you know here's our roads and i don't feel like we're keeping up we're always falling behind yeah it's not like personally you're you know shortcomings but it drives you crazy because we want to be successful right yeah we do we want to give you guys everything we can so 500 year cycle on culverts it's like no one can work with numbers like that so we Our funding source is really over 30 years old, 35 years old coming up on that. So back in the early 90s, right, a federal gas tax and state gas tax were set. Those are per gallon. So times like this when gas prices go up, we actually sell less gallons statewide, right? Because people are looking at other modes. They're just not taking those trips. So our funding actually decreases when gas prices go up, unfortunately. So we're always happy to, Advocate for support, anything you guys willing as a county, any groups you sit on, any committees, anything like that. We love getting supported when it comes to funding. You're reaching out to your state legislators. You're telling them, this is a priority. We can't do it on our own necessarily. We need support from our locals and our community members and our elected officials to help us get there. But it is a funding challenge.

I wonder if a gas tax is subject to TABOR restrictions.

Subject to what? TABOR restrictions? It is. It is, right? Because it comes with capital.

It goes into the general.

But the feds could certainly raise there. Well, yeah.

And so right now, we're about 50-50 in federal, state fund. Maybe it's about 60-40, as you saw in my slide. For Utah, they're 80-20. 80% state, 20% federal. That's where they prioritize much more their roads. And so when you look at that type of thing, you really want to look not just at the total budget, but the percent of federal versus state. And that'll really tell you where a state's putting its priorities.

It's such a tricky balance too, because I noticed, you know, when you're on icy roads and you're going around the turn and it's bumpy, that'll break your traction easier, you know? So it's on one hand, it's more dangerous, but on the other hand, you get a freshly paved road and watch how people drive on those. It's so dangerous, you know?

So it's like, how do you balance that? We see it all the time. People's driving behaviors on good, fresh pavement. Yeah. It's like the perfect groove. Yeah, you don't want to test it. Everybody's Mario. People drive to the conditions. I think you had a second part to that question about, I guess, technology.

Is there any, on the horizon, major technological advances going to happen to asphalt that will make it more durable?

No, a lot. We explore different things, right? So we're pulling more modified So the asphalt that's in our mix basically has plastics and polymers added into them. And so we modify them for the conditions, right? So up here, it's not the same pavement as, say, on the interstate or down in Grand Junction climate. So it's modified for the temperatures. It's also modified then for, you know, through truck traffic or heavier traffic. So the interstate gets a stiffer pavement binder. Versus up here, we do something a little softer that's more forgiving. And so it's not you know, it's going to freeze thaw, you know, and withstand that mechanism of failure a little better. So the bad part is, like yours, we'll run a little quicker on a hot day, a lot of truck traffic, we'll see more running. So we have pavement engineers back to our support units. They're looking at that. So every project really is built with a different mix design, and it's for your certain area. We are chasing technology. We're actually doing what we're calling a highly modified pavement design down on the interstate by rifle this year. So they're testing out a new technology. And Utah has been using it for a few years now. They love it. But it's highly modified because it takes the top end up higher so you can have more truck traffic, but it lowers it so it's not prone to that freeze thaw. And they think it's very successful. They've proven that it's working for them. So we're going to try it. So maybe we won't see as much cracking. You know, even though it's stiff enough for the trucks, we won't get that freestyle thermal cracking like you see a lot of times. So we're exploring all the technology. Honestly, not a lot of it out there for pavement. It's kind of one of those kind of industries that it's like, well, it's pretty set. There's not a lot of advancement going on.

Yeah, it's like truck chains. They've been the same since like the 20s. They tear the heck out of the roads, you know? It's like, can't they use it?

kevlar sock or make that like and that's an option um you know so the traction laws allow some of those other devices most of them when they find it's not cost-effective right so those socks not too expensive but it's kind of a one-time use yeah and then that's throw away right so chains you put them on you take them off and you use them with these other ones whenever they're having to use those socks you know they can add up if they're having to do that multiple times

Especially you get on just a little bit of dry pavement and it just eats those socks up almost instantly.

Another thing that counties can do is the gravel permits. You know, keeping the gravel pits open and making sure we have a supply of gravel materials.

and that's a good point huge benefit because what we find materials yeah material you know proximity of where the pits are located versus our projects so the more pits there are the better it is keeps our cost down it keeps safety you know because we're not putting those trucks on the roads they're not hauling you know more loads that kind of thing so so anytime we can have pits close to projects that our contractors can bid out of you know that's available is a benefit for us all. And we get more pavement done because of that. So we can put more asphalt there.

We're doing it right now.

Yeah, thank you. Oh, that's great to hear. We sure appreciate that.

We're doing the one going south and the one going on 24.

That is great to hear because we have some counties that are kind of going the other direction. And they're against pits. And it makes it very challenging for us because now we're having to look at, OK, where are we going to bring material in from? And it has to be trucked in. And again, it's putting more trucks on the roads.

and safety as well to keep those heavy trucks in limited areas.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, imagine that. That's a tremendous cost, 100 miles of trucking.

It does. That's a fast 25 yards. They have to put that many more trucks on the road to get those cycle times, to keep their paper moving. So it's a challenge for our contractors.

Well, gee, thanks for coming. That was a really great discussion and great information.

I know there's a lot. Again, there's a lot of the team here, and for different things, different needs, we probably have to reach out to different team members. But if you don't know who to reach out to, again, reach out to myself or Mark, and we'll make sure we get you in touch with the appropriate people. But we do appreciate all your support and getting to meet with you. Yeah. Same.

Appreciate you guys.

Thank you for giving us a place to drive.

Thank you. keep working on it appreciate y'all thank you thank you guys thank you guys see you mark thanks see you guys

Just in between. We just didn't have time to put that in. I'm gonna submit a work session request for the

And traffic safety cooling measures. For us to all get on the same page and reach out to Zane. Yes. Or reach out to Zane first, but get it on the web.

Yeah. The data reporting department that's been doing this with me, because I heard over the last year and a half or so that you weren't being reported properly. And that was leading to the . That was the coroner, and that was the police.

I was looking for you guys online.

I wasn't sure if you were coming in person. What's up? I wasn't sure if you were coming in person, so I was looking online.

I'm like, what is going on? It's live. Here we are.

How are you? Good, and you?

Hi. I don't want to sit in the front.

All chairs are equally unwalkable, if that makes any difference.

Oh, well.

I'll trade with you.

We can just do cubes every now and then.

oh yes that's where a lot of our grants

Get started everyone. It's 1230 and item number two on our work session agenda is overview and discussion regarding potential options and cost estimates for the Lake County landfill. I think Josh is leading this one.

Yeah, thanks. Michael wasn't able to be here today. And so I'm going to go ahead and help facilitate the discussion here around the landfill. So the background on this, we were in for a work session about a month and a half ago now, roughly. and talk through potentially some options related to the landfill. I think there was a potential idea of some partnership with other counties to do a transfer station and maybe a regional style landfill. And there were some lingering questions about what the costs of that would look like for the county who were to pursue that route. So you and I'll give some direction for Public Works to sort of return, take a look, a little deeper dive into the transfer station costs. So we have some folks from our engineering team here, that can help provide some technical expertise here, as well as a lot of our public works staff. We've got Robin, Gary, you can see Mabel back there. And then we've also asked our sustainability contractors from C4 to join us, because there's some conversation around waste diversion, you know, increases to recycling programming and things like that. So hoping to have a pretty robust discussion about where we're at on this. And I think the way to best tee this up, I think, We included some information in the packet. We had asked the engineer folks to kind of take a deep dive into transfer station costs. They put together a pretty robust memo that's in the packet to talk about what that would look like, both from the standpoint of the capital construction costs and then just operating maintenance over the years. So that full memo is in your packet for review. also have some cost estimates related to what we expect the landfill expansion and the new cell and those capital costs and then Gary and Michael took some time to kind of pull all that information together into a single document comparing the overall costs of those things so I think that's probably a good place to start and then we can just sort of dive into some specific questions if you want to pull up some of those other documents I can certainly do that I will go ahead Yeah, I think you all have a hard copy of that summary in front of you. And so I think really what we wanted to point your attention to is sort of this summary at the bottom of this document. I'm going to go ahead and share this for folks online. Can someone online give me a thumbs up that you can see this? Anybody, Sarah, are you able to see the Excel?

Yes. You guys are good.

Thank you. Thanks. Okay. So I'll just kind of go to the summary here and then maybe I can pass to you to talk about the analysis here. But just to give you the bottom line breakdown, I think that was one thing we were wanting to compare at the last work session. So current operating maintenance costs for the current landfill and what we anticipate the new cell is about $628,000. Our construction costs, capital construction for a new cell that would provide 34 years of airspace is $2.4 million roughly. And then the construction costs for the transfer station, we're looking at more like $5.3 million. And then there's just a lot more operating Everything, drop site, college, everything associated with the transfer station is going to cost more money. We had some conversation with the engineers a week or so ago. Some stuff that hadn't really come up during that transfer station discussion was what happens if the rules change at whatever our regional site is, what does it look like if a solid agreement in place for long-term lease, things like that. So this is sort of that baseline estimate, but a lot of this is really subject to change kind of based on some of those variables.

