County Council - Session - Special Meeting

Okay. I want to welcome everyone to the 04/27/2026 County Council Special Meeting. So it's the budget hearings first evening. And I want to just advise about the usual procedures that we have and then something a little different for public comment. So we're going to have the meeting in hybrid format.

So we'll have people here in person in council chambers and then also be able to participate via Zoom using computers or their devices. So we're going to have public comment accepted for a block of time at the beginning of the meeting tonight. And the comments will be on anything people want to comment on tonight, hopefully on the budget options that we have and budget itself. So during public comment, Ms. Madison will be looking on Zoom to see if there's anyone that wants to make a public comment.

And we'll be targeting thirty minutes for the comment. And so we'll keep track of the time and probably have three minutes allocated. I'll announce that. We'll do a poll to see how many people want to comment before we get started. So please make sure you state your name if you're coming and making comments in person and that you have your name listed on Zoom so you can be properly addressed.

And there's been some discussion about how long we'll go tonight. Usually we check around 09:00 with our progress so we're planning on doing that again tonight and see where we are in terms of the different department presentations. So with that, I think we have actually all counselors present. So I'll just make a note of that for the record. So seven counselors are in person here in the chambers.

And please with that, I want item number two, which is pledge allegiance. So if you're willing to enable, please join us in pledge. Okay. So now we'll go to public comments. So is there anyone in person that wants to make public comment tonight?

Not seeing anyone present in person. Is there anyone on Zoom that wants to make public comment?

If you'd like to make public comment, please use the raise hand feature. Chair, I'm not seeing any hands raised.

Okay. Thank you, miss Masson. So now we're on to item number four, which is approval of the agenda. Is there a counselor interested in making a motion on the agenda? Councillor Culp?

I move that we approve the agenda as presented. Second.

Okay. So we have a motion by Councilor Cole, second by Councilor Neil Clinton. Don't see any discussion. Can all those in favor raise your hand? Okay. Motion carries seven to zero. Okay. So now we're on to item five, which is the public hearing.

So we're going to have start with introduction

section. So Ms. Laurent, are you going to start us off?

I am. Thank you, chair. I'm just going to wait for the slides to come up for a minute. Okay. We can go to slide two, please. Well, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the fiscal year twenty twenty seven budget hearings. Just as a little bit of a recall, we do this every year. The county adopts a budget every year. And we look out every other year to the second year. And so this is a year where it's a new budget for both fiscal year 'twenty seven.

We do a projection of 'twenty eight. But what we're considering for adoption here is only one year. And this budget process and putting it all together goes back, and we start this process actually back in 2025. We start in the October, November time frame, where each year, we have a strategic planning session with counsel. We talk about strategic priorities and focus areas.

And then we transition that into budget guidance, which comes before counsel usually in January. And then from there, we start crunching numbers and putting projections together and looking at the trends and how much we've spent per year and what we think is coming up in the next year. And every department submits a proposed budget that gets reviewed by the finance team and the county manager's team to then present to publish as a draft by the March and then bring to counsel for these hearings. And by law, the budget has to be adopted by June 1 of the year. So that's where we are.

And so we this is the first night. We have anticipated up to three nights, Monday night, tomorrow night, and Wednesday night, and it's depending on need. So when we get through with the approval and adoption of the agenda, we can we don't have to continue. It really is just one meeting. We're continuing this one meeting and agenda to tomorrow and then continuing it on.

So we're not actually gonna adjourn the meeting today. We're just gonna recess to the next time we will reconvene. And as we go through the, different department presentations, as items come up, if we feel like we're we need more discussion about that or council would like more information that we don't have readily available, we just would like to put those items on the parking lot and then continue on. And then at the end, we'll come back and go through those parking lot items to resolve where we land on those, provide additional information to work through those topics. On your dais dais, there is some green sheets.

We do have some correction pages that'll be referred to. Just as we publish the budget, we see errors. We see things that come up, so we keep track of those. And then when we per after the budget is adoption, we publish a final budget with all the corrections. And then as we move through the budget department presentations, as in has been what we've done historically is we do tentative motions.

Those are not binding by counsel. Counsel can change those before you make any final motions. It's really just to get a consensus that we're ready to move on to the next department that we largely have consensus on that department's budget. And and then we do also, once we go through the different parking lot items and any revisions council makes throughout the hearings, we summarize those at the end, incorporate them into the toe all the different

Is it a campaign you've been

And make sure that your final motions are all correct. Next slide, please. Okay. So for our agenda this evening, we are on bullet one, which is the introduction budget guidance, and then I'll turn it over to for inner for our finance staff for the overview, department presentations, then we'll go move to the capital improvement projects fund. We'll move to the financial policy and long range financial plan discussion, parking lot items, and then we'll break for any to make just make sure our motions are all correct before we come back and ask counsel to make their final motions.

Next slide. One more? Okay. So let's get going. I'd like to introduce this the team here that's gonna talk about the overview.

I've got miss Helen Praleo, our administrative services director. Missus Melissa Dodsey, who's our chief financial officer, and I have miss Tara Mariano. She's our budget and performance manager. And, I wanna thank all of them for all the hard work behind this as well as all the department heads you're gonna hear from. And the, budget guidance that council supported this year a few couple months ago was to incorporate into the budget well, before I do that, let me back up.

There's a couple things that happened last year that we should talk about. One is the last two years, our gross receipts tax have not come in as projected. So you'll see in fiscal year 'twenty five and fiscal year 'twenty six, the revenues for GRT did not come in as projected based on those adopted budget years. And because of that, council considered and adopted an increase of 05% GRT that will go into effect July 1. So this budget does incorporate that increase coming into effect of gross receipts tax revenues coming in July 1.

But with that, it is it's a flatter it's a flat budget guidance. It is not an increased program, increased staffing. It really is taking into account taking

care

of our current programs, taking care of our current situations around insurance or contracts or any of those master plans we've looked at and councils kind of adopted. We really focused on taking care of that, prioritizing our existing assets, and taking care of that. So with that said, the budget guidance was to obviously meet our obligations for our union salary agreements, CB Collective Bargain Agreements, and we kept the overall structure to a 1% for salary this year. We've done bigger increases to the structure in the past. We know we've been in inflation and a very competitive market with salaries that we see that flattening out.

So that's been reduced back to 1%, but we did keep in up to a 3% merit based increases. I think we've all seen the cost of insurance going up. We were not immune. And what we have done the last couple years, we are propose propose to do again, and that is to have the county split and cover some of those insurance costs, about half of them, and then the employee is picking up about half of the insurance costs. And interdepartmental costs, those are costs, things like the fleet department maintenance, fuels, and things that we charge back to the departments.

And we all know that the cost of goods and commodities and things like that are continuing to increase, so we did see an increase on interpart departmental costs. But what we did do to offset a lot of those to keep as flat a budget as possible is to really look at all of our other discretionary budget items and see if we could decrease those in every budget. And that was a little easier for some of the larger departments and some of the smaller ones that don't have much discretionary spending. So we scrubbed every line item, looked at past spending, projected forward, and really tightened that up quite a bit, and you'll see that as we go through each department. Okay.

Next slide. And just to kind of expand on what our focus was, is it was to keep the wheels turning, keep our programs, keep our progress, keep our priorities moving forward, and also catch up. We feel like there's been a lot of initiatives over the last few years that council has funded that we're still not done yet. So we really want to catch up with some of the projects and initiatives and make some more progress on those. And we don't need to refund them because they're already funded and very much tie our progress to the council's focus areas and strategic priorities.

And with the capital improvement plan, we've really moved to we are retiring some old $70,000,000 debt service, and we are issuing new debt service. And so instead of funding as many projects with cash, which has transfers from the general fund into the CIP, we're using debt service and so it spreads those costs and transfers to the general fund over a longer period of time. So we've done the 40,000,000 bond issuance for broadband that's complete, and we plan to do another 35,000,000 to continue on CIP projects in the fall. We were very fortunate with the timing of this bond issuance, and we're hoping that by the time we get to the fall, we'll also, the timing will be good to to move that forward. And then with the this was also a priority in guidance from council that is with the additional gross receipts tax.

If revenues come in above what we need to maintain operations, that we would, at this year time next year, as part of the budget hearings, ask counsel how do you want to prioritize those additional revenues in these categories. And then that is going to be a topic we talk a little bit when we go over the proposed revisions to the financial plan. And with that, I think the next slide is missus Dazi's.

Good evening, Charity and counselors. I will start by sharing my screen. And for those following along in the budget book, I'm sharing page 62, which is the general fund summary. And I wanted to start with the f y '25 actual column and going down to the gross receipts tax revenue. As county manager Lawrence said, we did receive less than we had budgeted.

We received $80,700,000 in 2025. And compared this comparing this to FY '24 actuals of ninety eight point two, it is about a $17,000,000 decline from '24 to '25. And we see that kind of trending into FY '26 as well. We did adopt a '26 budget of $87,200,000 in gross receipts tax revenue. However, jumping over to the FY twenty six projected column, we are projecting and on track to receive about $83,700,000.

So, again, about $3,400,000 less than what we adopted. And then at the bottom of the f y twenty six projected column, looking at the ending fund balance in the general fund is about $70,400,000. And if you go down to the blue highlighted line down here, you'll notice that we are projecting an operating shortfall of about $23,000,000 for FY '26. And what that means is that we will need to probably dip into our reserves for FY '26. However, the good news is that we do still plan foresee us meeting our target reserve of 20%.

And I wanted to just give a quick recap of how that reserve is calculated, and it is based on the total revenue for FY '26. So going back up to our total revenue, you'll notice is a $120,000,000, and that reserve so our target is 20% of the 01/20, which is about $24,000,000. And where we look for that number is in the unassigned fund balance in the general fund. And as you can see, we are projecting that we will end over the $24,000,000 So we project we'll end with about $41,600,000 And essentially, the unassigned fund balance is what the county has left over after taking into consideration initiatives that are already restricted and assigned or committed for specific initiatives or projects. And so that is where we project to end FY 'twenty six.

So now I'm going to stop sharing and go ahead and go back to the slides. I wanna discuss the oh, next slide, please. And so here, I'm gonna discuss the FY '26 adopted to the FY '27 proposed budget. And the first thing you'll notice is there is a change, a decrease in of one full time equivalent position in the fire fund, and this is mainly due to an overfill in the of positions in FY '26 to accommodate changes in staffing needs due to additional training, which will be completed by FY '27. So that will no longer be needed.

So you see that reduction in '27. There's also an overall increase of $2,200,000 in revenue, which is due to a couple of factors. The first is an increase in the projected GRT revenues, which is based on the new increment that's effective 07/01/2026, as well as a projected decrease in utilities revenues due to decrease decreases in wholesale sales as well as decreases in grant and loan revenues. And one of the things I want to point out that utilities did a little bit differently in their budget this year is they did a five year trend analysis, and they looked at consumption usage, actual usage over the past five years. And so instead of adding a percentage to last year's budget, they actually based it off their trend analysis.

And so that's some of the change you're seeing there as well. On the expenditure side, there's an overall net expenditure decrease of $18,700,000 countywide. Dollars 9,900,000 of that is in the general fund is actually an increase, which is in line with budget guidance. And that will actually be explained in more detail once we get to the department presentations a little bit later on tonight. There is a $1,600,000 decrease in debt the debt service fund.

And as county manager Laurent mentioned earlier, we did issue the $40,000,000 in broadband. However, we have not yet issued the $35,000,000 for other capital projects, and so we are seeing a little bit of savings in our debt service fund. So that's where that's coming from. The $13,700,000 decrease in capital improvement fund is related to either deferring or delaying capital projects. Again, the $14,000,000 decrease in the Joint Utility Fund is mainly due to, again, deferrals in capital projects.

