County Council - Regular Meeting

I want to call this meeting of the Langster County Budget Workshop to order. I ask that the clerk note for the record that a quorum of council is present, that public notice of the meeting, including meeting agenda, has been posted, the requirement at the time in the lobby of the county administration building on the county website, and that the news media was notified at a meeting time and place. I welcome you to your county council uh budget workshop. Uh I would ask you take a moment, turn off, place on vibrate any cell phones or pagers. Thank you for not wearing any hats or caps. and council chambers and please be considerate of others in the room by refraining from conversations given this evening. Uh I ask that you please stand and join counsel for the pledge of allegiance followed by the invocation given uh yeah Bri given by Bryant Neil. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Let us pray. Our gracious heavenly father God, just thank you so much for this day. Thank you for this beautiful weather you've given us, God. Just thank you for each one that's here today and what they do for the county. God, as we start this budget process, just lead, guide, and direct us that we'll make the best decisions for the people of Lancaster County. And forgive us our sins. We ask it in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Okay. All right. Uh I have approval of the agenda. So moved. That is Mr. Charlene and uh

second got a second. So these all right everybody in favor of the agenda raise your hand unanimous. Okay. All right. We'll move on into our department departmental presentations and discussion items. Uh Mr. Willis.

Hi Mr. Chairman, members of council. Um, want to thank y'all for attending what is probably, you know, one of two of the most important meetings you're going to have this year because the budget is, you know, what we have to adopt every year. And as the old saying goes, you can tell me what your values are, but you show me your budget and I'll know what your values are. So, the budget's not only a financial, it's a valuesbased document as well. Um SC code 49640 states the administrator shall prepare the proposed operating and capital budgets and submit them to council. Few points to keep in mind. Administrator didn't do deadly squat. We've got a fantastic staff. Um certainly want to recognize Sabrina, Jamie, and Jaziah for their work as well as all the department heads. You're going to hear from them because they are the experts in determining what their needs are. Um, like I already mentioned, you'll be hearing from the department heads. And finally, the administrator can only recommend a budget. Council adopts a budget. Your input during this process is crucial so that we come close to having a final draft by the time we hit first reading. If you see something you like, tell us you like it. If you see something I don't like that, tell us you don't like it. So we first reading then you spend a bunch of time on something we could have already taken care of. Um want to thank the uh finance staff for the schedule they have because I was always a firm believer need to have a public hearing at second reading to give the citizens a chance to weigh in and y'all can consider anything the citizens may bring up. And you know some years we had no citizens comments some years you had a few. just it varies. Who knows what'll happen this year. Um but I always would like to make sure you have time to look at those. Couple of points. This is still a little

bit in flux. Um you know, just one example in staffing. Lester County Sheriff's Office is requesting 12 correctional officers. Is that going to be the final number? Beats the heck out of me. Department of Corrections hadn't told us yet. We may end up having to add more if we don't want to have a $90 million empty building. 12 may be sufficient. That's best information that we have and that's what we're going with right now. And finally, we're going to get impacted by material cost. Um just got an email from Jeff Kato the other day. Um, as of April the 1st, asphalt is going up, depending on what you know, their cost actually is $5 to $7 per ton. And of course, it's petroleum based and we all know what's been happening with the price of oil. So, not unexpected, but you know, there could be other things that come about because of the delay cost of diesel fuel for our suppliers and our vendors. We'll have to see, you know, how some of that's going to play out. Um, at this point, that's really about all I've got to say. Um, before we turn it over, um, to the finance team, uh, late great Ed McMahon used to say, and now here's Sabrina, Jamie, and Jaziah.

Mr. Chairman, can I ask you a question? Yes, sir. At this point in the budget process this year, is this these requests haven't been to you yet? Yes, sir. They've been they've been So you've already vetted. Okay. But I tend to be pretty liberal as you know. So yeah, I know that. You got a lot of experience with it. All right. Take a question. Got a balanced budget

at this point. We just we literally just got the uh population numbers and we just got the increase. Yeah. I I do not know. Um, at this point I would doubt it, but I don't think we've even gotten to the revenue yet, but I'll defer to Sabrina on that.

Yeah, just to jump us ahead a little bit, we have not gotten to the revenue discussion yet, but I will promise you when we present the administrator's recommended budget. It will be a balanced budget to include those um areas where we're recommending how to fund, you know, different options for how we might fund what's included in that recommendation. Okay. All right. So, um, if we want to go ahead and get started today, I'll just, uh, level set us on a few things. Um, we know that we're here to be able to, um, hear from the departments with their, um, budget requests for next fiscal year for fiscal year 2027. And so we have um um we've encouraged departments to as they're coming to present their budgets, you're going to hear from them um the services that they provide, highlighting um some of their key performance indicators, but to really focus on those things that are significant changes, especially around new requests for next fiscal year. um included in their budgets are also some things that departments don't have a hand in making changes to specifically ongoing services like software that um is already supporting um services across the organization. If there's an in an annual increase that's already been incorporated, you'll see that on some of their slides. They'll talk about that. Um also things like our utilities, telephones, um lease copier agreements. It has done a good job in estimating um what those projected costs will be for next year. So you'll see on some of those slides where for some departments those amounts might have gone down. You'll see where if the estimation has gone up, you'll see that increase on those slides as well. Um we have had an interdep departmental process where departments are asking for things like positions, new software, building maintenance, capital um investments, and we've um routed those through the departments that really need to be able to vet those appropriately. For example, if it's a personnel request, it's going to go to HR to make sure the position is priced right. It's measured against the market.

It's if it's something that's existing, it's measured against existing positions, folks that are actually in those positions to make sure that we can estimate the right amount that we would need to be able to appropriately recruit and hire and be able to retain someone in those positions. If it's a building request, it's gone through our building maintenance department to make sure we can get appropriate quoting um for whatever the request entails and that um again, we can price it right. If it's for software, it's gone through our IT department to make sure that not only that it's priced appropriately, but that it includes the right bundle to be able to support whatever the request is and also that our IT department can support it once it's um plugged into um however be it'll be used across the county. So, you'll see all of those things incorporated into those departmental requests. Um it'll also include any new one-time requests. Um and that um it covers those things that might previously be approved as a part of our um current capital improvement plan as well as any new requests that meet that same criteria. All right. So again, we've um asked departments to really focus on with the time that they have. Each department has about eight minutes. um the larger departments that cover um more of the county might have a little bit more time, but we want them to focus on what's significantly different and also leave time for you all to be able to ask any questions of them as well. All right. So, today we'll see about half of our departments. And so, um, at the very end of it, we are going to do a summary of the operating budget, kind of give you a snapshot of where we are and, um, look at some of those things that are factors that we need to be able to incorporate into, um, the, um, the budget for next year, um, especially around inflation and things that we know are changing. We'll summarize it for you, but just on today, you're only going to see half of the departments. We'll come back on the 15th to see the other half of the departments and then we'll resummarize again so you can kind of see the entire picture in you know

just kind of one snapshot or dashboard view to be able to help inform some of the decisions that you'll make. All right. So um if if there aren't any other questions um it looks like you have Yes, sir. Sorry just as an overall question and comment. So, I understand the issues with petroleum based um costs that are going up. The flip side of that is are we going to have a budget adjustment down when the costs go down?

No, but I'm saying if we're saying that we're looking at potential cost increases because of asphalt has gone up five to seven. But what I'm saying is when those things go up, we know that they're going to come back down. So, we need to keep that in mind to make sure that we're making those appropriate budget adjustments down then, too. Absolutely. Yeah. What we what we do as a part of the um budget development process is we're we're assessing that, but also asking departments to make sure they're only asking for what they're needing. And so, they're not coming year over year and just asking for the exact same thing. there's an assessment of the true need and the cost at the time to be able to build their budgets.

And that's why I'm saying like the cost at the time can fluctuate as well because we know that this is a temporary bump that's happening. It will eventually even out back again. So, and then the other thing is on inflation when we're talking about those costs, I'd like to understand exactly what is being caused by inflationary increases so that we can track that and make sure that it's consistent with what we're seeing across the market. Absolutely. We'll make sure to cover that during the operating portion. Yes, sir. All right. Are there any other questions? Okay. So, with that, I will invite up our first department. We have the Banwick Fire Services. We should have Chief Ruth and Mr. um David Basri.

Morning, Mr. Chair, member of council. Um this year, you know, our strategic uh priorities always public safety. Uh this year 2025, we ran roughly 400 calls. Um this year we we currently have one pay employee. We've asked for an increase in our fee, which y'all graciously gave us, so we can apply for our second person. Um this year, the increased cost of operations is due before the second person uh for their turnout, gear, radios, etc. And this year we've asked for money in our special projects for a outside building which we've ran out of room in our other building which houses our RTV and trailer which we currently have in two separate spots. Um and that that's roughly our budget. Our operating budget just increased due to our new personnel coming on. Be glad to answer any questions. Anybody got any questions?

With the fire services, each fire uh district will request their own or will it be a combined districtwide request through Greg? Our ours is just through Van White. Okay. Rest of Yeah. I was just wondering what rest of it come through the fire commission. Okay. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Now we'll move into the fire service. Greg Nicholson, Keith Wilson.

Mr. Chairman. Yes. Go ahead, Steve. Are they going to get us a hard copy of this? I'm having trouble. I like to I you know it's it's going to be hard to keep up with circling stuff that cuz I mean there's a lot of information going to be coming up the hard copy. I don't think Go ahead, Greg.

Hey, good evening. Thank you all very much for allowing us to come in and uh talk about our budgets. So, the first one we'll be talking to is the 141 fire service budget. This this pretty much uh takes on all the volunteer systems uh throughout the county. So, there's no staffing u in in this budget. It's all the volunteer um side of where we pay like the utilities and things like that for all the volunteer departments. Am I running this or am I running this? There we go. All right. So, uh you can see some of the numbers. Um operating 1.8 8 million and some change capital 670. Um on that can this turn down a little bit. It's hot. Um so training uh we did increase training as we increase our staffing levels in the county. Uh we uh need to increase our training. That is where the guys go and or the firefighters take classes throughout the state. Um and so we as we increase our staffing levels uh it was decreased last year uh for unknown reasons. So uh we're just trying to get back to where we was. Uh we this this budget takes on all the pretty much special ops to extrication boat ops uh high low angle uh stuff throughout the entire county and this goes all the way up into the Indian land area and comes with us also. So the um um so the uh that's what this money is for on the training side is to just get that back where it needs to be uh from last year. Uh obviously protective clothing that consists of our high

school program which we're very proud of. was probably one of the best in the state or probably one of the best in the country uh of retaining people for the fire service on our side on the volunteer side which we still re rely on heavily. Um but as is probably no um news no new news to y'all is that everything is getting more expensive. So uh gear included where probably when some of y'all was on the fire service you could buy a set of gear for $1,500 $2,000. It's over $6 to $7,000 for one set now. So, uh just extremely expensive. Uh and and this program keeps increasing from year to year as in attendance. We getting more and more people in it. U got how many this year?

14 in it this year. So, that is exceptional for a school system that they can do. Uh and then all the other to me is just kind of self-explanatory on the utilities, vehicle maintenance, stuff like that. Uh obviously the bigger our fleet gets uh which we're hearing it's going to get even bigger so that's better. Um but that just just covers our rising cost of parts and things like that. Next one. Any questions on that slide? Uh the only you know I've been around here a long time.

Yes sir. in the fire service has changed, but there there used to be a lot of grants out there for volunteer fire departments. Is that is that changed with everything else?

It has. It's changed some. There is still several grants out there uh that 99% of our departments can get a hold of the Vsafe grant. It's like 14,000 and some change now for each department per year. They changed it. It used to be a three-year grant. Now it's a every year grant. The FEMA grants are still out there. They're extremely hard to get. The cost of them is like the matching and all that is just got kind of ridiculous. We still put in for a lot of grants, but uh the getting them is difficult these time this time. Any other questions on this screen? All right. Next, please. All right. Uh and this is all really it uh our software packages uh which and for us it's our active 911 um first due things like that uh the things that we get our calls in on our phones or we get them on our computers or laptops uh that is what that is for lease copers obviously and a grant match uh existing match that we have already a grant now uh that's the the amount that's matched. Will this show up in another budget somewhere?

Which one is that, ma'am? The IT part. Uh I I don't think so. I don't think I can take it out.

But it will go into the IT request or not? No. Okay. Yeah. We don't really mess with that money. that the it takes care of all that now. So, it just shows in our budget so they can track who's using what. I I think what she's getting at is if we're seeing it here, we're not going to see it somewhere else. So, that there's a double accounting for them. That is correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's Thank you. Was a clear question.

Thought it was. That should be the last one on any questions on the fire service grant on fire service grant. Fire service budget. Any questions on the budget? All right. Next. Y'll see me for a little while. Okay. Down Kershaw. Down Kershaw doesn't really change a lot. I'm sorry.

If I could just before before Greg starts covering town of Kershaw. um was talking to Greg the other day on another matter and I asked him if I he had a copy of the current fire service contract with town of Kershaw. I didn't have one. So just curious seeing what it is. So we started talking about it and understand that you know last year it was amended uh where it was a 50/50 um split between the town of Kershaw and the county. So I asked him said, I mean the calls for service are in the town versus outside because the fire service of Kershaw is a pretty dog on big district covers the gold mine out that way and everything and learned that you know without going back and counting just an estimate would be somewhere about 75% in the upperated area 25% in the town. I said didn't sound equitable to me. I I'm proposing in here changing it to where it'll be 2/3 county, one-third town, and then next year they can actually run the numbers and see where the calls for service are coming from and try to do a more equitable split based on where the calls are actually coming from. If the most of them are coming from the unorporated area, then the majority of the the funding should be unincorporated. Well, I think y'all know where I'm going to what I'm going to talk about on that. I mean, we just heard from the Van Wire District. We'll hear from Indian Consolidated. Those residents are paying for fire themselves now. So, I think we have to be very careful about continuing to pay for for fire um in other areas of the county.

Greg, I understand the town of Van White does not pay for fire service.

We do. It's $180 per not the town, the the the the fire district does. My point is that there's people in the county that are paying county taxes and they're paying additional for services as well. And I think we we need to solve this. I I agree with you. I' I've seen some of the PowerPoints for the long-term plan where they were talking about an east, west, south um service area. We've got to include the north. I, you know, I'm I'm on your side on that one. If they're going to be using, you know, atvelour dollars and needs to be covering everybody. That's why in the past the fire service, a fire commission was very, very careful. Every single department was treated equally. They got, you know, funding for equipment, training, all that. Fire commission has been meticulous about that over the years.

And we still get equal across like on the 141 budget that I said covers all the volunteer departments, Indyland, Vanwack, Kersel, all those are included in the uh all of the uh utilities and equipment. They get the same amount of money for equipment that everybody else gets. So, it it's all fair on that side. It's when you get into the paid staff matter is where I think we're going to have a little friction. Yeah. And I think to Mr. Graham's point, the resolution has to happen within this budget that we're looking at. It can't be something that we're looking at going forward. So, we can't kick the can. So, we already kicked it last year. Yeah. We've

The only thing I'd tell you is we can make it happen, but you know, I have to get with Sabrina because expenses just really went up. I'm just telling you what we have to do. We have legal obligations, so it's got to happen. You know the old administrator joke, first side to four wins. Y'all just let us know what you want to do. The law wins. You remember that song? I fought the law and the law won. It beats four council members.

All right. So, the Kershaw budget there again, you heard Mr. Wilson's on that. Um, and I I and I spoke I spoke as when I spoke to him, I'm sorry. Um, and I told him, I said, I can absolutely get some solid numbers on what they run, but if you look at it in the same as the town of Heath Springs, um, the county fireman, the 10 or the 14 that we have in the county system runs calls in there and Kershaw covers that one. And so it's um it's hard when you you're pulling the Kershaw town of Kershaw people into the county side and the countyy's not paying anything for them, only the Kershaw people. So that gets a little sticky, I think, uh with Councilman Luis's point. So

yes, Greg, I do think it's around 7030.