Yeah, and the other thing that we talked about was what do you do with the existing landfill? You don't just walk away from it. There's a lot of money to close it. You've got to monitor it for another 30 years, just like you're doing now. All the groundwater, all the gas, that continues so that's another thing that really costs there's some operating expenses for that and capital for the cap of the old landfill for the existing landfill I should say.

One of the things to consider as well is that you know you still have the same number of trucks coming into the landfill but now you have trucks so you're putting more trucks onto the road at the same time. It might balance to a certain degree, but you do have an extra load of trucking on 24 that's going from here to Slider or wherever you choose as the regional location. That's the one we were looking at as the base case.

Gary, I believe the closure costs are rolled into your transportation capital costs. Is that correct? It's a separate item.

So landfill, I think it's worth noting that it is permitted for 230 years. This is just phase X of various stages. But again, in real life, it's 230 years.

We won't be in office then. I mean, I think it's pretty clear what we need to do. Interesting to see that it's, you know, the price tag on it.

I mean, speaking for myself personally, I've used transfer station setups in other regions and I would much rather stick with what we've got up there at the landfill, be able to maximize efficiency and utilize that to its best potential as opposed to

further entertainment of the transfer station that's just speaking for myself the analogs that we use to develop the estimates for the transfer stations are you know similar size similar size of you know demographics and and everything else but they all have something in common that's kind of like a compelling reason to you know to go to the transfer station and normally they're Those at least we didn't see all those variables exist here. So, you know, there's a little bit of overhead that's in these others where there's a compelling reason why we were almost forced to go in this direction for other reasons. And you maybe don't have those same kinds of stimulus. Just wanted to be transparent about that. We tried to do our best. You'd have to design this from the bottom up to get a real good number, but we think we're pretty close based on what we have.

There's a lot of analogs out there within this range. Just the yearly operating cost is comparable to what it would cost to have another 34-year cell here.

The fuel, the labor. the amortizing the the uh trailers and everything you need if you buy your own even if you contract you're going to pay somebody else's amortization on the trucks that they buy so you know when we add up the numbers it's pretty surprising even at a decent discount rate it's a couple of million bucks and the closure is not included here yeah that's another three million right closure closure so over the closure is the capital cost to cap it post closures 30 years to monitor it

And that doesn't assume there's any problems. If there's a problem, then it's fine.

I'm so sorry, but does anybody know what that sound is?

They're doing some kind of work downstairs, but I'm not sure what it is. They're moving things down there. That's why they asked me to move my car. It sounds like they're drilling something. It's pretty wild.

It sounds like they're dancing.

Yeah. You can feel it under your feet.

Thanks. Sorry, online. Sounds crazy in here. Okay, are we gonna talk about other options though? Like we talked about, obviously we're not gonna do a transfer station, but we were also gonna talk about recycling measures or diversion from our current landfill.

Yeah, I can give a little bit of background on where the county is at just generally overall improvements in the landfill programming, things like that, and C4 can certainly jump in and help here. So there's a couple things in the works. We had put in an application a while back. I don't think we've yet heard about the recycling reimbursement program. So we're still waiting to hear that. That's just some state funding that would allow us to improve both outreach and education around recycling and just generally increase our waste diversion efforts.

So that is pending. We're also in the process of working on a grant that's due at the end of this month. I think we flagged this at an operations meeting at one point.

But to the Colorado Circular Communities organization has impact grant funding available and technical assistance programs available. And so we sort of started down the path of the technical assistance program. And we're then encouraged after a site visit here to the landfill by the C3 team to resubmit an application that we had put in last year just with some more targeted feedback into how we could improve it. So that is specifically around some equipment and installing a scale at the landfill. And if you recall from those discussions, that's kind of about getting our revenue stream a better handle on the revenue stream, what's going into the landfill, what's coming out. ensuring we're charging people appropriately, and then being able to reinvest that money into recycling operations, into expansion, things like that. So that is due next Tuesday, so we've been working closely with C4 to get that application turned in. I think Thursday is the final meeting on that to make sure everything's all in order on the grant application. And then we'll hopefully have some success with that grant this time around. Is there anything else? from your end you wanted to add related to that?

Are you going to talk about the steps?

Yeah, I can go in there. So the technical assistance program is the C3 steps, which then helps us work towards developing a full waste diversion and management plan, which a really incredible program that the state has put together. And so we sort of had those initial conversations. We had them up for the visit, and they're sort of suggested stepwise approach is to pursue the funding through this impact grant program, help improve our operations on the landfill side, and then sort of immediately on the back end of that, we will put in for the STEPS program, which is a, I believe, 60-day technical assistance planning process that helps take a look at everything holistically, and then we start to look at how do we improve the, in spite of whether we get this other grant, how do we improve our outreach and education, How do we increase our waste diversion efforts to give a bit longer life to this new cell? That's their how to pursue things. Really, yeah, I think we're all pretty eager and hopeful that we'll be able to get ourselves into that program.

One thing with our consulting tour, we met Jamie Gormley. He is the broker of Recycling. And he saw our commodities. and actually encourage us to go with him because all of our recycling is 100% clean. So he wants to do all the cardboard, which he took a first load last week. He wants to work on our aluminum. He's given us ideas on how we can increase our drop sites, things that we can do as a community and the commissioners to encourage people to recycle, whether it be imposing additional fee if they choose to go take it to the trash. Some things are not obvious if they're in bags, but the blatant things that's obvious, even though we can encourage them to recycle, they don't. They'd rather pay their fee. So actually, I look forward to working with Jamie and I can't wait to see what the outcome is because dealing with waste management, our revenue was like maybe $600, $700. And then you have to look at the cost of our transport and stuff down there. Jamie offered to bring his truck and trailer with no cost to us. So whatever goes to the mill, will be our money.

Jamie's a new contractor or a broker?

Jamie Gormley is a recycling broker.

A recycling broker. So the C3 grant funders brought him in as a consultant to look at our landfill, do a tour, understand what's going on. And then he offered Robin and their team all this advice for how to improve. Cool.

Yeah, and some of that stuff we were able to implement pretty quickly and directly. Some of it is sort of a lead-in to what this broader technical assistance program will provide, and us being able to actually get our hands around what is the scale of the challenge here in the county, and what are the most beneficial next steps to take to kind of start meeting some of those challenges. So yeah, we're definitely keen on first putting a lot of energy into this grant application, because that was another recommendation that came out of the visit. go after one of these impact grants. And then as a follow-on to that, we'll be working again to do the C3 grant.

And the thing is, for the scale, you'll see people probably doing more recycling because they're going to be weighed by the pound. So the less they can get out and recycle, the more they're going to be out of here.

So to be clear, there's an impact grant that's due at the end of the month. C4 is working with our team to submit that's for the scale whether we get that grant or not we're then going to go out for the steps grant which is technical assistance which will actually help create the like long-term diversion plan and then from there we can go out for extra grants work with our partners etc to figure out what other diversion tactics we can take okay and then and the thing with the c3 grant

it's not just the scale that we're focusing on one of the things they recommended is extra storage for us for recycling yeah so we incorporated two more 53 foot trailers um they recommended a forklift with a scale we incorporated that for um efficiency with um bell weights so we are taking it baby steps but realistically so That's awesome.

Is there any program, like I have my trash picked up, but they don't pick up recycling. Do a lot of the commercial trucks, do they carry a lot of recyclable materials that aren't sorted?

Waste management did send out a notice to customers last week that they are going to launch commercial or like recycling pickup in Lake County by the end of July. believe it when I see it. I believe that Apex or Chaffey County Waste also offers it, but you have to be a trash customer in order to get recycling through them.

Are we still having struggling with contamination or mixed uh batch issues at the recycling center over by community field and i feel like that was identified i mean a while ago and it was there was a malfunctioning camera or something that couldn't that was missing when who was putting household trash and cardboard bins and things like that is that still there was never an existing oh there was never a camera there no um

Part of, I guess, Stewart's program is to implement it at the drop site.

C3 did have feedback on the drop sites, but given the timeline to turn around this grant and the cost of the scales, they encouraged us to focus on the scales, and then the drop sites will really be part of the steps program. and what we can do to improve and address contamination there.

Something that's maybe way out there, left field, but that has popped into my head in the last couple months was, is anyone aware of anything that other communities do that would be like a single-use plastic excise tax, like on water bottles or like You know, all the disposable nature items that could be used to add funding to landfill operations and recycling operations and things like that. Is that like crazy or is that like...

Ask the state for that excise tax.

That's something you have to go through the state to even find out if it's allowed. I don't even know if it's allowed. That's kind of what I'm like. I figured...

I mean, they create those levers, right?

Yeah.

If it exists, then yes, we could put it on a ballot. But if it doesn't exist, we'd have to ask the state.

There is the bag fee on single-use bags, which now that plastic bags have gone away, I think it doesn't generate as much revenue. But that does get paid to both the city and county. And my understanding is that you are supposed to put that towards waste diversion efforts, outreach, and education. And you can increase that fee.

That's kind of what lit the spark was like oh we used to do that for plastic bags and then being in the store and watching people come into town and buy case after case after case of water. I'm like the water off our taps is cleaner than what you're paying for cases of right there. It depends on where you live. Most of our taps are now pretty clean water compared to classic water bottles. A way to encourage people to just fill up a jug.