The $600,000 in ARPA funding, that is essentially due to the fact that all remaining funds must be fully expended by 12/31/2026. And just to give you a recap of the ARPA funding, the county did receive about $3,800,000 initially in ARPA funds, and of that, we only have about a 100,000 left to spend. And so we do project that we will spend that, by December 31. There is a $1,400,000 increase in the fire fund, which is in line with the Department of Energy agreement. And, again, a $100,000 decrease in the airport due to decrease in capital projects.

The next slide. And this is a chart of the total overall GRT revenue for countywide, not just the general fund. So that does include the fire fund, the health care assistance fund, and environmental services fund, all which were enacted by county ordinances and are currently in place. And you'll notice in the in FY '24, the actual so for total countywide GRT, we did receive about a $107,000,000. You can see that sharp decline of about $19,000,000 from '24 to '25, and then '25 countywide was $88,000,000.

And, again, for '26, and there's a typo. It should say, there was a $4,000,000 decline in FY '26 adopted to projected. So we did adopt a $96,000,000 budget for GRT, but currently, we are on track to receive about $92,000,000. And the FY '27 proposed total GRT is 113,000,000. Of that, about 104,000,000 is proposed for the general fund.

So next slide. And this slide does show the historical GRT fund GRT revenue in the general fund, and it's a picture of over the past ten years of what we've budgeted to what we've actually received. And you'll notice that in 'twenty three and 'twenty four, we did receive significantly more than what we budgeted, and that did contribute to a healthy fund balance that is now being drawn down in fiscal years '25 and '26. And then, of course, we have our '27 proposed, which we we will be coming to counsel as we get into FY '27 and be updating counsel with the actuals that we received for '27. And so with that, I will stand for any questions.

Do we have any questions? Councilor Weager.

When you say this the GRT, about $104,000,000 of that is in the general fund. And where is the rest of it going?

Chair Reiting, Counselor Rieger, the rest of that is going to those other funds, the FIRE fund, the excise

The the which fund?

The fire sorry. The fire fund, the environmental services fund, and the health care assistance fund.

The the GRT goes directly to those other funds. It's not part of a secondary allocation from the general fund?

Correct. We

And what about the name of the three funds? The fire?

The fire fund, the environmental services fund, and the health care assistance fund.

How big are those funds then? I don't think the Health Care Assistance one is very big, is it?

Chair Reidy and Councillor Reger, no, they're not. But they do receive, I believe so the detail for that is actually on page 51 of the budget book. And And

just so chairwriting, councilor, can jump in on that. Those are those are due to enactments that we've done in historic GRT structure. So prior to 2019, when we could just do general GRT, these were earmarked specifically. So I believe the They were

earmarked in the law or in

There are local local enactment. So just like we did the five eights recently, it was similar to that under a county GRT or municipal GRT structure. The fire excise tax gets a a one eight, I believe. Okay. And and the ref and the environmental services gets a one sixteen. And then our H cap, which is health care assistance, also gets a one eight. So that that's how those increments used to be under a pre house bill four seventy nine structure. So pre 2019, we used to we were able to locally enact for certain types of funds, and one is fire excise. Mhmm. Indigent care was what it was called before we called it health care assistance, and then, environmental services.

Yeah. But all the state laws now change.

Yes. It's

changed. And so these are, just

We've left them in place. We've never de earmarked them. But as a as a council, if you ever had to consider it, some councilors or some commissions have actually de earmarked older enactments, but we have chosen not to. It's it's been a policy that we keep those in place to help support those funds. Otherwise, it would be most likely a transfer from the general fund anyway. And so we've It wouldn't make any difference in

terms of how it adds up.

Yeah. It adds up to where you would just it's either general fund GRT or the addition of those extra increments makes up our total GRT revenue for the county in total. But it would all

come out the same way either way. This is Exactly. This is Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Sure.

Conservative.

Thank you, Chair. Just to add on to that because I have been asked I just want to be clear with everyone that environmental services, that fund, has nothing to do with our climate action plan. It it is strictly well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's it's refuse collection, recycling, and operation and maintenance of our county landfill. Is that correct? So even though it's named environmental services, it's actually kind of a basic, you know, important function for our community.

Yes. Correct. And chair Reidy, councilor Haberman, some counties refer to it as their solid waste function. And there's a lot of state law on solid waste, but we call it environmental services. The one thing I will note is that the the GRT that's earmarked for the environmental services is actually pledged for debt that they have as well. So we we actually intercept that GRT. So whatever they get, it pays their debt service. So just another aside. But you are correct. It is only for county environmental services, solid waste function.

Great. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Can I ask about the one that's labeled jail and courts? Is that one not go because that table lists an increment county correctional

Can you repeat the question? Sorry. Which one

are So you looking there's another increment on that same page. 51, county correctional, middle of the table, middle ish table. It's an it's another eighth, jail and courts. Is that intercepted and gone to a separate because you mentioned the other three.

That's actually housed in our general fund because our because our detention is is funded by our general fund.

So Allowed to not we're the de earmark it. No. It's functionally de earmarked anyway. Okay.

Correct. I mean, is and it just basically becomes our general county increment. Okay.

Thank you. Any other questions on any of that? Okay. Please go ahead.

Okay. Miss Madison, are you ready?

Good evening, chair counselors. I'm pleased to get us started with the department presentations. And it says county clerk, and it's not. It's the county council. So we'll start with our budget highlights for your department.

As you recall, the compensation for newly elected counselors was enacted. It goes into effect 01/01/2027, so your budget includes those increases to the four positions that are up for election. Your budget also includes the agreements for both for the public defenders and federal and state lobbyists, and you also fund the employee appreciation lunch. So here's just the detail, the overview. You can see with the 58% that is because of those new new compensations that go into effect January 1, and that's so just that's just a half a year.

And then you can see the projected in f y twenty eight would give you the full year of that salary for the again, for those four positions. The benefits, the second line goes up, you know, almost comparably due to the increases of those salaries. And then if you look down to the professional and contractual services, that is where you'll see the contracts for the public defender, the state and federal lobbyist, and also in that line is included the facilitator that we use for strategic planning that's paid out of that line, as is memberships and travel and training for the seven counselors.

Thank you. Do we have any questions about the budget? And then Yeah, there's an option. Yeah. Yes. So we have a budget option to reflect more more budget for travel.

Right. And and, Chair, what I'll just add to that is that your current travel and training specific budget is right a little over 32,000. And so there has been, in the last year, more focus on national conferences, NACO, NLC, a lot of Energy Community Alliance conferences as well. And so, obviously, those are more costly. So this budget option would allocate approximately $10,000 per counselor and would we feel would allow for some of that national conference attendance.

Okay. Can I ask a question about how we account for the reimbursements that come from Energy Community Alliance? That's the main so we pay membership to BCA. Correct. And then they reimburse us for travel. Correct. So is the budget or is the actuals reflect the net? Or is it the yeah.

Chair, council, the actuals do reflect the net. So we, the county, when you do your travel reimbursements, we pay the full amount. So we've already paid for the airline and the hotel and any per diem and such so that we pay the full amount to, you know, the hotel or the counselor or whatever. And then we submit for reimbursements to Energy Communities Alliance. And so we get a check back, and then that gets credited to whichever account the travel was out of.

We normally do our membership, get reimbursements for two attendees for most of the conferences. And so what we started to do is use one for counsel and one for staff that attends as well. So we'll do, you know, half of the one of the reimbursements will go back to countymanager'sofficeorg and one will go back to, counselor'sorg.

Okay. Is that clear to people? Sure. Yep.

So you mentioned that our current travel and training is about 32 k this year?

Correct.

Does that include the reimbursement then from ECA?

It does. Okay. And I'll just note that this year you will use other funds to go over that amount. So that's that's why we thought that a budget option may be appropriate since there has been kind of this shift to more national conference travel.

Yeah. Councilman McLennan.

So I just wanna make sure the math is right. So currently, we're at 32,000, but 10,000 per council would put us at 70,000. So would that be $1.00 2?

So the budget option is just the difference to get us to the 70,000. So you already have $32.02 $6.50 in the budget right now as proposed. This would add the $37.03 50 to get it to a total of 70,000.

So it's a differential. Okay.

It's a differential. Sorry. Didn't know. No. No.

No. Just that. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

Okay. Any other? Counselor Rieger.

But where is all this on the previous page? There's no travel line in the council budget.

Okay. Chair Reidy, Counselor Rieger. Good point. If you look at the line that's labeled professional and contractual services, that is a summary of both the professional and contractual services that I indicated: the lobbyist, the public defender, your facilitation, and your travel and training, and your memberships. So that 507 502745, it includes all of those line items, including the 32,650 in travel itself.

Your memberships are, I think, little over 120,000 as well. So that's all in that one line item.

Yeah. But then, basically, it's more than it's roughly doubled in a few years, and I'm wondering what's that difference? B 50 to six, seven hundred. Yeah.

In in general, that change is this year is really due to the new contracts for your federal lobbyists and your state lobbyists. Those you know, we had had our state lobbyists for many, many years, and and he chose not to continue to do that function, and so we went out for a request for proposals. And so the new agreement with Mackie Mackie and Luke is a little more than double what it used to be, similarly with the federal lobbyists that we went out for RFP when our federal lobbyists chose not to do that work anymore, And, it was a little bit more than double. So those two contracts themselves are almost $2.50, a little less than $250,000 a year.

Is there any reason why we don't just break it down on this page and you have it all lumped? Almost the whole budget is one item, and then there's almost no other no almost no information in the

on the page.

Chairwriting and counselor, I can get you that breakout if you'd like. In general, this is how we we show the summary of all the departments. So Yeah. Yeah. I that it is a lot lumped into one line item.

Yeah. Would And then travel stuck in there somehow, which I I guess we're roughly doubling that budget too. Right? Okay. Well, can we see a breakdown of that in, like, tomorrow or something?

So, like, I have a parking lot item for so we're not suggesting we'll change the budget book or the right? Or or do we wanna change the actual rows and what we approve?

Well, we just have to have a clear number of where does that all go in that care

Yeah. So the formality of what you're saying in the budget. Yeah. Any we should all see what it is.

Yep. Chair Reidy and councilor Rieger, I have it here. Know we gave saw we used it to some councilors during their budget prep because this question came up. So I can make copies and we can get that to the rest of council.

Okay. Yep.

Thank you.

Yeah, maybe make sure the press gets a copy too. So there won't be any questions from them. Okay. So you have one more question?

So I I I it possible to get an a number for what we've spent this year on travel and training? I I I think that's what I thought you were giving when you said 30 about 32 k, but I think that's our budget number. So

I do have that number. Give me one second. You have spent so to date, you have about 1,700 left of the 32,650, but knowing that there's travel that has taken place and other things, My best guesstimate is that you'll probably be total spend of about $37,006.50.

So because we approve travel to go. So we're gonna have to pay for the registration for, like, NACO annual conference. Because it makes no sense to wait.

And we haven't chair it it does not you in chair Reidy and counselors, you have other funds within your budget that have not been spent. One of them is advertising, and that's a fund that you use when you advertise for boards and commissions or other town halls. There's there is money in that line item, so there's not a problem with using other lines to cover additional expenditures. I I don't believe there's gonna be a problem within your budget.