Okay, that's I I told him I figured 7525, but I I was just an absolute wild guess just by listening to the radio. So uh but on the town of Kersaw there again you can see it the operating went down a little bit just moving some monies around but the personnel um this was the year we changed a little bit but they have three full-time per day it's 8 to five type system uh so they rely 100% on volunteers after that unless these three get called back in if they run calls then obviously that's overtime. Uh so uh the monies went up a little bit on that and then operating uh I put in a little bit extra for uniforms uh for them from last year. Just I went down there and had had breakfast with them one day. Sat around seeing out kind of what they needed and uniforms was one of the things they kind of needed some more uniforms and some little bit of equipment. Not big equipment but little things here. So that's why a little bit of a raise on some of it. Any questions on the um on the Kershaw budget?

Again, I just want to reiterate I mean although and when you look at the total amount is it's is it's not significant in the in the grand scheme of things when we start talking about an operating budget for the county. But again, we just raised the fee in Van Wike from 90 to $180. is hard for me to explain for someone that lives in Van Wik or Indyland for that matter why they have they're paying for fire service but some someone that lives outside the town of Kershaw is is not having to pay for expanded fire service. So I think the next budget we get to is going to answer a few questions.

Okay.

All right. County Firefighters 144 budget. That is the county staff. I apologize. Any questions on the Kershaw? Okay. Uh Lanster County Firefighters. This is the uh staff down at the EOC. Uh this is the budget that we are uh asking for. You will see a pretty good increase in this one. Um there again from the six firefighters that we requested last year starting this past January uh to staff the McDonald Green station. Um and we still haven't got that staffed yet. So we're way behind on that. Uh this is also an extra six for a secondary location in the Shallow Unity somewhere in that area. Uh Buford, I don't know in that side. uh to kind of cover which um kind of draws into what they're speaking about is having coverage inside the county uh versus you know I think it's going to this is Greg's opinion it's either going to be we allow these districts to do a fee like we have up in Indand in Vanw uh to support the staff side of it and I think that's needs to be done anyway in Greg's opinion but this is very critical to the fire service right now uh is getting these firefighters in the county to respond and understand that I know it's the people in Indie and Banwack paying a extra fee for the staffing we have up there. The staff that we're requesting for down here can also respond up in the Vanwack and Inland area if needed. So it it does help cover the entire county multiple times. the people the firefighters from the EOC has come up and they might not come exactly to our fire that we have in Indand or Van Wack but they'll move up

and cover our other calls that we're having uh or they will come to the fire. So I I want to be clear that the ones that we're asking for these six at McDonald Green and the six at the secondary station and down the road was next year was supposed to be six in a in a third location. They are county firefighters. So if we need them in any land they come. if we need them in Vanwack, they come. So that money is covering the entire county uh and stuff. They might not be dedicated to that district, but they do assist us when needed. So that's very important to understand that. I they're saying that we pay for a higher fire coverage up there just because of the amount of people and buildings we have in Indianland. But you know obviously these two on a truck down here is much different than what we have up there just because size of the places that we are covering. So um the personnel cost uh we absolutely hope that y'all will fund that the extra six and the six that goes into the McDonald green station. that gives the county their first 247 response throughout the county and that is very very important uh for us. We're also asking for two additional maintenance staff to assist the backlog. Uh our maintenance division is Oh, thank you. Uh our maintenance division um is is struggling right now. There's three people just put a third one on. Uh it's been two uh and I think the last backlog was what Billy 150 something. It's down when we presented admin was it at 400 and something service request that needed to be filled and he's atund and something now but that's extreme that's counting equipment equipment and uh trucks everything. So uh very very important

that we get them also. Can you back that up one slide? Sorry. Uh yes, additional fire marshall division as ask asking for a community engagement and inspection. So someone you would not believe how many in uh how many engagements we go to in the public that we are uh going out doing smoke detectors, doing CO alarms, just talking to communities in a fire safe. We're a fires safe community uh or county and so this helps. So the having the p that person would help tremendously. Uh you see on this one the three shift captains, the three shift engineers and the firefighters for the operations center. That is the 24-hour coverage. Uh a logistics officer would be we are just getting so many people so much equipment. We need that logistics officer uh to make sure the inventory uh is being utilized and bought and all from one person so we can keep track of that. And then there again, the community engagement, fire safety educator, uh, is on the staffing side. Any questions on staffing? I know that was really quick, but I know you just got things, but I'll be glad to entertain any questions on the staffing.

Anybody got any questions on that? Now, Mr. chairman to uh we we do have to get something. We we've got to come to a compromise or find a solution because we we have got to have that coverage on the south side of town because there's a disaster waiting to happen at Edgewater. I mean it's that is your next big big ticket right there

because I mean there's 1,500 houses down there right now probably in 10 foot apart and if one of those firestorms comes through I mean you got you got subsections that got 10 houses per acre. Yes.

If y'all haven't seen the plans for Edgewater uh they have up to 12,000 houses in that in that entire community. Uh if you think about the Sun City side, Sun City is about 4,000 houses. So that's three times the size of Sun City, what that's going to do. So that's that's your next obviously the Rosland and North Haven and all that's a ticket item, but Edgewater is that's that's good. And we have land supposedly have land there for a fire station. I have not seen it, but uh here we have it. So Mr. Chair, I agree with Steve. Uh we've got to we've got to do something because the more we don't do the further we get behind.

Yes ma'am. So as much as we can do in this year's budget we need to do it because if not we're one step we going backwards instead of forward. Yes ma'am. And and we talked about this at our cows meeting is that we got to look at a comprehensive plan for the whole county. It's just no way around it. Absolutely. you know, with the growth that's coming south and the growth that's coming central and the growth that's already in in uh the up uh in the land area, we got to do something. Yes, ma'am.

And it is and and obviously we know these are big numbers. Uh but in the whole scheme of things, when you're looking at ISO and you're looking at all the uh different things that we have to cover, um it's it's really not that much to to look at. And I heard something on TV about the ISO scoring in some county was five. And I'm like I was looking at something on TV and they was talking about the the average ISO score in some counties was five, but it should have been a one. And I'm like, "Oh my god." Yeah.

There's there's counties out there uh in this county used to be a nine. Uh which is a 10 is no fire protection whatsoever. So, you can see, but we've came down to a countywide four, which we're very proud of. Uh, we are due for an inspection. It's We're waiting any day now for them to walk in the door and say, "It's time to get reinspected." And how we looking? I mean, are we looking?

Yep. So, that next budget ought to look good. But, no, it's uh we look good. I think it is. We, you know, we've got more firefighters. Obviously the the staff at Indyland, the staff at EOC, staff at at VanWack helps in ISO helps the entire county because we do a countywide system. So it does help with that. Uh because paid staff, one paid staff counts for three, four, four volunteers. So uh it's it's it's very important to have that career staff in there. They really look at that hard. And there again, as our staff grows, you got to understand our county is growing also with houses and apartments and all that. And so it's kind of a balancing act. The last two things on this is the uh Riverchase development or you'll see the apparatus technician and technician assistant. That was for the maintenance side for them to get some of this our trucks going and moving. Uh Riverchase development station, that's the 6.2 million. That is the station that when that development gets to 250,000 250 homes that were required I think the council's required. So

it's in the development agreement. I asked Darren uh Robinson the other day they're at 199 uh cos so we're getting close but they're not there yet where we can mandate it. Understand that they asked last year if they would voluntarily go ahead and do it and the developer declined. I don't know why it's these are capital costs, right? Yes. They shouldn't be in the operating. They're in the operating. They're not. I don't know. I I asked the same thing. So, uh I think they're just trying to get everything in into three slides or four slides that we get. So, uh yes, the the Riverchase fire station, the live fire training facility, uh our capital should be on the CIP and the trucks as well.

And the trucks. Yes, sir. Yep. Greg, before we move off that one. Oh, I'm sorry. You got one more. Well, it's just that's just the F350 trucks uh for the stations, the uh one at McDonald Green and the one at uh at the second station for them to maneuver around in when they can't take a apparatus. So, Greg, and when you add the personnel costs, I it's hard to see because the operating costs have been mixed with the capital costs, but there's going to be additional operating costs, too, as a result of the increase in personnel because you have uniforms, you

all that should be in there. Okay. So, as we when we request staffing, we request the radios, the uniforms, their gear, everything that's needed for each personnel should be in the operating cost. Uh on the personnel is obviously just salaries, benefits, retirement, stuff like that. And then the operating cost will uh take on all the items needed for those people for the firefighters. I I want to be realistic right here. Uh at this point I think we are way behind in our fire trucks and I would agree

and uh and the this year I don't see a training facility happening. Yeah. I mean, I just I think that could be something for capital sales tax 4 or something, but yeah, not going to be able to have that in our budget. And I'll be honest with you, Darren put in for the capital side, so I don't know exactly. I don't have all the specs and all that. I know Brett might have some some insight on it. Uh the 26 million, I think that's on the very high side of a training facility, uh because they're looking at putting it at the

landfill. Landfill. Okay, there's area there for the landfill. So, the land's already there under the county's name. Uh, but obviously building a, you know, a four or five story tower, uh, some other burn buildings, things like that, concrete, and it's going to be expensive. I don't know about 26 million. Uh, but, um, can be done can be done in phases. Yeah, it absolutely could be in phases. So, you know, if if you if you get started and say, we're going to do this, we're going to build some burn chambers, and then we're going to next project's going to be this. um you know and the uh but I I will tell you if it's getting all the other stuff other than the fire training facility I would absolutely go that way. So

would the plan be on Riverchase to eventually be staffed fire station I mean anything we build would that or possibly or is that it really depends on which direction y'all go. I know Mr. Mosdale has talked about, you know, letting the departments build their or do their uh fees. Uh Riverchase is in the It's in the Van Wag fire district community. So, it's in the fire district of Van Wag.

It in Greg's eyes, if yeah, if we put we got staffing at Vanwag, if down the road we put staffing in that one uh with Van Wack, then I think that's a a win-win, you know. But it really depends on if we're going county's paying for all this staffing or it fee districts or is it a you know uh you put a a millage on for capital and a millage on for operating. I I don't know. That's a that's y'all decision and how we'd fund that. But yes, I would think that at some point it'd be paid staff. Chairman.

Yes. One question if I could ask um based on the conversation I'm hearing now is council now amanable to having FSAs throughout the rest of the county. my understanding earlier, no that we're not I I'm just make sure y'all know I've been engaged with Clint Sel who's the chief of McDonald Green is also chair of the fire commission. Um find out, you know, what do the departments think about some of the agreements in in talking with our county attorney information from the fire service was never getting back to her. She's the one that's got to help craft these agreements. So if council is now amanable to having FSAs, maybe have a southern FSA, a western or an eastern.

We had to discuss what we never got to that point here. Here we got to that point. I mean try to get it trying to get feedback from the fire chiefs to give to the attorney. So whenever council's ready, she will actually have that information because some of the information talking with Clint earlier, it obviously never made it back to the attorney. you know, we have these discussions, but we never made a decision whether we was going to move forward with which area. it just kind of stopped and not

now we we did I mean this time last year we talked about how we were going to do McDonald's Green and I my my the agreement that I heard and that what I was agreeing to was that we were going to fund McDonald's Green for 6 months with the understanding that it was going to be a fire district because I I want to be very very clear I fully support fire in the and throughout the county it has to happen it's extremely important to this county and to the growth of this county. It I mean that's I' I've said that continuously up here. What I cannot support and what I would not support in this budget would be funding firefighters in the southern part of the county that are not part of a fire district because it's not fair to half the people that live in this county. Indian is paying for fire service and operating for for fire service and so is Van White. We have to get fire full-time fighters in and around Edgewater, but it needs it has to be in a fire district.

The only thing I would say is when whenever y'all are ready, I'm trying to get the information, get it back to the attorney, but whenever y'all are ready, from what I've seen, it's a pretty viable plan. um kind of fits in with what y'all are talking about, but that's obviously a council decision.

Mr. Willis, let me ask you a question. Is it a viable if we do go with the fire districts, is it viable? I don't know if this would work because you still got, you know, personalities and volunteer fire departments. Could it be a combination of of Gucces, McDonald Green, Elgen, and uh and Belltown into one district or do they all have to agree on that? Well, my understanding if we do that, it's it's ultimately it's council's call how we're going to do the districts. But that's why I wanted to get feedback from Clint who was talking at the most recent chief's meeting.

How do they feel? But I'm assuming it would be districts. You have to have a big enough district to raise the funds. Is that correct? Did we not separate those districts and look at the separation of districts?

So, so what former administrator Marstall was working on was exactly that we were talking about particularly in the panhandle having you already have the Indian Land district, you have the Van White district. Do those go together? Does Van White stand alone? Does it consolidate into the rest of the county taking multiple different areas of the county? We had all kinds of different scenarios that we talked through. So, just to clarify, the agreement that administrator Willis is talking about has nothing to do with the creation of a district whatsoever. That is for the county to have these volunteer fire departments operate fire service in the county. That's a totally separate issue from creation of the districts. Creation of the districts would be your call. So much like you've been talking about with these new developments, the Haven Roslin, the Maritage, if it comes back online, you could make all of that into a district and whatever fire departments service that area would continue to service those areas via contract receiving either rooftop fees or millage, however you move forward. So, we had several scenarios we put on the table, plus a countywide capital district that could run over the entire county, but separating the two things. is a countywide capital district only being for capital projects and potentially districts underlying that multiple districts, two or three districts, however you all wanted it that could be for the operating purposes of the fire departments within those districts. It's very convoluted and we've had a lot of discussions about it, but I think where we kind of stalled on it before was we have to talk to the municipalities because they have to opt in or opt out because by law and by constitutional provisions, they're required to provide fire service within their boundaries. So, they have to say we're giving that up and turning it over to the county to put into these FSAs. And I think that's where the discussion stalled and that's why we are where we are at the moment

both on the capital district as well as the FSAs. So if I'm hearing you correctly, then the direction is that the county administrator needs to go back and have these conversations with those fire districts. Well, I mean I think the the conversations have already happened in the Heath Springs, Kershaw, town of Anwike. I don't know where the city of Lancaster sits, but I'm not sure that Mr. Willis has had those conversations. Sir, I had a conversation with the mayor last week. He was supposed to call you, did he?

But I am trying to arrange um with the county attorney a a meeting a team be a team's meeting because we have outside counsel, you know, would would weigh in as well. Um so I do have an inquiry into Chris, Chrissy, Wanda down, Heath Springs, and Flip. Get me some dates.

Yeah. So I if I understand it correctly that needs to happen first. We need to make those decisions. We as a council need to make a determination on whether it's going to be one big fire district or if it's going to be different sections. But at a certain point before we finalize this budget to Mr. Graham's point that he said last year we have to make that decision and move it before this budget moves forward. And that's on us that we have to determine those districts. Once we get those dates and we make that determination, we need to tell the other fire districts, the town of Heath Springs, all the other, this is the date. You either are in or you're out because right now it's just a moving date because we haven't made a decision. So, we have to make a decision. You have to have these conversations and then all of this has to happen before we approve the next budget and that is about three months away. So that and that's going to be a really tight time schedule with the statutory requirements for doing correct these things.

Correct. If I can. So my so I guess my comment is we need to and

and that means hurry but I'm not positive. U just understand that as as we move forward into this that's a huge decision if we're going to stick with the volunteers and allowing them to be districts or if we're going to go outside or combine and things like that because uh we are heavily relying on the volunteer system in the entire county other than the north end. Uh and just so you know as we started putting staff on we had about 30 to 35 active volunteers in any land and today we have zero. So as you put paid staff in the volunteers is going to go down. So once you make that once you make that flip that switch you got to you got to flip it and you got to be ready to put the

I appreciate that and I and I think we all understand that. But I would also look to the town of to not the town the Van White fire district where they do have an employee. They do have a volunteer network and a strong group of volunteers. So it is possible to have uh um some some paid staff along with a strong volunteer. Absolutely. And that will in absolutely work. I'm talking if you're talking about putting Lancaster County fire stations throughout the county inside the volunteer districts, you're going to kill the volunteer side of that. And so that's where I'm saying you better be ready to fund them because you'll start losing it.

So, Mr. Chairman, if I may, just just to elaborate so council understands when you're talking about these FSAs or these districts, they are nothing more than a funding mechanism. That's what they are. So you're not necessarily putting paid staff in places. These these fire departments still exist. They are still their own entities. They would have contracts with the county to perform the services in return for those tax dollars, whether they're rooftop fees or whether they are millage dollars. That is that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about building new stations unless they're needed with the capital district or what have you. So, you're not talking about taking away the volunteer districts or the volunteer fire departments. You're talking about giving them a funding mechanism that will help them to operate better and be able to do more within the boundaries of their districts. That's that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about necessarily replacing them with paid staff or anything like that. So, just to make that clear, that's not what an FSA intends to do. So sorry I I have one other comment. So while we're having these conversations, I started doing my calculations.