One of the options that we have discussed while working on this grant that I think we're interested in exploring with C3 and the staff's technical assistance is could the county introduce, and Robin mentioned this, could the county introduce a fee if Now that we have cameras, whenever you bring a load into the landfill, if you choose to bring items that could be recycled, could we actually say there's a 25% fee on that? That it's free to recycle it, but if you want to put it in the landfill, it'll actually cost you more.

But that is for definitely.

tricky enforcement I think. You'd almost have to look at people's trash before they dump it, right?

So with the new system there will be cameras that look into vehicles so they can identify what is being thrown away. If it's in a bag obviously you wouldn't be able to see it but for larger roll-offs and those sorts of things they will be able to.

One thing I wanted to add about C3 is when they came for the tour of the landfill and recycling center they were really impressed like they gave robin and her team a huge shout out for how clean our landfill is yeah and they were just so impressed with like what they've been doing with recycling with how little we actually have there in terms of infrastructure and resources And they told us that we were the only landfill in the entire state of Colorado that did not have a scale. So they were shocked by that and they were like, we really want to work with you to help you get a scale. So that's huge. That's a huge win. And I think what we've been learning is the relationship building piece with grant funders who don't understand our community is so important. And we've been spending a lot of time. Yeah, doing the relationship building piece, so it's been cool.

Also helps for your waste accounting too, having a scale, because it's one of the things we run into all the time is when you do calculations for emissions and everything else that comes along with those. Sometimes once people are in, you know, getting into a system and you get the numbers, it's a real easy process and say, hey, you're way below the limit here. You don't need to worry. Don't make any guesses. You've got the tonnages and you've got everything worked out in advance. So that's the other advantage of having a scale and other than enjoying it.

Cool.

I also see it go hand in hand with an uptick in composting practices as well, just because that's by nature like a heavier waste product. Yeah, you're paying for a lot of it.

A lot of landfills are putting in compost operations right at their landfills. Glenwood has it, Summit has it.

Separate from our work with the county C4 and Elements Mountain Composting out of JP County, we were awarded a C3 grant, so the same funder. to launch a commercial composting pilot for restaurants in Lake County this fall.

That's going to start? Or is that going to roll out this fall?

It'll start to roll out this fall.

Cool.

Yeah.

So they already have the business. It's just bringing their business here to pick up from restaurants.

Awesome. Seems like a good opportunity for someone to start a recycling pickup, especially if we're going to start charging people extra. Somebody that just had a truck that ate plastic number ones on Monday, glasses on Tuesday, or leave it out in your curb. Business idea for somebody. Because it's difficult. I'll admit it's difficult for me to get motivated. I recycle all the cardboard from job sites and stuff. That's easy, but a little plastic yogurt container, wash it out and set it aside and Maybe deal with it next month and starts to build up.

Little admission commissioners.

It would be nice if it was super easy. Cross it out, stick it in the bin, put it out. My trash guy picks it up or somebody comes and gets it.

If I were a single parent, I would definitely not recycle. Just to be honest.

It takes a lot of time.

It does, but I'm really grateful that we do. I'm just saying it's definitely worth the effort.

But the carrot and the stick, you know, like hey, you can not separate your trash, but it's going to be this price. Totally. Or you separate it for it, it's going to be the same price, but I don't know.

And for it. So that's something that we will explore with the STEPS program is How can we is a mark of possibility in the county yeah so that's what's required to have single stream recycling or mark materials recovery facility.

And so it's yeah but conveyor belts and like robots sorting instead of Robin and her team sorting by hand new.

So that's what you need to have single stream recycling. Those start at about a million dollars. I'm sure they've gone up since we last looked. And so hopefully developing this plan through the steps program will also make us a stronger candidate for the Swiffer Grant the county went after with the EPA. Because combined, that's quite a bit of funding that would make that a possibility for our community. But I think in the meantime, we're really looking into how can we improve the program we have for the least investment of our local dollars as possible.

What's the timing on that second three-step? The steps program? The steps program, thank you.

So as soon as we submit this grant, which is due early next week, then we will begin the steps process.

Is that just rolling?

Yeah.

Oh, awesome, okay, cool.

Yeah, and they just really, they understood, C3 understood that getting this grant in within 30 days was a really big turnaround, so we didn't want to do both at the same time. We wanted to really get this grant and respond to their feedback, and then begin the subs program.

And there was some conversation, there are two deadlines for the Impact Grants, there's June 30th application. We wanted to prioritize June 30th so that we could get immediately going on this. Steps to September 30th? No, no deadline for steps. The grant that we're applying for in June also has a deadline in September, but then there was potentially some sequencing, like if we get enrollment steps, then there's another opportunity to apply for more impact grant funding down the road as a result of our involvement there. have that as an option for next year, depending on the award title.

Nice. NSC4, are you all helping us with the steps application as well?

Awesome. Notably, I think on this summary sheet of the costs, I think this is important consideration. Thinking ahead, it's not nothing for a new cell. So we need to, as we're going into budget season, We'll need to start thinking about where we want to budget that from. You know, we'll have that, I assume, included as part of our capital request in terms of the preliminary budget. So we're just yet, we're still looking at like two and a half million dollars roughly.

We're going to fund that expansion. Which is a little better than the numbers we heard over the last year, which was three or north. So two and a half, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye. What's the timeline on that, Josh?

So we roughly have, what, up to seven years, potentially, of airspace? Is that right? So four years. Realistically, this is the year we should be considering getting started on that. I'm looking at engineers here in terms of planning and trying to get construction done on that new cell. We have a fair amount of work to do to get ready just to build it with trees and different things like that.

Is there anything? about constructing a new cell that will inhibit the existing space that we have? Or are they gonna, you know, work side by side seamlessly? Okay, awesome.

It'll eventually coincide.

Cool, okay. I didn't know if, like, you know, sometimes construction overlap or we can't use this bit of existing space because we need to.

What would be nice is if you could start taking soil out of that cell use for your operations. Save you a little bit of money in the background. When an excavation contractor comes in, instead of taking out a million yards or whatever it's going to be, it's a half of a million.

And then you're going to pump one from the wood. Right. And it'll go fast. It'll go fast.

Sounds good. We like saving money.

Yeah. Me too.

I don't have any other questions. This sounds great.

This sounds great. Thanks for all your hard work on this. Yeah, thanks for having us. For giving us a clear choice on the path forward. I never wanted a transfer station anyway. It just sounds complicated and expensive. A lot of trucking, a lot of desolates. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see you.

That's all right. Will you entertain a comment from the public?

Go for it.

I just wanted to make my pitch again for household hazardous waste day. It hasn't gotten any traction over the last few years. I've proposed it several times as a budget item. But it's all the stuff that people have under their kitchen sink or their bathroom sink that they don't know what to do with, acids, bases, pesticides, all of that.

all of that stuff.

And I understand there's not grant funding from the state for that specific thing. It would be great to try and pursue some sort of opportunity to do that. I think it's probably been about 10 years since the last one. Whether it's corporate sponsors, Climax, a good environmentally responsible company to help fund this. It probably costs, it's been so long now. I bet it'd be a lot of money.

went over what they actually did for us because we did have a brand from c4 we did it they said they could do it for like 35 and then all of a sudden it was like 55 and then they still didn't pick up everything so we had to hire another company to pick up the rest so it was a nightmare and tires took forever yeah so there has to be management obviously you know you only know

three hours on a Saturday to come in. Or when the truck is full, that's it.

Yeah, and I mean, I think we did it for like a certain time span because I was out there working it, so I know. Yeah.

So I think the important thing for the community, you know, to be able to get rid of this stuff and not throw it out in the woods when their under sink gets full. I agree. You know, some sort of consideration of that I think would be appropriate by somebody.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a scary concept because it's like you don't know what to do with it. You're going to put it in a contractor bag and throw it out in your regular trash, you know. The one thing I always struggled with was spent or old gasoline. You can go and recycle oil, but I got like, you know, a jug or two of old gas sitting around, and it's like, I don't want that in my house, so what do you do with it, pour it over?

I was about to say, where's the chief daily?

Lots of fire. We take a certain amount, because we mix it with diesel, and then we use it for burning.

Okay. I've got some gas that's pre-mixed with diesel. Yeah. Do you fill up the Sprinter around?

Right now.

We take a certain amount, so if you have a gallon or something, bring it to us.

I do think with, just for considering the future cost of the landfill, our landfill currently is unlined, and so you are correct that when people aren't sure what to do with something, they put it in a bag and it makes its way into the landfill anyways. And that is a concern for the county in the future because you will be liable for any leaching out of the landfill.

Pick it up at one of the metering stations down, one of the wells, you know, down low, right?

Cut a little bit. Yeah. The new landfill will be fully lined. They go into a sump and they get pulled out where they can be disposed of properly. So they don't go into the groundwater or the surface waters. You know, liner systems and landfills sort of came about for that very reason. They realized that there was no way that they could keep household hazardous waste out of the landfill. And over time that precipitated the liner systems. much more than what they were in the past. Yeah. That doesn't mean it's still not a good idea to keep it out of there if you can.

Right.

Well, thank you all very much for working on this.

Anything anybody wants to close up with or add before we close this up?

If we were curious about following up on a hazardous or household hazardous waste program or day, is that something that we would work with you, Mabel, on and maybe C4 to understand what happened last time?

I would say we would have to have Robin in on that too because you have to find a company. That takes a lot of work, Tony, because you're going to have to make sure money is put somewhere to pay for this because nobody's going to do it for her.

Yeah, totally. I get that. I'm just saying, since CFO was part of it last time, and Emily, that was probably before you if it was 10 years ago, when they were Kendra, but would you just consider if that's something you guys would want to be part of and let us know so that if we are curious about moving forward, you guys would know if you want to be partners in it?

Because I think now Clay Harbor is taking the paint, so at least we've got that option. And that was one of the biggest things we got. That and vegetable oil, regular oil, gas, we got everything.

But you are taking paint, old paint? Yes. Okay. That's good to know. Is it free? Is that recyclable or is that a charge item?

It's free.

It's free.

Unless you bring in a huge amount. Oh.

Then we recommend you go straight to the company.

What's that?

Then we recommend you go straight to the company. But sometimes we get like a hundred five-gallon buckets. Yeah.

Jeez, man. We actually encourage them to take it to pre-care.

Yeah.

In Harbor.

Okay.

And then we turn around and buy it to do the ice rink. It's all recycled. After they're done with it?

They mix it all together and usually get like an off.

No, there's a company that they does recycling paint.

Oh.

And we reach out to them if things need to be painted. Yeah. And we get it at a cheap price. Nice.

Some of the big painters came from St. Petersburg as well. I'm on Sherwin-Williams in the Denver area. That's where I, all my paint, I just come in there once a year with

take it even recycle the containers yeah seems like maybe we should work with staff to understand what the cost will be and then we can come back when we're in budget season and think about especially we have the natural resource manager on who would put it and where it fits into the budget so I think we could get data together to figure out can we make it happen this next year

Well, thanks again, y'all.

Yes, well done. Let's do it. We're just ahead of schedule today, aren't we?

Keep rolling. Thank you. Bye.

You've got a monster for us. It's kind of

strategic plan next

We just had a schedule for like half an hour, right?

Yeah.

It was an hour. Oh, geez. Item number three, overview and discussion regarding the Board of County Commissioners strategic priorities.

All right. In your packet, and I apologize that wasn't more timely, but I was scrambling to get it done. Commissioner Tharp came back and had some comments and items she wanted to add. I want to make sure they're all on the same page. And also, Peter came back last weekend and asked you to consider thinking about our comprehensive plan and some of the items that were identified there. And so this is an opportunity to come back if you guys want these changes implemented or you want other items added. Since Elsa's changes were handwritten, I typed up what she requested. I also typed in an area where we had a staff perspective of things that we were on board with, had some other additional thoughts for, etc. So we can have conversation and determine what do you want us to add to that document so that we can get it updated, bring it back next week, and get a bow on this thing. I really want okay to solidify for staff these these are the priorities commissioners came back to us with because we want them to focus their budget decisions on them so when we're making budget decisions we want to be asking are these in alignment with things commissioners are asking us to work on and are these in alignment with you know the priorities that have been set for us so we don't have expensive here instead of being purchased sitting doing nothing for us we want to be intentional that what we're doing supports where you guys want us to be working towards okay thanks yes i read through both items you want to just go through elsa's changes and talk about each one individually that would be great i'm going to open the packet really fast for myself so i know what i'm looking at we'll go through one through six and just kind of give direction on each one pull open the packet would be great And then I put the original in there just if you want a reference. It's a PDF so you can just look. So I PDF them so they don't get all weird. All right, the first request we had was to change nonprofit to grant. Staff had a slightly different perspective. DOLA provided this language, and I think I get the sentiment of why they did. I think the concept is that historically, Lake County government has given out funding, and this doesn't even have to do with nonprofits in particular, has given out money to entities who are partnering with without a clear deliverable and making sure that the funding given away, given out, is actually leading towards clear deliverable outcomes that are what the money was given for in the first place. And so happy to change this whole sentence if we want to. But in particular, when we do pass money on to nonprofits or groups that we're partnering with, even if they're contractors, it's why we have RFP and a scope of work, right? And I know that our nonprofit partners provide a lot of support to us. And when we are giving out funding, we really want to be intentional to say, hey, here's what it's for. show us where we're receiving those deliverables, whether it's a local partner, not a local partner, regardless. So happy to consider other language. But it was something DOLA really has flagged for us. And having gone through two prior audits, we do have a lot of funding that we haven't had really clear deliverables for or agreements in place. And I can't explain why. you know, especially with COVID funding, like large swaths of money have left us to go to other people and that, you know, that's just not transparent or accountable. So if we want to do this some other way, totally fine with that. But I do think holding, I think even if it's not nonprofits, even if it's just like partners of any sort, we should be having a scope of work and accountability for it. So if we want to say, not non-profits, I just think our biggest gaps historically have been with some of the non-profit partners not having those agreements, and I think that's just an evolution of what professionalism in the county is.

I don't think it's a dog whistle. In this community, we hear non-profit and think that everybody's doing bad, and so I don't want to call out non-profits as though that is one of the linchpins of our own. Funding and accountability. So whether we say grant, stewardship, whether we say contractor. Couldn't we say partners?

Couldn't we just say all of it? Partners is fine. Non-profits, partners, grants, like just put them all in there. So we really, I mean, it's, you know, county funds. We want to be responsible with every dollar we send to everybody.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, perfect. What's a dog whistle?

She doesn't want to point at somebody and make them the picking point.

Exactly.

I think that there's this impression in the community, some in the community, that nonprofits are the problem. And I don't think that it's fair of us as a government entity who partners with a lot of nonprofits to allow for that dog whistle to continue.

Do you think DOLA was using it?

No, I'm saying that...

I mean, if nonprofits are the problem, or a problem, then shouldn't you call them out? Whether it's coded or something? Sorry.

I don't think that DOLA... I think I was trying to localize the language. Where DOLA might say, oh, nonprofit funding accountability, this isn't a problem. But it's actually our partner funding accountability. The issue is, like, what is our internal process that we are trying to change? And we are not responsible for nonprofit funding accountability. We are responsible for anybody that we partner with to make sure that our funding accountability is intact.

Well, if we give them money for that, certainly they're responsible for us. Totally. Yeah.

We give lots of people funding that was passed through.

We want to hold nonprofits accountable, but we also want to hold any partners accountable.

So I think instead of just keeping... Who else can we name as partners besides the nonprofit?

We have contractors, and I think that's where the gap has been for DOLA. When we have contractors, we have a contract with them. When we have given funding to nonprofits, we really haven't ever had a contract or an MOU or an agreement with them. And that's where we really should do that because it holds them accountable, it holds us accountable when we're passing funds through. And of course we do like our donations every year, but that's why we've asked people to come back and present to you all if they've gotten a donation, what have they done with that? And we're doing that in October.

We want to hold nonprofits to the same standards that we hold any of our partners. work with or get funding to without just throwing them under the bus as a specific problem. So by adding more categories to this in naming nonprofits, partners, and grants, I think it adds accountability to all of them without singling anyone out.

And there's lots of different nonprofits. So I think that it's important to say if there are certain nonprofits we've got an issue with, we should look at those specific partners. If you lump all of them together, it perpetuates this idea that any non-profit is a problem. And I don't think that's it.

So we'll replace non-profit with non-profit grants and partners? Moving on, priority number two, fiscal stability and financial resilience.

Yeah, so Commissioner Elsa came and chatted with Josh and I, and also Matt Hobbs has flagged us multiple times. We've got some outdated codes, and so one of the items, one of the tasks, if you will, under priority number one, We would look at adding is a code audit overhaul focused on affordability be added to this section, and so what we as staff think this fits under number four, the service and departmental alignment. There are a couple other bullets where it could be checked in there with it, but if you're really thinking about what are we trying to accomplish as a staff to work on. What we would like is to get a sense from you all of what affordability means. Does that mean what does it cost for someone to build a new house here? Is that affordable housing? Are those development costs? Are we in economic development? So we can work on crafting language. We provided a bullet point but also want to get a sense for if this is what we would be trying to say, if we're all comfortable with adding it, and just get a little bit of direction from you all regarding the addition of that item.

This came from that, remember that workshop we were in, Matt, at CCI, where they were talking about the housing affordability audit that the Denver Metro area had done with the Contractors Association, and we talked briefly about how HPC is one of those major obstacles. And it seemed to also, to Peter Dave's point, fit in with one of the Complan values and tasks, where it's like, this wouldn't just be us. This would be the city. And even if we couldn't accomplish it, how could we start the conversation about doing it together? So I appreciate wherever it could go. I don't really care where it goes. I trust staff about where it could go. But it just seems like one of those tasks that we could be starting with the city.

And specifically, the affordability aspect. Thanks for that, because I needed this one flagged, but I need some elaboration, because requested that a code audit overhaul sounded like a big lift.

It will be a big lift, but it needs to occur. It's going to happen anyway. The staff has talked about it being really necessary. And my flag was, can we make sure that part of that code overhaul is filtered through the lens of affordability in our housing market.

Affordability in the housing market.

Yeah. Accessibility in the housing market. Because this panel that we went to talked a lot about how there's plenty of state regulations that get in the way when it comes to code. And processes, but you can that we as Commissioners can start at the local level through our own code. and other entities like the HPC.

So it looks like the suggested bullet language for the task just adds efficiency and portability as opposed to.

just affordability yeah because efficiency also equals affordability move it to number four as opposed to yeah I think it was just written in could it go here and I think we thought about it for a while after we looked at it more like hey we think maybe that service and the departments you know getting aligned made a little more sense to us but we could put it somewhere different if there's a different feeling a code audit are you talking about building codes or And that's what we defined at the bottom there.

And maybe Matt, it would be helpful to provide some context, just the challenges that you run into in terms of, I guess we're going through enforcement reference with CPD, just to give a little context there.

You know, I think the biggest thing is the base of your code, the land development code, was adopted in 1999. And these codes are meant to be updated over time. know when you have 20 plus years of updates it becomes really hard to have a comprehensive code that sort of speaks to all the different sections without really at some point taking a step back and saying okay is this really working um it's come up you know came up recently with uh temporary use permits we really have that's really outdated which is in this community, as we know, is a huge thing with temporary use permits. But there's probably a couple paragraphs on temporary use permits that talks about carnivals and demolition derbies and fairs. All great ideas. Who doesn't like a good demolition derby? I mean, that's why we have more beat up cars sitting in people's yards around here. So, yeah, I think that's the main thing, but it's just, you know, there's a lot of structural stuff I've identified with sort of, yeah, just not talking to each other, just the procedures not really aligning in terms of either how they're being done, you know, by passing things from the Planning Commission to the Board of County Commissioners. Yeah. Yeah, and I think just a general step back, not saying, I don't think throwing the baby up in the bathwater is a good idea when adopting these codes. And Tupi County had kind of a disaster with how they implemented their land development code where they had a three-year moratorium. And the outgoing county commissioners were like, oh, let's just get this done. And they passed it. And now they're dealing with a bunch of backlash. So they essentially threw out their entire code and brought it .

So how long does that take?

It's a big lift, yeah, and usually you work with, you know, a third party, because just expecting staff to do that, it would consume the entire department for the better part of the year, so usually there's, you know, there's third parties that help with that, so there's certainly a cost to that, yeah.

yeah when is it is coming from staff it's gonna have to be done eventually anyway and so I just wanted to make sure that when we do it we don't lose the opportunity to look at that filter okay I just want to include the idea that it aligns with the comp plan and it does by increasing efficiency and affordability which is the suggested bullet language and then the the initial request are you okay with the suggested bullet language is that okay i was just making a note after our whole conversation we had like an hour-long conversation about it and they were like yeah put it somewhere in the strategic plan and so i was like can i go here this conversation

my sentence referred to the whole conversation that we had yeah okay this is not like hey i want this language that staff came up with that yeah yeah i'm all for these by the way there's a bill in washington now that addresses the land use and construction it's been there it is uh senate passes bipartisan housing bill so that targeting large investors. Yeah, I saw that. And also to help with some of these issues to help streamline the process and cut through some of the red tape that states like ours have implemented. It's so expensive. It's got to get through the house.

I mean, the City of Austin is a good case study, too. They really revamped their land development code and it's driven down the cost of housing in Austin.

Cool. Well, it's nice that there's other communities leading the charge that we can kind of pick some stuff from or I guess encourage our contractor to you know this is what we like that we've seen other communities do can we model something off of this that fits this this community as far as and it's great to get this added now we started budget meetings yesterday yeah I mean all my apartments are first so no one else had to sprint to be ready um

But this is the sort of thing we want to make sure, as we're working with CBD, that we think we need a contractor to do it. We're getting a clear idea of a quote and including it. Because these priorities matter, especially when we need to budget times. We tell directors, this is what we've got to be aligning with. When we ask for things, we have to ask ourselves, does this align with where we're trying to head right now? Yeah.

And Dolla has historically had a lot of crap.

Fingers crossed, all the time.

Well, we're done with the one community project and all the adoption of the new code, so let's get another big project teed up. Hey, deferred maintenance.

It's the biggest project of them all.

Yeah, it's not just bricks and roads. Okay.

Number three? Yep, we're just changing some language or there's a request to change language um to indicate that it's not imminent that the mine is going to close um staff i think we included some suggestive language below i guess to me whether we add that item or or not we know the mine will close someday right it will they all close at some point and it's such a big part of our Our budget, we just want to make sure that if we change, if you guys want to change that, great. If we don't, I think we just want to understand that Climax does play such a big role in our revenue base that we should not let it fall off of our radar to have an other plan, whether that's other economic development opportunities. This is more like from a county internal budget lens. So we are just flagging for you all that we're going to change that if we feel good about that.

I think, is there a way to wordsmith that to basically say we want to get ourselves off of Climax revenue for operational expenses? Because I think we'd all agree that Climax revenue shouldn't be treated as something we need to keep the engine running. It's more of like for performance parts.

Right now you can't. I know.

That's a good goal. add that as like the goal under the yeah it's like you know like like climax revenue would be great to just know it's there for capital projects yeah when it's there but we don't need it but if you know if we could get to a point where just our day-to-day operations didn't rely on climax revenue that's like off the aspirations but i have great hopes we could get there with enough work and enough efficiency and enough

I think I changed this specifically for PR reasons. That's the only reason why I added that. Obviously I'm fully on board with our mind closure plan, internal forecasting and potential proofing. I only wanted to add the potential and hypothetical language for PR reasons so that Which, Andy, I've heard you bring up many times.

Yeah.

So that's the only reason why I tossed it in there. It did not change my commitment or it did not change this entire section in any way except for PR.

So that's why I put it in there. Yeah, I would really appreciate it if we could not be putting the

close you know I mean that's not up to us it's not our yeah you guys heard Sarah and I don't I agree Andy though like it would be great to get to that point but I think that we have to start the bigger conversations first to know when we would be ready to actually move towards that goal it's like far far down the road that's a big lift yeah yeah do you think it would at a minimum

be helpful to start to identify how much is it contributing to our overall budget and start to think about what wouldn't get to happen if we didn't have it. So we can think about it. And part of this plan is to look at new revenue streams and start to think about, OK, well, what wouldn't we fund if we did lose that? So we can think about, OK, how should we be funding those items? Yeah, we can't just rip that band off.

Not yet.

Not yet. So new. All right. Sandra, can that be opened again? Oh, awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I get that.

Sandra, shut up.

So also wanted to add commissioners to the following task, evaluate options for revenue diversification and include growth strategies. had some conversations with Dolla before we created this document and really the lead should be staffed for lead items. So we recommend that lead stays, the county staff remain the lead, but that the direction and policy guidance for those items should be provided by you guys. We should be coming into a work session with, here are ideas we, or not ideas, here are the incentives for diversification, identify growth strategies, and I mean, usually you have someone do an audit of that for you, who usually isn't your staff, but I mean, I think staff can have some input too. Conduct financial analysis, develop recommendations, and then come back to say, hey, here's the digging we did, and then you guys set budgets that would allow for those things to happen. And then any policy guidance that would be needed to get those items moved forward. And so I think this is just like kind of staying in line with our governance. Like staff does work, brings items. You guys give us direction based on, you know, what you guys glean from that or other thoughts that you have.

So the reason I wanted to add commissioners is because of our role outside of this county. to advocacy on any of the other places that we're splitting. So whether that's going to the state legislature, with CCAT, with UCOG, IMTPR, et cetera, those are the places where we're representing the county and where we can have these larger policy roles in trying to help this happen. Because there's only so much that we can do as a county with the levers that are allowed to us, and it seemed like an appropriate place to me to add an actual task for the OCC to make sure that we're pulling our weight with this as well. I hear what you're saying, Candace. I think it's really important for us to know that we're not just passively sitting up here in terms of policy. We have our role, and I think that in the entire strategic plan, this was the place where we can actually do something, but if it's not

Can I just add an extra item that is related to policy guidance and how you can be engaged? Because I do think that is important and it would be really awesome to have you guys commit to show up in the places where you can make it easier for staff to actually be able to do their job and that policy piece is part of it. So could we add an extra bullet? I don't have the language off the top of my head right now that really is like where you guys can be engaging you know, to do that, not just for revenue, but for other items that you guys could be advocating for us on the policy front. I'd love for you guys to have a bullet that is like you own making it from a policy perspective easier for us and advocating so our jobs aren't just so hard. It would be great. Thoughts?

You lost me there.

Can you just simplify that a little bit? Where you guys can show up and really, you know, make a difference for us is showing up to CCI, being engaged in policy discussions, advocating for us at IMTPR. UCOG. Yeah, UCOG, when, you know, we've a million times asked about where are WIC dollars going, but you get to be a part of that board and really drive home, no, we actually have to know where the dollars are going. I would love to just have a bullet point wherever it makes the most sense that is like how you guys can be going out there on a policy level and advocating and helping these things be easier for us to do.

Maybe that's what Elsa had in mind and was confused with revenue growth and diversification strategies. Those are two different things.

I mean, I was trying to shoehorn it in to wherever there already was a bullet point. Yeah. But yes, that sentiment to put it in its own bullet point is fine. I just wanted to make sure we knew that like that is our task and yeah.

Could you guys just give me a hypothetical example of how this would be put in practice? Like, does this have something to do with like us having a comps person who could be like, okay, like here's what you want to accomplish with UCOG. as far as understanding where our work dollars go or making sure that the kitchen at the senior center is accessible to our own staff, like here's how you would frame this to ask that board. Because those are things that sometimes, or is this more like bigger picture, like we need to present a unified front to a couple different groups like CCAT and CCI to try and get a piece, legislation like I'm kind of all of it and that's why I suggested a separate bullet that kind of outlines where as commissioners you guys can be showing up and advocating from a policy change level yeah so basically getting help from staff to be like here's how you want to here's a suggested way to pose these questions to this group

Think if you hear stuff saying like we're having trouble with you a cog and trying to get our wick money back you think in your head awesome I need to follow up with staff see what you typically to they're talking about so I feel scared when I go to you a cog and then follow back up with staff and say I did this it didn't work. Let's find out a new strategy.

You made inappropriate jokes and laughed at me.

Yeah, totally.

I guess, can I just offer a little counterpoint to this discussion, just for consideration? Sure, yeah. So we have adopted a governance policy for the county, right? Which sort of lays out this as the overall strategic priority for the board is to advocate for policy, is to set policy, is to set a budget.

Yeah.

And this document does really get down kind of more at the task level. So I guess I'm maybe saying we've already accomplished what you're saying could be its own task. Like to me, if we were going to add something for the board to do in this strategic priorities document, it would be advocate for specific policy X at the state level. And I think that takes probably another much bigger discussion than just say, like, Because I think we already captured what you're trying to say in the governance policy specifically. I guess the way I view this is that the fact that this is a VOCC commissioner priorities for the year, I see those initials next to every single one of these tasks. Because we've already kind of identified that the amount of work that exists inside this document is a lot. There's going to be times throughout the course of this where we'll come back to you for guidance and say, okay, we've got two or three things that we can get done with the revenue that we have, with the budget that we have. Here's where we need your policy guidance. And so you may be weighing in on everything, not just this particular task. I would say just to give a little more specificity and like focus over the course of the next year or two if you do want to put something like that in then let's have a bigger discussion about what is the specific like what policy are you going to be advocating for or which groups have we identified as priorities for the focus area because otherwise I just think we might get lost and it's already covered.

That's a good point and you don't want a single commissioner taking a flyer

well i i get what you're saying josh and i think that it's like it's fair but it's also a little academic like this is also kind of like a it's a communication not only to our staff but to the rest of the county what we're working on so if you don't see commissioners anywhere that doesn't look good and so people don't necessarily understand that like oh we have this separate document the governance document that implies that we're next to everything and that we are the policy decision makers. So my inclination would be to put us somewhere, whether that's under a specific policy or because this is kind of like fledgling. We could have kind of that generic duplication where it's like, hey, we're just kind of getting used to our advocacy. Our policy advocacy is everywhere. Or we could take a lot of time to determine where we want to see specific policy advocacy. And I don't think there's a wrong way to go, I guess is what I'm saying. But if we think about the audience of this, in my mind it makes sense to have our name somewhere.

Yeah, and that's perfect. I'm actually just pulling up the plan itself to see if that is captured anywhere in the language about what this tool is.

Right. It's supposed to be guiding us as well as staff.

Yes, there's a little language that speaks to that here.

And maybe we can update it in that top section that was about this.

Just clarify that the BOCC is like setting the priorities. Yeah, setting the priorities.

And this is what staff are working on towards those priorities. Yeah, and we can have a separate, I mean, I know this sounds like too much, and I agree. the BOCC could have its own separate priorities when it comes to policy advocacy. Not only inside of the organization, but what is our policy advocacy priority outside? And that doesn't necessarily have to be enumerated in this document. It should last longer than this board, right? Well, we should update this. For sure, for sure, but I just think that it will, some of these are very long-term. You're not gonna get it all done. Sorry, team, you're not.

Please don't get this all done.

If this isn't worth talking about, that's fine. I don't think the document is wrong without this. I just wanted to bring up the point that we're not here.

Well, we're talking about it, so. Yeah. I think it's worth talking about. It just seems like we're talking about a couple different things. If we go back to fiscal stability and financial resilience, evaluate options for revenue, diversification. You know what I'm saying? If we get back, we veered way off into all kinds of stuff. So we can just get back to the actual language of what Elsa wanted to add and see if we want to add that or not. And I agree with the staff perspective on that we shouldn't be looking for revenue diversification or growth strategies, for instance, I don't know I can't I think that's adam's job. People to work on.

So that's already in this is already in the strategic i'm not suggesting that this go in i'm suggesting that Commissioners go next to under. who is responsible for it under the lead that we can add it to because right now it's cmc i mean obviously we're going to evaluate options for revenue diversification if any decisions come our way

It's like we don't want to micromanage these aspects, but we also want to get the point across that these are things that we are going to steer at a level that works with you guys and makes sense with what you bring to us. And then we are like, well, this doesn't align with the board's vision. This does. So I guess just what we're trying to do is this as far as like a forward-facing PR piece, we want to let people know that it's not just staff that's looking for this. It's a collaborative effort between staff and BFCC. But I don't want to be telling Michael Irwin or the rec department which grants they should be going after or how to make more money at the landfill. They know that stuff better than me. So it's trying to draw a line between or make it clear from the community outreach angle where our roles are and where our roles are and where they stop, where you guys start.

I get that you don't want to add the OCC to this document. That makes sense. I was just thinking if we were going to go in anywhere, this would be the place because options for revenue diversification does have very specific advocacy to the legislature to create revenue diversification avenues. And that is something that staff can do, but only at the behest of VOCC, and that's actually where we have the most action as VOCC members.

Well, isn't this a list of our, this is in the document, and the document is, yeah I know, I'm just, since this is in the document, the document represents our priorities.

You're basically just saying commissioners shall evaluate or should take the lead?

No, in the third column, it says CMO Ted, all documents. I wrote comma VOCC to suggest that this is where we have a very clear role.

I'm OK with that. I'm not OK with this. It says we take the lead on that stuff, which is what it says here in my document.

we should be evaluating options for diversification including growth strategies so i i think the way that this document works because it's a dola document and they do this with a lot of counties is commissioners set the overall priority and the things that they'd like to see come out of those priorities and then staff takes direction from commissioners and operationalize it operationalizes it and that's what our direction from Delaware was is set timelines for staff and assign staff leads so someone owns making sure it comes back to commissioners to get done and that's where we just assigned the staff leads to make sure we are doing we need to do a study to understand like where are we not I mean when I think about our recreation department we have never It's not statutory. And we have never run our Parks and Rec department like it should be funding itself. And it should be. And that's where it's like staff should do the work of here are ideas we have for how we can diversify revenues in this department, bring it back to you all and get direction on this.

Yes. Like this whole document encompasses things that the BOCC wants to be involved and when the time appropriate situations take lead or give direction. It would be weird to see BOCC in just one of these and absent from everything else when really our fingerprints are on a lot more. I feel like this...

Which is fine. It just felt passive and I think that we have a critical role in that, in particular this year. So it's okay. I'm fine not putting it in. I see the complication that it's having.

Even just talking about it's complicated, I agree with the staff perspective. We're going to be involved. We shouldn't be leading that. We shouldn't be leading those things. We establish priorities and policy direction, and then we make the decisions and the evaluations. Going to the state and advocating for policy is different.

What this is trying to say.

Right, totally fine.

kind of where Candace was going with the task related to policy advocacy, or maybe we just need to define in this how to use this document section just clearly that the BOCC has identified these as priorities for the county and will be responsible for the oversight of everything within. Yeah. And it's overarching. We'll just clarify that in this third paragraph.

That's what I was thinking is because then it covers every task, which really The whole goal is to align budgets so when they come to you guys and staff has work lined out, the work that's lined up for them is funded. And we should be checking in at the end of each budget year to say, we're not perfect, we're not gonna finish every task, but we should know what kind of progress we've made towards a lot of these. Or if we had to wait for a funding reason, that they're on the horizon for the next time we review this and say, okay, where are we at? What are we still working on? What else do we have?

Great, thanks for hashing that one out, thinking it through, because in my notes for number five, all I had was the word next. I'm like, what did I, I guess I was confused too.

Okay, let's move on to service and department alignment.

I added this so we could check something off. That's what I wanted to do. And because it wasn't clear if we were actually going to move in this direction at the time that I wrote the feedback. So I just seemed like it was worth putting in there.

So we have a check for it.

So we could check it off. Yep.

Not only are we going to have a comms person who's not us tag teaming at nighttime. Yep. but they will actually be able to be strategic in our office. Are we cool to add this? Yeah.

Is there anybody queued up, or prospects, or job description?

Well, you have to approve the supplemental request first, and then we can actually post the position. So that will be in Q2 supplementals with the goal to have a really clear job description, what we want that person to be accomplishing, and then probably Q3, because it takes a little bit to do .

Okay. All right. Making some progress here. Is this in Canada? Public health, safety, and well-being under insights.

So this isn't a task. This is under the bullet points? Yeah. If you look under the section.

So each priority has a first page and it kind of says insights about the section that you're about to look at the task on the next page.

We had that work session on violence reduction and harm reduction. And here, since we went over our strategic plan and I thought it was worthwhile putting in an acknowledgement that part of saving the county money and diversifying revenue includes making sure that we're investing in upstream prevention, if we can, if where we can, so that it costs us less to provide some of those services.

And that's in number five? Like, this is bullet item six, but that's in priority number five?

Yeah.

The only sticking point for me is that painting it all in the same colored brush. Not every situation will be the same. How do you get this point across, but not in a one-size-fits-all approach? We heard compelling evidence about how this would affect the DV subject, but it doesn't. I have difficulty imagining it's the same across every... I mean, I get that violence prevention is about the pound of cure, but how does that apply to every single subject in number five? The same.

I mean, we heard from Heath, Laura, and Kelsey also saying, hey, so not all... About violence prevention. Yeah, not specifically domestic violence prevention, but They said that prevention, period, helps keep people from needing the services that they provide, and the services that they provide can be very expensive. That's what Heath, Laura, and Kelsey all said. So I was trying to make sure that we were covering that, what we had learned in that meeting from our staff and our elected official about violence prevention, or about prevention. not specifically about domestic violence, but that sometimes statutory services, some statutory services that a county is required to provide can be very expensive, where a community, whether it's a county or not, can invest in preventative services to keep people from needing some of the statutory services that cost taxpayers a lot of money. I was trying to make sure that we were building Because I think that's an important fiscal consideration.

Where it makes sense is, I guess, what I want to add. It's investing in tick bite prevention or feral beaver control. There's too many things where committing strategically or prioritization of funding to such a broad topic could, I don't know, maybe I'm over complicating it. So if I am, I apologize, but it feels like it's a pretty broad subject to have. In my notes, I have no one size fits all approach, no way to say all preventative funding pays off. And this correlates with priority with priority change one, It's case-by-case scenario assessment, I guess, was what I was kind of leaning on for this.

My notes are a little short.

So one of the things you said is how do we know that what we invested in has the outcome, like the prevention piece? And that's why, under the staff perspective, I said this is where, you know, like the state uses prevention partners, that are, some are non-profits, some are hospitals, some are whatever, and that's just where whatever the outcome is we're hoping to get or whatever load we're taking off the staff, that's where it'd be really great to use those external partners who are going to cost us less than an FTE with benefits but could provide a service that we can't provide without another FTE, that's where we should have really good MOUs and agreements for those partners. And I think Gloria and Kelsey, I wasn't here for that work session, but I think Gloria and Kelsey, that's what they were trying to say, is sometimes we've got a handful of grants that they're working with other community partners on where public health is going to be providing services they already provide. right but they aren't going to be operationalizing it they're just going to be a piece of this bigger part and they'll have probably an MOU that comes before you about what they'll provide and this is just saying where it would be really expensive for us as a county to fully cover housing people who are unhoused we have community partners that work to do that and that's where we should have an agreement you know that they are going to be providing that service where we don't have tons of housing to put up people who are housed.

Right. But we're not statutorily obligated to house unhoused people.

I mean, just, you know... No, but DHS sometimes, if they're children, will have to figure out what to do with them, and those are where we have those requirements. I think that's what she's saying by adding this is we're going to be covering part of it either way, but if they were never in-house in the first place, they may never become a DHS playmate.

Yeah, and Kelsey and Laura and Heath were all, I don't know, I feel like they weren't yelling at us, but they were very, I thought they were very moving. that it was really important for us to understand that. So if there's a different way to write that, totally get it. And that's why I put it under insights is because it was like the way for us to make sure that we're looking at all the tasks underneath this to make sure that we're also acknowledged that we see that just because something's statutory doesn't mean that we don't try to save money by keeping people from needing those statutory and the obligations that we have to take care of our people.

I agree with both. I agree with Elsa's comments and I agree with Stafford's comments. So it's done smartly and that fits into what we talked about earlier with the nonprofits and the grants, reporting and accountability when it comes to with their tax dollars, so I'm cool with that.

The key difference in the wording, I guess, is the concept of effective prevention as opposed to just investing in prevention and prevention partners.

Can save. Yeah. We could also say some statutory services are expensive to make sure.

I can't think of any cheap statutory services, but yeah.

All right, I'll make the changes, put it in the packet, we'll adopt this thing. Thank you, team.

Thank you. Appreciate that. That is a lot of work. I don't know what you guys are going to do next year.

At the end of the year, we'll be like, okay, we got to this, not that, not that, not that. Oh, look, we got that done. Okay, next year, we'll just...

They're really good jobs.

Just putting that dog in the video is a lot of work. We can't take credit because Dola helped.

No, you guys did a lot of work. Of course Dola did, but you all did an amazing job. I'm sure of her. Thank you.

Yeah, they gave us the frame. You guys put the drive train and the wheels on it.

That was the most important thing.

All right, so I'll step out and do some jumping jacks. When does that last? 23 minutes.

2.30. So is there no linkage between the comprehensive plan and this plan?

There is with the overhaul of our... um land development codes to be more efficient and allow for more affordability which is a lot of what the comprehensive plan is overhauling that lets us actually accomplish other i mean there's you know the comprehensive plan is much much more than the land development decisions he talks about you know getting snow off the sidewalks and and you know it seemed to me that

maybe in the letter from the commissioners. Well, I'm paraphrasing. The sentiment is that the comprehensive plan will help to guide everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it just seems that this plan is the first instance. I mean, the new comprehensive plan hasn't been approved yet. But it just seems like, at what point do the commissioners then you know, go with what the public wants in the Comprehensive Plan and incorporate it into strategies for the next year. And it just seems, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, it just seems like the Comprehensive Plan should be mentioned in this, even in a sentence, just saying.

Well, right at the top it said strategic priorities to be determined. I mean, I thought that's where the Comprehensive Plan would get plugged in. Am I wrong about that?

at the top of the original document there was some to be determined language those are um culture mission vision and core values that staff will be working on so that's what's to be determined I mean we can mention the comprehensive plan in here I also think this is a very 2027 document and I think it'd be mentioning a lot more of the items in the comprehensive plan if we had a lot of these foundational things that normal counties already have put together aligned.

My impression is that the city has their own strategic plan as well that is not the comp plan. And we have not had our own internal strategic plan. And then the comp plan is like our third dovetail that has so many tasks within it, some of which are shared and some of which housed under each one, right? It's a really good point that we're not mentioning the comp plan at all in here. I think that's perfectly reasonable that we should pause and talk about that. But in general, I also think that it's important to have fully unique strategic plans outside of a comp plan.

Oh, I agree completely. And this plan is really great for helping government to make government work better. I guess my only point is, You know, where is the piece where, you know, the community is going to be helped? What are the commissioner's priorities for, I mean, like, what was it, last summer some kids came, some, you know, preteens and talked about, you know, a roof over the hockey rink. You know, that kind of stuff. Is there anything that the commissioners want to, you know, want to pull out of the comprehensive plan to then put in the strategic plan?

It might just be a matter of perspective here because I'm seeing overlap with goals in the comp plan and with this. You know, certainly maintain and modernize critical infrastructure system. I mean, that is also mentioned and touched on in the comp plan. And that's just the first one that, you know, that half a scroll. I know there's definitely more across this and it The wording is it's not going to mimic it word for word, and I guess where the line is drawn for me is that the the COMP plan is more of like. The county's roadmap, this is a roadmap for the Commissioners to implement things that are going to get the county to a place where we can. follow the roadmap that's in the there they're separate to me, but they do there is overlap. So I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm just reading it different. Like I do see things that are our goals and this could also help steer the next board to say, okay, here's what the last guys were trying to get some stability and consistency across this eternally rotating table, which is kind of chaotic, you know? So, to to stabilize and reduce inconsistency i feel like aligns with parts of the comp plan the infrastructure pieces the efficiency the the operational efficiency pieces mobility accessibility safety um i don't know i i i see what you're saying but i don't know if they should be such mirrors of each other because then i feel like i'm not suggesting that at all i'm only suggesting

that you've mentioned the comprehensive plan, you know, somewhere in a sentence and, you know, in the very beginning, just to say that, you know, we acknowledge the comprehensive plan and, you know, we'll work, you know.

Yeah.

In conjunction with.

Yeah, yeah, just not ignore it, I guess.

Well, those are, those are like internal. So maybe it'd be helpful if I read this from Dolan. comprehensive plan provides the policy framework for regulatory tools like zoning subdivision regulations annexation and other policies gotcha so the goal of the comprehensive plan is a little bit different than the goal of a strategic plan and i think they're they're guiding two different sets of items and i think that's why planning departments are tasked with the comprehensive plan is because it's going to decide, you know, what will you allow in terms of development in the future.

I understand 100%. But our comprehensive plan is, you know, much, much wider.

Yeah, it's very non-traditional.

It's kind of a wish list of everything. What are there, 130 strategies or something like that?

I have not counted.

I think there's something like that. You know, so how to, you know, how do all the things that the community wants, you know, get, you know, get considered.

Yeah. And this is yearly, and the comp plan's much longer, right?

Yeah. Well, and I guess it's important to note, too, that coming out of the comp plan, once that, there is a matter of sequencing here, right? This is getting adopted before our comp plan is adopted, maybe depending on when we get this back on the schedule, but I think including language and referring that we know that that is that has been developed through the community i also think there's an action plan that's been developed as part of the comprehensive plan that's coming back to both elected bodies and so there are some there'll be some very specific early like action tasks for elected officials um and leadership of the city and county but then i also think where i think where Like your suggestion is, Pete, is that we, for the 2027 iteration and update of the strategic plan, we'll be able to pull things from very targeted things. We won't maybe have the capital asset plan completely finished, but we'll be well on the way at that point to start making some infrastructure decisions, I think, at this table, where we want to devote resources and where that aligns with what the community has said related to infrastructure.

That sounds great. My only perception from reading the strategic plan is that the comprehensive plan wasn't even mentioned. It doesn't exist. All the work that got into this over the last year and a half really has no bearing on anything. So just what you said, if you say that the comprehensive plan is post-finalization, those values will be considered in future iterations of the strategic plan.

No, it's an important view. We're looking at the map and you're like our Google Street View sometimes.

Do you want us to add that at the beginning somewhere? Tie it to the...

I don't have a word. Some kind of in conjunction with or where, identify, alignment.

Yeah, potentially right here in this statement of intention section, like The end of this first paragraph would be a good reference, I think, concurrent to the development of these strategic priorities for the comprehensive planning process in the One Community Project.

I think referring to the One Community Project helps a lot, because that's the whole of what we've done, whereas the comp plan is this very specific document. So maybe referring to the one community project would be more valuable.

Yeah, but that disappears.

The comprehensive plan is... Yeah, the comprehensive plan is the rock there. The group that tells the process, I think, is not... The comp plan is the comp plan.

I don't know what that is. Sorry, it's not... Community Builders is the group that... The one community project is what we all did together.

Yeah, the project was the process of developing our comp plan. I feel like the comp plan is more concrete.

Okay, thanks, Pete. We'll consider that. Thanks for keeping an eye on us. Can we have a break? Yeah, we're going to take a little break. You guys will be here for the next item. We've been in here all day. We're just going to take a little break and be back at 2.30 on the nose. On our work session agenda is an overview and discussion regarding public use, county liability, maintenance options, and community support strategies regarding Harrison Field. Thank you all for coming. Who is going to lead this one?

Are we going to say something first? I can kick us off.

Why don't you?

Um, so recently we had, um, one of our, um, recreational baseball teams, uh, that's hosted by Lake County government. So it's our programming. Um, and we had some concerned parents reach out about, um, the safety of kids. Um, and we were made aware that our programming. the practices were happening on Harrison Field, and Harrison Field hasn't been maintained by the county for quite some time. So the request was made that county programming for baseball not be held on a field that we know we haven't been maintaining, and the request was made to please practice on other fields. And then we've gotten we had made that request and that request i don't know if it's been honored or not honored but when that request was made i think some communications by community on facebook really led to that request for county programming practices not to happen on that field really brought up some other some other issues that the community has with the field, some misconceptions about the thought of the field for use as a housing project, which I think prior commissioners had looked at, but is not something we're exploring at this time in any capacity. And so we had requests for the county to bring this issue up so that the community could have an opportunity to be heard and how they felt about the field. And so the coach that in question was Alex. And we invited them to attend today. at your request so they could communicate the issues that are there. Sorry, that's not the most eloquent intro.

Sorry, we were shooting by that because this one came up real fast and we wanted to get something on the books quick. And so usually your staff has more time to prepare and get statements, you know, rock solid. The intent here is that we'd like to see a way to make this work. is there anyone who doesn't understand why there could be liability for the county involved and that would like equal us dealing with lawsuits expensive for taxpayers why it's our job to look out for these kinds of things and make sure the county doesn't get sued for something is that unclear on anyone why we would not want to get sued the ball field belongs to west park right no the ball field is owned by the native to the neighborhood of west park back in the day so to their property their field I don't know if that would hold up in court. And in the event it does not, we'd need to insulate ourselves from liability.

There's a way...

Okay, for argument's sake, let's say somebody could sue us. If someone got hurt on the condominium field. Someone could, you know, like, if there's the possibility there. All we want to do is make sure that we're not going to get sued for not doing something properly. Well, any field you could be sued for. Correct. Yeah. Okay.

So it doesn't matter if it's Skyline or Lighter, Baker, or Harrison.

Would you agree that one that hasn't been maintained though could present more challenges? Well, why hasn't it been maintained?

Hold on a second. Can I just say something here? I want to keep this real cordial. We're all neighbors and And so I don't want to turn this into a big argument or people just talking. We're not here to argue with yet. We're here to help you, man. We want the kids to be able to play baseball. And so I can see you're angry at us. That field has been in disrepair for years. So I think the goal here is to try and find a path forward. And so I'm just going to ask that everyone just be cool and keep their cool and treat us as your neighbors.

I'm kind of in the wrong spot because, of course, we need the county. We need the county in order to keep the county used to always help us. We need the county, the parks and rec department to help us. I mean, and that's all of a sudden all our neighbors are going to get together and do it. But we've always had a working relationship with the county for as long as the last 20 years that I've been here.

Just a reminder, you guys are the county. When you say the county, you think that we're the county. I mean, we're all the county. So we're all friends and neighbors. We really have no interest in keeping that closed or locking it. Our interest is in protecting liability. And then I'll also add that in in years past, former commissioners and other people, you know, there was a, there was a plan that said there wasn't enough people that wanted to play baseball to support four or five baseball fields. And the plan that I read from 2022 was to start consolidating that. And then all of a sudden we hear that the coach can't get field time and stuff. So all this is new to us. Maybe we wouldn't be here right now if in the spring or in the winter someone would come and say, hey, man, can we get this thing up and running? So now we're in a situation where we're having to watch our backs liability-wise because there's bushes and apparently a homeless guy living in the dugout and all that stuff. So all we were asking for is a little bit of time to help straighten it out, and then it seems like Once we start getting yelled at and our staff starts getting yelled at them communication relationships start breaking apart and everyone digs in and and it's just human nature for us to dig in and say. And then it's close like hit us up next spring, so I think the goal here is to try and find a way forward with this doesn't burden us with with dropping everything that we're trying to do. and get the thing open. So I just, I want to reiterate, we're on, we're all, we're all the county and we're all on the same side and particularly on the side of the kids. So I think we should establish some boundaries here and some rules, like everyone not talk at once. And, and, uh, you know, if, if someone does make a point and, and you want to make the same point, maybe just say ditto or something like that. But, uh, I think One of the things we need to establish is what it would take to get the thing up and running. I think we need to update our liability waivers.

There's a couple of things.

One, we need to update the liability waivers. Two, I mean, Stewart, who's in charge of facilities, went and walked the property just to assess basically, you know, what it needs without, like, I mean, there's some paint out there that I'm sure we have to make sure lead's not in it. He did not do that over the course of time we've had. Also, I mean, it's really important to share that We are looking at all of the county's capital assets as part of a capital asset management plan to figure out what all can we maintain. None of us have been here for the last several decades in these seats. And there is a massive amount of deferred maintenance in every facility that we have. So this building you're sitting in is full of all kinds of treasures. There are a lot of items that we have and That's just one of the fields. We've got a skate park. We've got all kinds of items. And so for us, I know that part of it is also that we didn't allocate money for this field for this year. So then we have to go to a supplemental budget request to touch our savings to work on a field we didn't pay for this year. if we get a consensus from commissioners. So it's not so easy as just wake up and have a complaint from a citizen, and I go drop money on it the way county budgets work at the state. So we have to allocate money for a specific purpose. And if we want to take additional money outside of when the budget's adopted, we have to go back to DOLA with a supplemental, which these guys would have to consider. But I do want you all to know that we are looking at every asset that we have to figure out what does it need. And quite frankly, we probably can't maintain every single thing that we have as accounting units. That's why a lot of things aren't maintained. And so it is one of our biggest priorities to understand what is our roads? That's an asset. What all do we have? What all does it need? And then prioritize those items. And that's what commissioners have asked us to bring back Capital Asset Management Plan, which Dolla gave us a grant for, to have people assess what do we have, what does it need, and then asking ourselves, what are counties required to provide? Recreation is actually not a statutory requirement for counties, and very few counties actually provide recreational services. We do it because we know it's important and it's meaningful to the community, but we don't get additional funding from the state or anywhere else. And there are things like roads, public health services that we are statutorily required to provide that we don't get to opt out of. So there is a point where these guys have to say, okay, what all can we do? And so the intent of saying, hey, let's not use a field that we haven't maintained, we don't want to spend the money that we would spend having a child hurt, especially because it's our programming. If you want to use the park at your own risk, that's fine. But us hosting our activities there, it's us telling people they have to be there if they want to be a part of that sport. So I think those things are helpful to share. I also think, if Stuart, you don't mind, would you be able to share just a few of the things that you saw that we would need to work on, just so we can get an idea of scope? We didn't price anything out. It's only been a week. But I think that would be helpful for Stuart to share the items he saw.

Stuart is our facilities and maintenance manager.