We're we're not gonna be over the the number. So the adopted budget is the $319,000 Right. We're not going be over $320,000 Doctor. No. Doctor. But we're just over on travel. So we're going to have more discussion on it because just to make councillors aware of what we've been spending and that it's also something that should be available to everybody to use if they want to go to meetings. Correct. So that was the whole purpose of having a little discussion tonight. So any more questions?

So we'll make sure everyone gets a copy of the breakout. Mhmm. And any more questions? Not seeing any. So I think the process is, if you remember from last year, we'll come up with a tentative motion. And so we can. So if anybody wants to put anything in the parking lot, we can. But the tentative motion will be we'd assume that we'd probably be moving forward with us. But you can ask. So if you have if you think about it again and wanna do something, then you can we can come back to it.

But just to get us going. This is usually an easy one, but it's not an easy one this year because it's got the whole travel issue discussion. So we would just look to see if there's a councillor interested in making a motion about the budget from the council and then whether or not you want to include the budget option in that motion. So this is the basically the motion in the package if you think about it that way. So is there a councillor interested in making a motion?

Okay. Councilor Cole.

Although there isn't $1 difference in what's on here and what's in our book. But I move that council tentatively approved the proposed budget for the county council in the amount of $689,037 period.

Sorry, is that correct? The book does have 36.

36 or 37.

Could be a rounding thing. Okay.

Okay.

Did you include the value option?

No. Okay.

Okay. So is there a second? Second. Okay. I don't think we need to have discussion. But Okay. Please call the roll.

Counselor Neil Clinton? Yes. Counselor Hand? Yes. Counselor Herman? Yes. Councilor Reiting?

Yes.

Councilor Riegore? No. Councilor Haffman? Yes. Councilor Cull? Yes. Motion passes six-one with Councilor Riegore opposing.

Okay. The record show motion passes six one with councilor Rieger opposing. And okay. Now we're on to the county assessor. Think if we're looking at this correctly in the book. Sure.

Do we need to officially move this budget option to the parking lot?

Yeah. Think we'll just make a note of I think any time you will want an item in the parking lot just request it and it goes in the parking lot. Okay. And we'll just double check.

Yeah. Let's just double check that. Oftentimes, we've added it to the tentative motion, but if you would like to just request that, we'll take note of that. Then we'll we will edit the motion as they flip up if there's any

other Yeah. And and I think moving that. So typically yeah.

So just to clarify, you did want to move the budget motion to the parking lot?

I think

that's Okay. I'd like to.

We got that.

I think there's enough heads shaking. Yes, I think that that

Okay.

I think we can go ahead with that without taking a new vote motion and vote. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks.

Thank you. Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. George Chandler, County Assessor and Nettio Gudoway, Deputy Chief Deputy. So whoever the first slide, please, we're gonna skip through these pretty quickly. I'm not gonna read that to you.

We're we're an assessor's office, and we do mass appraisal properties in Los Alamos and under the supervision of the property tax division of the Department of Finance Administration. So next slide, please. We've done our duty and got our notice of evaluation out. We're in a protest period waiting for that protest period is almost over. And we we have spent a lot of time doing public outreach and a lot of our budget goes to that sort of thing as well as training.

We do a lot of training in national and state conferences on the assessor business to make our office more efficient and competent. And so if we go to next slide, And the next slide. Okay. So there's the budget is not much change. It's up 11%, but mostly, we're doing the same things we've been doing for years.

It hasn't changed much. We spend most of our a lot of time on travel and training and, public outreach and memberships and stuff, that sort of thing. So the the biggest increase in our fund was salaries and benefits, which is always a problem. It seems seems to go up much more than just the money we see in our pockets. The one thing that's not on here and is going to come to you later, we're doing the procurement for a new computer system.

It's going to cost somewhere total over fifteen years, somewhere between $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 None of that's in this budget, and we'll be coming back to you sometime later this year. Once we've got that all sorted out, we're about So so the budget itself, next slide, please. Oh, next one then. Yeah. So do you want me to read that to you? Or

I don't I don't think you need to read that.

I'm sorry?

I don't think you need to read that.

I can't read.

Yeah. It's we have a little bit larger version in front of us, I think. We have the budget book too. So

Okay. Then how about if we stand for questions?

Okay. Thank you. Do we have any questions for the assessor or his staff? Counselor.

Yeah. Mister Chandler, did you say that you did not include this new computer system in your budget? That that's something you'll be bringing back

to new the computer system is none of that is in this budget.

Okay. I just wanted

We'll be coming to you for yeah, down the road.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? So so is your office fully staffed currently?

We are short one person right now. We're we're we've been juggling positions, and and we're we advertised. We were not satisfied with the results, and we've changed things a little bit, and we're going out and advertising again.

Mhmm. And then I think just maybe to forward the public, but I think so we have, you know, you have a fairly small department, but I think your your staff keeps getting, you know, more experienced or more credentialed, So because people might look at the salary from a couple years ago And then because I think you made an allusion to this, but it's just that's the reason is that there's just more experience among the staff that you have.

Yeah. Our office is we have people come in at the bottom, and they go to the top. They came in at the bottom. Yeah. And he's at the top. Okay? And and there's just a it's a train. They they run during year after year. It's very effective. Then it comes with training. We do a lot of training and and move people around, do cross training between different positions so that everybody in the office has some knowledge of other people's positions.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. If there's no other questions, then I guess we can look at a motion. And you have no budget options now, but you'll have some budget adjustment coming later. A big one, yes. A big one, okay. Okay. So this is fairly straightforward one. Is there a counselor interested in making a motion? Councillor Young.

Thank you chair. I move the council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county assessor in the amount of $1,103,955. Second.

Okay. So we have motion by councilor and second by councilor Hefferman. Is there, any discussion? Not seeing any. Can the clerk please call the roll.

Counselor Reddy?

Yes.

Counselor Reagor?

Yes.

Counselor Hand? Yes. Counselor Cole? Yes. Counselor Haverman?

Yes.

Councilor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Herman? Yes. Motion passes seven zero.

Okay. Let the record show the motion passes unanimously. So thank you, assessor Chandler for being here. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. I see the county clerk should be next.

Good evening, Chair Reidy, counselors. I'm Michael Redondo, the county clerk. This is my chief deputy clerk, Tessa Joe Mascarenas. If you can have the first slide. So we've had a number of significant accomplishments.

Our regular election, that's the school board election, saw 26% voter turnout, which is pretty good for a school board election, not the highest we've had, but pretty decent. We have started transitioning our poll worker training into an online format to reduce the hours that we have to pay poll workers. This is a section that usually the Secretary of State reimburses us for most elections costs, but when the training occurs outside of the regular elections cycle, we end up paying it for ourselves. So we have been trying to shift to reduce that cost. And then we have also implemented automatic voter registration through the motor vehicle division, which is started last year and has been an interesting process, but we are moving forward with that.

It has greatly increased the number of registered voters. Next slide, please. We've also completed preparatory work for the implementation of semi open primaries. Our primary is starting early voting on May 5. So hopefully we have are ready for that.

We've been working real hard for that. Hopefully people are aware that decline to states can now vote in the primaries. So we're really excited to see an increased turnout due to that. And then we're also leveraging our records management system in order to work on our backlog of indexing historical records. We spoke about this this time last year when we just started this we have gotten about 11% of that project on it puts us on a timeline of about ten years, which is kind of what I had guessed doing it in house would be.

We had looked at potentially having to spend up to a million dollars in order to contract that out. I am hopeful with our upcoming RFP, our current contract with our records management system ends in at the end of this year. We will probably be having an RFP out that will hopefully include some AI assistance with that and then we can hopefully speed up that process considerably. Next slide please. In preparing for the budget, have adhered to our guidance and I can I'll talk about that just a hair more in the next slide.

We're also, as I said, trying to reduce the amount of training that we spend time we spend paying poll workers to come into training. Next slide, please. So the biggest way we have met that 10% goal is by transitioning to a new election worker management software system. The the state is has started to implement this. It's not fully implemented yet, but we have gotten rid of our old election management system and the state will be paying for this new one.

So that has been a significant cost reduction. And then we're also our budget tends to have a little bit of leeway in it because we often have recounts and when we find out we needed to do a recount, there's less than two weeks usually for us to do it. So it's not a whole lot of time to come back and ask for a budget revision. So our budgets do include a buffer to allow us to have the contingencies to pay for recounts when necessary. Next slide, please.

Yeah, so we generally nationwide There's about an $8 to $10 per voter cost for running an election that comes out to about $160,000 and that is about what we end up paying in salaries to poll workers. So next slide, please. And that is in part because the state increased our mandatory requirements for poll worker pay so you'll have seen since 2023 an increase in our salaries almost doubling the daily rate for paying poll workers so that that cost has increased significantly and we do have a memorandum of understanding with the Secretary of State so most as I said most of those costs do get reimbursed after the fact by the Secretary of State. So a portion of this isn't actually coming out of the general fund. It is reimbursed by the state.

Next slide, please. We've got a couple of contractual services. Our recording software is probably the largest. We also preserve and digitize the newspapers. We've got a few other smaller contractual services.

Those are split between two funds. So we've got a recording fund that is specific that is to the clerk's office that is paid for by the fees that we charge for recording things like deeds mortgages, marriage license fees, a portion of those fees go not into the general fund, but into our recording fund. State law requires that we spend that on recording related expenses. Next slide, please. Here's a quick overview of our budget.

I will let you take a look at that. And I think allow you to ask questions if you have any.

Okay. Thank you, miss Rudando. Do we have any questions from counsel for the clerk? Counselor Cole?

So we postponed any discussion about salaries for the clerk's office till this fall. Right? I think that's what we were gonna

This going to lower the the next. So Okay. My my understanding was that you wanted to wait until it was closer Mhmm. To the term. My, term does not end until, two years from, the end of this year. So Go ahead. It could be next fall or fall after that.

Okay. So for right now, the f y twenty seven budgets probably okay. I mean, '28 budget is probably okay. I was just looking at that increases just kind of assigning a 3% increase but I

think it

could be something very different.

Any potential increase would not go into effect until after 2028.

Okay, thank you.

Okay. Any other questions? Councilweaver?

I just you said a 10% decrease, but what 10% decrease in what?

A 10% decrease to operational budget. So things outside of salaries. That was what we were aiming for. Our guidance suggested we aim for that. We came pretty close.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions for okay. So you touched on the recording records processing. So you're waiting until the end of the year to see what the new contract might look like. So that's good. I was curious about when you're calculating the cost of an election, it's it doesn't matter how many, like, races or ballot questions there are. Even if it went to a second page, that's really no different in cost to you to run an election with multiple pages on it?

Sure, Eddie. That is correct. For the most part, know, there are some small expenses that might increase for a second page, the back, know, paper is not a big part of the expense. The greatest part of the expense is poll workers. And poll workers, we sort of have a minimum number that are required to run any poll in place.

We were required by state law based on the number of registered voters in Los Alamos County. We were required to have a minimum of four polling places for any given election. We have five. We have one extra as a buffer and there is sort of a minimum number of poll workers that we need. So in for example, the school election, the regular local election we had last year, I am not comfortable running any polling place with fewer than six poll workers.

In an incredibly busy election, we might raise that number to as many as 10 in a single polling site. So that might increase our costs fairly significantly, but it's usually on those really busy days on for example, election day itself early voting tends to not require quite as many.

Okay. And I do recall we had a mail in vote. So is that still allowed by the state constitution?

So we certainly can. We try to avoid those because those if we have a special election, an all male special election that cost we have to bear ourselves. That percent not reimbursed by the state.

Okay. Thank you. Just and then I think like most of the smaller departments, I mean, you had substantial change between the salaries, you know, that were like $20.24 to now, but it's a difference in the staff, right, levels. Okay. See any other questions? I have one. Councilor Newklin?