So if I'm looking at this correctly, the capital amount that should have been in the capital budget was about 32,773518. If you subtract that out from what's in the operating budget, just the capital number is 78,39 higher than what's in the operating budget. So going back to my point about we're not even co covering the capital costs that you have in the individual line items in what's in the operating budget. And on top of that, from what you said, there's additional operating costs that are going to be attached to this budget or should be attached because of the personnel increases. So something's

the personnel the all their equipment is in the should be in the operating side. Uh I know this is extremely hard to follow just because it's there again they're trying to cram all this numbers in three slides or four slides until they they combine numbers. So I'm So I'm going to ask, so when we're doing these presentations, are we using an Excel spreadsheet that's kind of tracking all these or are these being entered individually into a slide? Yeah, that's No, it's a it's a Sabrina question.

All right. So the the the starting of building this budget happens in our current financial system and we are exporting what's in that financial system that combined budget to be able to produce these slides. Um I I do feel like with this scenario because we're covering multiple departments. We've got the Langster County firefighters, we've got Kershaw, we've got Indian Land. I'm not even sure which one we're talking about right now because when we're talking about the um 30 something million that's specific to the firefighters. And so as you see these different slide packets come up, it's like two to three slides for each department. So I guess if you're confused and you don't understand them, how are we going to do that?

Well, I'm following based on the slides. And so if he's specifically talking about Lancaster County firefighters, but I feel like the conversation has shifted somewhat, not so much to what's on the slide, but to what needs to happen in No, I'm talking about this slide. So if you look at Lancaster County firefighters,

the total operating budget that we've identified is 32,695 379. We had a conversation that those are probably capital costs. So, if you identify the three capital items, the two F350 trucks, the Riverside station, and the live training facility, that all totals up to about 32,773, which is about $80,000 higher than the total number on the front page. And that doesn't even include the operating costs that would be included as part of the personnel increases.

Okay. Um, click to the second slide because I'm looking at the changes. I'm sorry. Go back to the first one. That 38,167. So, this is number 32695 does not is less than the three individual line items that are being shown. Right. What you're talking about in the center, that's just the change from the prior year.

Correct. So, We're not even looking at, let's say, the three capital costs are all changes. Those total 32,773. That's less than this by about $80,000 or more, I'm sorry, than this. Okay. I'm I'm not following what what you're referencing. I'm I'm not The math is not math. So, the Riverside Development Fire Station is identified as 6,228,000.

Okay. plus the live training facility is 26,228,000 plus the two F350 trucks is 317,518. If my math is correct, that totals 32,773518. Even if you included all the capital from those three items, that number is still lower than that by about $80,000. And that still doesn't include then all the items that I was asking Mr. Nichols about. Okay. Yeah. I'm not I'm still not following you. Let me let me get the slides myself to look at it to be able to

Okay. Greg, go ahead. You want to move on into the Indian land? We got to move along here. Stuff you see. All right. Um, you ready? Indian land.

All right. As you can see, Indian land there. Again, um, you'll see some savings. Obviously, we've got an increase in the personnel of about 13%. But, uh, we also moved some line items around in our part-time versus moving it to our full-time because we're asking for staffing on our rescue. So, uh, we kind of tried to offset the cost some. So, that's where you see the increase, but it's not where you would when you see the personnel, it's going to look different. Uh, the operating cost, obviously, the uh, drop in that was going back and looking. We've started using the county shop for some of our maintenance which has decreased our cost in the maintenance side which is great. Uh and some radios that we had a good bit of money in for radios and we've lowered that amount now. We've got most of the radios we need and then our capital line is on the vehicles. We dropped that uh significantly also. Uh then the debt service is the station the old pleasant valley station which is our inland station two now. Uh that is a number that I guess county does that that's our b our building payment back to the county uh where when y'all the council paid our building off and we consolidated so we have to pay that building payment back each year and last year's 175 this year is 174 so that's the savings on that. Any questions on that line? And as you can see that just busier busier inland response this year. This past year was 39 and some change and projected this year and we're online for this is 45 almost 4,600 calls. Uh next slide you can see the um uh station three we've talked about several years uh on the it's on the CIP along with the engine company. Uh this

engine company is outside the ones on the county's purchase. Uh this is one that if if station three gets approved and starts moving forward. Uh we would need an engine company for that station. So that is what that one is. uh the three firefighter captains, three engineers, and three firefighters. That is where I was talking about on the rescue company. Uh increased our shift coverage. Uh part-time has been a great band-aid for us. But uh moving forward, we need to get some some u guaranteed spots on that truck. Uh that is our technical truck that runs all our extrications, high angle, low angle, uh wrecks, things like that. So, uh, we moved a lot of the money out of our part-time budget, and we still run part-time for back pay back, uh, coverage and all, uh, but this will give us a little bit more, uh, coverage on our rescue, our special ops truck, and, uh, but we done that by part-time. Any questions on this one? All right, next slide. Uh so then we're going to get into some capital also on the station one. Uh we talked about last year it just didn't come through. So uh con concrete repair it's really going in there and tearing out all the asphalt and replacing with concrete. Uh that station is the old Indian station is our headquarters station or our station one. uh it had never had uh a ladder truck there, but one of the towers went to there and uh that's about a 80,000lb vehicle and it's tearing the asphalt up coming around the building, things like that. That building the asphalt was just pretty much the same as you'd put on a on a driveway. It's not very didn't have a good base and all that. So, I had a company come out and look at it. pretty much tearing it out, putting a new base in and replacing with concrete uh is what needs to happen there just to keep

from tearing our trucks up with the back with the parking lot. Um also on special projects, 380,000 is for another storage building beside to keep our brush truck and some other stuff. uh going to put in security gates and fencing around the back of the stations uh just because we're having a lot of people come through and uh as we call it at 2:00 in the morning doing a door check to see if anybody's doors is open. Uh so we're having some issues with people riding through the parking lot. So we're going to put some gates up to protect our staff's vehicles. Uh and then our bailout kits just uh that is a firefighter safety mechanism. If we get stuck on a upper floor of one of these apartment buildings, they would be able to self-extricate uh by bailing out the window. And this is just buying a bailout kit for each firefighter. We're also asking, same as the county as one logistics officer and a safety coordinator, this would improve our accountability of all our equipment and keeping the lifespan of our stuff hopefully better. And right now our three battalion chiefs take that one on each shift. And it's kind of a a um mess trying to see who ordered what and when. So one person would it been 8 to five job would help tremendously on that keeping us uh hopefully better organized in our in all of our equipment and gear and things like that. They would also act as a safety officer on scenes of fires and enttrapments during the day. Uh they would automatically go to the calls to be our safety officer. Any questions on this one? All right, next slide. And this is kind of getting into our operating budget. Um, travel training dues no different than a county fire budget. They was cut last year tremendously. Uh, and as we are increasing our staffing, the training has to come with it. So, uh, take sending them to conferences, hot classes, learning things, bringing

instructors in, which we've been doing a lot of in-house training, but it's still cost to bring people in and things like that. Um, supplies obviously as we grow and it comes the supplies to keep all these people, all the firefighters in gear and in clothing and uniforms and everything else is comes with an increase. uh the capital there again the SUVs and radios uh we dropped that by almost $224,000 just because we about caught up on our on our vehicles right now as in our SUVs and our trucks. Uh so we dropped that down some to compensate and then the maintenance vehicles there again we running through the county uh has dropped our cost on that. Uh then absolutely increase price and fuel. I don't think 5,000 will help us at all right now uh as fuel cost is outrageous but uh just trying to get that up. Any questions on that slide as end of Indyland? Any questions for the Indyland budget? That's what I like to hear. So thank you. All right, last one. Yeah, go ahead.

Emergency management There we go. Uh, no different in the staffing side of it is three full-time that's out of the EOC office. Um, and obviously uh the emergency management side when I took the interim uh position here. I didn't realize how much uh time it spent in the EM side. It is extremely time consuming. So they they absolutely uh get your money's worth out of that side. Uh personnel obviously 2.16% increase that would just be the I think the average increase for salaries operating a little bit increase on that just the drone program alone and then just doing some of the stuff for that uh is uh the increase in that. Um, and then the capitals 200,000. That is the buildings out on Lynwood Drive. Just trying to get them up to where they need to be. Uh, is what the capital 200,000 in capital is for the EM buildings out on Lynwood, which is working out tremendously for us, uh, in storage and having a place for, uh, all of the all the equipment. Uh the drone program, you'll see it in the 25899. That is going to be a fiveyear program uh that we're looking at and trying to get more drone programs and on pilots and then more another drone and getting some training in there as a absolute tremendous asset to this county side as in whether the police or fire that we can deploy the drones. We had the large fire on Craig something farm road or something wherever it was over there in Elgen's area and they had the drone up and we could see exactly where all the

hot spots was at and where it was moving towards uh to move our resources. So the drone program is absolutely an asset to this county whether it's missing person fires u all the all the above. So uh we're trying to get some more pilots. Right now we have one and you just he just raised his hand. So um so we trying to get more so we can deploy them. Any questions on emergency management? All right. Well, y'all probably tired of looking at me so I am going to that wraps up all the fire and em if if you have any questions. All right. Thank y'all for your time.

Thank you Rick. Uh we'll move into Lanster County EMS. Call our directors up. Mr. Chairman, before we get started, uh I think our EMS that may win a couple of awards. Yeah. Mr. Kato like to congratulate you. Uh

would you enlighten us on what y'all received? I'm short. So, last week, uh, Langster County EMS participated in the annual EMS symposium at the beach. Um we had a team compete in the uh paramedic competition on Wednesday. Um which was a very awesome scenario realistic. Um we our team responded to uh Williams Bryce Stadium for a stampede after a large upset of a team from the upstate. Um and we had victims all over the field that we had to treat. Um they did very well. Unfortunately, they didn't win, but they represented you guys and us very well. Um later in the in the week on Friday evening, we had the annual awards banquet where they were presented a trophy. Um we had uh Sydney Dwey from our EMS staff won state EMT of the year. And then um unfortunately they couldn't find anybody else to take the plaque and they presented me with the South Carolina EMS director of the year award. So um that's Um and then after that, um the results of a statewide election were announced and I unfortunately will be the uh incoming or president-elect for the South Carolina EMS Association starting in July 1. And that's all the good, bad, or indifferent. Before I start, I would like to thank you guys for allowing us to present and a program that you guys started here a few months ago. You were allowed to sign on with Amazon where we see bulk packages and then it's

distributed through the county. Some of our high school programs are participating and I understand the fire service has gotten to participate in this. uh USCL student athletes were able to participate in this and then um Miss McGriff allowed EMS to come and a lot of the things that they had there that may not have be a benefit to some departments. Um before I say this, please don't cut my budget when I tell you we got free stuff. Um but it was stuff that we could put at our that our stations that we normally buy. Coffee, paper plates, coffee cups, sugar, creamer, uh potato chips. Um, and these are things that we made care baskets for all of our stations. So, as the crews began to come in, they had snacks to help refresh themselves after long calls. And I just want to thank you guys for for that. Um, before we start here, let's see. All right, I got it right. So, I'm not going to go for through the slides. I actually presented presented you with a hard copy. So, Mr. Harper, I was ahead of you on that. Um, the other information you have in there is documentation for all of our request u for you to do some nice homework reading, bedtime reading. Don't fall asleep though, please, because it could be important. Um, what we'll talk about is our uh things that we accomplished last year. Last year, we set an all-time record for MS responses in this county. Um, as of today, we are running ahead of that projected number also. So next year or the end of 26 that number will probably be even higher. Thanks to you guys adding staff. Last year we were able to uh lower our county response rate. So thank you guys for that. We lowered it doesn't say a lot but 11 seconds can mean the difference between life and death when you're having a medical emergency. And we were able to increase increase our collections by 1.5%. As of today, we are on par to break even

with collections. Our collections are running a little bit behind because of I think the federal government has been closed a bunch this year. So, they're not paying their bills. I guess if I didn't pay my bills, they might come after me, but I can't go after them. Um, we also had some federal changes. Um, we've talked about this in previous council meetings. Um, DEA regulations changed. you guys authorized us to buy some equipment that we're having a little trouble buying um through the procurement process and the temperature tracking changes. We're also trying to work through that process right now. We also started the uh first ever paramedic class in Lancaster County. Um we've got four wonderful students in that right now. Hopefully they'll be finishing up in September. And then uh if approved in this year's budget, we hope to start a second program. The first program didn't cost us anything. Second program will cost us a little bit because of the cost of the tuition. So, our big push this year, there's a little thing because in public safety called mental health, our guys and gals are extremely overworked. Right now we have 16 slots at Lanster County Miss that are either on FMLA or some type of leave or vacant. We are being poached by every county and entity around us. Uh we're the training grounds for other counties. They come to work here on a schedule called 2448. And in your package you have an example of how many hours that they work on a 2448 schedule. You also have a copy of this nice colorcoded county. This is a breakdown of every counties in the state of South Carolina and the hours that they currently run. You notice there's a lot of red. That is a 2472 schedule. The yellow that you see is a 2448 schedule. There are only eight

counties in the state of South Carolina that operate this. Many counties have moved to this 2472. I have attempted to get this before you before but uh was not allowed to bring it up but this year I have been allowed to present it to you. This is something that we need to definitely consider. Our guys and gals are working too long, too hard and not having a lot of time to recuperate. So what we have asked for in this year is two proposals. one to move all the crews to a 2472 or one proposal. And these proposals are in here. They're broken down. We actually have salaries that we pulled from HR from all these staff. It broken down to regular rate, overtime hours, yearly rate, and that it would c what it would cost for each program. And they're attached to that. And we're not going to cover all that. I want you to read that on your own. If you have questions, feel free to call me, email me. That is the that is the SK. That is the picture I just showed you. Yes, ma'am. So, when you take the 2448 schedule and the 2472 schedule, that is an average of 112 hours per pay period. The 24hour the excuse me, the 72-hour schedule is only an average of 84 hours per pay period. In a 30-year career, someone working the 2448 schedule works enough hours that 10 more years are added to their tenure. So in the 2472 schedule 10 years is taken off the physical hours worked. That's how many hours that there is less.

So CLA are you saying you are recommending that or Yes ma'am.

And this benefits from that. So the bene the benefits of this is we now have we can compete with the local entities. I've got three employees right now who are about to walk out the door to go work for a neighboring county because as they quote put it to me I can make the same thing and work less on a 2472 schedule. You make the same money if your hourly rate is adjusted and you get 30 30 more days off a year. So, if I'm making $70,000 a year and I can go somewhere else and make the same money and work 30 days less, by golly, I think I'm going to do it. Of all those counties, we run more calls at any of those. So, we are working harder and technically paying them less.

So, what will it take to go from the system you're running now to this system and what are the um the the negative part? So the negative is the financial impact and that that's upfront and Mr. Willis and I have talked about this. So you have to create a fourth shift. So basically we're asking for 23 new employees to do this. So that's 23 new employees to flip this. That would be to go because we're so big. That's and that's keeping the same amount of trucks that we got right now. That's not adding any additional response trucks. Have you calculated the cost at 23 more employees?

Yes, ma'am. That is in your package and and there's a breakdown. It says 2472 proposal and attached to that is the financial impact that it would cost. There's also a financial impact of what we currently run and a financial impact of a partial roll out of the 2472 program. What page?

It's about m middle way in there. It's It's probably just off the top of my head, it's about a $2.3 million increase to go full full-fledged. And this is being proposed by three other counties across the state. Berkeley County, which is I like to say is one of our twins. US, Berkeley, and Aken. We run the same amount of trucks and we run we mirror almost the same amount of EMS calls. Um Akens flipped 2472 a few years ago. Berkeley County is trying to do the same. He did his presentation on Monday of this week. Um

only service us as to where we're at. Yes, ma'am. It it will. The problem becomes now is we can't staff everything we got because people are leaving. I just had two leave and go to a county. I got three more getting ready to potentially leave on top of the the eight that we already have vacant. So I' I've pretty much got a half a shift out right now. Almost a half a shift. That's not counting the additional EMS.