Just really quickly. So you said that there's a minimum amount. So what's the magic number for us? We have five polling places. Do you want at least six in each? So that's 30?

So at the very minimum. And that's, you know, for an election like regular local election, we we can do that. For the primary, I'm gonna want more. And for the general, even more. So in the general election, I'm expecting to have on election day ten in each polling place at a minimum. Okay. Maybe one or two more as a buffer, but that is is generally what we aim for.

Okay. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Okay. And I was gonna try to remember. So next Tuesday is the first day of voting. We will be meeting in White Rock for all the council meetings. So just another reminder for councilors. Just remember we'll be in White Rock, not in Los Alamos, so that this room can be used for voting. Okay. Is there looks like we're ready to see if there's a motion. Councilwanna make a motion? Okay. So there's a motion. Is there councilor Abbott?

Thank you, chair. I move that council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county clerk in the amount of $1,413,467. Second.

Okay. So we had a motion by councilor Hoeghman and a second by councilor Neil Clinton. Is there any discussion? Not seeing any. Can you please, click on the scroll?

Councilor Reagor.

Yes.

Councilor Cole? Yes. Councilor Hafferman? Yes. Councilor Herrmann? Yes. Councilor Reidy?

Yes.

Councilor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Hand? Yes. Motion passes seven zero.

Okay. Thank you. Let the record show the motion passes. Emily, thank you for being here. So we're gonna have the county sheriff budget,

and I

believe that chief Scambelan is gonna be available for any questions or overview.

Chair Reidy, counselors. The sheriff could not be here tonight, so I volunteered to present his budget. Pretty straightforward budget. Sheriff handles sex offender registries. We split administrative duties, in terms of PD staff and assist with the sheriff with sex offender registry.

Currently six registered sex offenders living within the county. Next slide, please. So the sheriff can do these, not only the administrative part of the sex offender registry, but house checks and there could be associated training with that and some limited supplies. So if you look at the actual budget, it's pretty straightforward. It's the salary of the sheriff and then supply budget and some training training money.

There's only 19,000 or 18,000. Excuse me. Is there another slide?

Yeah. That was it, I think.

So if you have any questions, I'll try to answer them.

Okay. That's a call.

Why is there a huge jump in benefits? Anybody know the answer to that?

Chair Reidy and councilor Cole. I can answer that. So when we budgeted for benefits this year, we waited until January when we saw the actual elections by individuals. In this case, the main difference is that, sheriff Herrera elected to, contribute to PERA. So that is PERA primarily. Okay. Thank you.

Okay. I guess I got a follow-up question on that. So his contributions to PERA are his contribution, not so they would so they I mean, it comes out of the salary if it's like the the county contribution. So I'm anyway, maybe we can check on that because I I don't believe that doesn't sound it sounds like it's kinda being double counted twice then if it's in the in the benefit. But it's a small number.

Maybe you don't need to worry about too much. But do we have any other questions? So I was interested in the so we had listed verification house checks. Do you know is there a frequency that those are should be conducted? Do you know? Chief?

I would think each sheriff might have a different perspective on that, but I don't know that there's a particular requirement in the law, but I would think a couple times a year would be minimally appropriate.

Okay. Okay. Something like that. And then I guess like our other like our council budget. So we have some general categories. So I guess I'll ask a hypothetical question. I'm not sure if you can answer it. If there was no sheriff, would we still have the expenses that we see here for professional contractual services and materials and supplies for your department doing this work or is that would that go away?

I think we could absorb that.

Okay. So do we know I guess so there's been some actuals I know that one point the the sheriff somehow had some sort of delegated responsibility for, like, serving warrants. That's that's not included in here at all.

Right? No, sir.

Okay. Okay. I don't see any other questions. So I guess see the draft motion. Do wanna make a motion? Yeah.

Move that council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county sheriff in the amount of $18,671. Second.

Okay. We have motion by Councillor Herman and second by Councillor Hand. Seeing no discussion, can the clerk please call and roll?

Councillor Hand. Yes. Councillor Reitke.

Yes.

Councillor Cull. Yes. Councillor Neil Clinton. Yes. Councillor Reigor.

Yes.

Councilor Haberman? Yes. Councilor Herman? Yes. Motion passes seven zero.

Let the record show the motion passes now. So thank you, chief. So I think we're on to the municipal court. Yes.

Alright. Good evening, chair Reidy, counselors. I'd like to thank the chief for cleaning this when he was done. You probably didn't see it, but he did a thorough cleaning. I'll go to my first slide. So I just wanna highlight a couple of things with, the my clerks. We continue to work as our number one goal, ensuring that people have access to justice. So all court proceedings are held remotely or in person. People have an option to choose, and we continue to work on our customer service. Proceed.

Our probation and pretrial program continues to be quite successful. 44 people served on pretrial while 64 were on probation. And just so note, three hundred and eighty five days were served on electronic monitoring. That cost is $5 a day for the county, but pursuant to our ordinance the defendant would pay $15 in order to take advantage of that. So it is a good option in lieu of gel time and quite budget friendly.

Also of note, we've done quite a few weddings. People are traveling throughout the whole state to attend weddings here because there's no waiting list. They're having a very hard time finding any in Albuquerque or even Colorado, so they come down here for weddings. So we're seeing quite a few of that as well as an increase in community service and people doing defensive driving classes. You can go on.

My favorite part is our youth programs. We have so many kids that attend Hawk Hangout, and it just the program just continues to be so fulfilling and continue to grow. We've also had 445 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade participate in our field trips at the courthouse. The joy of that is making sure that these kids maybe have a positive experience in a courthouse before they ever have a really scary experience in a courthouse, maybe take away some of that fear. This is a field trip where the kids were deciding whether or not to find the big bad wolf guilty of the three little pigs, which, of course, their teacher played the big bad wolf, so they did not find them guilty.

Do you wanna move on? Teen court is continuing to be a successful program. We've had a 100 teens participate this year, and it's held every Wednesday. We have seen a huge increase of just kids that wanna come and hang out. They come to our quarterly ask a cop event. They come for food. They sit on juries of their peers. They come for community service, whether for, National Honor Society or ROTC or just because their friends are there. And, it's become like this really welcoming space, which is which is really great. So we're seeing a big increase of that.

Move on. Mostly our budget highlights, the increases of salary and benefits. We did have to get a new software, which I came before you for a budget approval, a budget adjustment, I think, is the word. I never had asked for one before. But, mostly, what I just wanna focus on is that we're continuing to provide supports, prevention for the teens in our community, for the youth, electronic monitoring, and be up to date with best evidence practices for probation and pretrial.

This slide just highlights the professional contractual services that we have. Most of it is the court software. Right now because we're doing the migration, there's additional costs like training and data backup. They have to convert all the past data into the new system that we went with. Also, the language access service, this is one that we provide anyone in the county the number.

And so if someone shows up, you know, and needs a ASL interpreter or a Russian interpreter at the library, they can use the language access service, number that we have and get someone right away. In addition, by ordinance, there has to be an alternate judge in case there's a case I cannot sit on, and that's where the judicial coverage comes from. And then our drug tests, our electronic monitoring, our SCRAM those costs as well. So that's my budget. I'll stand for questions.

Okay. Thank you very much. Do we have any questions for judge Allen? Okay. I there's no questions. I want to thank you for the report and really did appreciate all the youth outreach that you're continuing to do. So it's such a great thing.

So fun.

So, Okay. I think then we're ready for a draft motion. Okay. So is it councilor interested in making this motion? Councilor Hill.

Thank you, chair. I move the council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county municipal court in the amount of $945,750. Second.

Okay. So we have a motion by councilor and second by councilor Herman. Okay. Not seeing any discussion. Can the clerk please call the roll?

Councilor Cole? Yes. Councilor Raygour?

Yes.

Councilor Hand?

Yes.

Councilor Havamand? Yes. Councilor Herman? Yes. Councilor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Reidy?

Yes.

Motion passes seven-zero.

Okay. Let the record show the motions passes unanimously. So thank you again.

Thank you.

So I think we're going to have, Ms. Redondo come back and talk about the probate court.

Good evening again. As clerk of the Probate Court, I'm prepared to speak in lieu of Judge Claire. He sends his regrets. I have reviewed the probate budget, but I apologize. I have not had the opportunity to look at these slides. So I'm seeing them for the first time along with you. Hopefully, can get through this a little quickly. As you all know, I think the probate judge covers the process of probate, which is the process of distributing the assets of people who have died. That is the quick and easy simple description. If I can have the next slide, please.

We've had a pretty steady business in there. I haven't noticed any particular difference in the amount of probate cases. It's been pretty steady for years. We continue to perform those duties. Next slide, please.

The big budget highlights are going to be it's a rather huge increase and it is thanks to your action on the probate salary. That increase will occur halfway through the next fiscal year. So there will be a pretty large increase in this upcoming fiscal year and then yet another large one in the following fiscal year. And here is the budget and I stand for any questions.

Okay. Thank you. Do you have any questions on the probate court budget? Not seeing any. Okay. I think we're ready for a motion. Okay. Is there a councillor interested in making a motion? Councilor Cole?

I move that council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county probate court in the amount of $19,149. Second.

So we had a motion by councilor Cole, second by councilor Neil Clinton. Seeing no discussion, can the clerk please call the roll?

Councilor Herman? Yes. Councilor Haberman? Yes. Councilor Cole? Yes. Councilor Rigor?

Yes.

Councilor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Reitie?

Yes.

Councilor Han? Yes. Motion passes seven zero.

Okay. Let the record show the motion passes unanimously. So I believe the county attorney is next even though the county manager I think is just out of place in the budget book.

Chair, counsel?

Yes, please go ahead.

I was asked to put some slides together this year or some highlights and some of our contractual obligations. So here's some things I just happened to highlight going through some of the agendas for the last year. These are some of the ordinances we've

Can you get a little closer to the microphone?

Yes. So here are some of the ordinances we've done through the last year through our office. They're just listed up there. I don't think I need to read all of them for you. And so those are the ordinance accomplishments.

May I have the next slide? Then there's some of the housing and economic development projects we have had some significant work on. Those are listed up there also, along with numerous ordinances and resolutions for grants and loans to fund infrastructure improvements in the county. And then we have some telecommunication stuff we've done. We amended a lease with ATT Mobility for space on the North Mesa Water Tower.

We granted a communication site license for a microcommunication cell tower at Overlook Park, which should enhance cell coverage in the area. We finalized a long negotiation for a cable television franchise agreement with Comcast, and that is appearing on your agenda soon. It's been introduced as an ordinance and is up for a public hearing. And we worked on a pretty complex agreement regarding the broadband network. And all these telecommunications agreements are complex and take a good bit of time to negotiate.

So we're happy with those. And here's our normal. We do continue we regularly attend council meetings, BPU meetings, planning and zoning and personnel boards. We attend other board and commissions meeting on an as needed basis. We continue to provide training to boards and commissions and county employees on the Open Meetings Act, Spectrum Public Records Act, Code of Conduct.

And we regularly advise county counsel, county management and other elected officials on all we are often advising the county clerk and county assessor on election and property law, respectively. So as our items for the year, I noticed we completed. We have a tickler of items. Not all items are of equal size and importance. But in the last fiscal year, we our number is something like three twenty four items completed.

These are a lot of things you see on your consent agenda and all these contracts that make for good reading and all that. And that's sort of a lot of what those three twenty four items are. And that's what we do. Our support serves the highest quality legal service in an efficient and economical manner. And we do that while observing high standards and ethics and confidentiality.

And a lot of what our office and how our office runs is guided by the New Mexico Supreme Court and rules of professional conduct that govern attorneys for organizations who have an organization as a client. And then I had some professional interest in the contractual services we maintain. We maintain contracts, long standing contracts with certain law firms or lawyers to address these issues, telecommunications issues, some federal regulations regarded to utilities and specifically FERC regulations. We deal with an attorney out of Washington DC who has specialty in that. We deal with land transfer issues through CooTek and ROC with the DOE.

And I believe they've assisted us with legislative issues. We have contracts for bonds we issue, like the $40,000,000 bond issuance we just completed. We have that with Module Spurling and Peter Franklin in particular. Module Spurling also advises our pension people on ERISA and complex tax law associated with pensions and those kind of things we have to maintain. We have a contract with Ortiz in Zamora, where Mr.

Ortiz often is the hearing officer for the personnel board when they meet and sometimes is called upon as a hearing officer to assist counsel if, say, a complicated planning and zoning appeal were to be here. And probably our most relied upon contract is our contract prosecutor in municipal court. And those are the kind of contractual services we maintain. We may have other contracts for one off legal needs from time to time, but these contracts have been vital to the success in the county in some of our negotiations, especially when it comes to utility rates. I don't know if the county recalls our negotiation a few years back with a German national company that was exiting the natural gas market, and they they owed us some money.

And we had to negotiate a settlement with it and contract with a very competent expert attorney who can do those kinds of calculations for how much they have to pay us now for a gas contract to set the price for twenty years or something like that. So those are the kind of contracts we have. And this is our budget. It's mainly salaries and benefits. You have an allocation for the professional services area.

We typically don't spend nearly that amount of money, but we have it. As you can see, it's $84,000 to date. But we've always kept that figure there because some years have been very high. So just because you're budgeting it, I can guarantee you we're not necessarily going to spend it as you can as is evident from that fact right there. And then we have materials and supplies. We reduced our budget by 12% on that as requested. And we have our interfund charges. So that's our budget, and I'll stand for any questions.

Okay. Thank you, Ms. Leipart. So there was a comment I got from somebody about the slides not being synced on Zoom. Do we know any reason why that might be? Okay. Okay. Do we have any questions for mister Leiper about the attorney's office budget? Or any of the other items he highlighted tonight? Councilor Cole?

Yeah. I was just curious about the the benefits increase. Any idea why that jumped 33%?

I see the slide. I am not sure. I know we are filling two positions. We have two attorneys coming in, in May. Those positions have been vacant. And I believe they are budgeted for at the mid salary level. So I don't know if that's what caused the jump in the benefits, but those are budgeted for and will include the two new attorneys that are coming aboard in May.

Okay. Thank you.

Council Meager? Thank you, Chair.

Yeah. How does this professional and contractual services break down? There are huge changes from year to year. I can't you know, 200,000 and then 85,000 and then back up to 200. I'm wondering what is all that about?

Chair Reidy, counselor Reiger, that has to do a little bit with budgeted versus actual. It has all the same categories that Ms. Madison mentioned earlier that was in the council budget of training, professional contracts, and other things. But the attorney's office contracts are a little different when you do actual because even though we have budget to pay out some of these contracted services, it's only on an as need basis. And so we don't pay out on those contracts unless we use the services. And so you're you're comparing actual to budget, and so we don't often expend all of our monies on those, but that's budgeted for those.

So some years you really underspend on professional services quite a bit.

And sometimes it's high, depending on what's going on.

Yeah. And then we make a budget adjustment sometime during the year. Is that

what we do?

I don't think we've ever had to do a budget adjustment because that I can recall. Because we get this budget for any and it's usually been sufficient. Don't unless I'm not remembering something, I don't remember a time where we had to come for a budget adjustment for our contractual services.

When the budget's low, you don't say anything. We don't have any.

What? Excuse me?

When the budget is lower than when the costs are lower than the budget, then that's just what happens. We don't have a secondary discussion of that.

Correct. And we try to come in under budget.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? So you're currently fully staffed or you're looking for one person right now and then maybe some more in the future?

Chair, we are we are not fully staffed. And Thomas Wyman, who's been a great attorney for our office, is retiring after a long, long career of public service, and his last day is Friday. And we will be down two attorneys, but we have we have two who accepted offers. And they will be starting one will start on May 11, and one will start on the day after Memorial Day. So we will be fully staffed and pretty happy about that.

Okay. Okay. Thank you. So I think we're ready to maybe make a motion. Okay. So there's a councilor mentioned. Councilman Clinton.

I move that council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county attorney in the amount of $1,659,283.

Second.

I think I heard call counselor call or counselor. Yeah. It was pretty close. So counselor we'll say counselor half a minute. Not the second. Okay. Not seeing any discussion. Can they please call the roll?

Counselor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Hand? Yes. Councilor Herman? Yes. Councilor Reiting?

Yes.

Councilor Rigor?

Yes.

Councilor Havamand? Yes. Councilor Cole? Yes. Motion passes. Seven zero.

Okay. Let the record show the motion passes unanimously. So thank you, mister Leipert.

Thank you, chair and council.

So now we're on to the county manager's office budget. I'm in the rent again.

Chair, I'm gonna delegate to Ms. Maxon.

Thank you, chair, counsel. I'm glad to be here to present the county manager's budget. Before I go into the details, I just wanna remind everyone that this county manager's office as a department consists of an administration division, human resources, which includes our risk management, our communications and public relations division, and it also includes the intergovernmental sustainability and broadband programs. So quite a lot. And as you'll see, we have some very top level snapshots of the budget, and the budget book has a little bit more detail.

So if we need to go to those, we can. So just before I dive too far into the proposed budget, I'd like to just highlight, like we all have been doing, kind of the significant accomplishments that have happened over the last year or so. And, obviously, I'm not gonna read them all. I'll just try and highlight a few that just so we can remember some of the things that have happened. You know, big accomplishment from our office was the completion of the climate action plan that was accepted by council, and we're fast and furiously into implementation of that plan.

We also finalized the agreement with Bonfire for design and implementation of the Community Broadband Network. And, again, lots of stuff happening in that area. I think we have a groundbreaking in a couple weeks that we're all very excited about. Another thing that we're continuing to work on is we had a MOU with the City of Espanola in Rio Riva County to investigate the feasibility of a regional landfill. So that's ongoing but happened in the last twelve months or so.

I'll also recall that this office provided the support for your inclusivity task force that just recently presented their final report. The HR division received over 2,600 applications and resulted in hiring 176 employees and 163 promotions or transfers. We had a couple of department directors in the last twelve months. And I'll just take time to note this is successful implementation of our summer student intern program for mostly high school students, but a couple college students as well. And I'll just note that I think there's a couple more days to apply if you know of a high schooler that would be interested in that program.

We've really been focusing on our safety training compliance. We're well over 90% with implementation of those trainings. We've made a change recently to include a lot of those within about the first week in the new employee orientation, so we're really seeing that compliance number jump. And another something that we started in the Communication and Public Relations Division is centralizing all of the county social media operations through Zen City. So that's a great tool for us.

It not only kind of takes the pulse of kind of the sentiment that's, know, is it positive or negative about the county, but it also allows us to program and schedule social media campaigns. So there'll be lots more in this coming year about that. And a few more accomplishments just to highlight. Actually, we wanted to focus specifically on sustainability, and again, I know we have our sustainability manager that comes quarterly to give you updates, but again, this seemed like a good time to give kind of in one snapshot what's been happening. Again, as part of that, after the climate action plan was accepted by council, we have created a Climate Action Plan implementation work group consisting across departments, and we're focusing on the immediate, the one to two year timeframe, and ongoing goals and tasks.

It's really great. It's a monthly meeting where we can really focus on those tasks and get status and figure out the roadblocks and such. So it's really going well. I'm sure you've noticed our EV chargers that have been going up, the six level two that are here at the Municipal Building and soon to be two DC fast chargers at Mesa Public Library. And we're also looking for staff designated chargers at Parrido Cliffs.

We recently accepted the fleet conversion and community wide EV charging plans as well. And you should have heard very recently about the kickoff of our campaign for the climate action marketing and educational service with a company called Firebrand. So, that was kicked off at Earth Day, talking about giving a shift. And, Firestation four design, that task order was very recently in front of you, Glenn, that included all electric solar panels and an EV charger. And as part of the Mesa Public Library grant, chargers, we received a grant from NMDOT, just over 400,000.

Okay. So now with those accomplishments, we'll look at what this proposed budget, the highlights of this budget that we're presenting. And again, I won't read everything. I'll just highlight a few of these because they're they're probably are the ones that denote some of the increases. Within the CMO's budget for f y twenty seven, we have included funding for upgrades and or a new system for our agenda creation and meeting streaming software.

It's we'll be taking a look at that, seeing what we can do to kind of update that system. We also have funding for, it says Webmaster, but it really is web services. It's really to continue to improvements and oversight of the public website, but it also will take care of some of the ADA compliance that will start this year that we will continue with remediation in the following years. And again, we've just started we just, I believe, signed the wildlife management plan, so this budget includes contract oversight of that plan. Something else that's included in the budget is we have kicked off mandatory customer service training for all staff.

I think we're a little over halfway through about 16 sessions. We are partnered with Santa Fe Community College. It's a six hour class, and we are getting some really good feedback from staff about it. We're having great discussions internally with the classes and really trying to, you know, raise that bar in customer service. And then also in the budget, we'll including the support for the inclusivity board after its creation.

Like you've seen before, we'll just give you a little snapshot of professional and contractual services lines, and I'll note again, you know, this does include also travel training and memberships. And then some of our professional and contractual services, you know, are are shown here. One that I did not that I missed was our market study for our salary. We are obligated to do that every four years, and so this year is one of those years. So that's also included in the line item.

So again, I'll apologize because this is a very high level view of our budget, and I'll try and walk through each of the divisions and give some information of why you see some of the variances that you do. And I'll note just upfront we're going to talk about regional strategic partnering after, so I'll skip that line. But the first time the CMO, accounting manager, where you see that variance, that variance is almost entirely due to salary and benefit increases that you have seen in other departments, and also the, call it the Granicus upgrade of some kind, where we have budgeted $100,000 for a one time cost for whatever that implementation is, and then some recurring costs of $150,000 So that's between those two items that include that increase of 26%. Sustainability, again, I don't want you to be nervous that it's minus 40%. I'll tell you what's happened is we've kind of right sized that budget, so we have not cut any programs.

What been what we have kind of zeroed out is there's two items. One was a grant writing services. It was about 50,000, and we've used it, and we've it's been very successful. It's an on call contract. But what we've found is that we don't we don't use it all. So we will just carry over what has not been used. So like this year, we're not using any of it. So we can just carry that over for next year. We don't have to re budget. The other item was way back we had a budget option for $100,000 for grant matching funds.

And again, this was when we were just barely, we just started and created the sustainability program. And we thought we want to be able to go for grants, but if we don't have matching funds, we're going to be, you know, we won't be able to apply. So we put a pot of money for that. Again, now that we're in the thick of it and we have some projects and programs that we're working on, in general, when we the grants that we have applied for and that we have received, the program or the project costs become the matching. So we don't need another bucket for matching.

So when we got the when we get the $4,304,400,000 of grant funds for Mesa Public Library, we're our matching is in the all the other the design work, the installation, and all that. So we don't need this other bucket for matching. So we zeroed that out. So those are that's what that decrease is. The Communication and Public Relations division, you see about a 9% increase.