Yes, ma'am. One thing just to echo Clay's comments, we're going to pay one way the other. Either going to get some more staff and we're going to transition to 2472 or we're our recruitment and training cost are going through the roof because as he mentioned, you can drive across the Kataba River, go to work for Chester County, It it's cheaper to keep people than to hire new ones and train them because like the sheriff has told you in the years past, it it takes us a while to train a paramedic, to train an EMT, and then to get them to the level that we want them to be at. That that is our big big push this year. Obviously, in the capital, we're asking for for a few things. Um, we're asking for a generator in the Kershaw station. Um, when bad weather comes and power goes out, we have to abandon the station. Um, we're asking some additional QRVS to help offset some of these areas where we have poor response times. We can put a paramedic in a QRV. Um, the EMS headquarters, um, during inclement weather, we try to cook. Um, but during the construction of that, we had to cut the kitchen part out. We're asking for that in the capital this year. And then we're asking for a little mini ambulance that we can run special events. Um we have one paramedic instructor that's coming off a grant in September. We're asking for that to be converted. And then we're asking for the certification officer to go with the EMT firefighter program that we discussed recently at the Cal meeting. Yeah. Sorry. The last item is body cameras. Um many services around the state have

moved to this. This is a protection of both the employee and the county. Um we have a lot of people who said he said she said well the EMS directors that I've talked to around the state tell them tell me all the time how many times it saves the county and their service because of patients accusing them of things that didn't happen because they'll say one thing and they say do you want to watch the video and they say no and then it goes away. Mr. Chairman, if I if I could, just so y'all be aware also on the ambulance equipment, I asked Clay to add it back. We used to I order the ambulances equipped. So, that kept the equipment updated as we ordered the new ambulances and you get a little bit of a tax break because you got the maximum tax because it's going on a vehicle. um somewhere that got stopped and that's why y'all got hit for some equipment cost this past year, but I asked him to add it back in. Then a few line item increases, obviously medical supplies. Um I got two uh letters yesterday from vendors. Prices are going up in July. Um I actually had included enough in already in the request to cover that. So there wouldn't be any more than what we already added. That's pretty much it. Unless Damian, you got anything you want to add?

So, just just a question. When you're going through each of those line items, the amounts that are in the specific line items are the things that you all are requesting and those are the amounts that you all have looked at. Yes, sir. Those would be the increases over last year. That's the difference. The increase or decrease, whatever it is, is in that second column. Yes. Okay.

What you're looking at right now, the body cameras obviously is a is a startup and fee. Um I did increase uh $5,000 for postage. The more calls we run, the more bills we got to send out. I I just want to highlight that because I think we all need to be looking at those individual line item numbers because the totals aren't totaling up from my calculations because when I total up all those individual line items, it comes out to 4,800. So, there's like an $800,000 difference in this one.

I don't know what you mean.

The very first slide covers the summary. the second and and um and most departments only have a second slide, but EMS has multiple changes. Yeah. The four the four pages might have two or three um pages of changes. Those changes are covering the significant changes. It does not include the portion that's for the salary increase and there may be other small amounts that are not included in that. That's the reason why we also with this supplemented with the line item details so you can see every single change. If you add those in the um in the changes column, they're going to be very close to what's on that summary slide.

That's why I'm saying it's not. If I add the ones on the four pages, it comes out to 4,800. The total that we have for Lancaster EMS is 4,40. So that's about a $800,000 difference. So that's going to account for um the salary increases for those staff that are not outlined on this slide. That means it should be that means it would be more. No.

Well, I mean I'm not looking at the pages that you are, but I just want to be able to um make sure that it's clear that those items that are listed here, there's no way for us to list every single change. And so we do list it here as a highle summary, but we also supplement it with the line item detail. I guess what I'm looking at is if I calculate the changes that we were given, the specific line items, that totals 4,800,000. Is that correct?

I can't say that that's correct. I can go back and calculate because I did it when we the one that you just asked about that I didn't have it in front of me. Going back and doing the exact same thing, the difference was about $80,000. And considering their $34 million change, we're talking about about 70,000 that wasn't showing there like a 2% difference. Correct. That's usually living in the portion that we don't list on the changes, which is the salary and benefit increases. I would have to do the same thing here to see and and can tell you exactly what's not listed on the slide. But again, that's the reason why we give the line item detail because there's no way we could list every single thing on the slide and have departments come and only have eight minutes to try to address their comprehensive.

I I get that. I'm just trying to understand if we're talking about the increases and decreases, like I would expect them to be consistent. They're only focusing on the most significant changes in their department, which is what we've listed here on the on their slides that follow the summary slide. So, in other words, they will not balance out unless if you're trying to add what's here to that summary slide, it it will not balance out. But this is not the only document that we're providing to be able to explain all of the changes that happen across the organization in every single budget.

Okay. So, that makes So then these numbers are really not the same totals as you're toting the line items. No, this is just to focus on what the departments are coming to ask for for next year. Only focusing on the changes. Okay. Get moving along. Uh you got anything else? Any questions, comments, concerns, complaints? Any comments, Clay?

So, the last thing is our fee schedule. Um, I have requested um an increase in the standby fee for medics. And this would be um at all county events, all county senates where they request us to stand by for medical coverage. And it's $45 per person. Um, and then we've had um what I would call an abuse of 911 in certain areas of the county. We have uh some of our assisted living facilities who have medical personnel on staff. They have what they like to deem as a no touch policy. So little grandma falls out of bed. She's not injured. They refuse to pick her up. So they pick up the phone and call 911. And we have to go. So we pick grandma up and put her back in the bed. It might happen three times in a shift. It might happen four. It might happen one. It might not happen at all. And technically right now, we don't have a way to bill for that. If you guys pass it, we'll charge them $150. all of a sudden they might want to come up and lift their own grandma back in the bed.

I did not know that. This is not for a house. This is for people who live who are paying to live in a facility that have medical personnel already on there and that are not injured. If the if the patient is injured, then by all means, us and the local fire department will respond, assess the patient, and decide if the patient needs to go to the hospital. But if I fall down, I can't get up. And because the the policy of the facility where they are says an employee can't touch this, we have to call outside. Um we're having we're being abused and and I think Chief Nicholson can can agree to that that uh this this needs this is a legal way that we might be able to slow some of this down.

Does the county council have to take action on this in the form? It would become part of the fee schedule as part of the ordinance uh for the budget. Let's make sure we document exactly what's covered in that so to to keep from getting blowback, you know. Is it done in other areas? Other counties,

other counties do this. Yes, ma'am. This is no different than if a helicopter lands at the hospital and we go and pick up the patient at the hospital and take taxi them down to the helicopter, they fly away. We build a helicopter service for that that use of the service. And we the same same bill $150. We don't do any patient care. We're quote unquote, as you would describe, as a Uber. They assume patient care. They do all the patient care. They use their equipment. They just use the stretcher to ride them to the helicopter. And the helicopter pays us every time. $150.

Not everyone does it. So there are certain ones that do it. We got three facil um white oak Lancaster and the Grove. Most of them are in north more than that. Most of them are in the north end. A lot more than that. So So pretty much once you get past five, we don't have a lot of issues.

Y'all good? Anything else? Moving on. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. KO for all your help and for what you do in this county.

Come on, Robert. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of council. Thank you for letting me uh give my spiel this afternoon. Uh we're starting with public safety communications. Um, inside of the 130 fund, I have made three significant requests. Um, I have them all listed as capital. Um, the generators at 911 need to be replaced. Both of them are right at 14 years old, if not a tick older than that. Um the quote that was provided to me was roughly $150,000 per. So that's a $300,000 project to do both generators. I'm also requesting 1.9 million to replace the 12 dispatch radio consoles. Uh, the last time this was done was in October of Sir. I'm sorry. I jumped ahead. There we go. Okay. All right. So, uh, the last time this was done, uh, Mr. Willis and I did this in October of 2020. Uh we are now approaching six years of 24 365 usage for these consoles. Uh the replacement solution is the Motorola Access Dispatch radio console and the quote provided for that was 166,000 per console. That's how I came up with this number. Now that total does not reflect any uh discount that we would receive from

state contract or anything like that. This is just a quote uh to make sure everything is included. So this is really a worst case scenario quote that I'm putting before you here. And the final request is 750,000 for uh fire dispatch CAD integration. What this will do is assist. We have the full-time firefighters uh on the north end and in the city of Lancaster. They all want to go to a unit dispatch uh solution where we're punching out a specific apparatus and crew to a call as opposed to waking up an entire station. Uh you know, these are staff stations. Some people are asleep or trying to get some sleep. And right now as we dispatch them out, we're dispatching the whole station instead of one apparatus with that crew. Uh that's just one example of what this would do, but it's basically a seamless uh dispatch for fire. It's a uh it's a artificial voice that basically comes on as soon as they set the call type. It actually tones them out, sets them out. Um, other things that can be integrated in this is in the future as we expand the fire service and build more fire stations, we can actually integrate into those fire stations where this will automatically open bay doors. It'll turn lights on, uh, different things like that. And all that is just generated by setting a call type in CAD. Um, this is, you know, there's a lot of counties around us. Uh, Chester County, for example, is actually looking into this right now. Uh, and I think we're in a

situation as the fire service is growing and more potential for more stations. This is a good time to get into it instead of trying to retrofit u stations after the fact. So, does anybody have any questions about that? Uh, Mr. I do. And I guess it's to Steve. Steve, did we not do at one point the radio consoles replace? Were we not on a cycle with that at some point? We we had talked about that and that's what this is. This the the the consoles are up and it's time to replace them. So we

you can't replace the consoles one at a time like you know do two ambulances a year or something like that. We replace all of them at the same all of them out. Yeah. Okay. I remember that. Yeah. So and we either replace should it be you said six years. So we would be looking at replacing those consoles on a six-year rotating

basis. Uh I think and Mr. Willis, correct me if I'm wrong, but because some of that predated me, but I think the last ones were about 8 years. Ideally, five years is your, you know, ideal replacement. Uh, that's where I come to you now. Uh, because this stuff will hit end of life faster than the last ones did just because they were more analog than these are. Yeah, by the time you get them all done, we'll be in 2027 and we last changed them in 2020. Okay. I I just remember discussion about cycles and maybe it was all of them at one time. Yeah.

Anybody else?

Uh for the E911 fund, uh that is a lot simpler than this one. I am simply requesting a thousand more dollars be added in to the advertising budget so that I can have some flyers made for job fairs. Other than that, that whole account remains static. Anybody got any questions on that? All right. Thank you, Robert. All right, we will move into a break. Uh, and we'll be back here in 15 minutes or so. It's 2:34.

Uh, let's we'll cut it a little bit short if we can when we get back on track. So, uh, 242. We'll try to do about 17 18 minutes. That' be good for everybody. We good.

back to order. Uh let's move into the IT now. Uh come on up and we'll hear yours.

Hello, Mr. Chairman, members of council. So here today I have a my ask for this year is going to be in personnel. Um you will see in operating cost there is a million dollars. The majority of that ask is the inner departmentals. So when a department asks for a fire truck or when they ask for software, if it doesn't specifically fall with them, if it uh covers multiple apartments, it'll sit in mine. So there was something asked uh earlier today if Greg was asking if it's for him, it only sits in his department. If it was something for like Firefield Mobile or that's not a good example, but if it was something with the Tyler Tech that we use for other departments, then it would sit in mine. So, just to help clarify that. So, see if this thing works here. All right. So, my biggest ask for this year is personnel. The number one thing I have to have is the cyber security manager. We have one person now and we help support him. There's four of us in co eluding myself that try to keep up with our cyber security landscape and uh that is almost that's that's it's turned into a full-time job for us all. So I just want to drive home that our my biggest ask if you guys can give anything for this year is going to be that role. The ERP we have funded that for six months. I'm just asking that to be turned into the full-time role. The last two there's a GIS and on the next screen is the IT tech. GIS as we've grown now over a 100,000 in our populationation. I still only have one person that does GIS. So I would really it would be very beneficial

for us this year to get this additional staff member. the IT tech. This is if we're gonna continue to uh grow, if you guys are going to continue to add fire departments, we're going to continue to add EMS. So, we're going to continue to add vehicles on the road. That's where I would ask if I can also get this staff here. If we are not going to move forward with those, if we're not going to grow in that, I'm okay with what I have. We can keep up. But if we are going to grow, that's what that ask is. So, and then as we go down the line this year, we're asking a decrease in travel. Um, technicians and staff have not utilized the searchs and stuff that we give out. So, to help try to keep budget down, I'm asking for a decrease in that. Utilities minor change. We're we're going up. IT specific software. This is I think at last count I have 193 different pieces of software. So this is just that cumulative in increase across those all when we look at special projects and special pro projects and the software IT managed. I just wanted to make sure there was another slide. These are where the interdep departmental ask come come come from. So, those are going to be I have a current list of roughly 13 a little over a million dollars here that the apartments have asked for. So, in special per projects for itself, I'm asking for a 100 grand to finish the Wi-Fi on the sheriff's campus and to replace our mobile device management because that has run its uh end of life. minor in increase and lease the same

annual replacement for all hardware and tough books and that it manage for department software that's the software that like I said that doesn't fall if it's not specific to them it falls into mine so that is some of the new stuff we are asking for this year and one of those is for sheriff and Robert is trying to take our CAD system and go to the loud. It is a it is a pretty high cost for year 1. It's roughly 844,000 that comes with a one-time cost of 415 and then a SAS annual recurring of 429. So to put it in p perspective though, I have to buy servers out there every five to six years. The last time we did this, it cost us 841,000. We spend in maintenance every year roughly about 140. So if you break that down, we're already spending a year about 300 grand on this. So I mean I'm I'm recommending it for this this year. We can wait till FY to W 28 but the server refresh will have to take place by FY to 29. So and it takes about a year to do this uh upgrade. So anybody have anything questions?

Any questions? I I was just going to highlight a couple of things that you did not highlight. Yep. Um, so in the presentation, the first slide, you're talking about core protection threats that were blocked. That was 237,000 that your team has done. Yes, sir.

In addition, there were 322 advanced threats blocked. That is a tremendous job that you all are doing and it's a significant effort to protect our county and the resources that our county has and it protects people's and constituents personal information. So when you talk about the need for a cyber security manager, that is a huge infrastructure need that I see for our county and I appreciate all the efforts that you are doing and your team is doing in that effort. Thank you. Steve,

30 seconds or less. Can you talk council just briefly about the transition that's coming in the next couple of years? Software as a service is going away. AI as a service will be coming in because that new anthropic vistos that's a hacker's dream.

Yeah. Um 30 seconds or less. So yeah. So you guys know the big tick on AI it is really there's a lot even our current software is he is heavy leveraging this. So what Steve's talking about is companies now sell stuff as a SAS. It looks like it's going to be moving towards this new AI driven where it's actually going to be doing the work for you. So um I'm trying not to be I'm trying not to scare anybody here. I I'm you know it's it's it's going to change the way that we do things. So um be on the lookout, I guess. And and let me let me highlight some of that because I know there's a lot of concerns about AI out there and what AI is going to do. When people ask me how is that going to impact jobs in the workforce, I compare it to the same thing that happened when Excel came out and you didn't have accountants now just running manual spreadsheets and running calculations on their own with the little receipts that you would have to staple to your sheet. It simplified things. AI is a tool that can be used by people to improve their job performance and increase efficiencies. So yes, it's going to change the way the jobs look just the same way that Excel and Microsoft Word change typing.

Right. But we figure it out when we transition, everyone improves. Right. Right. And right now, I guess the best use case I can think of is the sheriff is using that for his stuff now. He has that to help them track on cases and vehicles. AI is a tool. It's not a rep placement. They will start trying to gear it towards more more of of that. But yes, okay. Anybody have anything else? Got anything else? Thank you, Scott. Thank you.

We'll move on to Council of Aging, Miss McGriff. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Uh before you, my name is Jessica McGriff and I serve as the executive director for Lancaster County Council on Aging. We operate Lancaster Area Ride Service or Lars, our county's public transportation system. This afternoon, I want to share with you not just what we do, but why transportation is not a supplemental service in Lancaster County. Transportation is infrastructure. In the past year, this past year, Lars has made significant improvements to better serve Lancaster County. We lowered fairs to increase access for residents. We expanded service hours. We increased destinations and trip purposes. We introduced discounts for seniors and veterans and we improved overall operational efficiency. This year alone, we completed over 29,000 trips. That's an increase of 2600 from the previous year. We are serving 34% more of Lancaster more clients than we did the previous year. And for work and work training, we completed more than 8,500 trips this past year. Our retail is continually month by month on increase. We have seen a 250% increase than where we were six months ago. So in other words, more people are riding, more miles are being covered, and more needs are being met. And we're doing this with a fleet of 17 vehicles of our 22. 17 are uh daily uh

operational and many of those are aging and maintenance costs are going up. Lars is not just transporting individuals. We are getting residents to work, ensuring access to medical care, supporting individuals, attending job trainings and education, connecting people to essential services and daily living needs. Without this transportation, individuals cannot maintain employment, access health care, or remain independent. And when that happens, the cost of that transportation does not disappear, but it will shift to emergency services, health care systems, social services, and ultimately taxpayers. When we when we invest in transportation, we are supporting the workforce, supporting our local economy, and reducing the long-term public costs. Now, the demand for transportation in Lancaster County is exceeding our current capacity. We are seeing increased trip requests, greater service area needs, and rising operational costs, particularly in vehicle maintenance and fuel. At the same time, our ability to operate this system depends on meeting a required local match to access state and federal funds. For the upcoming fiscal year, our required local match is approximately 246,000. This is where the county support becomes critical. Without sufficient local funding, we risk limiting services, reducing availability or being unable to fully leverage available state and federal funding. This year, we are requesting $200,000 in county funding to support Lars. This investment will help meet our required local match, allow us to fully leverage outside funding, maintain and expand service availability, and continue to support

the residents of Lancaster County in a meaningful way. This is not an expansion of me of mission. This is sustaining and strengthening essential infrastructure that our community is already relying on this uh even today. I'll close with this. Every trip we provide represents something important. A job kept, a doctor's visit made, a life maintained with dignity and independence. Transportation may not not always be visible, but its impact is felt across every part of our community. Transportation is infrastructure, not luxury. If you can't get there, you can't work, you can't heal, and you can't remain independent. We appreciate your consideration and continued support of Lancaster County residents. Do you have any questions for me? M

just to pro off the top of your head, what's y'all's total budget? I mean, I mean, our operating costs are 1.4 million. Pretty cheap for that many trips. Y'all are And that covers very efficient organization. Thank you for that. I've worked very hard this year to make us so.

Uh Mr. chair. Uh thank you Jessica for what you do. Um and for those of you who may not know uh Lars is a a service that the county that the council on agent subcontracts through the county. So we are required as a county to match to a certain extent. Steve, you may can give a better history than I can, but because council was unable to provide those transportational service in the county and council agent was set up with uh doing transportation. So, they received the grant from the county some years back. So, Steve, you may be able to to add to that, but uh and it's doing a great job and and has grown. Yeah. Within the year, the last year. Just just would note again we we we originally started this working through the uh council of governments and um it is a service where we are obligated to match in order to pull down those federal fun. Okay. Is there any other questions? Thank you very much.

Thank you. Okay. We will move on to storm water. Mr. All right. Good afternoon. Since protocol has already been established, I want to start by saying I'm not asking for increase in my budget. So, won't be too bad this time. Um, the number one thing for us right now is our storm water office. I know Mr. Willis said he was going to chime in on that as well. Want to, sir? What was that, T? I'm sorry. I was handing

uh my number one concern about storm water office. Um, currently I'm in a I'm in a building that we're renting. Come the next 5 years, I need to come at the end of this year, I need to find a new location. We we we talked a little bit about that at the start that I've gotten the memo out to them. Do we want the three or the five-year option to renew the lease?

Okay. All right. Since we covered that, um, one thing we have been focusing more is on infrastructure as a department. Uh, one of the things we we're looking at purchasing is pole camera that will work for us and collaboration with public works as well. Again, our capital budget is a decrease, but we've trying to finish Blackhorse Run and I know Mr. Willis been talking to council in reference that as well. Um, Henry has covert. Lonar is coming back with another plan as far as the covert. If they don't replace the covert, then um they're going to give us another plan back to the county and then we look at that. Um IT requests, they already covered that through it. I get the next slide. Okay. Far as us, we have seven full-time personnel. Um storm water fees not increasing. there and compatible with York County which the two of us are the fast two counties in Meckllinmberg and Charlotte metro region um we have looked at 69 civil plan reviews as of so far this year over 2,000 residential reviews um again one thing that we have increased on is our outfall mapping which is part of MPDS permit we have established 130 outfalls we covered about 20 almost 20 mi of stream. The the beauty of this this part is if there's any anything that goes into the water, we can go back to that and try to track and see where the pollutant will be. So, Penny, any question? That's all I have for this this time.

What kind of farm balance do we have in storm water? Anybody know? We were at 4.2 um 4.2 million beginning this fiscal year. And we're gonna use some of that to for Black Horse Run.

Any other questions? Well, thank you very much. I I'll be followed by Miss Stephanie Snowden. Airport.

Council Louise, don't beat me down, please. So, uh, before I get started, I just wanted to, um, let you know that in January, um, um, Administrator Willis and I started looking at our fuel and particularly for GA. Um, and in January, we sold about, uh, $4,625 worth of fuel. in February and March after we made the adjustment, that's been over $8,000 for each month from February uh through March, $8,18 and $8,315. And so if you look at um at the front uh the first page looking at fuel sales, um I really estimate that we'll be closer to $500,000 in fuel sales this year for the first time because we usually hover around 390 or so. Um so that is absolutely um good news. Also um I committed to you all in January that I would start doing research. So thus far far um myself along with the line one lineman Mark Gonzalez have met with the airport directors and staffs in Sumpter the Greenville uh downtown airport as well as Hamilton Owensfield and we're slated um um to look at Monroe. Um Mr. Um Gonzalez wished he could be here right now for the first time. Um this um uh we've had a flight of a Gulfream 400 come in today, 12 passenger. So he's working with them. We are seeing over the last uh month we've had about five new um corporate uh customers that come in. I think that is really a testament to the change of what we're doing with customer service and making sure that we're available and that we're providing um really good

service. So, as you all know, um the airport is an economic development engine. It also u fills a gap, a community gap. This week we had probably about close to 600 um community residents out there to greet a young cancer patient who wound up uh the sheriff as well as our um EMS uh folks and airport staff coordinated um his return from California on a corporate jet and then escorted him him home here in um in Lancaster. And so that fills a gap and then also for um emergency preparedness. So going to make um some adjustments to this. If you look at the 205 uh 26 budget and the increases being requested for 20 uh 26 2027 uh in personnel operating as well as capital that capital cost is actually um to um up um above ground um fuel tanks. Uh I will be looking to see if there's any uh sort of um grants that we might be able to get for that, but that has been captured in the CIP. Our current tanks are underground and they are um and they're approximately 20 years old. Um and then u there are some requests for u miscellaneous expenses. those that's a small handheld equipment as well as um uh some training um and that sort of thing. And that's essentially um it the um the uh request for um $30,000 for uh lawnmowers. That request um u we're removing that request because we were able to find some funding um from another source. Right now, the um parks and recreation staff are helping us out

and they're mowing about 300 um acres for us u just about um every two to three weeks and during the height of the summer. So, I'll entertain any uh questions that you might might have. Any questions from Snowden? You know, I just like I'm impressed on the corporate visits that we had. very impressed with that

is in December we had the largest one of the largest Gulf Streams an 18 passenger on December 28th and so we're seeing more and more um of that picking up. So I do believe that we'll be able to give you um give you some really good um year this year over last year data as well as a business plan for how we intend to move forward. We're forced to replace those fuel tanks out there. We need to sell a lot more fuel because many years ago I ran a convenience store and there weren't much profit in fuel, right?

I don't know what there is in aine airplane fuel could uh before our next when we move on through the budget process, how much per gallon do we make or whatever, you know, what's our call spaces for this $360,000, right? And I'm dig and I'm digging into that. Yes. Hard to fl it fluctuates. Yes. But uh just an idea. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Move on to risk management.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, council. Here just to present to you the risk management budget for the upcoming year. Uh we are a department of one. Uh we are high performance and we're also dealing with public safety. Uh we have seen a decrease this year in workers comp claims. So I looked this morning we're hitting about 36 total incidents reported for workers comp. So that's an improvement over the previous years of 25 26 workers comp data. Um as you can see again too with those numbers there. Um some things that we can't overcome with workers comp is once they're injured they're they get a a maximum medical improvement rating and that's by state law. So um say we have a claim that has 300,000 let's just say $200,000 with a cost. There's also a claim where the claimant's entitled to a lump sum as well. So sometimes you may have 150 in claims and you may have another claim that sells for about $160,000 as well. So those costs fluctuate. Uh we're seeing more providers now here that are not really open to putting employees back to work. Depends on because of liability issues. They want to make sure they're protecting themselves too. So that that's also another reason some of the costs are increasing for that. And as far as the budget operating expenses, just only a 2.97% increase, which could be for the IO cost of living increase for the next coming budget year.

Any questions? Any questions? I just like to compliment you on the last 16 years. Uh we've got these excellent awards for Lancaster County. Thank you. I'd like to compliment you on that. I'm becoming a one of the older gentlemen in the room when we go to our annual meeting. So one man show, huh? We do. We're there when they need us. So I like the awards, but I like the moderate, too. That's important. There any other questions? Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, we're going to move on to the library. Good afternoon.

South Carolina State Library. put a snapshot of each county library and that's the latest stats for Lancaster County. Langster County Library has 24 total employees, 14 full-time and 10 part-time. We focus on quality development, high performance. As you can see, this year, we're not asking necessarily for an increase in our budget. We are asking for an increase in personnel, and I'll get to that in a minute. But if you look at some of our numbers, we are hitting it out of the park with our numbers. So, we had a total, in fact, that circulation of materials is not the most accurate. So, the one that's been recently that I'm handed you today, the one that's most recently for 2025 that the state library, we have to turn in an annual survey to them every year and then they release the numbers for every county. So, if you're interested, I can send you that link because you can look at each county. We actually had 295,695 items borrowed last year. 295,000. That's an increase of over 30,000 from last year. We also had a total of 182,395 library visits. That's an increase of over 17,000 visits from last year. We also had a the intraconorial loans received. So some of you may know we are a part of a consorcia of South Carolina libraries. They are just adding seven more to that consorcia. So hopefully all the South Carolina counties will be in that consortium. But we received 37,000 a little over 37,000 items last year and

sent out those throughout South Carolina. We had over 20,000 computer use sessions and our digital services circulated 50 over 56,000. Our new card registrations last year were 3,265. So we average about 272 new cards per month. That's our average. So those are new people getting cards with our library every single month. We average 272. The number of times our meeting spaces were used by external groups. This is not library programs. These are external groups, nonprofit organizations, county departments, 823. So many of you maybe I hope you've had the pleasure of coming to the library and using our meeting rooms. um the county um departments such as IT and HR and finance use those rooms. We also have United Way um Promise Neighborhood, some of our Rotary groups. The community is really using the spaces that you have provided and it's a great amenity for our community. Can we um advance to the next slide? some of the changes to our budget. We are asking for a full-time circulation assistant for Dell Webb Library. As you know, Dale Web Library in Indianland is our highest circulating branch. It is it circulates Kershaw and Lancaster combined almost times two. So, we are asking for a full-time circulation assistant in that branch to handle the increased circulation and the programming demands for that location. It has also um requested projection screens. This was not my request. This is from some of the department heads that were coming in and using our projection screens. They said they could they look blurry. They couldn't see the images. And so we're interested in putting TV screens in there which are number one easier for patrons and groups

to use and also have better quality for the projection. And it is the other ones are from it. Did it cover that? Have they already covered their budget request? Do I need to cover it again? Are we good? Okay. So, the only thing that the library itself is asking for is that circulation assistant, which is really important. If you look at other counties that are similar to our size, if you look at Sumpter County, which is pretty close to to our population, um they have three locations as well, but if you compare their visits to ours, so we had um 182,000 visits, they had about 94,000. So we had 295,000 items barred, they had 133, a little over. We did 421 programs. They did 271. So my point with that is we are maximizing our employees with programs and services. And imagine what we could do with one more employee. So every single person in that library contributes to our programs and services. I even have part-time people doing programming. So we use every possible strength and talent that we have to meet the needs of our community. And so this year I'm hoping that you will grant a request for one more full-time person at Delell Webb. Does anyone have any questions for me? There

any questions? I just want to thank you. I visit the Delell Web Library quite a bit. Um it is a fantastic resource for the community. I see all the people that are there. I see the activity. It makes sense with the numbers that you presented us today. So thank you for all the work that you are doing and the efficiencies that you execute in the Dell web library in particular. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Delinqu with tax. Good. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? All right. All right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much for the opportunity to come before you today to present my physical uh budget for you for 2627. Um I too am just trying to make some changes to the existing budget that I have. I know that you have already had discussions about um some across the board changes with personnel and also some it because of our contracts that we are mandated to have. Uh I am let me back up. I am the delinquent tax collector for Langster County. I am also the director for records management and passport. So, we're going to be talking a little bit about each one of those things today. Um, we are an office of six. We have four in our delinquent tax office and two in records management and passports. Um, our strategic priorities are resource optimization and high performance. Uh, the figures that you see before you are from the 2025 tax sale. Uh this past November, we um brought in 4.334601 million in bids and taxes. And of the 4.3,46,698 were taxes paid. So the remainder of that is overage bids. Um we brought to when we rolled last March not this present March March but to last March we rolled 3265 3265 parcels came to our office from treasur's office. By the time we went to tax sale we carried a little over 200 which I think is pretty impressive. Our goal is always a little less than 200 but that's okay. After the sale we had

sold 167 properties. Um the redemption total that was of March 2nd. Uh as of April 1st we are around 35%. So that's roughly about six have already redeemed. We're in our redemption period and about 60 of the 167 have already redeemed which is good because we don't ever really want to deed those properties unless we have to. Um currently we have well when we rolled this March we rolled 3281. So we're kind of on pace. We really haven't. We clicked a little bit but not too terribly much. Uh about a month prior to that we were a whole lot more and that was kind of making me nervous but anyway they kind of brought it in so which was good. Um okay hold just a second. Our three main expenses in delinquent tax are our postage which is huge. We've had at least two increases this past year in the postal service just for our execution notices which by the way go out today. Yay. and our certified letters. Uh those are restricted delivery which is the most costly. I know there is legislation in the general assembly right now to try and change that. Hopefully that will happen this session, may not, maybe next time, but it may be that we don't have to have the restrictive um signatures which would be helpful for our cost. So we'll see how that works. And then the physical posting of the properties. In general, we post around a thousand properties a year. um 1,00 to,200. Our contract is a three-year contract each year. We are in an evolving year, so we will be going from $25 to $27 a posting for that. Um, so a lot of any of the increases that or the changes that you do see will be from those contracts that but I have adjusted that in in uh in my budget. What I did was I took a look at my budget and I

said, "Where can I move some money? Where am I spending it? Where could I spend it better? And that's what I did. Um, if we'd go to the next slide for just a moment, please. So, you'll see what I did was last year we did have a line item for my passports. I want to separate that. I don't think it's too clearly defined in my budget. I don't want to lump it all under delinquent tax because it is not always like that. So, um, I want to pull $8,000 from my postage and put it over into my passports so I can track how my passports postage is going. Um, the 135 is for increases in the contract for uh my software and for my postings. The 4,000 is an increase in ads for our um newspaper ads that we do for our tax sales, which again, all of this is required by South Carolina Taxation Law, Title 12. Um and then the lease copying was a suggestion or recommendation from it because we make a lot of c of copies. We have to have work files. So if we have to go to um well when we take send them to our um attorney for vetting for our deeds, we have to have copies of everything we've done. So we make a lot of copies. So in essence, that's where we are as far as delinquent tax. Wanted to talk briefly about passports. We are um very very steady. I think our community is very very pleased with our services. We have two walk-in days which help a lot with our appointments. If you can't if you don't need an appointment, you need to have something done very quickly um then you can walk in on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Uh we are also opening up for renewal um help. We currently right now the traveler does not have to come in to renew their passport if it is a current passport. But a lot of our older community or a lot of first timer, well not first- timerrs, but a lot of repeaters want us to kind of review

their application. So we just tell them to come on in and we will review that, make sure everything's okay and then they mail that off. So that they've been very appreciative of that as well. So that's um very very steady and um been very very successful. That second position that you gave me several years ago has been more than appreciated. uh it has helped us tremendously especially with our records management division of that because it has helped us to have more hands- on deck, more training, more uh processing folks. So I've greatly appreciate that and it has more than paid for itself. So thank you very much. Uh records management, if you're a records management nerd, you're going to be excited. Um South Carolina archive scheduling is getting an update and that has not happened in 20 years. We are hoping that they are going to add a lot more of the digital records so that we don't have to keep as much paper. So that's due to come out in May. Uh once that comes out, we will definitely update all our department heads to make sure that they have their scheduling so they know what they are um keeping and what they can destroy and things like that. I'm also very fortunate um our summer financial workshop has invited me to come and to train on the system and to also you know provide for those updates. So, I'm very much appreciative of the finance department for that. I think that's going to be well use of our time.

Any questions? Any questions? Uh, on digital management, I know there's millions of records down there. Are those old records? Are they digit? Are they already what you call it? Digitized. I don't know the word.

Some are, some aren't. It just really kind of depends. A lot of our archive stuff that are real. I mean, we have some like mortgages and deeds and stuff from like 1800s and things like that. They are definitely not um but some of the newer things like the assessor's office has digitized his. I think um register of deeds has digitized hers. Um and there was and that's what I want to see about the update because there were some components that you still had to either keep the physical copy or you definitely have to be able to access the digitality of what you did. So, the technology's got to stay up with it. So if they change this next year, they're we'll probably be uh taking some of the old records and

could possibly that department requests those to be digitized. Um but also it would help in the fact that we're not going to have to hopefully go off campus for storage space. So that means we don't have to rent a space from us to go store records because we can keep it in house and where it is. So yeah, would be good. Any other questions? Thank you very much for your time. Great job. Circuit court clerk and family courts.

Good afternoon, Mike Watkins, Clerk of Court. Thank you for this opportunity. Um, we can get right to it. Uh, we got a murder trial going on right now. So, busy over there. Uh, and I'll have some news at the end that I just found out about three hours ago. That's great news for our county. So, can't wait to tell you. But, uh, starting out with circuit court edge of receipt. Tell us. Okay. Hurry up. I will I'm Miss McGriff. You're going to appreciate it being No, I I hope it's what we were working on.

It is actually we're working on. I'm not asking for any increases as far as uh budget wise in circuit court. I do see we had an increased in amount of 188. I think that must be from the uh 12 to $15 uh raise that they got last year from the uh for the baiffs. Uh you can see the pending general sessions cases 2564 that's defendants not charges. You add charges and that gets a little over 5,000 uh cases pending. But we did dispose of more than uh we have and that that's good. That's the first time several years that our solicitor's office has been working hard. Uh pending common please cases. Uh that that probably pretty much stayed the same, but we disposed of a few more than we actually have pending. So So we're working over there. Um so over there's any questions on that.

Any questions? clerk of court. Uh the data was on the last one with the pending cases. Uh general sessions and uh common please little bit less this time. We did not ask for any capital projects. Uh the last we are starting on the last courtroom upgrade with the video audio courtroom C. So uh that was a bigly decrease. Not asking for that this year. Uh not asking for any increase anywhere else on the budget side of that. That was the equipment there, the upgrades. Uh, family court. Um, I think the increased amount on that's a little different. Nope, it is. I think that was that new position that we got granted uh using the 40 funds and then the 25% uh on that. And uh yeah, there it is. The legal clerk won the amount there. uh utilities, leases, DSS incentive, it's there. So, we're not at any more other than what's already been given to us on the family court side. Uh the the pending cases on that, if you can go back one, the highlights and impact data, uh you can see um although it's it shows cases remain pending 26 348. uh that's the files for each case. But as uh as that case moves forward, you have several hearings that they just go into that one case where it's a temporary rule to show cause. So they're staying busy over there. Last week they had uh and it looks like they're going to start holding occasionally during the year two family court going at the same time. They handle it like champs. Those those ladies are amazing and the whole staff, but certainly that family court side

handled two courtrooms. When you have two courtrooms going, uh you'd like to have a clerk assigned to each courtroom, whether they're in the courtroom or they're on call. So, that kind of pulls them out of our office and but it looks like we're going to start going to that probably three or four times a year. U and of course, we're very busy on family court side. usually three three uh weeks of court a month, two to three a month uh with that. So, of course, you can see we we uh support and alimony, we we bring in a lot of money. Uh now that Colombia is handling most of the child support, not as much money comes through our office, but it's it's probably three or four million in child support that's paid uh through our office through Colombia a year that they That's all. Any questions on the family court side? We're not asking for anything additional there.

All right. You want good news? Yes. Give Brian Given just called me about three hours ago. Uh Everett Stubs, Senator Stubs called him. The new judge position has gone into the budget. The House has approved it. It's got to go through the Senate, but it looks like we're get this new position. So, thank you. Thank you, Jesus. I came in smiling for Lan this district I mean the this circuit the Lancaster Chester and Fairfield. Yes sir. And it we're going to push Will it be housed here? Housed here. That's Yes. In our in our courthouse. Yeah. We've already got the suite. Uh so we got a fulltime

judge. Judge. And and for those of you who don't understand what that means is Steve was over the CJC CJCC coordinating committee and on that committee tell me what the heck that Steve I'll turn it over to you. That was the criminal justice coordinating council.

Okay. And it was me and Steve Harper, the sheriff, solicitor, uh, public defendant, clerk to, uh, court sat on that committee. And that was one of our recommendations, the top recommendations that we get a a uh, sitting judge in this county because of all the cases that um, we had on the docket and it finally happened and and thank you. It's been 13 years since judge sitt in that court courthouse from Lan SC uh Judge Goldmith retired. Yes, that is fantastic news. He thinks

we we've got a lot of people behind this. Justice Kitridge, all of our sen all three of our senators Harvey Peeler is behind it. So think it's going to happen. He thinks we start screening in the fall. Hopefully this time next year we've got a judge sitting in that. Yes. Got the sweep available. I know y'all know we've got the buildout starting for the solicitor which is going to finish another jury room and another judge's suite, but regardless on the second floor, we've got it ready. It's it's empty right now, but we'll have that that ready.

With that, we are uh we thought it a good idea to request one additional personnel uh because the work's going to pick up with a sitting judge and the family court works picking up and uh we're staying busy. So, uh appreciate your time. Sher, would you like to say anything sheriff about that committee because you are were very instrumental in putting together that committee. Well, I just think

Yeah, Mr. W. Go ahead. If I could, it's good news. Bad news here. Great news. Got the judge. We're going to be able to move the cases. They've been making some pretty good progress on getting rid of some of the backlog, but there's still a lot to go. Oh, yeah. In order to do that, Mike's got to have staff. Ry's got to have staff. Williams got to have staff because you you can add a solister, but if you hadn't had a public defender, case isn't tried. Got to have staff to actually hear the case, move the case. Y incumbent on us to come up with that.

I was just going to ask so the numbers for FY26 date does that go through for the family court? I lost that last part there. So is it is it through January of this year, December of last year? Like what is the the tracking for FY26? Uh if I can ask my family. so far. So it the the data the name number of cases filed was through the end of March. Okay.

Okay. Any other questions? Thanks sir. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Okay. Soil and water convers conservation district.

I'm ready.

I'm waiting on her to put up my slides and talk. All right. So in our budget request, remember I am representing the Solen water board and two watershed boards. So there are 15 people and just one staff member. Um we are asking for it looks like a lot more um when you're looking at that percentage change, but Mr. Willis, during our um meeting, we were talking about um asking for one-time funds. So there are two um one-time funds that we were looking at. Um, and the one-time funds we were looking at is some watershed projects. Remember, we are um public safety, infrastructure, we're high performance, you know, we're a little bit of everything um when you start looking at your um strategic alignment. So, last year I presented that I was trying to get a grant from the state dees and we were going to try to put staffing gauges at our watershed dams. Um, but the only problem was is that was a new program and they ended up like changing the deadline, changing the guidance, and all of a sudden at the end, like after they changed the date three times, um, it kicked us out because ours are not in poor condition, but we do have some that are at the end of their lifespan, and we have two more that will be coming up in the next, you know, four or five years. So, Mr. Willis wanted me to definitely talk to you to make sure that you know that our wershed dams are getting to the end of their lifespan. Um the Gent Reservoir and Campbell Lake are already over those two the 50year lifespan. Gills Creek, the one that protects the Lindsy Pettis Greenway, um that is up in 2028. And then we'll have um Little Lynches and then Bear Creek. So, um, those will be big projects, but we just

wanted to kind of make you aware as you're planning for things to kind of remember that those are protecting lots and lots of lives downstream of those sites. So, one of our projects is putting in the um inundation sensors and then the other one is we need to repair the basin at Bear Creek. We have repaired the other basins and um when I guess it's been a long time ago when Veron Veronica was the finance department and we would like save a little bit of money and carry it over and we kind of did like one here, one there and then the next. So we do partner our maintenance with the um water and sewer district. So, we're just asking for a little bit like 30,000 and we're going to share the cost of maintenance with um water and sewer. So, so that way they're going to help carry some of that cost. So, that's kind of our big change. We are asking again for part-time education outreach coordinator that will be able to help the soil and water board and the watershed boards. Um, since I am just one person, I've been doing this job for 19 years and of course the county grows, you know, people are finding us. Um, I mean, I just look the last 90 days I've had 150,000 views on social media on our page um just looking for programs. Um we did ask for just um operational expenses um increasing tort liability um staffing increase um cost of living um go back to the other slide. Okay. So the stolen water board sets aside financially funds to be able to

fund the um seeds at the county library. And last year um my office and the library total together gave out over 19,000 seed packets. Um we started this year I talked to the A teachers at all four a um all four high schools and part of their job is to have um outreach classes with adults but sometimes that doesn't get a lot of people in. And so what we did is we partnered together and we've been hosting them at the library and we have seen a tremendous increase of programs with people coming in to come and learn about um different um gardening things or agriculture related topics. Um so if you haven't joined us yet, please sign up. Um join us. Um sometimes tickets go really really fast. So I think I think tickets sold out like 50 of them in like three minutes one time and I was like oh goodness. So um we also do Arbor Day, Earth Day, Pollinator Week. Um the Soul and Water Board had a lot of farmers ask for this service and it's been a long time since they've been into the renting of equipment. So they purchased a used no till grain drill from another conservation district. So now we're able to offer services to land owners who want to rent a no till drill to you know put in cover crops or plant pasture land. So we do have those services now that are available and I don't know if you have any more questions.

Any questions? Yeah. And I should already know this but uh maybe I forgot. Is is this a county department or do we support them because of what they do for the county? We we support them but they are the board's actually elected.

All three boards are elected by your count or by your citizens. And then every conservation district here in South Carolina is set up differently. So some conservation like let's say Greenville. Greenville, for example, has four employees and they are housed in county space and they have county computers and they get county cars. Richland is similar. They are in county space. They're a county department. But then you get to some of our other ones where we are housed in USDA field office. We use a USDA computer. So you don't have to provide us with all the software stuff because USDA is providing that for us because we have that partnership with the state government and the federal government. And then the way it works is with us all being here together then your farmers or land owners get millions of dollars coming in through the programs that come through our group. Any other questions?

Yes, sir. Briefly me, you touched on the dams are hitting the end of their life cycle. These are earthen dams, but y'all have done a great job maintaining them, keeping trees out of the right end of life. And I have John here who is our DNR watershed coordinator and I don't know if he wants to come up and explore. I was just I was looking at I don't know if he want That's okay. Okay.

That's okay. Um cuz he he may he may be able to tell you how ours look compared to other ones. Our watershed board takes the money that you give us and they want to make sure that ours look wonderful compared to everybody else's and well maintained because you know some of them have trees growing up. some of them don't have the maintenance budget that you give us to be able to do these items with.

I guess my question was whatever we give you, your uh agency takes that and do your own budget, they're not a part of if we do something countywide, right, Sabrina? If we do a countywide across the board anything, they're not affected. Okay. Okay. That is

Yeah. Yeah. Because they kind of just My board just asked for you, I guess, to try to treat me like a county employee to make it fair. If they get a raise 2%, then I get a raise 2%. It kind of lines like that. Okay. Are you good? Yeah, I'm good. We thank you for overlooking these dams because the last thing we want to be is in the news when a dam breaks like it did in Colombia a few years ago. It's not pretty. We don't want no trees running out of our dams.

No, I will say we have I think we have some of the beautiful lakes, nice green grass, you know, they're beautiful. We just there. Any other questions? Thank you. Hopefully nobody has any April Fool jokes for y'all today. Nobody's played any today. No. Okay. Yes. Uh Mr. Chairman, Jenny brought up a good point. Because they're not county employees. Technically, we're not giving them a raise. We're increasing the amount

that we fund the board. who they choose to do with it is up to them. Yeah, they got one bunch.

We're going to the assessor now.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, council members. I'm Brad Cars, assessor. our staff. We have staff of 14 full-time employees who just recently completed our reassessment program for this fiscal year county. In doing that, we uh reviewed almost all of the parcels in the county. We added a little over 800 new uh construction parcels. We did almost 5,000 property. Uh going forward into the future fiscal year, we have estimated that we're going to have over 1,200 new construction properties to add. This year, uh we're estimating 5,000 property transfers and probably a little over 4,000 ATI, which is that's properties that sale that's tied into the transfers, but that's properties that sell that we revalue um going forward into my budget. So this year I'm actually not asking for any increases other than we had some small increases for our software contracts for our camel system right around $2,000. But my overall budget is actually going to decrease this year. Uh reassessment costs are coming off. So you know last year I asked had to add money for implementing reassessment. Those costs are coming off. So our budget's actually going down this year.

Any questions? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Communications and marketing. Hello everybody. Wonderful to see you all today. Thank you so much for your time and and hearing uh what I have to talk about about my budget. So, I have full uh four I am full, but uh four full-time staff members and our strategic priorities are high performance and resource optimization. And I think some people don't really understand what we do in our office. Um but a communications team for a county, especially a county growing like ours, is invaluable. We're able to talk to citizens in a way that we weren't before. we're able to communicate with them, hence the name communications team, but also provide them a service which is letting them know where their tax dollars are being spent. Um, allowing them to feel connected to the work that their local government is doing and letting them know if there's changes in ordinances or any important things that they're going to need to know for their day-to-day lives. So, I wanted to provide you with highlights um in our impact data. And I also wanted to point out that this is just measured from the time I started July 1st um through March 3rd, which is not the full year. Um but I don't like to take credit for someone else's work. So I wanted to just do the time that I've been here. So our social media engagement, the numbers have actually increased. Um so we're over 15 million um impressions across our Facebook, which is a 73.7% increase. We have up there it says 781 a little over 781,000 but we actually have 95,000 engagements. So that means that many people in that amount of time have engaged with our content. Meaning

they've commented, they liked it, they've seen it, they've digested that comment. Um going down, we talked we just talked about impressions and it's up even higher than that. But then we also have gained a lot of new followers. As our county grows, so does our following on social media. And I this is a focus on social media because that is where most people do receive um their news. Approximately over 50% of people receive their news on social media. Anyways, sorry. Our total net followers is now 61,89 with a total of uh almost 10,000 new followers. So that's up 106% from last year. in website visits. As of from July 1st to March 3, we have 234,000 views on our website and that's active view. So that means they have visited our website, click through, they've either clicked through whether it's to pay their taxes or to interact with something on our website. So we have a couple of ask and a couple of realignments. The first one there you'll see is overtime. Um I did inc I did ask for an increase on this um simply because we are a staff of four and three not including myself the three folks that I have in my office they are hourly. We are asked to attend afterhour work after hour projects whether it be here for council meetings planning commission meetings um any really after hours meetings that our services are needed at but also events. We go to every event that the county puts on from parks and recreation to county sponsored events and we're not there just having fun because they are a good time but we are there covering the event and making sure that our folks know what's going on. The next one is a capital request and that's a gateway signage. So a big thing that I've noticed is in our county and I've lived here the majority of my life. Our county has a

couple of signs welcome you into Lancaster County. Um, but they're becoming dated and they're actually not branded in the correct brand. They're branded for the city of Lancaster, but they are welcoming people into the county. Um, I don't actually think we have one in our 521 corridor from Indian Land, do we? We do not.

We do not. Okay. I'll say I don't think we did. Um, we do not have that welcoming people into Lancaster County. Um, and signage really is important. um not just from a marketing standpoint, but um it's a long-term investment and it's how we present our community to residents, visitors, and businesses. It involves it it aids economic development, community pride, consistency, and longevity. This is a one-time capital investment that will last for years. Um and then when you break it down, the annual cost is um it it's it's very low for a very visible impact. And then these will be placed in key entry points. I've been working with one of our wonderful project managers um and he has identified some places that where they would be most effective but also um some options that would be most cost effective. Obviously, we would bring those designs to you guys and that's further down the road. Right now, we're just asking for the project. Um, but it's really about putting our best foot forward and making sure that every single day at every entrance or the major entry points to Lancaster County, people know that we're proud to live here and that we're proud to serve Lancaster County. Um, cell phone replacements. I know I feel like a teenager asking their parents for a new cell phone, but um, this is really important for our folks. Um, a lot of times that is our first um, I always say our first line of defense. We have wonderful 4K cameras, but when we're out in the field, a lot of times it's easier to grab footage on our cell phone, whether that be images or video, and then package that on the go. So, residents are getting real-time information. Our cell phones now, they function, they function like a cell phone, but um the higherend, the higher grade cell phones, they have improved camera function. They have longer battery life for field photography. They have a higher grade lens, low light capability, so we can do things more at night. image stabilization. So, we're not having to go back and edit on our 4K

cameras. We can these headphones actually shoot in 4K. Um, but we're able to do it in real time and that's the big thing for us is making sure that we're either the first to break the news or first to get the information out there to our residents. Um, we do have a increase in advertising and this is for the historical commission. Um, believe it or not, they're one of our most forward- facing commissions in the county, and they have um pamphlets and different things and different materials at rest stops and and really all over the state. Um, and that hasn't been looked at in quite some time. And my team is partnering with the historical commission to make sure that we're putting our best foot forward and when people grab those pamphlets that they're high-end, that it's great information, and that um it is it's tangible and something that they want to take with. And hopefully people want to come visit our museum. Next slide, please. Contractual services. Um, we use right now a media partner. Um, we are hoping to get one of our folks drone um, certified. Um, not to the same caliber as our emergency um, our public safety, but that will also help there. Um, and then training, travel, and dues. There is an increase there again for the drone the drone test and all that good stuff and then our phone which is an IT protection.

Is there anything that you guys have questions on or anything I can highlight? I don't have questions but um couple of things. I'm I'm not sure about the gateway signage. Okay. Just me personally. Yeah. Um because then I started thinking of all the maintenance costs and everything else that that goes with it. Um, but I am more focused on advertising, especially with the historical commission and the 250 celebrations. I'm wondering if that's going to be sufficient or if that's something that we should probably like add some more, especially because of everything that is going to be happening in the county. Yeah. For the next few years.

So that the 2000 I agree with you. The 2000 was a historical commission ask. that is what they came to us and Jamie um asking for. But I do agree because it's more than just pamphlets. It is um they're going to need um digital advertising. They're going to need video campaigns. Um and a lot of that can be done in house by us because we do have those talents, but we do have to pay uh we do have to pay for digital advertising which is costly. And then obviously um newspaper and and that physical advertising aspect. There could be like event management type stuff where you're tracking ticket sales or whatever it is and and you all can try to help. Exactly. Yeah.

Because the unique part of our department too is now the historical commission will take up the majority of that, but just tying back into that piece is um not only does our staff do communications and marketing in a sense, we also do a lot of event planning and event hosting and things like that for the county as well. So yes, I agree with you. So it could it may be a conversation that you all need to have with them and be like, "Have you thought about this?" or because those are things that are going to drive economic development for the county. Absolutely. And when I'm looking at things and I'm looking at the focus areas for our budget, anything that we can get a return on investment so we can give back to our constituents and our taxpayers, that is a focus point that I'm going to have. Great. Thank you,

Mr. Steve. Do we have any money uh in our budget for the 250 year celebration? No, ma'am. We do not. Um but a lot of that you we get grants to the state and I'm I'd really prefer Gina and and Ken to talk about that because they're the they're the chairs. But what I'm saying is if we don't we need to because we're going to be we gave money. Yeah, we did. It was part of the grants. Okay. Well, that's what I need to know. We've got money in there to for Lancaster to celebrate that occasion, if I may. Whose budget is it in? What department?

It was a grant. The 250 club. The 250 group. It was for the 250 commission given to the uh because 1776 was just the signing of the the declaration. Was it given to those? We're actually into 2030 and all that for 250 here in L. But we gave money to the 250 Old English district. Yeah. But I wanted to make sure that we had money set aside for that. Just wanted to to make sure if it's if we don't we need to. Is it a 250 committee?

250 committee. How much did we set aside? How much did we give them? Okay.

We also have a special projects budget. Um it we didn't ask for an increase this year um just because um we didn't use all of last year. So I didn't want to ask for more money. But when we do work with the 250 Langster County 250, we would pull from some of those funds as well because we use those for special projects or event hosting. for example, will have a corner's office um grand opening, things like that. So that's where it would So there is there is uh money's accounted for it. It's just in a special projects budget. Thank you.

And I just want to highlight the efforts that you all have made over the last few years and the changes that you have made to increase the marketing profile, increase the amount of followers that we have. Um I think if I made the calculations, it was about 118% year-over-year um change. Um, and then when you talked about the active web users, that is a and I don't know if a lot of folks understand that is a significant shift that when you're having people actually interacting with our website and it could be part of the transparency efforts. I would hope that that has some influence on that.

It absolutely is. I can actually track and see I can't see I can see their clickth through um but I can't see their end destination. So if they click out or anything but that is driving website driving traffic but also um our team has started refocusing on a portion of our website we have something called latest news and a big part of me coming from um a news background was I don't want other people breaking our news I want to break it right so we're using that as as as our breaking news situation and driving people there from social media to our website to get that information right so I just wanted to thank you and your team for your efforts in doing all that thank you I appreciate it any more questions or anything I can highlight

any other comments questions council consideration of the signage I wouldn't want to say they're old but they were put up back in the middle of chap's time as administrator so they're old there used to be one as you came in on 521 but I think it it got um part of an act which is part of the reason why I'm saying that there are maintenance oblig and like it We'll see. I'm just not sure what Thank you. Thank you. Okay, moving along to the treasur's office.

We got a break. I'm not looking at the agenda. Sorry. We got a break. We will take a break. Okay. Oh my gosh. Yes, I need a break. Long

Okay, Madame Treasurer, you're up.

Good afternoon.

It'll take me about 20 minutes, so y'all just sit still. Okay. Now, I would like to thank all of y'all for um being here today and listening to everyone's request. Um the county treasur, we are a seven full-time and one part-time. Our main focus in our office is customer service. Um as you can see, the um growth has caused increase in revenue. Each tax bill the auditor's office generates, of course, the treasur's office has to collect. And if you can see the little screen up there, you can just kind of see the increase in the current and the vehicle and water creek watercraft over the over the past two years. Um, our increase is only for it and of course, um, I don't have any requests this year, but I do support 100% the cost of living for our staff. Um, if it wasn't for them, we couldn't do what we do. So, I ask if each one of you would support the staff that we already have currently.

Any questions for me? Yeah, right quick. Uh the state and fixing to change watercraft. Yes, they has changed watercraft. Changed it. Any idea? Are we talking $50,000 $100,000 less or million dollar? That would be a question for Susette. She'll have to do the assessment and see how much less that's going to bring in for the county. I will. Yeah. Any other questions? That's all I Governor signed the bill. It is official. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Finance.

Sabrina Harris back representing finance. Um, I do want to insert a correction about the U 250th celebration and I got them mixed up with the 250 committee which is different and so I'm going to say this word wrong but the cesquincentennial celebration that's the 250th and we do not have a request listed there for that but we can make sure that we add that for the administrator's recommended. Yeah, I I I thought it was worth discussing because I'm sure county will be doing something. Um, you know, it depends on what we're going to do and how we're going to do it unless we're going to depend on those other groups that we uh gave grants to. I don't know. I just don't want us to get there and realize what are we going to do.

Yeah. But we'll make sure it's on the table for discussion. Okay.

Okay. All right. And um for the finance department, we are a staff of nine and a half. We currently have nine full-time positions, a part-time position um that right now is vacant. Um just to look at some of our data here on the side, you can see that year-over-year or at least a five-year comparison um the significant changes in the grant awards and expenses that we have as well as PECARD activity, the number of transactions and the dollar amount in transactions. And um lastly, um AP vouchers. So when we're cutting checks, the um number of checks that we cut has increased as well as the dollar amount in checks that um we cut has increased. All right. So I'll go right into our request. We have a um change in our um current year budget of a total of 97,204. That includes a request for um increasing our current part-time position to a full-time position. So right now we have a part-time accounting um clerk. that's been a hard to um fill position or at least to keep filled. We've had two folks in it over the last two years and um just haven't been able to keep it filled. And so we want to be able to um one get the position filled to be able to support um day-to-day operations like reconciliations um especially with the complexity of different funding sources that we get with the grants and increased number of grants and also feeding into the audit process take that position from part-time to full-time. Um it also is in line with um our audit recommendation that's come from our external auditors for the last last few years um just to be able to build out um adequate staffing in our department. And so we feel we'd be able to support that with a making that a full-time position. We also have a request for increase for funding to be able to um do a little bit of renovation in our department just to paint um the finance office as well as the budget department. there's a lot of wear and tear um in the walls, paint chipping off the walls um and doorways.

And so we're just asking for funding to um cover painting that. Um the additional dollars for contracted services is covering the annual increase for contracts that we already have in place for our um our fixed asset software um as well as um our software that we use for investor um you know to cover our investments. The $600 for telephones is the IT projection. Um, and the lease copier has actually gone down. So again, an IT projection to adjust that line item in our budget. Um, any questions about any of the changes to the finance department budget?

I do that office repainting. Where did the that dollar amount come from at 23,786? Was that Yeah, that was a quote that was obtained. We submitted that as an interdep departmental request to our um building maintenance department and they work with um vendors to be able to come in and actually assess the area and so the quote came directly from So that's a real number. That's not an estimate. Oh, that is not an estimate. That's a real number. Okay. All right. Any other questions there? Okay.

All right. Oh, forgot we had a second. Okay. But I can talk about these two. The decrease in our software budget is just for us being able to find efficiencies with the software that we use currently. And so the cost there has gone down. Uh the mileage increase is just to be able to cover staff travel um a little bit um of an increase in supplies just for um being able to um pay for the things that we need to especially around the annual audit. And um if we do the summer conference this year, this will be our third year doing the annual um summer finance conference uh training and dues. This was um to be able to cover our dues with the GFOA year-over-year for all of our staff. And then again, the IT projection, this is just covering the cost for increase for telephones. All right. The finance department also manages the non-EP departmental budget. This is where we budget for things that um like um the workers compensation insurance um retirey insurance and the retirey match. And so as those rates changes, we estimate those rates um by the um in by the um notice that we get directly from um South Carolina workers compensation as well as any rate changes for um things like um detention center detainees. the notices that we get about increases there, we've incorporated those changes here. So that increase, the 181,000 is covering all of those things in that interdep departmental that non-dep departmental budget. Nothing else is budgeted there. Um the we only use it primarily just to pay the bills out of there. And then lastly, our debt service is also managed by the finance department. you see the sign significant decrease and this is just us paying our principal and interest on our current debt. We haven't taken on any new debt. So the adjustment there is just coming down by what we've paid this year and we budgeted for our upcoming principal and interest payments.

The debt that we have and just to note the debt that we do have is for bonding to cover um supporting things like our roads, sanitary sewer and waterways. All right. Any questions? So, just just so that I Sorry, are we paying down the debt faster than we had anticipated? Um, I don't think it's faster. I mean, it's on schedule. We haven't paid anything in advance. Um, that is something that we can discuss, but we haven't paid anything in advance. Okay. Any other questions? Thank you very much. All right. Thank you.

We're going to go to the coroner's office now. Good afternoon. Thank you guys for um having all of us here. And I'm sure you're exhausted, so I'll make it short and sweet as well. So, our full-time, we have seven in our part-time, we have five. The seven are investigative staff, the five are transport staff. And um some of the highlights in our impact data, we will be in our new facility. We have to be in by December 2026. We look like we're going to be about two and a half months ahead of schedule. If you haven't been out there, go by. It's fantastic. Thank you, Steve Harper. Um it looks really good. So, it's going to be great out there. We have um a 31% increase in death from last year. It's pretty common. It just keeps continuing to rise every year. The more people we add, unfortunately, the more death we have. We added a sane nurse this year to our was the position that you guys um I asked for a deputy coroner and I hired her. She's also a registered sane nurse which is which is a sexual assault nurse examiner. Um and that's a great benefit to our office as well. I'll jump down to the bottom. We have a national certified phabotamist also. So when we have a child fatality, we often um pair with sled or law enforcement to see if those parents are willing to give a sample of their blood and they used to say sure because there was nobody to draw it. Now we have somebody. So and that stands in court and it's a great thing to have. Um the quarter's office had 496 transports last year. I think a lot of people think that when we go out automatically the funeral home comes. Not the case anymore. Um most of more often than not it's actually us that goes because

people are not planned like they used to be. Um 562 cremation permits issued. 56% of the deaths in Lancaster County were cremated. So that's a big shift from several years ago. Um cremation was not very heard of and now it's very prominent. Jennifer and I um now have to be at the office seven days a week. that is not funded. And we have to be there because we have state paperwork that's mandated that has to be done. And we also have to be there to serve the families because if your loved one dies on Friday afternoon at 5, we can't tell you sorry be there Monday morning at 8:30. So we have to be there seven days a week. So that's pretty taxing on our office. Um, and again, it's something unfunded, but we do it to make sure that the people who need us can get our services. And then once we get in the new building, um, we will move toward accreditation. And then, of course, my favorite part, our little mounted unit. We have the C first corners base mounted unit in the United States. All right. And so these are some of the changes and requests that I'm going to ask for. I would like to have a records and a data manager because when you guys want numbers from me right now, why we have to go in I I buy lunch or sorry I buy supper for my crew and say be back at 7 o'clock tonight and be prepared to work till midnight. We have to literally go through 900 plus files by hand and count them and put them in categories. Could we put them on a spreadsheet? We could. We don't have the time to do that. So, I'm getting further and further behind in data management. And when you guys are asking me for data, I

can't just spit it out there for you. So, I've asked for this a couple of times in the past, I'm asking for it again, obviously. Um, and then our professional services medical, that's my autopsy budget. I'm asking for an increase there. Most of you are very familiar with how that works. It can go up, it can go down. It depends on what kind of year we have and what kind of needs we have. Basically, I think Steve said this many years ago, you give it a number and you just hope you're close because you can't you can't give that an exact number. We are un well we're in the red on our equipment vehicle. That's because um we didn't know if we would get the deputy corner position last year or not. We did. So a vehicle had to be purchased for that deputy quarter. Our corner's office expansion. I don't know a whole lot about that number and I'm not going to try to decipher that. I think that comes at another time, right? We'll have a discussion with you guys about that. We got one more slide.

All right. And then um I think that's about it. Our clothing goes up a little bit just because I've added some staff and we ruin clothes pretty quickly around there, but I try not to buy expensive stuff because you don't ever know what's going to happen to it, but we go through it pretty quickly. So, any questions from any of you guys? Any questions for the coroner? Nobody ever has a question for the coroner. I will when I get to the 850,000. That's what I was going to ask, but you said somewhere else. So, I know Stephanie's got it.

Yeah, Stephanie, we we've all been working diligently on that breakdown. So, it would be unfair for me to stand here and try to guess at things for you, but but all right. I just wanted to give you a shout out and the fantastic work that you all are doing in our county. Um, all the things that you highlighted are tremendous things and they give a focus on our county that we richly deserve. Um, I also want to give a shout out to our general contractor who is building that new building because it is moving up quickly. They're on top. They seem like they're on budget. I've heard great things from Stephanie. I've heard great things from you. So, fantastic. I will. That's the way a partnership should work. Yes. I think this is the first design build that Lancaster County has done. And all women. All women. All women.

Yeah. It's amazing. I mean, they really they got it knocked out, but they did do a lot of meetings with us to make sure they 100% understood our needs. They didn't want to go back and be reactive. They made very sure they were proactive. So, it it's been fantastic. Wait, are you saying that there was a lot of communication and strategic planning beforehand? Tons. What? Women was involved and it worked. It worked. Wow. It worked very well. Tell them why. Tell them why it worked. Cuz it was swimming, right? Steve was calling out what was wrong initially. Right. Is that correct? Because we weren't going to spend $2 million on a 100%.

We wouldn't Yeah. We wouldn't be where they we were if it wasn't for Councilman Harper. Well, call I also want to say that moving into that new facility will put you in a position for accreditation. And I think that's wonderful. Yes, you did. And you I will say that you have been championed for us since we were in the closet at EMS. So, you're going to get to go through every single building with us. So, there you go. Thank you all. Have a good afternoon. Okay. Parks and Recreation. Bring us home, Chris. This is my favorite. Do my best. Get everybody out of here.

Um, all right. Oh, there we are. So, a few highlights. Uh, staff, uh, 34 full-time. So, we're up a little bit more from the last couple years, which has been great. We definitely needed that. Um, from a from an impact data perspective, we're trying to do a little bit more with KPI. We're trying to track numbers better than we have in the past. Uh, and I will say that the field reservation revenue year-to- date, so the FY25 number is year-to date. So, this time last year, currently we are at 90 just over 94,000 in reservation revenue. So, we're seeing more and more growth, more and more interest uh in our facilities from that standpoint. our youth sports participants. Um that year to date now is 3713. We were waiting on our spring numbers to come in to make sure we could share something accurate. So we're a little bit down. That's more reflective of some dips in basketball and baseball we had. Uh and then our youth coaches throughout the year, you know, we're between six 600 700 coaches. Some of those are repeating because they do multiple seasons. And then our special event attendance because of the events we're doing now, we're seeing fairly steady increases. Uh we're up to eight special events that we host or participate in um on an annual basis. Uh all right. So our our budget number from a request standpoint, I know it's big. uh 2.1 million of that and I'll get to that but 2.1 million of that is requesting Walnut Creek to be turfed for their soccer fields. So I'll get to that point in a minute. Um staffing, we want to take two assistant well they're they're part-time site supervisors in essence of Buford and Andrew Jackson and we would like to take them and make them full-time. So, it's not it's to basically taking two existing positions and elevating them to full-time so we

can try and get more activity and programming in use out of those two recreation centers. Uh the two program activity leaders, uh those would be full-time requests and that would allow us to supplement the recreation center staff, the athletic staff, help with the additional um strain we're seeing right now on rental requests on weekends. So it'll in general give us more flexibility, but those those staff members would be based at uh Indianland Recreation Center in Springdale would be the goal. The recreation associates are existing. We would just like to bump their hours. Uh again, it's more of a front desk position. Uh it will give us more flexibility. Springdale and Indianland as well. And then Placer AI, we talked about that last year. This will allow us to really track the coming and going the the use of our parks. Um the we'll be able to track our special event attendance a lot closer than what we have been in the past as well. So we think that will be a good investment for what we're trying to do um as we grow and try and track numbers. The registration software that is something we'd like to replace the current one. The current one, while it's been good and served its purpose, uh we think upgrading that to something new would allow us to get into numbers a little bit more and separate out different uses, different um levels of revenue. Right now, we we can only dig so deep. Um and this it's not civic rack. to be a different actually rec uh technology uh that would allow us more uh in-depth analysis of different uses as well as it integrates with another software we use for our parents. Something called team sideline which helps manage the schedules and practices and changes on the fly and it integrates directly with that. The vehicle situation we just we have a lot of vehicles we we want to try and get on a cadence where we can up upgrade our fleet a little bit more intentionally. Um, and I won't go through these one by one because there's

a few on here. Um, if we had to prioritize them, we would prioritize them with the mini buses to give us greater flexibility to be able to move kids around. Uh, Chris, we're not on a cycle. We're replacing your vehicles. No, ma'am. We have vehicles from 2007, 2013. No, there's no cycle. Um, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our our our three of us So, so that's why we'd like to I mean, there's there's a lot here. We have one that's just sitting in our parking lot because the battery just dies. Staff doesn't feel comfortable driving it, and we just drive around the parking lot to make sure that the battery functions. Can we just go ahead and like get rid of that? Sure. Don't ask me twice. Anything we I don't know. Anything we transport children and need to be safe and

reliable. And the the mini buses give us flexibility because we don't necessarily rely on the CDL drivers. So, you don't need a CDL license to drive a mini bus. So, it gives us flexibility. if a CDL driver, you know, calls out or something happens, then we can use the mini bus to get kid pick the kids up from the schools because remember our after school program, we go and pick up a lot of the kids. And so we use the big buses because they can go from multiple schools. If we use the if if somebody calls out, then they just jump in the mini bus and they might have to make a couple more stops, but they're still able to get the kids. We'd also like to replace we have three full buses. Those are dated from 2014 and 2015. um you know the the creature comforts on them aren't exactly meant for 2026 I'll just say so um from a bus standpoint and transporting the kids for after school summer camp field trips those would be our priorities u to address those this year the other ones would be just switching out replacing older vehicles that we've had again 2007 2012 2011 um but top of the list would be the buses

if we do anything we need to get on a cycle schedule because there's no sense in having this many this much of a need in the same year when we can do it within a cycle.

Any questions on vehicles before I move on? Okay. On the capital side, um Flat Creek, we've had discussions about making some improvements out there to Flat Creek Park, which is a large property, uh and needs it needs some work. And I've been working with Councilman Neil on that. We've submitted some requests down to Colombia on that one. Uh but that would be specifically to fund the walking track that's there that has fallen into disrepair as well as putting a playground in. Uh the playground that was there was basically just individual pieces of play equipment that have been there for years. It wasn't necessarily it's not really a playground to meet current uh safety standards. So that's what that's what that request encompasses. um the gate access at Spring Park. Springs Park would allow us to automatically close that um on off hours. So, we would match it up with um our hours being open at 7:00 a.m. and closing at 10 p.m. and the gate would just automatically close. We've worked with it on that and they they've provided that quote through their um vendors. It would be accessible for emergency purposes much like when sheriff's department shows up to some of the properties in the county. It's a it would be a click to push button. So, they'd be able to get in if anybody's in there after hours, say coming off the water with their boat from fishing. Um, you can pull up and you'll be able to get out. Um, but you won't be able to get in coming coming up on it. Springdale gym floor is back. Um, we've got the roof underway. So, the the roof should be repaired in the next two weeks. Uh, and then we so we'd love to be able to get that gym floor repaired and it'll give us more flexibility from a rental standpoint and a youth standpoint. the current gym floors that we have at Springdale, AJ, and Buford um are limiting as we discussed, you know, where there's interest in more indoor pickle ball and those plastic courts that we have. It just doesn't allow for that type of programming. Um

questions on those capital before we get into some of the line by lines. Go ahead. I Well, I wanted to say first of all, um the repairs at Flat Creek Park, I've been there. Um those are necessary. Um I've seen those conditions are not good. Um so I think we need to to do some work there. I'm wondering if we can use some of the impact fee appropriations to support that.

So we need to look at the map. I can't I need to take a closer I have it, but I can't tell because I need to get it blown up. I don't know if the impact fees it doesn't look like it goes out that far. Yeah, it the impact fee zone is more Indian land, Buford, and where the regional park would be is what it looks like. That's that's what I was looking at with the regional park. Yeah. Okay. Yes, sir. One thing just just throwing this out if it finds favor with council certainly have to work with Sabrina to do this but I know councilwoman McGriff and you'll recall um council Harper years ago we actually did a recreation bond.

We did. And it may be time to look at another recreation bond. It was $18 million items. Citizens, you know, really seem to like that. Yeah, they voted that that helped the greenway and uh did uh Hope on the Hill uh it was about six or seven projects. Yeah, we did we did something up at Walnut Creek. I can't remember what, but can't remember, but it passed overwhelmingly.

So, um next on the list, the adult sports. That's just one of the line items. We want to increase that because there's there's more of a an interest. And so staff's looking at um gosh, flag football, soccer, uh basketball, and pickle ball as options. Not all four of those. That's a lot. But those are that's some feedback that staff has been receiving from the adult community wanting to see a little bit more. So, we're going to take a closer look at that. Um next slide. Where did it just go?

Nope, not that one. Keep going back. Uh, one more. One more. That one. So, thank you.

So, this is the Walnut Creek request um for turfing the soccer fields, the big soccer field and the two smaller ones. um that includes a contingency. So 2.1 if you know we could certainly talk about doing the bigger field only this year. It would allow the the whole doing a whole complex would allow us to obviously serve our programs in a greater capacity. Um the that neighborhood for sure and uh the rentals we're seeing a lot more rental pressure especially up in Indianland but now it's growing down in Buford as well as in Heath Springs. And so there's there's a need for more. We're seeing more interest in the soccer clubs are growing tremendously. There's a lot more of the travel soccer happening throughout the county. Uh Harrisburg is busting at the seams uh between our programs and other and other clubs using it. So this would go a long way towards serving serving the county as a whole and you know it'll help our our rental revenue as well. We'll we'll see. This is a huge generation.

Was that was that on capital sales tax three? I'm like, it it's it's listed in the CIP plan. Yes, sir. And how much? I think Was it a million? I think a million. One one million. One million. Right. Right. So, we're basically looking for another million. Another Well, do you know what the big FE So, that that number, that 2.1 is including the big field and the two other fields. Correct. If we just did the big field with the 20% contingency, that's 1.4 a little over 1.4 million. million. Okay.

Um regional park. So the impact fees, it says regional park, but it's really the zone. Um we know that that we're able to start spending that money this this year. We have three years, I believe, to spend it. 518,000 throughout the the impact fee zone, which again, I went to zoom zoom in on the map a little bit more and understand, but it covers all of Indian land. um Rosland where the regional park will go and I believe it extends far enough out to Buford as well. So we have some options as well as Springs Park so it goes the other direction. So we we have a few options with that with those funds. So we can use the impact fees for the Walnut Creek.

We could use it for some of that. Yes, sir. those before I continue.

Um, there's a bunch of these, so I'm just going to touch on some of the high level ones instead of going line by line. If you have any questions, just stop me as I go. Uh, the afterchool program, that number is really just a reclassification. We're not asking for another 30,000. In the past, the way our after school and summer camp was always one number, and we're just trying to separate that out so we can track the expenditures better. So that's what that is. The farmers market, Britney Chavis is doing a great job of getting that uh property activated. So we just want to clean it up a little bit, some paint, refresh the bathrooms, um change out the signage, uh and and just clean up that space a little bit more.

I'm sorry. The the for farmers market is a a county property. I did not realize that. Yeah.

She just had a farmers market meeting the other day with vendors. She had a really good turnout. People are excited for it. So, it's something we're trying to grow and do more of um considering the the vendors, the farms, and the the different properties around us. So, we're trying to do more with uh with that property in general. Uh all right. What's next? The advertising. Oh, no. See, special events. I mean, our we're doing a lot in the special event space. Britney and Jason do a great job of managing that from a fund standpoint. Uh but we would like to increase that budget uh a little bit just to give us a little bit more flexibility with the events that we have. Um the travel training and dues is is some additional trainings for the rangers.

Let me ask you something about the special event since we've been talking about the 250 anniversary. Do you have anything in your budget for that celebration? So that's going to be tied into our July 3rd event at Buford. And so this the goal is to just scale that up for this year. That's what we're trying to do. You do have it in your budget and we'll have it. Well, not necessarily, but we will make it work. More hot dogs. More hot dogs. Yeah, maybe we'll do a blueberry pie contest, too. Jose can only do so many contests, you know. False. I can do unlimited contests.

Oh, all right. um questions on this. The next slide up I believe is the fee schedule which is a lot and so the fee schedule quite simply was just has been very chaotic the last few years and we're trying to clean it up, streamline it, make it easier to follow, um get a little bit more in line with neighboring jurisdictions and taking the feedback from from some folks that use our facilities. you know, we've we've made some adjustments. Um the the adult sports, we're removing those. We're just going to have one fee. It's a flat fee. It's a per person fee instead of having all these different numbers per per team, per sport kind of thing. Um so that'll just make it a lot easier to manage that going forward. Um the nonprofit aspects are being removed. Again, this is just to really just try and shorten the fee schedule and clean it up. What we're proposing instead of having all these separate breakouts for nonprofits is to just offer a nonprofit discount and just they we do the math. You rent it out at a regular rate and then we apply the discount and we subtract it and just do it that way. It's it'll be just a little bit cleaner and easier for us to manage. Um same thing facility rentals, you'll see that there there's a lot of nonprofit lines in there and so it'll just it it'll flow better. It'll be easier to follow and read. Um

will you break even? Will you lose money or make money or what? You hadn't calculated that?

We haven't. I mean, we haven't looked at that kind of a analysis on on anything. No, ma'am. Uh, where are we on this one? The activity room, independence contractors. Okay. And then the historic courthouse. You'll see this as we go. The historic courthouse was listed twice in here. We missed that last year because it had its own its own lines. But we took over the operate the management of the courthouse 18 months ago or so. And so we're just folding all the courthouse language into ours and trying to make it consistent with what we do from a facility standpoint. So later on you'll see them being removed. Um staff overtime that's been lowered. Quite frankly, I don't know why it was ever set that high. I don't know why we did that. $25 an hour is a standard rate, especially when we look at other jurisdictions. Um the parking lot rental, the whole parking lot rental idea, again overthought that. Um that's just going to be classified as special events. There's a special event fee already in the fee schedule. And then on the outdoor rentals with the complexes, we're just going to categorize this as an athletic complex rental. We're not going to categorize it as Harrisburg, East Spring, Springdale or anything like that. Uh, and we re This is just more of a reclassification because what we were doing in the past was the way it was the way it was called was was per per field per day and but it was just one lump sum number. This and it was it just got out of whack. This allows us to actually do like the per day is 800. The math still works out, but we've just cleaned up the language in essence with with these complex rentals. Does that make sense? Because it confused me and hurt my head when we were trying to fix it. And then the food trucks. Uh oh. Well, and then on the field prep fees, again, one flat fee. This seems to be what a

lot of our the jurisdictions around us are doing. Just another example of us trying to stay in line with folks um around us and their their field ma maintenance and management. The food trucks we cleaned up a little bit as well just to to lessen the the different options there, but be consistent with um the use we're seeing and the interest. We're seeing a lot more um interest from food trucks attending our all of our events, including athletic events, as well as them being interested in just doing daily popups on properties. And then that last one is what I referenced with the courthouse, just taking that out. Um, oh, and then the the nonprofit rental discount is what we're proposing is uh a 10% discount for nonprofits. Um, when somebody's renting or using any of our fields or gyms, do all these food trucks have to meet deck requirements? I mean, they have to have a a I mean, I I don't want any food trucks on there that aren't uh

aren't inspected because we could get oursel into some trouble. Yep. A lot of them come from outside the county as well where there's stricter regulations than what we have here. But that's something we're working on cleaning up just to make sure we're we're covered from that standpoint and we have that all laid out. This is current and they're moving They're removing it to a questions. Yes. Yes. Just on the adult sports. So you have the current and then you have new, you have remove, you have explanation, remove.

So what are the new fees? So what we're doing is just it's going to be a per person. It's $40 per person across the board. That's it for for any adult program we offer from a from an adult league perspective. So where is that? It's on the fee schedule. They just put in what was being removed. So it's it it's in the fee schedule, but it's not on here. Correct. Yes, sir. Okay. Yep. Which is $40 per person. Yes. Any other questions? Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Okay, we're going to move on to item 5C, discussion of operating budget and personnel updates. Mr. as well as Miss Harris and Miss Peruse. Mr. Chairman, understand we've got a five o'clock meeting in here. That is correct.

If you want to take all give it the um Excel people this year because you know we're not going to have a whole lot of choice. So certainly the list you see is you know we can't add all those folks. We know that we have to prioritize. But yeah, I I just recommend we move the operating budget overview and personnel overview to the next meeting. We can start with that overview that quickly and then go right to the departmental um presentations the second half. That'll be fine. Sounds like a good idea. Yep. Right. And then if we could um I would like to see the line item detail as we go through the next budgets.

Yes, please do. We'll make sure that. Yes, sir. Okay. We'll have that for us. Yeah. I just wanted to have it in front of everybody. All right. All right. Have a motion to adjourn. Second. Favor. So, we meet out here. Uh we open it up out here. Yeah. We're starting out here and then we're going in the back. Thank you, ma'am. Got anything coming in? Stay out here.