That includes that web services that I spoke of, so that is trying to get us right with the ADA rule that'll come into effect, and also having someone or maybe a contractor kind of do some webmaster or oversight of our website. The next item is the human resources, and again, that increase is primarily due to, as I said, every four years we do a market survey of salaries to benchmark our positions and the salaries associated with them. So that's every four years, we kinda have this little bump. And then the this year, we've also included some funding to do we're calling it an applicant tracker. It really is new software for our employee application recruitment application.

We've had a lot of comments and concerns about it's just a little clunky, our application software, and we all kind of live with it. And so this we have money this year to take a look and try and get a new software, so that, again, is part of that increase. So I think that's all I wanted to say about that line or that page slide. And then we just have one budget option, and again, this is really just some money to as we create as council creates the inclusivity board, we believe there will be some training that they may recommend or want for the community. So this would allow us to have some money to bring training to the community as needed.

And with that, I will stop for the moment. I would next go to the regional strategic partnership fund, but I'd like to just answer questions on this part of it if you'd like.

Okay. Do we have questions on the first part of this? Okay. It's $25,000,000 budget. There might be questions.

So I think the FTEs and this the CMO line, are those the sustainability manager? So what were those? There was additional person in the office plus the sustainability manager? Or what was the order of those? Because those show up in this starting in '24. Right?

Right. So we had the so we created the sustainability manager. We created the intergovernmental affairs manager and the broadband manager. So, again, I'm not I'm sorry.

I don't have those exact When they when they started.

Showed up. I believe the sustainability manager was the last one that showed up. Yeah. And then also last year, we also the eight to nine, there's a one, there's a limited term project manager for the broadband the community broadband network project. Okay. That that's that's the eight to the nine. So but it's a it's a limited term. We have not we have not filled it. Okay. We don't know if we're gonna fill it, but that's included that was included in, last year's budget.

So I was curious about the dashboard. So that's in progress of

Chair being Reidy, the with the changing of staffing that we've been going through with both HR and PIO and also some finance department changes, we are regrouping and hope to have that up as soon as possible. But

Okay. Because I I looked at it, but it's as you know, it's not updated. That's correct. So so I think that's pretty important for us to have that information. Yeah. Councilor Cole?

Can you talk a little bit about the risk management line item? What I mean, is that mostly workers' comp? I mean, what what's driving those costs? I mean, there's three individuals in risk management, and they're spending 14 almost $15,000,000. I know it's I shouldn't be viewing it that way. But can you talk a little bit about what's covered under risk management or where those costs are coming from?

Mr. Chair and Councilor Cole, I can just give us a brief overview real quick on the risk management. That's where we do all of our self insured funds. So it's more than just risk. It's also our health insurance, our medical, our vision, our dental. And then it is also our workman's comp, our unemployment, And then any other risk that may happen for claims that are outside of our our premiums that we pay into our insurance. But but it's largely those those main components. And so the larger increase on that was due to primarily medical. Even though we shared in that cost, we are seeing an upscale in in medical premiums. So that's that's the primary place where we found it.

Okay. And that's for all employees? For all employees. Correct. So they do that as an internal service fund, and that's what helps drive some of the interdepartmental charges across the county. But they do budget for the premiums, and we pay them out of there. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. Any other questions? Thank

you, Chair. Well, first, I'd like to follow-up on that line of questioning. I think this came up a year or two ago. Is there a reason that it has to get categorized as risk management? Because it does seem a little confusing.

So primarily, the reason we call it risk is because there's many sub funds, and that's the level we budgeted at. And we also report it on our financial statements. So we choose to do a higher level fund for most of our funds, and that is makes it very efficient for how we budget and how we do our financials. And then we have multiple sub funds, and so risk has just been the overall catch all for that. So we do have a medical insurance fund.

We have a a workman's comp fund. We have unemployment fund and other risk funds, but they're all sub funds under our that structure. So it's really just about efficiency in accounting and present and for DFA reporting as well.

So could it be called risk management and employee benefit funds? Or I mean, it's just

so rename the fund.

That would make sense. If it makes sense, least consider it or ponder it. I just think it's misleading or it I see. It makes you think, wow. You guys must have a lot of

A lot of issues.

A lot

of things you maybe are doing on the little sketchy and having to get a lot of extra insurance for that. I don't know. Just We could look

at that. That's definitely not a hard change at all to modify the overall

fund name. Just the title. Just so it's a little bit more accurately descriptive. But then I'd like to ask, please, about the sustainability program. And I do thank you, Ms.

Madison, for the explanation on the 14% apparent decrease in that fund. What I really care about is are there sufficient funds budgeted to carry out the objectives in the climate action plan? And if this employee internal working group, you know, that meets monthly, if it comes up with new innovative ideas, will there be a bucket of money to leverage to implement those good ideas that maybe help us meet objectives of the climate action plan more effectively, more efficiently, with better results, etcetera?

Chair Reidy, Heather Haberman. Thank you for that question. Yes. At this point, there is sufficient funds. There is funding that I think it's right around let me just check my notes.

There's 150,000 for CAP implementation. So again, utilizing the implementation matrix that was part of the Climate Action Plan, that's where we start to kind of walk through, you know, what is just research and we can do without, obviously, some cost or what is there other you know, what other things that we need

to do that we need

to take on that could use that money. So in general, we're utilizing that money and we have not found that we, you know, haven't been able haven't been short in anything we want to do.

And Ms. Laird?

Chair Ready, Councilor Heberman. It's not necessarily directly in this fund, but it's something we've talked about with sustainability where it kind of branches out into a lot of different areas, whether it's our capital plans or grants or other initiatives through our fleet fund. And I guess not directly related to the county manager's operational budget, but you will see that we maintain a million dollars for sustainable enhancements to capital projects for this current fiscal year. And you'll also in the fleet fund, you'll see that we've been able to exceed the climate action plan goals. And due to increased market availability, we are seeing a lot of electric or, well, hybrid options that aren't exceeding what we already have budget for those replacement vehicles.

So I just want to mention that while we're on that topic that there are some other areas that address those concerns as well.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I also think we've talked a couple times about how when projects are undertaken by county staff that thinking about ways to make them have less of a carbon footprint and or be more sustainable, etcetera, meet objectives in the climate action plan. That's just almost built into the thinking now, almost like how we think inherently about customer service and communication and outreach and input. And it's the same kind of thing with this.

I'm hoping and I think I've heard that. I just would like to affirm that. So that maybe just we have the line item here in this category, but maybe there's other things happening in other departments that also help meet these goals. I mean, especially with the utilities department as well with working hard to, over decades, get off natural gas, for example.

I will go on the record as affirmed.

Thanks very much.

Okay. Thank you. Because I think it's also in the housing projects too, right? So it's not a big thing. So I think it shows up other places. But this was one when we were starting, this is where it started. But it's other parts of the budget now. So I guess not to belabor the risk management fund, so there's the page What is that? '91? '92?

It has the fund listed. And then in there, there's all the things that you kind of expect with insurance. And then it says other risk management. So I think is there a simple way to clarify what other risk management is besides the, like, workers' comp?

Sure. So from my recollection, I might not be a 100% recalling everything, but I know that we do do some small claims that our insurance doesn't cover. We probably have some of the professional services and other other things that could be charged out for that for that for this team, for the staff. There could be some staff charges there, although they're primarily budgeted in the general fund. And I think it's relatively a small fund. It's one of the holding funds that we put everything else that doesn't go into one of those categories, the the specific benefits and so on and so forth.

So Yeah.

We could get a better look at that for you too and look at some of the details.

Okay. Because I I think the one I'd asked before was, like, we pay then the self insurers fund the premium. Right? So is it like premiums to the self insurers fund? Oh, so sorry. And also to the was it Mexico County's Insurance Authority?

Yes. I'm sorry. I just got clarification that it's actually our general liability premiums that we pay out of there. So our general and our auto property liability insurance premiums come out of there.

That's what think what people think about is risk management.

Yes. Exactly. That's what a typical risk management Yes. Sorry. So even though it's other, it's really the bulk.

Yeah. Okay. So okay. Thanks for the clarification. So I think maybe we're done with questions on that part. Ready to go on to the regional. Okay.

Okay. So we'll go right into the regional strategic partnership. And again, know, some accomplishments. We continue to have the reimbursements to Rio Riba County and City Of Espanola for projects that you've approved. Think we continue to see great progress in the construction of the nursing and rehabilitation center in Rio Ribba.

And, again, over the last twelve months, Pueblo Of San Ildefonso had that $2,000,000 you council awarded or approved a $2,000,000 grant match for the middle mile fiber optic line. And again, kind of what this budget covers, again, remind you that it continues to fund our regional transit services through NCRTD. We also are funding regional economic development services through RDC and then again these continued funding for the capital projects. Okay, so we've tried to rework this fund statement to give you really an idea of how how much money is in the fund. And so I'm going to skip to the next page because I think that actually gives us a little bit of a great overview.

So what I did here was kind of gave, of the three entities that you've approved money through with this strategic partnerships fund, I kind of just gave, like, how much has been approved and when. So you can see Rio Reba, there's been a total of $5,000,000 approved Espanola, a little over $3,000,000 and then like we just indicated, the $2,000,000 for Estanil Dofonso. As of the twenty second, which I think was Friday when I ran the report, we reimburse so the Rio Reba, Espanol and San Jose Alfonso, they spend the money first and then they submit reimbursements to the county. And so as of Friday, Rio Reba had reimbursed back to Rio Riba about $841,000 Espanola just under $2,000,000 and Sanel Depositsunto $500,000 And again, for all these entities, the reasons why they haven't asked for more reimbursements are many. A lot of them are.

They may have other funding sources. I believe Rio Reba has many other funding sources for that nursing center, they're trying to spend those that they need to spend that have like a reversion date or such. So they know they have the money from the county, so they're waiting to expend other funds before they reimburse to us. Similarly to San Ildefonso, and Espanola has started to reimburse more and more. So as you can see from what you approved to what was reimbursed, You see the bottom line on this chart.

It's encumbered, so you've approved it, we promised it, but it hasn't been reimbursed. So those are those bottom line numbers. So if we assume that all three entities ask for all the money that's been approved, that bottom line, at the end of this fiscal year on June 30, if they do that, there'd be a million dollars in that fund at the end June 30 of this year. If that same thing happens at when we start FY '27, when we roll over into FY '27, that fund would have about almost $3,000,000 for allocation. So I'll go back to this slide which kind of shows this kind of where you see it.

So again, if we project that in FY twenty six, those three entities ask for reimbursements for everything that you've approved. You end up at the end of that fiscal, the ending balance or the available funding is just over $1,000,000. So then you start with that beginning balance in FY27. The budgeted amount is $2,500,000 every year. We pay out the contracts that we, you know, have the services agreement with RDC and NCRTD.

So then once you pay those out, there's about $3,000,000 in that fund if you chose to do allocations or approve other projects in FY '27. And again we do similar things for FY '28, the projected, but so with that I can stand for questions.

Okay there might be questions about this part. Councillor Cull.

So is it generally our unwritten policy to not allocate additional funds if funds haven't been expended other than Rio Reba where we made an exception because we gave them additional funding for the senior center. So Espanola has a little over 1,000,000 remaining to be reimbursed. Do we we know? Are they actively spending that? Do do we know status on that?

Chair Reidy, Councillor Call, Espanola has very recently, I think within the last month, submitted for reimbursement. So I believe they are actively spending and, you know, plan to expend the money. And in answer to your previous question, general, if discussion comes up that, say, one of the entities wants to come and get approval for another project, we do indicate that there's lots of money that has not been expended. I mean, we don't say you can't come, but in general we remind them that there is money that has been approved that has not been reimbursed.

Okay. And so, there's no real timeline on this either. We're gonna in the budget this year, we're we're gonna put another 2 and a half million dollars into the budget. So there will be some funding available potentially for City Of Espanola or Rio Riva County sometime this year if they finish doing what they're doing with their current funds.

Correct.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Counselor Nicklin?

I'd like to pull the string on that a little bit more. So for the funds that they have that have not been expended, remind them that there are funds available. But what if they don't spend the money, then do we still provide them with additional money considering they have money in the budget that they haven't used?

Chair Reidy, counselor Neil Clinton. So there is not a written rule about that. But what we would say is we would wanna know you're having trouble expending it, or do you wanna come to council and ask to spend it differently, or have your priorities changed? The the two things that happened, most recently was with the Ria Riba County project. The cost of that project was hit with inflation, tariffs, everything else.

So their initial estimates were, like, double tripled. So they came back and talked to council about how their estimates were really, the cost of the project was just going up. And so council added additional funds to that project at that time. And then we did get some interest from inquiry about the city of Espanola wanting to ask for funding for different additional projects. The issue with that was also timing because they were having a mayoral race, and there was some question about does whoever you know, if somebody else gets elected mayor, do they have the same priorities?

Do they have different priorities? And so we suggested that they give us a proposal in writing and and get the council to support this, initiative, and that we never heard back. So we never said no to that. But, so that's kinda how we handle it. It's just based on the MOU, they can come to us and make requests, and then we work with them on information to be able to and a time of when they would come to counsel and make that request. And the other thing we've done is we are so fortunate in our situation that if we were needed a little extra money based on an ask, we could also consider a budget revision at that time to move money from an assigned general fund into this fund should we have a need.

Has there ever been a time when the money hasn't been spent?

Not that I'm aware of. It I I will tell you that with some of our partners include sometimes we have to remind them, and sometimes we don't hear back, but we never we always carry the money forward, and we usually end up providing it to them in some way.

I'm going maybe I didn't ask it clearly. I know that we have the money, but has there ever been a time when they they being Espanola, Ria Riva or Sinai, has there ever been a time when they haven't spent the money?

It's not that I can recall. I would what I can recall is sometimes it takes a very long time for them to spend it and get us the reimbursement. So it we sometimes carried on the books for quite a while. Should we end up in that position, we would certainly ask them if they aren't planning on if they told us they weren't planning on spending it, we would ask them, what would you like to do? Would you like to come to counsel and spend it differently? Or do you have a different priority now? We would probably work with them on on what that looks like.

And this is another question of ignorance. So if we don't have a time limit for which they can spend the money, is there a reason why we don't have a time limit?

I think it's just a structure of our MOU. I mean, think we could. But I think we have not had that need or priority. We've been able to just keep the money in the fund.

And what's the longest we've kept the money in the funds?

I apologize. I do not have an answer for you on that one's allocated. I'd have to do some research on that and ask for some finance help.

Okay. Alright. Thank you.

Well, think the money was not even allocated for many years. So this is what we used to be called progress partnering when we're talking about this aspect. And we insist upon the name change, so thank you for that. But it used to be called progress through partnering and that dates back about twenty years. And I think that's the funding for the RTD and the RDC have been in there for a long time.

And then there was this initiative to have other funds available for neighboring communities. And there's no conceptual reason why there couldn't be other communities that could ask for money too. And then we have other kinds of engagement like the regional landfill might be something entirely different as it wouldn't be necessarily funded through this, but it's the same idea. This was one where we just had these general agreements and then the city of Espinal Ribeca or Pueblo, San Alfonso would come up with a request. And then we didn't make it overly burdensome for them to say, well, have to spend the money like the state does, or the federal government would say, you have to spend it in a certain amount of time, giving them more flexibility.

So it's I don't think it's a very this version of the program does not date back a huge number of years. And there was a number of years. I remember council one of council kept asking why we keep adding money to this when we don't actually allocate it. So that was a question that came up. So that's why we had the money available for these larger projects because we never used to have more than, I think, 500,000 for this. It used to be like 1,000,000 total for the regional partnerships generally. So that's what I remember about it. Do we any other questions?

I do have one other quick question. Do we always allocate that 2,500,000

Chair, Councillor Neal Clinton, that has increased as you can see, on the screen, it was 1.5 in FY24 and then FY25 is when you increase it to 2.5.

Yeah, I think it used to be 1,000,000 before that. Maybe it was 1,000,050 or something because of the two amounts down below for the RDC and NCRTD. So I noticed the I guess, the RDC number goes up and down a bit. So is there an opportunity for that to be better leveraged also? I mean, I'm just curious because we got the presentation from them not that many months ago. And

It never changes at all. It's always three fifty.

Chair

RDC. RDC. Not a art yeah.

RDC. You said RDC.

Okay. I think I said RDC. Yeah. Okay.

Chair, the RDC, we have a services agreement, so we go out for request for proposals for those services. And so that contract right now is right at a 175,000.

Okay. So that's what they told us it does take us to do that work. Right. Okay. Correct. So we don't have latitude there. Okay. Thanks for that. Any other questions? Councilor Rieger?

Now, there was another issue with GRT. Right? An eighth of a point goes to the NCRTD. Does that never show in our budget? Goes from the state to them directly. Is that the idea?

Mister chair and council Rieger, no. That's not correct. We actually pass it through. So it comes in, and then we we distribute it out back to NCRTD. So we are a pass through.

So an eighth of

a point is not three fifty. What does that mean?

That is a different item, councilor Rigor. That's actually for an MOU that we have with NCRTD. Every year, we've that comes to you in council to take action on that MOU. And so we that's an addition. We fund that from the county sources. That has nothing to do with the the GRT as the source. That is a generally funded source.

Yeah. But these are our regional partnerships. So where is that in this budget page? Or it's it it shows up on some other page of the budget. Is that the idea?

It's actually netted in with our GRT as a as a we know what how much increment we have, but we pass it through so it nets to zero. So you you don't see that come in as a source here.

Yeah. So we're spending a lot more on regional partnerships than is in this budget, But some of that, we have no authority over. So you're just listing what we have authority over. Is that what you're trying to say?

Yes. That's correct. We do not budget for that transfer, to be clear. That one is not included in our budgeted expenditures. It is just passed strictly passed through. So we don't budget it, and we don't show the expense. We pass that through.

Is there any page on the in the whole book here where that is discussed?

The only place that we can find it is in what we've locally enacted from our GRT.

Page

51. Sorry. Okay. So pages fifty one and fifty two of your budget book will show so we'll go to if we can, I can't flip it up here? But on on page 51, we show you the summary of all the tax rates that have been enacted historically, whether that's a municipal or a municipal authority or a county authority.

And then, the very bottom so we we summarize our county portion of GRT rates. That makes up 3.9125% of our GRT rate. The NCRTD portion for the regional transit, which we we contribute, Taos County does and also Santa Fe, that is a that point one two five stands alone. We don't it is part of a taxpayer rate. So if you were a taxpayer in the county, you would pay that portion, and then the state portion is 3.65.

That makes the total amount of our tax rate 7.6875. Now we do not show that as as a a budgeted revenue that then gets a budgeted expenditure. We net that for purposes of our of our general fund projections. So since it's a straight pass through, we don't we don't budget for that. But that is the only place that it it shows up, and we account for it every month in our accounting entries.

Oh, this is interesting. Where is this data you're showing right now on the projector? Where is that in the book?

That's on page 51 of your budget book.

Oh, alright.

Sorry. Page 51. Towards the bottom, you'll see a sum of all the county portions that that equate to 3.9125%. That's what the county enactment piece of our GRT rate is. And then right underneath that is the NCRTD portion, point one two five.

So, actually, the NCRTD is is a much larger amount of money than the three fifty that we are putting in. Is that correct?

Correct. I mean, it would be, but it's not our source. It's it's it's it's strictly goes pass through to them. Yeah. Yeah.

And the three

fifty is discretionary.

Yeah. Then we have to vote. I mean, the voters pass that.

Yes. The voters pass that.

In each jurisdiction. Correct. Every jurisdiction had to pass that, and then that just goes through. So we're done.

Correct. We're just a fiscal agent for that, essentially. We just pass it right through.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sure.

Okay. Any other questions? Okay. Not seeing any questions. So that might mean we're ready to have a tentative motion.

Maybe I did want to ask one question about the $15,000 I guess it is a placeholder so we don't know exactly Okay. So that's it. That's just putting something in there. Correct. Okay. So that's okay. So we have a councilman wanting to make a motion about the councilor Heffman.

Thank you chair. I move that council tentatively approve the proposed budget for the county manager in the amount of $25,120,330 and a budget option in the amount of $15,000 may I add for inclusivity board program costs.

I think that's okay. Is there a second on that? Second. Okay. So we have motion by Councilor Heaven, second by Councilor Herman. Okay. Not seeing any discussions. Can the clerk please call the roll?

Councilor Reidy?

Yes.

Councilor Reigor?

Yes.

Councilor Hand? Yes. Councilor Call? Yes. Councilor Hathamman? Yes. Councilor Neil Clinton? Yes. Councilor Herman? Yes. Motion passes. Seven zero.

Okay. Let the record show the motion passes unanimously. So thank you for all the discussion on that one. So I think that given it's after 08:00, it might be time for a ten minute break, and we'll see how much how many more departments we can get through tonight. Thank you.

Nope. I have one in the car and I

Okay. We're gonna get started again. So people wanna take your seats. So we're on to the administrative services department. So we have Ms. Palego here.

Thank you. Good evening, counsel. It's always fun to put on the department head hat during budget hearings so I can boast about an amazing team and a lot of our accomplishments and talk about what we're looking forward to this next budget year. Okay. So we can get started with the slides.

Just a reminder to everybody what administrative services does. Our oversight is is is highly focused on compliance, accountability across some of the really important internal infrastructure that runs runs all of the amazing operations that we do. We're kind of like the internal organs is what we call ourselves, where we keep the body very very healthy. And so we try to provide very high quality responsive service, and our our our high focus is on quality governance, our fiscal stewardship, and then operational excellence. And within our divisions is ASD admin, finance, procurement, information management, and our records team.

Okay. Next slide, please. So some of our significant accomplishments are really shared accomplishments across the county. Incredible teamwork and collaboration, I have to say. But one of the number one one, accomplished was, advancing our our long range financial planning, and that was highly done working in conjunction with you all and the public and everyone through all the engagement we did over the year to pass the GRT increase.

We know that that was not a light decision, and it took many years and a lot of contemplation. But but, ultimately, we do celebrate it as a success for the future financial sustainability for the county. And then we also did the $40,000,000 broadband issuance. So that is a huge accomplishment for the county, and and there was really an incredible collaboration on that. And aside from going through everything that we did, we maintain incredible bond ratings through our two bond raters.

It's like having a a consumer credit score over 800, to put it in layman terms. And then one of the one of the unique things that's behind the the the curtains per se is the procurement that went into that project. It was one of our most successful procurements that we can really hang our hat on, and that's due to the professionalism of our team that follows incredible letter of to the t, and that's Daryl Rogers is our is our deputy chief procurement officer, and he he really did an amazing job to guide us, the county as a whole, along with Thomas Wyman, who will be retiring in our attorney's office, and then Jerry Smith. So I just had to give a shout out to those power team because they really were an example to get us from the beginning to the end of a really successful contract. And then we came in to pass the bond, and now we're going to build we are building broadband.

So it's just a wonderful success for the entire county. And then aside from that, we did our we maintained our our Triple Crown honors and our Audit Accountability Awards. That's a huge attribute to the team that's led by missus Dodzi, our CFO, and our deputy CFO, Beatrice Otazulu, who really runs an incredible team, and they are all about compliance and volume and workload, and they just do continued excellence. And with that, they also launched the Financial Transparency Portal, so we have a lot more accessible data, even down to more of those details that may not be in the budget book. That's a place I was going to plug.

The Transparency Portal, once you kind of mess around in there and get used to it, you can really drill down into some more of those components. Okay. Next slide. Oh, before we move on, I wanna say one last thing on that accomplishment for that's not reported here, but there's a significant accomplishment from our budget and performance manager, Erica Thomas, who isn't with us tonight, and she's actually departing the county. So we wanna give a shout out to her because part of last year's budget is attributable to her success and all of the work that went into the GRT projections and the long range planning, and then also this budget that we're about to see.

So it's just a huge kudos to all of her efforts. She really made a lasting impression across the county. We will greatly miss her. So we will have a vacancy in budget. Okay. Next slide. For procurement, what we did that was very significant this year is implementing our e procurement solution. It really is an incredible tool to where we went and launched a whole marketing campaign basically to be sign up for anything that we're going to ask and solicit for business. So we opened it up to the vendor market out there for open and fair competition. And what we've seen is just some incredible results.

I mean, we we started with at least 145 vendors that we actively onboarded to now where we've really managed it through our team to get up to we're we're at almost 1,500 that have signed up midyear. And so that means that they get notified at any time that we put a solicitation out there, And we see it growing. And and what's really unique about this is that we've we've really streamlined processes. There's been a comprehensive overhaul of templates used. It's really about building efficiencies for internal customers and for the external vendors that wanna do business with us.

And the exciting thing is that we can now actively see who's interested in us. We can actually even see who may be interested in re who read our our solicitations and who may respond. And so it's just a great transparency tool as well as being efficient and getting more access to vendor relations. So it's a win win, and our team from procurement has done an incredible job doing that and hosting open house. And then on our warehouse team, they do an incredible job of managing our annual inventory certification process, and it is really of note that they have zero audit findings, continued excellence, and they continue to look at efficiencies in the warehouse, getting rid of obsolete inventory, slow moving inventory.

And just having zero findings in this area is is really huge for a county, I will say. Okay. On to the next slide. Okay. So one of the most important things of my goal as ASD director is to complete, keep investing in our powerhouse of human capital.

We have incredible people that work for us, and and so staff development is really important. Some of the jobs that we do are jobs that have been built from the ground up for years till you retire, and it's institutional knowledge that makes us so excellent along with new talent and and team and teamwork. So that's a huge one. It's always a success when we can do internal promotions, and we've done several of those this year. And then and and just efficiencies as a whole, being being the ASD department, being that infrastructure, we're looking for places that we can improve.

And we've been instituting those throughout inventory, operational, and then just workflow countywide. And then a shout out to our main user group who our ERP, which is our enterprise resource planning software that runs all the all the software for our our functions, they they attended the first annual New Mexico Tyler user group, and Chuck Baer is a great contributor to that. And so he we're we're fortunate to have his talent and to also leverage with other regional partners that use our system. So that's been exciting as well. Okay.

And I think next slide. And information management, I mean, it is all back office operations, but but we really do need to say that the reason why we're able to operate every day is to because of the incredible efforts done by our cyber team and cybersecurity being at the forefront. You know, just when I'm reading these stats, I I just think this is really important to highlight that, you know, it's probably more than what I have here today, like 8,300 blocks a day that that our team may manage just with all of our business operations. Those, any one of those could be a breach, and we are actively pursuing those. We have great teams.

We have great tools, and it is always going to remain a top priority for us. Cybersecurity is the most important. And And then we've been working heavily focusing on our disaster plans and our disaster recovery and making sure we can maintain our data, have our data, safeguard our data, and then looking at leveraging some types of systems be between on premise and then also in the cloud. And then I thought I would do a shout out to some of the environmental savings that we see because it is like what what councilor Haberman mentioned is how how are we ingraining this into everyday operations? And when we go electronic, we can actually start seeing some of the benefits.

And so this is part of our, you know, electronic DocuSign, how how much we save by just going electronic in in paper and and our carbon footprint. So we're always looking at that. I just thought I would highlight those stats. Okay. Moving on to the next slide.

In our records and inform management division, this is where we handle the Inspection of Public Records Act in compliance, very heavily compliance with state law. And what we did is we, you know, we have gigantic volume, 3,625 requests. And that's actually down from last year. That's like that's maybe half of what the volume, the amount that we got in IPRAS, but the hours to complete more than doubled this year. So it took more than five thousand hours to respond to 3,000 IPRAS, and we released 1,500,000 records.

So it just kind of shows you that no one IPRA is the same. One IPRA may take one thousand hours. One may take two. So it's just worth highlighting that we don't ever see the volume going down or discontinuing, so we're always trying to look for ways to maintain compliance and maintain the efficiencies around being able to gather all those records. And I will happily say that today, we are fully staffed. So our new employee in RIM started today. So we're very excited about that because we've had a lot of staff shortages throughout the year, and we also had transition of our our retired RIM managers. So good job to the RIM team. Amazing job. They keep us compliant.

Okay. Next slide. This is just pretty standard. We're we're gonna continue to support all of our systems, our all of our financial and procurement systems, and we always focus on cybersecurity compliance, but also efficiencies, customer service, tools, training, how we can help to to make the county as a whole keep us with the zero audit findings and being financially excellent and being accountable with being good fiscal stewards, essentially. And then we will be looking at potentially moving to electronic budget and that may leverage electronic budget and performance metrics and looking at some of the financial software out there to to try to streamline those places and also to become a little more user friendly, too, with the public as well.

And there are some areas where we will continue to use contractual services and technology, especially to look to help us with the specialized needs that we need and the workload demands, which are voluminous. Okay. Next slide, please. So that's a good transition to this one. Within our budget, we've managed to really follow guidance and in areas that we could trim and that are not contractual because we oversee 60 applications unique.

We maintain most of the centralized IT technology service contracts. So there are some that we just have no say over. We've already negotiated contracts. We look to balance that with other areas, but we do need to, and we really want to support the investment in enhanced RIM software that will help us to to flip that switch where we're not using. It doesn't take us so many hours to complete that volume.

We want to streamline where we can, and we want to leverage not having the need to rely on contractual services. And then be consistent and have a real clear auditable path that really is mainly for anything IPRA related, anything legal related for discoveries, and just so that we have a streamlined process. So that's what we built into this budget this year. We've also looked at advancing some of our AI abilities out there, and very responsibly, I will say, because we've started with an AI governance committee kickoff to really start trying to build the structure of how we want to what our policy will be countywide on AI governance, just for every user to try to come up with some highlights and some guidelines for everybody, and then look at what tools can we do that we can support that meet all of our technology standards and that are very safe. So of course, safety is always number one, and where does it actually make some business sense to use these and to leverage them very responsibly.

In capital, we do have one item that's very needed in our warehouse as a telehandler, and that's a large piece of equipment that's in lieu of a forklift. It can do much more. So we built that in as a capital expense that's roughly $200,000 over a useful life, seven to ten years. And we really have unique needs in utilities. We don't want to have to contract out for a $50,000 contract to move transformers.

We'd rather have a piece of equipment that we can leverage and use for all types of inventory. And then in our IMCIP, we are just continued efforts on our proactive cybersecurity and system architecture, our servers, our disaster recovery, and any hardware, and then capital enterprise software. So when you hear some of the departments talk about their new systems and their new software, like an example was the assessors tonight, that's where we'll budget for and we'll house most of those capital type purchases for long term. We'll manage that contract, and we'll work on how we how we structure that within our CIP. Okay.

Let's see. Next slide, please. And we're down to our overall budget. So we we we had less capital than before, but that's only from prior year carryovers that we needed a where we had an influx, especially due to the dispatch software, the CAD system. And then we've also stayed within our contractual obligations, all the budget guidance, but we did make some significant changes within our own internal lines that you don't see here, including where we could actually have some impact on deferring some of the smaller capital items that we may buy a centralized NIM, looking at maybe foregoing some professional services that are really nice to have, but we needed to scale back this year really looking for efficiencies.

And then also in our travel and training and other places that we could save. So we definitely took a red line to every single line very, very closely to meet guidance and to stay within this budget. And then with that, I think I will stand. I think that's all I have. I think I'll stand for questions.

Okay. Thank you, miss Bragler. Any questions? Council councilor Cole?

Are are the folks sitting behind you part of your staff? And can you introduce them?

Yes. I'd love to.

Thank you

for the opportunity. Okay. So I have Gayatri Sriram. She's an I'm program manager. She handles all of our applications team. Marlena Sanchez, she's the other I'm program manager that runs all our systems. And John Roy is our chief information officer, so he runs the division. I have Bev Purdyman, who's our business pro business operations manager, and she runs behind the scenes every single one of those contracts incredibly, budget, everything. And then we have our RIM division manager. She's an she's Fransella? Fransella? Fransella, what's her last name? Montoya. I went blank. I'm so sorry.

So that's my team. And then I have Daryl Rogers, wherever Daryl is. There he is. Daryl Rogers. He's the silent hero in the back that works incredible hours. And then Beatrice Orozulu, who's our deputy CFO. Tara is our new budget analyst, and we have our CFO. So thank you for the shout out. I love to give kudos.

Yeah. Thank you for the introduction because it helps me a little bit too. I don't have any other questions.

No other questions. Okay. Counselor.

Have a man.

I said have a man.

I don't know. Sorry. Okay. Thank you, chair. Righty. So thanks for all of that. That's a lot of things that you all do with 54 and a third people. The CIP IT project line item for the FY 'twenty seven proposed budget of just over $2,000,000 is that covering those things that were maybe a couple slides ago? The AI was one of the four. The telehandler was one.

Actually, those no. It doesn't cover those.

It does not?

No. So It covers other. Yeah. So those are not included in that. They're actually built into the operations.

The the those four things on that slide Yes. They're built

into the or

just other places in there?

Yes. Other places in there.

Then what would be some examples of what's in the CIP IT project line item?

Okay. So we have servers, hardware, cybersecurity applications, fiber, the what what we do for fiber around the county, any replacements, any things that we need to do with that. Anything else? What am I missing? Oh, our AV support, this room, the AV behind it. Okay. New

class. So we take on

Come on up, Bev.

Take on the implementation costs of new software. Here. Speak it to the mic. Oh, I'm so loud. Nobody normally needs that. So we take on the implementation fees or costs for a lot of the county software across, you know, across the board. And one instance of that is mister Chandler was talking about the new software that they're looking for for, you know, assessor and treasurer. And that is a line item that, we listen to that. We know that we are going to play a role in that. And so we start making sure that we have money in buckets for that.

So I do have I we have funds for to assist with the implementation. And then that will be gathered into our operational budget going forward for the following fifteen years.

For the operation and maintenance of it, for example, in that case?

Yeah. The CIP typically is for more of the the implementation costs. But, again, any of our upgrading of servers, upgrading of cybersecurity items like that, that is kind of a a standard in our CIP. The CAD mobile for public safety is our largest bucket right now. We're holding on to funds so that we are ready when that new CAD system is set up, and we'll be able to run with that.

But we also plan for our our telephony system. Our VoIP system is coming to end of life very quickly. It's approaching very quickly. So we have been planning for that for at least three years so that we have a bucket of money for that and we don't come up shorthanded when the time is right.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair.