Board of County Commissioners - Special Meeting

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Before we begin, I'd like to thank Corporal Thornton, Deputy Winnick, and Deputy Manley from the Sheriff's Office. And we're going to start with a budget discussion. Barry, you are recognized.

Good morning, Commissioners. So today we're going to have our first workshop on budget, really talking about different options and ideas. And there's been a few changes since we last talked. First, Commissioner Nowicki and Commissioner Shearer offered ideas in terms of ways to adjust the budget. And the main piece really focused around the general fund and what can we do to reduce down the general fund portion of our budget to provide for property tax rate reduction. That's really been the focus of the discussions from the comments that I've seen. I've also talked individually with each of you and listened to your thoughts and ideas. And so we have some, one, some updated numbers that we've kind of fresh off the press are able to incorporate within the budget. And two, we have a few of the budget ideas that we also think that we can incorporate that are reasonable in this discussion. So first, staff's going to be passing out a packet here. And as they get those out, then I'll wait till they deliver those. And so we can kind of use that as a guide. We're missing a couple of commissioners, so. Chris is going to join me up here so he can answer any questions. The other thing I want to acknowledge is. You could. You may have questions about anything throughout County government. I've asked all of our department heads to be here this morning, so if there's questions that Chris or I can't answer, they're here and available to get into whatever type of detail you want, right? And so. So on your packet, what you'll see is. some options for additional reductions that were not proposed as part of my budget presentation uh... just a uh... a month ago uh... in the if you look up in the yellow area uh... the first column there is uh... it says public works changes in allocation so we went back and looked within our public works area. And we believe that we can accommodate an additional $500,000 of reductions in the general fund impact within the public works area. The second column is the tax collector. So the tax collector did his distributions and increased those distributions by $584,000. We believe that's an ongoing savings. So that's an additional amount that we'll be able to see every year. So it can be recognized revenue. that again can help lessen the impact on our property tax. So we appreciate the tax collector looking at his budget and trying to reduce cost, increase revenue, and that's the distribution that he provides back to the general fund. The third column is a Medicaid payment. So when we have to guess what the state is going to require as part of our Medicaid distribution, that's one of those unfunded mandates that we talked about in the budget presentation. Well, we got the final Medicaid numbers and it's $975,000 less than what we had projected. And so again, that's another change that is kind of hot off the press. in terms of the discussions here today. The Medicaid, so the Medicaid, we get a bill from the state each year. That's part of our unfunded mandates. We have to pay that. Well, we're projecting out what that cost will be until we get the final letter from the state. We received that this past week, and it is $975,000 less than what we had... put in the budget what we have projected in the budget so it's still a lot of money it's still another unfunded mandate but it's just nine hundred seventy five thousand dollars less than what we thought it would be The fourth column here is the Tarpon Department of Health. And Karen and Dr. Cho have looked at this health center that we've had up there for a long time. They actually have reduced that a couple of years ago from a five day a week operation to a three day a week operation. And they're still not seeing the numbers that justify the continuation of that clinic. And so they're making a further recommendation is that we close the clinic. I'm looking back to Karen to make sure I'm saying this correctly. And that, again, will save General Fund $400,000. Yes, ma'am.

Yes, ma'am. You're recognized.

So what does that mean for you're saying we're seeing a reduction or not an increase in patient service requests? What are the numbers up there?

That would absolutely be a Karen issue. In essence, they're obviously seeing patients, but they're also waiting around, even at reduced hours of operation to where people do have choices. They have the Clearwater Clinic, but I'll let Karen answer those specific questions. But this is something that her and Dr. Chove had ongoing conversations. This wasn't really driven by the budget discussion. It just happened that they come to that conclusion during our budget discussions. So if, in fact, that is the recommendation, we can incorporate that within our budget.

I'll consider it, but I will say Tarpon is a nice little distance away from Clearwater, especially when you're talking about people that don't have transportation. I understand. How many patients are we serving up there? You may not have this because you probably didn't know I was going to ask the question because I just got this myself.

Sure. So I have some of the information that I can share. So in 2022, we reduced the operating days at the Tarpon site from five days to three days per week. So we're constantly looking at utilization of our health program as well as the general DOH services. We reduced the medical provider from three days to two days in November of 2025 because we were not seeing the encounters up there. There's been a 60% reduction in all medical services since 2018 and currently operating at only 58% of capacity even with those reduced days. So we are paying for staff time without being able to fill those slots. WIC, which is also up at that location, reduced services to one day a week in February of 2025. That's not the health care for the homeless program. That's the core agreement. And there have been no DOH dental services provided at Tarpon since 2019. We have also piloted for the healthcare for the homeless, the mobile medical unit. We piloted that for two years. And we also, we went to the Shepherd Center. We went to various locations up there and we still were not seeing the encounters. We also work with Advent Hospital. I meet with them every single month to talk about patients that they're discharging. Can they link them to the Tarpon Health Center? We give them the information on the care coordinators from the health department. We're just not seeing the volume. And this recommendation, while it's been in motion, is also one of the recommendations that the consultant put forward in the health program evaluation as well.

So you may not know the answer to this question. What were we doing as it relates to marketing and communicating information? to the public that this facility even existed and could provide services.

So in, so in addition to meeting with the hospitals, meeting with community partners up there, really trying to provide outreach. I have staff that go out in community and provide outreach at events where tape, you know, we table brochures. We just aren't seeing the encounter rates up there.

Thank you so much for answering those questions. I will consider this as, you know, which is the request. But we all know the minute you close this down, people are going to come out of the woodwork.

Karen, you also said there's some other ways in which you can provide services through your medical van.

So we still have the street medicine van. So the street medicine van does, that's the smaller van. The street med van can still go up to Tarpon and we always can pivot the larger mobile medical van as well. So if we do start seeing, you know, the community members saying, you know, we really miss the service, we can always bring the larger van back up there to make sure that we can meet those medical needs. Plus we have options for telehealth. So if we have partners in the community that want to be a telehealth location, we can provide telehealth services through the health program as well. Sure thing.

Okay, so that's the Tarpon Department of Health. And again, that recommendation would say $400,000. And then the final box in the yellow area is something Commissioner Scheer raised. When you're doing revenue projections on how many people are gonna visit a park or whatever, you're doing that, it's an estimate, right? And Commissioner Scheer raised this in his comments. We went back and looked at it and we think that they're probably being conservative there. And so just simply being more accurate or pushing that estimate that you can gain another $285,000 through that. So we've incorporated those. So those are five areas that just simply incorporating those would enable you to do a millage rate reduction by 25%. And so the yellow is a recommendation we think makes sense. We can incorporate that as part of the final budget recommendations. When you get to the, I guess, orange, We have some other ideas. The first one is Commissioner Nowicki brought up as part of the organizational efficiency studies. So we have about a million dollars that we budget in there and every year different things come up, but it varies year to year. It depends on what it is. And in our response, we outlined some of those things. When we had to do a jail master plan for that site, when we did the centralized the intake over there, we had to do a master plan. We had to look at all their different facilities. Well, that's where we bring somebody in that can do that type of space planning, master planning work. and work with the sheriff's office and figure out security issues and routes for transports and all those various things. That was one that we did. When we do the board strategic planning, we pay for it out of there. When we... When we had to do the CDBG-DR implementation planning, that's not reimbursable from the federal funds. So we had to do the plan and we had to pay for that in order to be able to access the $800 million. So again, that's another one where we used that. So each year there's different things that come up. We're currently doing a fleet operations review. I think there's a potential savings there of a significant amount of money. And so we brought someone in to look at it from a private sector perspective on how to manage fleets differently than the way we currently do it. So that's underway. So we've had each and every year we have different things that come up. But again, Commissioner Nowicki raised that as a million dollar potential area. We think that we do need money there because there are going to be things that have come out of our fall studies and things we want to look at. But since it varies and we looked back at several years, we can reduce that down by half. So we can take a half million dollars out and still have sufficient funds to be able to address any needs. And we also have reserves if, for some reason, we exceed it because it's one time savings. type money. So that's an area that we can look at. The next area, it was actually brought up by Commissioner Scheer, but this is in our water and nav area. Our water and nav is a specialized area. We do not think we can merge that with another department, and the people are busy. You're the ones that get the complaints about the the delays and permits and out of that group. And they also do all of our navigational work out on all of the waterways. So they work closely with the state. They oversee all of our navigational activities and we've only got a few people in there, but the permit fees haven't been raised in a long time and I'd have to get staff to tell me how long but but but it really should be breaking even right and it's not and that's where Commissioner Scherer identified a million dollars of cost but but for us to increase the fees to for it to break even we'd have to raise them by 120 percent which I don't think there's a great appetite to raise fees and we've actually been working with the contractors that do that work and staff's been meeting with them so we have a good relationship it's something that we can look at we'd like to work with the contractors we think it's an area that's right for additional discussion we don't have that in the first one but if you wanted to look at fees um even phasing those in over three years could generate about 280 000 so that isn't that's that's an option that we could look at if you choose to go there, right?

Excuse me, Chair. Can I ask you a question? Barry, the reason I brought that up is, you know, in my mind, permitting the dock is very similar to permitting a house on a lot and i don't unless it's required by the army corps that that department handle these permits for docks i don't see why our building division can't handle permits for docks they aren't they have They have everything in place to do it. They need surveys. They need a plan. They need design. They check the setbacks. They check the zoning. Why do we have to have a separate department that's a tiny little department in public works handling such a vital issue?

Well, first they do all the navigational stuff out on the waterways too. And that's fine. I don't want them to do that. But I'll let Joe or Kelly come up and explain that, the difference. But even if we put it over there, the workload, we get complaints from you because you get them from your constituents over the time it takes to get permits out now. All the time. All the time. And that's one of the reasons I like the idea of moving it. But again, if our permit people are busy, I can't add an additional workload on them without delaying permits. And so if, in fact, we want to move those people over, I need the people to go with it, or there's going to be a delay either on docks or on our regular permit activity. Either way, if they're busy. But let Kelly explain the difference on the activity itself first. Okay.

And I do want to say we have a permit dashboard on our website live, and we are meeting all of the permitting targets. I have received numerous. I know that sometimes when you get the emails, they're the negative side, but I forward all the good ones over to Jill so that she knows that equally we're getting positive feedback as well. I do want to put that out there for our staff who are working really hard. But they're very specialized. A lot of what we're looking at is it doesn't pertain to a parcel or the zoning or anything on the upland side. It's not land development code. What we're looking at is navigability. We have to look at the environmental aspects of that. We have the Army Corps of Engineer delegations, so we have to check all those boxes. And that's a service that the Marine contractors actually asked us to get the delegation because the permitting from the Army Corps can take an extensive amount of time. As anyone knows, I mean, minimum permit timeline from the Corps for a single-family dock is somewhere between six months and a year. We're doing it at the same time, and we're getting it done in a few weeks to less than a month. So we are able to do both our own internal navigability reviews, our own internal code reviews that we have to check those boxes, as well as doing the Army Corps review at the exact same time. There's also efficiencies in that when they're in the water, it obviously requires equipment. And we have other people who do similarly situated work. And they share the equipment. They share the boats. They share those things that they need with those same groups so that there's an efficiency there. They also share the vehicles and stuff. So there's an efficiency there. Barry mentioned we maintain about 1,200 aids to navigation and boater zones for speed and wakes and those types of things. And these staff work. We have one person who kind of coordinates the permitting and the maintenance work, but he can't be out there by himself. He needs those staff to come out with him to help do that work. So it's a combined effort. They're a team. We also do the dredge and fill permits. We do a handful of, we have the state delegated authority for mangroves. Again, another specialized area, but in the grand scheme of things, we do maybe less than a dozen of those a year. Really, the core permitting work that we do is with regard to docks and dredge and fill. It is not the same as being a building inspector. We also have two marine contract inspectors who, it's, again, a specialized area of construction where they go out and they do all the post-construction inspections, make sure everything was built properly. as it was supposed to be. So it is a specialized area of work. The workload is, we're full. I mean, they're still working overtime to make sure that we can hit the permitting milestones. And when contractors call us, and they do, to say, hey, you know what? I'm running out of work. Can you help me? I got to keep this crew busy. Can you move this? Where's this permit for me? And we've done that. And I've had them call me personally and say, I really appreciate your staff doing that to help me keep my crews busy. I know you guys don't always hear all that stuff, but I do, and Jill does, and our staff is working really hard to improve their efficiencies, to put out, to be very transparent with their review timelines, and even improve upon where they're going. Thank you, Jill. We're also countywide, so we work well beyond the unincorporated area. We work within all the jurisdictions that have navigable waters, and so we're also coordinating with those cities to make sure that sometimes they have very specialized things in place, and so we have to work with them and work to ensure that what we're approving is not in conflict with something that they have on the books. So there's a lot of coordination between our staff, the contractors, the cities, the Army Corps, DEP. It is a very complex program.

Yes. How many full-time permit texts do you have for docs? Do they do both? Do they do the...

The org chart that I provided you that I circled that, they all do everything.

I couldn't figure out whose responsibility was what on that chart. It doesn't really say. They do dock permits.

They do channel permits. We don't break them up. They all do everything. We have two people who came over from the clerk. This is a charter authority. We are the countywide water and navigation control authority. It's part of our charter. And so back in the 1950s, I think, when this was first implemented, the clerk of court actually did the intake and had been doing that for a very long time. And a year ago, we found an opportunity for efficiency. The clerk was doing it with three people. We pulled over two positions from the clerk and streamlined the process, looked at how we could use Acela better. And so now we've got two people who handle intake, And the rest of them all do all sorts of permitting. They do all of it. They do the dredge and fill. They do docks. They do multi-use docks. They do marinas. They do mangroves. They do all of it. All of them do all of it.

And does the Army Corps of Engineers require your department to handle the permitting or?

They require the conditions of the SAJ 96 agreement to be in place, which means you have to, you know, you have to be, you have to have the expertise to be able to do those reviews with regard to corals and other natural resources. But no, they don't require it. They require the expertise.

And do they require inspections that you were describing by going out with the boat?

Yes, they absolutely do.

And that's why we don't, I mean, we have an agreement with them, so we wouldn't have, we could cancel that. It's in our charter. No, I don't want to cancel it. That would then delay everything.

I actually asked for a copy of the agreement, not joining under the bus. I just haven't had it. I don't have it yet, so I didn't have a chance to read it. But it is a delegated authority. Okay, but they actually require you to go out and do on-site inspections under the docks.

They require us to look for all of those things. I know you're very busy, but in January, I did send over, you had initially wanted to talk with the Corps, and I sent over our agreement and our checklist, their checklist. I mean, it's an Army Corps checklist, and so it very clearly identifies all of the things that we are required to look for. So, yes.

But, you know, to your point, it's really how do we not make this a general fund expense? Well, the way to do that would be to charge permit fees that equal the cost of providing the service.

Well, I wasn't looking at raising fees. I was looking at reducing costs.

But that's, yeah. And we can't use building permit fees for providing that work. That would be illegal. I mean, building permit fees are restricted to those building functions. And so it would have to be navigable fees or general fund, either way. So that cost differential would still have to be assumed by the general fund. But we could increase the fees, and that's something we can look at. We just put it in here that if we phased them in over three years, and I think from what Kelly and Jill said, there's general consensus that we probably need to look at the fees, even with the contractors, because they want the service. They want that timely turnaround. That's way more important than the fee, but they also, I'm sure, would object to too much of an increase at once. That's just something we have to keep in mind. We put that in here that this is a possibility. We could do it over three years. That's how much it generates.

Yeah, and we've had just, you know, to Barry's point, you know, we've been doing very active engagement with the contractors. My deputy director, Paul, has been going out in the field and actually meeting with them, seeing some of the challenges that they're dealing with. I mean, it's a very complex environment that they got out there, especially when neighbors aren't getting along and we're trying to thread a needle to make sure that everybody can get what they want. But with regard to the fees, some of the feedback we got was that your fees aren't the problem. So when, for example, we have a dock contractor who specializes in high-end docks. So he has a problem in that most of his docks are in six-figure range, and the city's what they do is you go come in for a permit all they're looking at is their setbacks and issuing a essentially a building permit even though we're doing the construction review um they charge 10 of that so they are paying 10 grand to the city for a permit and we're charging a thousand bucks have we looked at third-party reviews allowing third-party reviews We have looked at...

So somebody can come in, they'll hire a specialist.

They're more expensive.

Well, sure it is, but it's a matter of time. I'm talking about time.

They would be more expensive. And again, the only way we could recoup that is to increase the fees or have a bigger impact on the general fund. So again, this is an area that we can talk about. We've put on an idea of a three-year phase-in, but this is an area we can talk about. So this is a ripe area. The next area is personnel lab savings. So we budget, if your department typically experiences a 5% turnover rate, we've, in essence, taken that out of your budget. So we'll budget you at 95% of payroll. So if nobody leaves, then your department's going to be short to meet payroll. And so we budget departments something less than 100% of payroll based upon what area it is and what their typical turnover rate is. We keep a set aside of $300,000 in case any one of those areas, they don't have the turnover that year. And so it's a safety net. But we haven't used it. And so we put that on the table. That's something that you could eliminate. And if we come up short, well, then we'll have to go to reserves to make them whole. because it's a guess on how much turnover is going to be. So that's an area that we could also look at. And then the final piece on the top chart is something that it's all near and dear to our heart because we think Kelly and her team have done an amazing job at bringing our infrastructure back into a decent state of repair. But we're not there yet. And that is in the third millage. So the third millage is what they have it targeted towards resurfacing. They have it targeted towards box culverts and various things like that. I'm particularly concerned about bridges, but we've We've transferred a lot of money for those three increments to try to get caught up. If you recall, not to beat a dead horse, but before you had those increments, we had 1,200 miles of roads that were in DRF condition. We were not doing local roads. We're not doing neighborhood roads. Today, it's less than 200 miles, I believe. Kelly, yes? around there. So we've made a significant impact. And that's because we can get out and do resurfacing, it's pretty easy. When you have to reconstruct a road, it takes a long time. Now you have to get drainage and you have to address those things. And in particular, when you get into box culverts or things like that, it's a lot more involved and requires engineering and takes years to complete. Same thing with bridges. Typically, especially in some of these neighborhoods, as you well know and you've heard as we've done bridges, Don's out there trying to get easements, trying to be able to reconstruct and things like that. So it takes longer. And Kelly and them typically go after grants for those types of projects. So our money is matched to do the local match for those. So we've made a lot of progress, but it is an area that if you want to provide property tax relief, this is an area where we could curb that back. So we put on for discussion that we could take half of the third millage, which is about $3 million. So you have three different millages. The first millage was to stabilize.

Okay.

You caught me with something I wasn't prepared for. But Chris has got an answer here. So the three mills, the first millage, it was a stabilization. The Transportation Trust Fund was not keeping pace because that's your gas tax. Gas tax is flat, costs go up, it does less and less each year. So the first was a catch up. And how much is that? Kelly can probably tell me. I don't remember how much the first one is. It's like six or eight million. Amount and the millage rate, please.

Here, I'll let Chris answer this.

Well, the first millage is 0.1279 mills, and that in 27 equates to 17.9, almost $18 million. The second millage is 0.1752, and that equates to $24.6 million. And then the third millage, the one we're talking about, is 0.0281, and that is equivalent to $3.064 million.

I'm sorry, I just wanted to get that context. Maybe you talk about that first one. That was a stabilization effort because of the gas tax.

And the stabilization was to, otherwise the Transportation Trust Fund was going to run out of money. So if you go back to when we were talking about this in 19 and 20 years, that Transportation Trust Fund was going to be out of money. And so this was to stabilize that to where we wouldn't exceed and we would basically have to start taking off projects and even maintaining the roadways. So that was the stabilization. The next one was really to get caught up on roads. And the third one also was get caught up on roads and bridges. But, you know, we've made a lot of progress. You're always going to have a couple hundred miles of roads because they're not ready to be repaved. Right. They some last longer than others and things like that. So you always have. We're in a pretty good spot, I think, with roads. We and again, as you can see on the list, she's got you know, she's got a million dollars, you know, planned for this year. And this is a. That's 4.2 lane miles. That was what we would pay for out of that money. But again, we can just plan for that in a future year, along with all the other road projects that we have. So we've targeted a million and a half, so half of that millage. That's a trade-off. It's a trade-off between that and providing property tax rate relief. The second and third millage are all for the neighborhood and local roads? And bridges. And bridges. Oh, and sidewalks, yeah. Sidewalks too. And if you recall, if you recall back when we started this, I think our chairman was out running and tripping on sidewalks.

Yeah, that was during the COVID when we were all doing things and I was out reporting on every nook and cranny that we had.

He did in real time sometimes. But that's where it took us 625 days to fix... a sidewalk when it was identified. That's how long it took before we actually repaired it. And so these funds went to catching up and then maintaining that. So that included both a catch-up purveyor where we got contractors on board and we got caught up and it also current crews that we have on an ongoing basis now that respond to trip and falls, changes in sidewalks and repaving sidewalks to keep them in a decent state of repair.

And so the second mill for $24.6 million is primarily roads. Roads and sidewalks, it's all combined. Okay, and the last one, separate, is just additional roads, bridges, and sidewalks, just additional funds.

That's correct. Box culverts. Yeah, and box culverts. She's got them segregated, but they're interchangeable. Okay. It's an infrastructure repair fund is what it is.

All of the penny dollars are going for more of our collector roads and our main roads projects.

Yes, exactly. That was the choice. Again, before, they looked at what we had in the penny and they looked at what was coming into the Transportation Trust Fund and then they just established the highest priority. And so if you have a neighborhood street, okay, or you have Belcher, well then, you know, you're gonna choose Belcher because of the volume of traffic and the impact that it has on the community. And so they were just constantly making choices to address the highest priority need, not necessarily getting caught up. This has allowed us to really actually maintain the roads and pave them at the right time versus seeing them deteriorate to where you get into a state where you have to reconstruct them. Yeah. Commissioner Newicki, you had a...

Thank you, Chair. These three millages are obviously a lot of money and the county's done a really great job, it sounds like, of getting from 1,200 miles to 200 miles worth of roads and hundreds of miles of sidewalk down to just a few sidewalks. I mean, can we get like a report showing like when we started, you know, halfway through and where we're at now? I mean, cause I just don't understand how we have to be collecting the same amount of money, but we're not.

doing twelve hundred miles roads we we provided a report back in april i think it was that where we and and kelly has a live dashboard so you can see that so we're getting there and and we'll we'll push it back out to you uh... you know the ends of the if we're able to provide that information we're getting there but if the guy i will tell you when we started what a lane mile road call and what does it cost today it's also you know uh... more than doubled in price and so um you know there's a lot of factors that go into that but you know it has been a very good fund but we're still not caught up um and so i'll never be you said and i said we'll always have a few hundred we will right but and it's it's a very fair question commissioner i mean it is a very fair question i've asked kelly that same thing you know when when can we see a less reliance on that general fund and we're getting there and that's the reason we've put on that theater increment as a just a start of that discussion i appreciate it

would imagine ongoing every year additional roads come on to the we need to get them fixed so we're always kind of going through this the the loop every

fifteen years or so and you know that the issues with culverts and drainage ways and bridges those are those are just longer lead items and so we only started this about what four or five years ago and so we've you know resurfacing is easy it's more it's more complex when you get into drainage and and things like that in the bridges themselves are we getting money from the penny for bridges it's not just this it's not just this uh millage it's it bridges usually require multiple sources of funds yeah and so my guess is i mean i i can't understand you kelly so come on up

So, we use penny to replace bridges, but not to maintain. So, the clerk has a very specific definition of what a capital investment is in a bridge, and therefore, maintenance items, even though they may be very expensive, don't trigger capital. Like, for example, we're getting ready to do about two and a half, between two and a half and three million dollars worth of maintenance on the Dunedin Causeway, and we can't use penny for that. We're using this money for that.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Commissioner Scott, do you have a question? Hold on.

Did you refinish? Commissioner Scott? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is that because of the ballot language that we used last time for penny specifically or?

Yeah, it's the penny by state statute is for brick and mortar infrastructure, not operations, not maintenance.

Okay, so it's not. So we couldn't, like if we wanted to change the ballot language going forward, that wouldn't change that.

We could look into it, but probably not.

So if you were just repaving the road, that's maintenance, and that's why we have this additional fund. If the roads get so bad that you're having to redo the roads, reconstruct the roads, is that capital? yes that's i'm looking at kelly nodding yes okay so those roads those those those roads would probably be eligible for penny the reconstructing the ones that are so bad that we have to reconstruct Oh, she's saying resurfacing is capital.

So we have flexibility there with that.

But then that means something drops off the penny list.

But again, you have three different things. You have penny, you have the gas tax, and then now you have these influence. So a little bit different definitions on some, but not all. But but we've put on the third millage to try it I mean because this is there's no right or wrong answer This is a balance on how much do you put the infrastructure? How much do you put on trying to you know ease the rate? But if you look at the yellow and the items that we've identified in the orange That would get you to 50% of a rollback and And I've heard pretty clearly from the board of your desire to do this. So that's the reason we kind of come up with these ideas for discussion on today. And I'm going to get to the end here and then turn that back to you to where you can have these future discussions.

Mechanically, I'm trying to wrap my head around the third millage. Are you proposing to reduce those millages or use the revenues to offset general funds?

What we would do, we would only transfer half of that millage amount, and then that would enable you to do a property tax rate reduction.

Okay, so you would hold that? Okay.

Yeah.

And so, but there'd still be, like... thirty million dollars and and those those coming in oh yeah uh... we're reducing down by man still don't come in and for those projects but right holds on the in five forty yeah the morning when i didn't get the last number written down so i was just estimated from what i heard sir what seventeen so forty million so come for

So it's still a tremendous amount of money. So 45.7 is the total. So you'd be reducing it by a man and a half.

As long as we're on it, I don't think that's a problem for me.

Okay. So those are just, again, these are just discussion points for you. We've heard you. We've tried to respond to that. And we went back and looked at our budgets to try to do that. Now, to go further than that, it gets more dicey and we really got to start looking at programs. And so there we've talked about and, you know, you've heard, you know, the sheriff, he opposes this. But, you know, again, everything should be on the table is what I've heard. So. Sheriff's fit you know 45% of our budget of our general fund budget And so if we get if we get more than that then then he needs to be part of that solution And so that would be and that's where we go to the green where we would ask the sheriff to contribute that'd be 2.8 million and how he figures what he chooses to do is up is up to him and that's

Just for context, again, his budget went up a certain amount this year in his first proposed budget, and then he's brought it back down.

Yeah, his budget went up 29. In the original. In the original was 29, and then we asked him to reduce it, and he come down seven, so it's still about 22. It's about 22, and this would come off of that 22. Yes, we'd be asking for additional amounts. I just want to make sure I'm clear. Go ahead. That would get you to 75% of a rollback, and then to get to 100% of rollback, my recommendation, we'd have to really look at programs. I've listed out programs here, and things like our BayCare home care program is 100,000. The social action funding, that's the piece that we are recommending we keep, which is ongoing programs, is 600,000. CABI is our scattered sites program. It supports services to people that have experienced chronic homelessness and trying to keep them into stable housing. And so again, that's a program that Karen supports. She thinks it has good measurable outcomes, but it's not something we have to do. And so we could eliminate that. We put on the act. That's small, but these are the types of things that we don't have to do. We're just listing out different ideas. Animal services, we do the capture, spade, and release. I forget the terminology. And then additional parts of the third millage. And so we have those ideas. There are other ideas, but they're programmatic. What do we want to cut programmatically? Because it needs to be sustainable ongoing cost if we're going to adjust. But we can get you there. We've looked and pushed our departments. Just to remind you, I mean, if you look back on your second page, you know, the are over the last you know what you know five six seven years um your county administrative department's a total of 5.6 percent the growth is in the sheriff's office it's all people based you've heard him before um you know and and so that that's a and that's also the largest share of your budget if you go to the third page um that shows you in real dollars 26 to 27 um The departments that report to you, I mean, we're down. And we've tried to hold the line. And then the last page kind of shows you that in real dollars. So, again, this is just additional information for your consideration. With that, that concludes my presentation.

All of these reductions that we're talking about, they're all ongoing monies for ongoing relief, as opposed to looking at that last page real quick. And I apologize for being late, and thank you, Commissioner, for standing in. So I may be saying something you guys have already talked about. but I'm seeing things like a reserve change. That's just really a one time.

Well, the reserve, so again, we had the 4.7 of reserves. These were dedicated reserves, not real reserves. We want to keep our reserve levels the same, but we want to take the 4.7 and put it towards a future bond payment for the new campus. We need to prepare for that. However, I also heard you loud and clear that you don't want to do the recommended changes to Wheaton Island. So then that 4.7 goes to about 4.2, right? And so we would transfer that amount over restore Wheaton Island cuts for one year, which is what I think you directed while we try to work with the state. And then, and we would transfer the remaining amount towards that future bond payment. so that's so the transfers hold hold steady and then any of these other reductions are things that are ongoing so if you eliminate a program well then you don't have that cost next year either and so it's sustainable year after year so any of the proposed recommendations we have in here are sustainable year after year okay all right thank you yes commissioner flowers

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much, Barry and Chris and staff for bringing this information forward. Kelly, I bet she feels like she's on name that tune today. For the docks and davits or any dog reconstruction, were there any new rules that came out for construction and maintenance of those as it relates to Hurricane Talena Milton because of the severe damage and just like they are requiring how homes to be built up and above. Were there any new requirements added to the installation and maintenance of docs when it comes to the permitting piece?

No, as a matter of fact, after those events, we waived all the permitting fees. And so they come in and just let us know that we're just putting it back as is, and then we would update the system. So we waived all that, but our regulations, no, they changed. I will say the docs and stuff that we're working on for the Parks Department, yes, we have to build them to a higher standard.

Okay, that was my point. And so thank you. That was for you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Barry, for the personnel lapse, I get it that we do have ebbs and flows within personnel within a year. So there may be fewer dollars needed to cover personnel costs. So when you have your... when you have your exercise for the different departments to do the internal reductions of 3% and if a department fills that position, how will that be addressed going forward for the next fiscal year?

Well, we don't address it by specific positions. We look at multi-year turnover rates within a department. Different ones will have different levels of turnover. There may be a really small department where they don't have a lot of turnover, and we may budget them at 100%. And so they may actually have somebody leave, but we don't necessarily budget that. But like a Kelly's department where you have a lot of different positions that have turnover, where then we're going to look at over over several years, what's the average amount of turnover? And then we'll reduce that amount out of the budgeted salaries. And so those are incorporated into the budget recommendations that you have before you.

Okay, and so that has no effect on the 50-plus kind of positions that you presented to us?

No, those were specific.

Okay.

Yeah, we looked at the positions that we could reduce down. That's how we got to where we're multi-million dollar down for the department to report to you. you know, we we looked at those targeted positions and Said that we can reorganize and find efficiencies and do without those positions on an ongoing basis So those were already baked into the recommendations that are before you on top of that We also have reduced down the salary vacancy rate.

Okay, and then For the the general fund because when we talk about which I support reducing the dollar value that we pay for, um, any type of, um, possible study, you know, so we're saying if we, uh, have to have another study that comes on board because we need sometimes that match to go with other funds. And of course we sometimes can't move forward on projects until we have the study for the data to show that we can move forward. We have a lot of things that may potentially have to come out of the general fund And so do you feel comfortable with some of the things that we're reducing but saying we may have to tap the general fund to provide for those things going forward if we have the need? Do you feel comfortable with that?

Yeah, it's a hard one to answer because you're trying to guess what's going to happen over the next year. But just like last year, I think we decided to do, when we did strategic planning, we typically bring in a consultant and in this discussion, we said, let's do it ourselves. But I couldn't have predicted that when we did the budget. And so things like that, we're trying to use less consultants and try to be more efficient. But things like the fleet operation, well, we couldn't do that internally. We needed someone, and the potential for long-term savings is great. So there we needed some outside assistance. So we try to make those judgment calls, but each time we look at particular areas, we'll need that. If we exceed the 500,000, I think the 500,000 is good for an ongoing basis year after year. If for this next year, we have a discussion in here and we want to do something different, well, we do have reserves. We don't like to tap reserves, but we do have that if we feel that we need to push something forward and do that. So I'm comfortable with that recommendation.

Okay. And then if my memory serves me correct, when Commissioner Scott first came on board, we had a lot of good discussion about the transportation gas tax and what that would be used for and whether or not we could lobby our legislative delegation in that regard. And I think it may have been on our, I'm going to call it our elevator wish list list. Yes. So are we looking at maybe, well, I guess that would be to my colleagues, really. Are we looking at trying to maybe push that again? Because I think that would help us a lot in that area when we're talking about the different services that are covered or paid for out of that fund. I know the whole topic was electric cars and gas cars and it's at the pump and who's paying and how much. you know, with persons now going more towards, not everybody, but some people going towards electric cars. So we're not generating revenue off of that. But then the conversation came up whether or not the legislative delegation would consider taxing electric cars for that. So will that be, or is there an interest from us to further that conversation and dialogue with the state on that? I remembered way back when.

Yeah. So I've had quite a bit of discussion with members of our legislative delegation about that. And I feel like they've got a real appreciation for the challenges that we're in, particularly with what happens or doesn't happen with Amendment 3. But I've explained to them several times the $45 million that we're taking from general from property tax revenue. that would be available to return to the taxpayers if we had another dial we could turn or leave that we could pull. So I'm feeling hopeful that there will be some options for us in this next legislative session for that. And as you're talking there, I was sitting here thinking that if we wanted to take more of that millage away and sort of take a chance that we get that we get something on some relief on the loft going forward you know we could always bring this back if we didn't um but we'd be you know going out a little bit a little bit of a financial one to do that well it'd be hard to bring it back because then you'd have to carve it out of yeah right something you've already taken off the table well and we know if amendment three doesn't pass something else is going to come back around anyway so that's to your point if we take it off it's probably gone yeah

and uh commissioner i mean you know work with you know three different chairmen okay um that where we've had this discussion and the discussion's always been about if the state would treat us like they treat their own gas tax they have a um what we call it a um multiplier no it's not a escalator Yeah, so theirs is indexed, okay, each and every year, and ours is not. And if they had treated us the same 20 years ago, you wouldn't even need these increments. So the actions, and it goes back to the same discussion we have, the actions of the state are impacting our local taxpayers' property taxes. It is. No ifs, ands, or buts. And so all three chairmen and your own legislative program has said, if you give us that in-tax, we'll take 100% of that and reduce our property taxes to reflect that. We won't keep it. It won't be a shell game. We'll reduce down these increments and return it to the taxpayer. But until we get that legislation, I really recommend that we continue to stay the course.

I mean, $45 million is four and a half rollbacks.

This year.

This year. I mean, it is. It's a lot of money. I mean, it's significant. It's significant dollars.

It is. So, yeah. It's the challenge, right? I mean, it makes such logical sense because everybody is paying for their share of infrastructure improvements through the gas tax, except certain areas. Right.

You know, and again, I'm not. And, you know, and if it follows this, like the sales tax, that means our visitors are helped paying for our roads. Right.

And then my last piece is it is so expensive. Stormwater sewer projects and rope and bridge repairs. Those are the two largest, greatest financial costs. I think that any local government has and not just the cost, but also time and inconvenience. because we're digging up roads or whatever. And so we're having to reroute people and whatnot. So I know that we try to use pen and money for a lot of projects that we can use pen and money for. And then in other areas, we apply for grant funds to try to help with that. I'm not sure how that's going to pan out, you know, going forward, whether it's from the state or the federal government as it relates to what we get. But So for me, just for me, I have no problem with what you presented. You know I'm a social service girl at heart, so I still have a little heartburn over the Tarpon Department of Health, but I will go ahead and support that reduction. But I would hope that should there be a need or we see an increase in numbers, because Like I said, people may not necessarily be aware, like much like we had with our other program. And now, you know, folks are really into it, but, um, once you take something away, then all of a sudden it's like the, you know, there's this, uh, light that goes off and everyone now wants to service. So I would, um, if, if that need arises, I will, I will be asking for us to come back and look at addressing how we could potentially meet that need. Should the need arise in the Tarpon Springs area? Yeah. Um, but all of your other, um, requests here, along with the other budget reductions that we've talked about. Um, I do support. I know that, um. With the sheriff's office, you're talking bodies, um, and no one wants to see a reduction in offices on the street. I know I don't as well as some of the other functions that the sheriff. does provide um i know we've had conversations about the social action funding and reducing that from that million down to that 600 and oh you want me to wait until you get no no no i i just want to make clear that i'm only recommending i know you're only recommending the top level yeah i'm going to i'm just giving you my overall these are renee's thoughts on the budget we haven't we have yet to talk about that lower level is that correct

Well, I just, I went over the, I kind of briefly went over those, but those are not areas that I'm recommending.

Oh, I understand you're not recommending, but if there are people that want a full rollback, those will have to be discussed. Correct. At least those and maybe something else that somebody has out there. Correct. Okay. So I would like to have that brief discussion about those areas. So we're clear. And that doesn't mean we're supporting or not supporting it. We just need to understand it. Hold on one second, Barry. Okay. Hold on. Before we jump into that, Brian, did you have anything else? I did, but if Rene wants to finish her thoughts, I'm fine. Okay. Did you want to go down and below? Yeah.

If you would like to do it a different way, I can wait.

I'd rather have him kind of talk to each of those. Okay.

I'll do that.

Okay.

I'll do that. So that's all I have for my top row.

Okay. But I know we're going to come back.

For my yellow and gold. That's all I have.

Anything on the yellow and gold. My questions were related to social action funding as well and also some things on our agenda for next week. So I'll hold that until Barry's done.

Okay. Commissioner. I was going to have some questions on the blue. Okay. So that was just kind of skimmed over. So I'm going to go there now. Okay.

Absolutely. Thank you. How he addresses those. So, so on the blue, we got, we got Baycare home care. That's a hundred thousand dollars. And I'll ask Karen to come back up and explain because I'll bring her up because she can explain each of these in great well that these first two in three or the first three in greater detail. So we'll just walk down through with the Baycare home home care.

Sure. So BayCare Home Care is part of the Pinellas County Health Program and Health Care for the Homeless, and it includes durable medical equipment. It includes home health, physical therapy, speech therapy, and IV antibiotics for individuals who need that level of treatment.

This is targeted for people at what level?

100% of the federal poverty limit or who are homeless. Okay.

So this is specialized an area that otherwise they wouldn't have access to those services and they got to meet certain income limits to be eligible. So that's the first one. That's the big care home health. The second area is the social action funding. And if you recall in the recommendations, those are three, there were three or four programs. Seven. Oh, okay. Seven programs. The reason I have her up here that are, So we had funded him past the last year for multi year. They they're not guaranteed that funding, but when we when our as part of our recommendation is, we said it was since to continue those to their conclusion and then just not renew and then not start any other programs that would be new that were proposed. That was 1.1 million 600,000 of ongoing programs, and so that was how we come to that. was the new program that no that was the ongoing program and we are talking about oh eliminating those so yeah so sorry our budget recommendation the original budget recommendation the 1.7 million i'm using round numbers 1.7 million you have in social action funding about 1.1 million of the recommendations were for programs that would be new and that's already part of the budget and And we recommended eliminating those as part of the budget. So what's left is $667,000 for ongoing programs, the seven programs that Karen just stated. And so you could choose to not fund those programs. There's no guarantee of funding, so you could choose to not renew those. So those programs would go away. So that's a social action funding.

And I believe that Commissioner Scott, didn't he ask? Did you ask for a list of those? Yeah, and I'm looking through my notes here to see if I could find them. Can you briefly have it?

I can grab OK.

And before you leave, and I don't forget, I wanted to hear what the update is from the hospitals on the Sunco services. See what kind of headway we're getting on that. Thank you. Appreciate that, Karen. Oh yeah, right on top Jesus.

Were you going to go through those or anything? Were you going to go through there?

You want me to keep going?

OK, so so that was the recommendation. Again, if we get deeper, if we get if we get to where you're going to try to go to a full rollback, you really gotta look at that funding. It's my recommendation. And then the copy funding. I'll let Karen again speak to specifically what that is.

So CABHI was a grant prior to 2020, and we continued that service as a decision package moving forward. We were right in the middle of writing for the new procurement, so we were going to kind of take the best pieces of that and move it forward. And what this is is field-based behavioral health services for adults. So bringing services to their home to keep them stabilized. Many of them were formerly homeless, placed in scattered site housing. So this is not attached to an organization. This is, they've maintained, they're in housing and they need additional services. And some of the areas that we're looking to expand is there are times that we are called from code enforcement for houses that have hoarding situations animal hoarding situations and this can also be used to bring services to those residents to keep them in their homes but also work with those who have severe and persistent mental illness who maybe went through a rapid rehousing program but their needs far outweigh just kind of traditional case management

Okay. And the hospital?

So the hospitals are still a work in progress. I sent letters to every single CEO, and then I have met with many of them that I routinely meet with for our health program to explain what this means with our reduction of funding. I meet almost weekly with the Suncoast CEO, and he said last week I think HCA was the only system that had reached out to discuss the letter.

Okay. And current funding, current budget has funding for Suncoast through December?

Through December, at the end of this year, yes.

So we have a little time. All right. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Thank you. You answered, I was going to have a question about the BayCare piece, but you answered that one. but I will go ahead and I think that social action funding can be funded through the legislature. They have more funds than we do. And those items are routinely funded in the state budget and the various silos. And so I would be supportive of that. just getting out of the business of funding nonprofits through the county budget and focusing on core services.

Can you speak to that? These are seven independent groups.

Yes.

Do they all have the same access to state grants and are they all equally taken care of or do some of them struggle getting the grants because they're not viewed the same way as others i mean i specifically look at st pete free clinic who provides food for a lot of different groups who distribute to our residents

They have a lobbyist. I'm almost certain.

So could you speak to the...

I don't know that I could speak to each of the seven organizations and if they have a lobbyist and kind of what their track record is with obtaining state funds. We can certainly follow up with them to ask that question. I mean... All of these are very kind of smaller nonprofits, probably with the exception of St. Pete Freakland. That's probably the largest of the seven that were recommended. And each year they have to demonstrate that this is a need, an emerging need in our community that they want to be able to try to fulfill. And it's the only opportunity that we offer at the county for new services or new programs.

Okay.

Okay.

Go ahead.

I'm good.

Okay. Yes, Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree with Commissioner Latvala on the funding, social action funding. I just don't really think this is a business that we should be in. But further than that, beyond that, I also have some questions for our agenda review later, item 18 and 19, which assumes that fiscal year 2027 funding. But item 18 is agreement with 211 Tampa Bay Cares for administration of the adult emergency financial assistance program for five years, worked out to a little over $1.4 million annually. And then the second one is with Vincent DePaul Cares and 211 for rapid rehousing service. And that one's for three years, that one's well over a million dollars a year. And I just look at all of these things and I'm sure they're doing great things in the community, but there just seems to be so much overlapping. Just like the, and I'd like Karen to speak to these individual programs, but then we've got the $1.7 million that we're providing to the Public Defender's Office to do a lot of the same things. And then money for social action funding for groups that are not-for-profits that are doing a lot of the same things. And then we've got $2.4 million for Safe Harbor that's kind of doing a lot of this. There's just such a tremendous overlap in all of these programs that we have. And I'm not saying that we necessarily should rip the Band-Aid off of all of these things in this particular year, but it just seems to me like it's a very fragmented, decentralized system, and there should be a lot more efficiencies. I feel like we're just throwing a lot of money to a lot of different groups to solve a lot of the same problems.

Yeah, I think there's certainly, and again, I wrestle with this, the things that we criticize the state about doing things spontaneously, and we're left holding the bag, so to speak. And so I want to make sure that we are respectful of a of an incremental process. But I too would like to at least have, in maybe the first quarter of next fiscal year, kind of a discussion about all the different things that we do and maybe where there is overlap. Because I'm certainly not at the level of understanding of the complexities of each of these and how they either overlap or they complement. I just don't know. I think that's a great question. It's something we should at least have a good handle on so that we know whether we are duplicating. I would give some deference to the group that's in charge to make sure that we're not doing that, but I think from an education standpoint, at least we should make sure we understand it. I think that would be an important element. I'm not saying that we don't touch it. I'm just saying just be mindful of these groups. And again, here we are, kind of like we did last year, we're September, right? And they're starting as well. So I just wanted to throw that out there as context.

So, I mean, Karen, would you be able to just kind of speak to these two programs? And is there any room for improvement at all as we look for next year's budget?

So I can start with the adult emergency financial assistance program that only serves adults without children. And so that really is one time funding for someone who has a very high utility bill. They're up to 200% of the federal poverty limit. They have to demonstrate sustainability. This is the only program that they can call in and have that utility bill paid so that they're not without lights or water or potentially evicted. And so we pay rental assistance, mortgage assistance. And this was built because the Juvenile Welfare Board built a similar program for adults with children. And there really wasn't anywhere for just single adults to go. We help a lot of seniors. We help a lot of individuals moving out of shelter. We can pay first, last and security to move someone directly out of a homeless shelter with this program. On average, we serve around 2,000 residents per year. I'm sorry, 200 residents per year and the average cost is around $2,000. Um, it's real, there's really nowhere else for them to go unless they go to the really, really small areas. Like they'll go to the urban league, um, and get something paid, but then they run out of money. So this really was built on efficiencies to really help single adults. There's really nothing out there.

Which program was that? I'm sorry.

It's the, it's, it's on the agenda for the 10th.

That's the one we're talking to. The second piece. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

And so residents call into 211. They do a financial screening. They submit a ton of documentation. They have to meet eligibility criteria. And it's really a prevention bucket. So I don't really see that overlaps with the rapid rehousing program, which I can talk about. But this is prevention. It's preventing our residents from becoming homeless.

Do we know that people don't double dip? That maybe they get assistance from... the public defender's pot of money and then get assistance from this pot of money and then get assistance from a not-for-profit somewhere else. I mean, do we...

There's not a centralized system for that, so no. but they have to demonstrate need, right? So we're looking at utility bills, bank statements, late ledgers. I mean, so I guess if they were wanting to defraud the system, I guess they could try, but there is not a centralized system. And that probably is one of the larger challenges across the entire nonprofit system is that we don't have a centralized data system in behavioral health. I mean, like that's the complexity of the services that we provide. That is something I will say kind of in the future that I know the Opioid Settlement Funding Group is trying to look at for the mental health side, but it is very complex and it's going to take a lot of legal work for the entities to kind of work towards that.

I mean, even the same thing with our food banks that we have. Correct. I mean, you don't have a card that says you've got some food for the month, so you can't go down the street to the next one and the next one. There's no way to even govern that, really.

Correct.

So that to your point, there's I don't know, some of that would be, I'm sure, very needed, you know, but some of it may not be. I wouldn't care to speak to that at all.

SO I CAN SPEAK TO THE SECOND SO I CAN SPEAK TO THE SECOND PROGRAM. PROGRAM. PROGRAM. SO THE SECOND PROGRAM IS THE SO THE SECOND PROGRAM IS THE SO THE SECOND PROGRAM IS THE RAPID REHOUSING COLLABORATIVE. RAPID REHOUSING COLLABORATIVE. RAPID REHOUSING COLLABORATIVE. AND SO THIS STARTED I WANT TO AND SO THIS STARTED I WANT TO AND SO THIS STARTED I WANT TO SAY 2016. SAY 2016. SAY 2016. IT WAS BUILT SO THAT OTHER IT WAS BUILT SO THAT OTHER IT WAS BUILT SO THAT OTHER MUNICIPALITIES COULD JOIN IN THE MUNICIPALITIES COULD JOIN IN THE MUNICIPALITIES COULD JOIN IN THE FUNDING. FUNDING. FUNDING. AND SO that adds funding to this agreement. That is rapid rehousing for families with children and individuals. And the county is, I would say, the largest funder of rapid rehousing services. We fund two programs. So we fund this external program, And we have an internal staff program. It's called the Family Housing Assistance Program, but that is it. So those are the only family rapid rehousing programs. And while it sounds like there's duplication, there's not enough. So last week I got a report that there are 50 to 75 families with children unsheltered today. They're not in shelter. They're living unsheltered on the street. So this is kind of that funnel that, you know, we have family emergency shelter as part of our book of business. They move from family emergency shelter into rapid rehousing. Then hopefully they're stabilized and they don't return. Both of the programs, the internal program and this program that's on the 10th, have very, very, very low recidivism. And we do track that.

Okay. Is the nonprofit world that deals with homelessness, if this program went away, I mean, would the not-for-profit world pick it up and run with it, or would these just be 50 families that would be out on the street?

This would be almost 100 more families that would be on the street, and there would be no funnel. So I don't know that they have the capacity to pick up and just run this program on their own.

Okay. OK, if. If there's any opportunity for improvement in these in these programs as far as for next year's budget, you know if you could look at that between now and. When we vote on this would be, you know, commissioners out there is or not, but well.

We've talked a little bit about some of the programs, and we've put some areas on for discussion, right? But we also could, just like on the healthcare program, we wanted to have that ready and back for discussion this year. It's complicated, and we sent out the draft report. We haven't even met on that draft report yet. It's gonna take time to implement, whatever we decide. we can do the same thing on kind of this nonprofit in this homelessness area because they all kind of interconnect in some way, shape, or form. And we can look at them more holistically in the fall if that's your pleasure because we never get enough time. We talk about this program or this program or this, but to your point, I didn't even know some of the stuff on what Sarah was doing in the public defender. It doesn't mean it's duplicative, but it could be. We just don't know and we could look at them all at one time It just seems like there's lots of pots of money that do very, very similar things.

They are. Yeah, and I think... They're very similar populations. Yeah.

And I, again, Karen's been in the business for a while and knows the different players out there. I think that conversation would be really a good one to have. I know that you keep as close an eye on it as you can in a system that, as you just said, it's hard to manage between different groups that are involved. um in some ways and i just you know you have to be careful how we say it but it's almost air on the side of caution just a little bit i mean i know there may be a little bit of overlap the potential for some but again there is something about taking care of our own our own families that live in our county that may be having and i'm not talking about the folks that I don't even want to use the wrong words here, but that homelessness is something that they like. There aren't many of those, but there are some that just live in that world. I'm talking about families who may be struggling, lost a job, lost a house. Those are folks that are neighbors or friends or whatever that I think we have to be a little bit aware of what we're doing when we take programs away that might, and again, we're talking incremental here. I mean, I wasn't here for part of the conversation in the first part, but it seems to me without a whole lot of straining, we're talking about a half a rollback, and now we're getting into that next level of discussion, which is, You know, the sheriff's is 25% and the rest of them roughly 25%. So we're talking in those where it hurts, you know. And so this is where it gets a little bit, as you said, dicier. And maybe that's the area that we need to spend our time on. Unless I misread the... Commissioner Shearer.

Yes. Thank you, Chair. I just.

I'm sorry. I owe her to go back to Commissioner Flowers.

Sorry, Commissioner. That's OK. That's OK. So I meant to say something last time we had this discussion and I forgot. I actually had a chance to work with Bob Dillinger when he created. the fund out of the public defender's office. That fund was created because there were a number of people that were being arrested for substance abuse issues, didn't have money for legal representation. And perhaps the crime that they committed wasn't a felony, but a misdemeanor or a low degree felony. And the state and the public defender's office felt like putting the person into rehab would be a good investment. And so I worked at Gulf Coast Jewish Family Community Services. We had two facilities on Darlington Avenue. So that's the borderline between Pasco and Pinellas. We had two facilities up there. And so those funds initially were utilized to secure beds for the rehabilitation. So we had one side that was men and the other side that was for women. And so they received... um, residential treatment services, intense, uh, wraparound services for the family. If there was family, uh, services for the children. And then of course they were able to stay there and gain some of the skills needed in order for them to become self sufficient once they were, once they graduated or moved on from the program. Um, So that's how that program actually started. As a matter of fact, I went up one year begging him for more money and he had to come here to beg for more money because we were really able to change some lives. So I meant to share that when you were asking what are those dollars used for and I don't quite get it or understand it. With the development and construction of the Davis Bradley Building, which is in St. Pete, it was an old nursing home that was renovated. WestCare is the lead agency there, but I worked there with the Coalition for Safe and Drug-Free St. Petersburg, and we provided those wraparound services and support. Services for the family and it was a residential treatment. It still is a residential treatment facility initially for all men. And then they brought in women, but some of those funds that the public defender's office had to try to help those individuals went to pay for those beds. So West care got money from. The state, you know, they got money from SAMHSA funding, substance abuse and mental health services out of the federal government to help pay for that. So that's what some of those dollars are useful. I just forgot to share that when you had asked a very good question. A lot of people don't know that, I don't think. So I wanted to share that. The concern I have with social action funding, and it's not just because that's the area I've worked in, I guess, really all my adult life. We have had, unfortunately, so many laws that have been implemented by the state legislature that in some instances criminalizes homelessness because if they sleep in their cars, now they can be arrested. We do have families that are sleeping in their cars and you can go by Walmart and see them, you know, parked with. uh stuff up over the windows you know and whatnot they go into wawa's and other places to get themselves cleaned up and their children are off to school in the morning how do i know that because i worked with a group of volunteers and we raised money to buy uniforms for school and personal supplies to give to them so that their children could start school and their greatest fear was if they find out that i'm homeless and my kids are homeless i'm going to lose custody of them so um When it comes to the services that allows an individual to be able to move into a place that has a roof over their head, as long as they can show that they can continue, they have a job that can pay the continued rent and utility bills and things of that nature. It does so much because a lot of those families, they are working. Both parents are working. They're just not able to afford anything. to get into a place when you need first, last and security. And typically the landlord is asking for twice the amount of what the rent is. And in some instances, that's about $6,000 to move into a small apartment. So I really support that. And if you all also remember when we were meeting over across the street, we gave the free clinic a lot of money to purchase that new warehouse off of 22nd Avenue so that they could expand their storage space for the food that they distribute to the public. I think some of you all have toured over there. I know I have. And it used to be the warehouse area. that was back up in there that did many blinds and stuff like that that employed several people but i've toured and gone over there um and it's fab the way that they have it you would think you're walking into a costco or sam's the way they have everything lined up and just so clean um uh and then they provide those uh foods that they collect to other groups like churches that do food distributions. Feeding Tampa Bay comes in and provides the food to do food distributions. If you want to see whether or not the need still exists, you can come on a Saturday morning, get there about nine, nine 30 on the corner of 22nd street and 18th Avenue South. And you will see the line all the way from 22nd street down to 16th street. How long that line is. And it wraps around the corner every Saturday. And not people who just are coming to be greeted, people who still need the food support and food assistance. So I see every Saturday, and it's not just them, Mount Zion Progressive does it on Wednesdays. There are some organizations when they're doing paperwork to help, they try to track a person so that they know you got help from the Urban League for your lights. Um, and so we already know you've gotten support for that, so we're not going to do it, but it's not on a bigger system like what I would agree that if something could be done to do that, I support that because that way you could help many more families when persons aren't. getting services from all of the different resources, and repeat people consistently coming. Now the issue is, so let's sit down and talk about your finances or where you are because you are an every month person rather than when you really, really need that help. For our homeless persons who are receiving those mental health services, and I'm talking schizophrenia, that are really concerning behaviors, those people are going to end up in our jails. And Sheriff Bob Gaultier has already talked about that. They're going to end up in our jails because they can't afford an attorney to get out or it's a revolving door. They'll be in, then they'll be out, they'll get rearrested because of their behavior and it's not under control. They're not taking their medication. They're not in a solid place, you know, to kind of give them that support and make sure that they're doing the things that they need to do. And a lot of our homeless people, they are veterans. When we do the point in time count and for the ones that will share information, a lot of them are veterans. So when it comes to social action funding, and again, I'm not just saying it because that's the world that I've worked in for so many years and do have a heart for that. It is because veterans, Even persons who go to work every day who may seem like they're okay, they are not. And the few things that we provide through our social action funding, it nowhere near covers all of it, but it does give those organizations an opportunity to help people right in the community. And I'm not saying that you're saying this, but I'm just going to make this comment. Even if they work at McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's, they're paying taxes. their taxes are being put back into the community or the revenues are being put back into the community. And this is the one specific area where they need some help and support. And I would just love it. If we will continue to be mindful and thoughtful of that, because we probably know some people who had some very good lives at one point, things happen, life happen, medical bills, divorce, um, loss of life, loss of a partner or whatever. And so now they're not where they used to be and they're having to navigate places where they've never had to ask for help. But they are grateful that there are organizations out there in the community that can provide them with that help and support. So I don't mind looking at reducing like what has been presented, but I would really love if we would support keeping something there because we are really doing a tremendous service to help people that are in need.

And you mentioned the parents and working, but the kids going to school is a whole other thing.

Yeah, and like I said, I could take you to some of those spots because they're very fearful that, you know, you're elected official, you're going to tell them, you know, I'm not going to report you. You're doing the best you can, but what services can we give? And it's hurtful when even I'm calling on their behalf. And like Karen said, the Urban League gets a pot of money. And they have people that call and they're quote unquote on the wait list and they have to provide documentation. But that money goes quickly. You have POC that have the ability to help seniors. That money goes, it just goes extremely quick because the need is so great. And unfortunately, the costs are more than what they can spread out. So they're only able to help fewer people. So I would love it if the state would step up and help. And I'm not saying that at some point they shouldn't, because I think they should. Because those legislators represent the same people that we represent. But I also know how many, and I'm sure you guys do too. You've heard the stories, you see it. I know you know some of the same people I know. you know who's out there hurting and need the services. So I would like for us to seriously consider at least keeping the amount that has been presented to us there in the budget. When it comes to the yak scholarship, we haven't gotten there yet, but I still support that. I thought that was a good idea and it's being taken out of a portion of our what we have in our offices. So I don't know how you all feel, but I still support that.

I know the blue ain't what you're recommending to go away, but I'm just speaking. We have to modify that. I guess a couple of comments from commissioners on that one. I'll have to clarify that in a second.

Okay, we'll clarify.

We're not solving the budget with that.

Yeah, but I support that. So I'm just saying. And then the BayCare home care, you know, I kind of wrap those comments up into what I just discussed about the need to be able to provide those services because they'll end elsewhere. So that's all I have to say. Thank you also very much for listening to my long comments.

Thank you.

Thank you for your perspective, Commissioner Flowers. Commissioner Shearer. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the time. First of all, Barry and Chris, I appreciate all the work you did answering all my questions, and you all worked really hard on getting the budget out. I was very encouraged when you brought the first budget out and saw how close we were to a rollback, and I still think we're very close. But I just want to say up front on a few of these things, I will not be supporting any more reductions to the sheriff's budget. He's done enough already. Number two, I agree with Commissioner Latvala and Commissioner Scott on the special action funding. I think it should come from the state. I appreciate those comments. And then specifically on the rapid housing, You know, there's a lot of places. I'm on this Penelope Safety Council Coordinating Council. There are a lot of places in Penelope County for homelessness for adults, but not so many for families. So when that item comes up, and I appreciate your comments, Commissioner Scott, I just feel like maybe the adult, we could do away with that program and maybe take half the money and put it in the fund for the children, families, because we don't have enough for families. So that's something I was gonna bring up at the next meeting, so I'm glad you did. And then, I did want to bring up, I did send this memo out, and I'm not going to cover every bit of it, but on getting back to the idea, if we do away with the special action, and I actually, the home care, I like that because it's more expensive to help people out of their homes than it is in their homes. But we're still really close. And then I wanted to remind you that fleet management fleet management your the budget proposes a two million five hundred thousand almost five hundred thousand dollar increase uh... into the reserves fleet management already has two million dollars and contingency reserves, and it already has $17 million in regular reserves. I don't know what the difference is, but that's $20 million. So I don't believe we need $2.5 million to go to fleet management reserves, so that's $2.5 million. uh... kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate kate

And so like for instance on the fleet budget, so this is not a general fund expense 11% is charged back to the general fund so again all your all your other funds that they go into that and so the contingency reserve for 27 is just a million dollars the replacement reserves for vehicle replacement is 20 million and So we budget for that replacement vehicle. If we take that down, then when it comes time to replace that piece of equipment or vehicle, we don't have the funding available. And so these are planned expenditures for the replacement of vehicles. And then the contingency reserves, we actually, and I'll let Chris explain this, there's a contingency reserve of $4.5 million from the BIS. We reduced that down, and so that's already gone, because I think you're getting some of the numbers from the original BIS meetings.

Well, that's what I was working, because I didn't get any.

Yeah, so there was a change between the BIS and my budget recommendation. And so there is a difference there, and I don't understand how you wouldn't catch that. And so we're down to a million dollars in reserves there. And again, out of that, there's only 11% of it is general fund.

Okay, and then what about the building development services?

Building development review services. First off, that's not general fund either. Let me go over to where that is. Chris, which page is that on? oh i got it um so again these are not general fund dollars of the reserves 3.9 million that's one-time funding that we set aside for substantially damaged properties so so all the work that we're doing on substantially damaged properties again again that's that stuff that we had to pay out in order to address that it was one-time money that we put in to address it we're actually moving it out over to a different fund but that's here nor there um but Again, the building fund is a special revenue fund and is legally restricted to be used only for associated building division operations. And it's governed by a Florida statute. So these are not general fund. So even if we make a change to it, it doesn't change the outcome of our general fund.

All right. And then my last thing was I found about $150,000 in silly expenses I thought that we had. They're in my memo. I don't know why. I've been to two NACO conferences now. I don't know why we're sending them $20,000. The agenda that they push on the national level is not my agenda. Not fact. I love fact. You're doing great. I don't know why we're doing the national. And then I had to pay for my own entry into the NACO. So I don't know why we're spending $20,000 on... I signed up for the conference. I had to pay for the conference.

You paid for it out of your office budget?

Yeah, right. But this is a $20,000 line item for membership to NACO.

I don't think we need it. He's differentiating membership versus what you pay to go to the conference.

Yeah, I do have several positions on the Hill. Yeah, the $20,000. I'm going to stay out of that one. I'm sorry.

You get to say whatever you want to say, but when you say payout, so you meant you paid out of your office budget. I paid to go to the conference out of my office budget. Yeah, that's what we all do.

The $20,000 is just the right of entry. The $20,000 is just the right for you to attend. No, that's not it.

It's for NACO operations. The conferences usually pay for themselves. It's like a yacht club. Separate from that.

And then... I'm sorry. Let me apologize to you, sir, because I interrupted you, and you didn't interrupt me. No, it's all right. I apologize for that.

You said NACO, and that got her attention.

Yeah, I'm like, wait a minute.

I will press my button when he's finished. Then I was just wondering, doesn't our—we have a— I have a couple things, too. I'm sorry. We have a— Representative in Tallahassee that we pay, right? What do you call them? Lobbyists. Yeah, our lobbyists. Don't they have a tracking software? Aren't they providing us with the tracking on the bills? What do we have paid $20,000 for a tracking subscription? I don't understand that.

That way we can track all of the bills. Tristan uses that on a daily basis. That's how he gives you updates, et cetera, and stuff. I just assume our lobbyists. Well, they track the bills that they're tracking. We track them all. And that gives us the ability to go into the detail to see exactly what's being filed and stay up to date in real time. It's a very valuable piece of software. We did look, Commissioner, based upon your review, we did ask internally, though, and the Alliance for Innovation is something that we're going to eliminate. So we actually agreed with that. We have it. We've been part of that organization. But we re-evaluated it and decided that it doesn't provide what it's worth. So we're going to eliminate that.

Okay, great. 12 grand. I like it. Hey, you had a $100,000 item on here. And then you've got a program that you're going to be doing in... Your HR department, the collaborative study, do we really need to have our own studies?

We get a lot of... Well, collaborative labs is, again, through St. Petersburg College, and they provide...

Page two. Hang on. Chris has directed me what to say.

So we actually reduced it from $80,000 in the BIS budget to $55,000. They do a lot of performance evaluation training. They do succession management training, supervisor training, and other employment engagement activities. So they work with the departments when the department wants to bring disparate groups together and create a vision or align services and things like that. We use them sporadically, but it's like any other type of training program. You can eliminate it, but it's going to have an impact on the way we operate. We use them as we need. Got it. All right.

I just want to bring those up. They caught my eye. Commissioner Lett-Bell.

I just want to voice, although I've never been to a NACO conference, and I never plan to go to a NACO conference unless there's one in Florida, I do not support seceding from NACO in the same year that we have a FAC president in our midst, because I think that the look would be very tacky. Um, because what there's like what 420 or 450 county commissioners in Florida or something like that.

Um, what is the around that for NACO? I'm sorry. Somewhere around that in Florida. Somewhere around that in Florida. And then in NACO it's 3,133 because some are called judges in Texas. They call them judges. They don't call them commissioners and et cetera.

All right. So that's just my opinion. And I also do not support cutting arbitrarily staff from the Economic Development Office either. But you did have some recommendations that I supported, but those two I do not. So thank you, Mr. Chair.

Commissioner Flowers. Thank you. So, um, the $20,000 that is paid is membership that goes into NACO that helps to cover, um, staff that they have that go out and lobby on bills that are, um, issues nationwide nothing that naco does is spotty when you serve on the committees anything that you discuss or talk about that moves forward through in a policy level it has to be something that affects All 50 states. It can't be just the one thing, for example, uh, issues surrounding affordable housing, which I served and was appointed by the former president and will now be appointed by the new, um, president of Niko to a national housing committee. And we work very closely with the federal government and HUD on changing the legislation so that it. Uh, keeps up with the needs in local communities, for example, um. The amount that vouchers are covered for now, um, no way covers the amount of rent that is needed to be paid to the landlords. So, lobbying for things like that to get those formulas change and we've been very successful. It also covers any kind of technical support or assistance that we may ask for or may need. Not all counties need that because some are better positioned. We have a county that has a number of departments, but some of your more rural communities, sometimes they need that extra help. But anything that we need from NACO, we can call and they are there and they answer the call. Their staff is very lean. They don't have a million people working. running around. They could have one staff person covering several different policy committees. I currently serve just had my first meeting yesterday. I serve on the justice committee that oversees policies and legislation relative to, um, um, criminal activity relative to laws that, um, that our sheriff ultimately ends up carrying out and specifically focusing on juvenile justice because that's become a big thing. I also serve on the housing committee. I am actually the committee chair for the housing committee for NACO. And like I said, we've been very, very successful. And that success does trickle down to us because if we can effectuate change, that means more money for our housing department, which is Tom Almonte's shop. So that means more money that trickles down. It goes to home funding. That means more money that trickles down to other projects and programs. So, um, I think it's worth it. Okay, yeah, I believe it's worth it. And not just because I'm a fact, I'm the president of fact. But you are knowledgeable. Yeah, Chris, you did lead, but thank you so much for sticking up for me.

I appreciate that.

But there is value in it. And, yes, I go and I'm very active. I go to all my meetings. I don't, you know, go to hang out. I go to work. get things done and bring it back. I go up on the hill to work, get things done, bring it back. So I just wanted to share. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

Yeah, go ahead. I'll be quick. No, I know. I'm just trying to get some things in too, so go ahead.

Sorry about that. It's all right. No, I just want to echo Commissioner Flowers' comments. I mean, I find the NACA meetings valuable. I serve on a couple of different committees and transportation committee being one of them. And I find that that you get to learn a lot, a lot of understanding and knowledge about how the federal government's looking at funding transportation for future projects, which has certainly helped inform my decision as we work towards original NPL. So so anyways, I just support what you said. Thank you.

It seems like we've lost three of our members here. I know Commissioner Letvell will be back. I think Commissioner Nowicki said he needed to leave after 2. I don't know about Commissioner Peters. This is our last workshop. Are we going to have a workshop? because otherwise we're going to be working during our hearings.

Well, you're going to be working during your hearings. So any direction that you can provide would be helpful because we don't have a workshop scheduled. We do on the 17th before the final vote. So you do have an opportunity between your first public hearing and your second public hearing. And so under your first public hearing, all I need is a simple majority vote.

uh... and then you'll have a work session and then we'll come into our second public hearing that'll require supermajority yet so again i i i can't think uh... the commissioners who done all of their homework leading up to it the questions and they're in the in the in the messages that uh... they've come to us with no response required of course or even allowed so thank you uh... to any all of you for that uh... And I think we've done a great job. I'm of the mind that a balance in our budget somewhere between the hardware and the software of our county needs to be looked at. And for me, when I look at that third millage, which represents about 10% of our commitment to roads, bridges, and culverts above and beyond what we're already doing in the penny, which is already doing more on infrastructure than we had originally thought. I'm an infrastructure geek, and I believe in all of it, but there may be a time for us to look at that third millage and roll that third millage out of the budget for next year. That represents as I said 10% of the work I'd like to know what that effect is and what we're looking at specifically because I do think we have responsibility the software of our county is Critically important and I just don't want to turn my back on it without knowing it I hate to turn our back on the social action funding without knowing the details and what's going to be affected what other sources they have I certainly am NOT going to support anything on rolling back animal services the The TNVR is critically important. In fact, that's an area that we ought to be committing more money to, to get a handle on the issues that we have in our county with regards to animals. And I certainly don't want to affect budgets that may be affecting our kids. or well-intentioned adults that are just in a bad place uh... and so i see that nestled into the bay hair home care the c a b h i the cab thing the social special the social action all of this stuff may have consequences that we're not aware of that are going to affect people. And we certainly talked about the sheriff's facility on 49th Street. And if we close that, then we're talking about folks being out on the streets that we're going to have in and around our community, number one. We may not like that. Number two, the folks that are there needing the help themselves, where are they gonna get that help? So you have places that we take away from, I just like to know what's their alternative, realistically. So for me, giving up 10% of of our road bridge and I can put my hands around it. I'm sure Kelly will let us know what would fall out and where we would go back, how we might not make as much progress as we wanted. But to me, that's an area that we can look at. And to me, that's an area that takes our money north of 50% rollback and at the same time preserves some of these programs that I don't think, whether you philosophically agree that we should be doing it or not, we've done it and people in our county are used to having it. So I want to make sure I'm clear on what that looks like if we take it away and I'm not. So I probably will not support any of the social action funding reductions, any of that until I know more, but I'm willing to throw on the table that .00281 mill, which is about $3 million a year, um on the on the upper upper part that was representing about fifty percent uh rollback so that would go up higher um i'm not sure what that looks like maybe it's sixty percent sixty five percent rollback uh okay you're talking about taking the entire i'm talking about taking the entire three million so that would be an additional basically million and a half So we can look at that. Somewhere around 60, 65%. Yeah, probably. We can look at that.

More importantly, what we'll tell you is what's going to come off the table, what the impact of that is. Okay. Yeah. I understand. It's a balancing act. I hate to see it. I'd love to see us tie it to when we can get the state to actually provide relief through the indexing of the gas tax. That's been our leverage point, but that's absolutely a policy call.

I understand. I mean, I would too. I've been pounding that drum. Obviously, no one hears anything about it. And I appreciate the conversations you've had with some of them to understand the connections that they do and how it affects the very millage that they complain about us. I mean, it's so direct. And we're talking about everybody paying their fair share of that. And to that end, Barry, it might be helpful to understand exactly what that gas tax is because it's not all just the electric car piece that they pay their fair share.

So if we, what we've always tied it to just, and I don't want to get down on a side thing, but we've always tied it to indexing of the gas tax. So we've also said that if there's been a lot of, and we always thought, I mean, Commissioner Lavalle will say when, you know, getting a bill opened, you know, is your opportunity, but there's got to be a reason for a bill to be opened or it's hard to get traction in Tallahassee. There's been a lot of discussion about addressing electric vehicles and doing a registration fee that would then be their part of what otherwise would be the gas tax. And so you put a registration fee on, we'd get part of it, the state would get part of it to cover their cost of roads, et cetera, and stuff. That's the opportunity for them to say, all right, at that time, if that bill, if they address that, include us in indexing of our portion of the gas tax, the same way the state does with their portion. That's really what we've tried to tie that together. We've just never been able to, in fact, spent on this. We've had this as part of our legislative program for years. We haven't been able to get traction. But then that's the reason I was saying that that we've always said that if we can get that traction, we'll take or calculate that. How much does that bring in and do a direct millage reduction on our side of what the transfer is?

I understand.

I just wanted you to understand the mechanism to actually make that happen.

Well, adding these three mills was painful for me, but it did what it's supposed to do. And to that end, I'm grateful. And it's not like we're still talking about $40 million. they were adding to that instead of for instead of forty three million and i mean i know that the different parts of money there but i'm just i'm again trying to put perspective around this we can tell you what an additional man and i have i can tell you what we won't be able to do as a guest in india and don't don't pick out just uh... hard looks at the road in front of your house yeah yeah that that kind of thing uh... fitted fit in front of what that was how um but yeah so i think again it doesn't sound like i mean if someone told me right now that we're going to lower we're going to do a 60 millage rate reduction or sixty percent number here are sixty five percent however we got there i'd be ecstatic and i'd say we're doing what our residents demand of us they may demand more of us and we'll see how that pans out in the next year uh... and you know and i don't you know i don't want to get into for this year but for next year we're talking about restructuring government and that means salaries are on the table it means Our salaries are on the table. All of it when we have that discussion. So those are additional steps that we're going to have to look at. I'm not prepared to do that this year's budget. To me, getting us to 60 or 65% is something that I can support, even though I may not support the mix. If the majority wants to do it in a social accident and leave the roads, I'm not going to. not support that and i'm giving the cards away a little bit but i don't think it's right to get rid of social action funding and the soft costs that that circulate through our county without knowing exactly who's going to be affected and how and do we have other sources that they can get to we did that for better for worse and so folks have counted on us and i don't think it's right to just do that in one fell swoop. There was a comedian that talked about one fell swoop. I'm trying to remember. Anyway, did you have something, Commissioner?

Yeah, I just wanted to say that I agree with you in looking at the The full third millage. And just a point on social action funding. We were very generous to not-for-profits with our ARPA dollars, which was a choice we made. We didn't have to do that, but we did that. And a lot of these not-for-profits, not all of them, but a lot of them have some pretty nice endowments as well. So I don't think that they're going to... I don't think that our... That's what I want to dig in and find out. Right. I have some of that information, but a lot of them have pretty nice endowments too. I don't see... Everybody likes to get money, but I don't see any of it as make or break.

I think that's a great point, and I think, Karen, at least when we have that next discussion on that and we get to specifics, I think that's a good discussion to have. Okay, that's all. Thanks. Oh, Vince Nowicki, you left. I'm not going to recognize you on the screen.

Mr. Chair, can I recommend that you all take a quick vote to allow his virtual participation?

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

All against. No, no, I'm kidding. Go ahead, Ben. He's in the timeout room.

Oh, well, thank you for allowing me to participate virtually. I was going to wait to bring all the hard cuts so I didn't have to be there in person and get tomatoes thrown at me. So I figured I would just leave and then present all the hard cuts virtually. We can't even see your face. Well, I'm driving, so I don't want the sheriff to pull me over in a flock camera. But I'll save that for another day. So I appreciate Barry and Chris, you know, all of the hard work to get us halfway there. I still think we can do a little bit more work and I support you chair by saying, looking at that 3rd millage. Looking at that, I'm still not sure how I feel about the social action funding. I think we need to maybe look at that a little bit more. Could go 1 way or the other on it a few things that I brought up. I mean, workforce relations barrier Chris. In that workforce relations, I think we're spending like. A few 100,000 dollars or budgeting that for tuition reimbursement. Do we know how much of that is actually being used?

I would have to look at that. I haven't looked at that specifically. I mean, Amanda's in the audience, but it's probably over. It's probably not in workforce relations. That's probably over in HR. Yeah, it's over in general government. That's a countywide program we have. It's part of our personnel policies and procedures for our employees. So that's a countywide program. Okay, I thought I saw it in our workforce relations. No, that would be over in HR. Or general government Chris is telling me.

Okay, and then I brought it up last year and I'll bring it up again this year. I don't think we should be paying for subscriptions. I know Barry, you adamantly disagree with that, but they're still promoting. As their core values and to train government employees, how to promote in government. So, if someone's getting 150,000, 180,000, 200,000 dollars a year salary. There's no reason why they can't pay for that on subscription on their own. So, maybe we don't need to eliminate it for everybody, but. I think if you're making a significant income. That you should be able to pay for that on your own. Because it's helping you advance there a person's professional life.

Well, ICMA is a professional organization that represents professionals throughout all cities and counties across the United States. They promote core values. Those values, those tenets that we live by include we believe in professional management is essential to the effective, efficient, equitable, and democratic local government. Everybody can wordsmith anything they want. It goes to affirm the dignity and worth of local government services, to maintain a sense of public trust. We talk about demonstrating the words and highest ethical standards and integrity in all professional, personal, and public relationships. The best interests of the community members. policy we submit policy proposals to elected officials and provide them with facts and technical and professional advice we recognize elected officials are accountable to their community for decisions they make members are responsible for so and and again you can there's all kinds of documents they're a professional organization they have documents and so i'm sure there's something out there that talks about equity and things like that but you go to the core tenants We actually hold our members accountable for those core tenets, including members that violate those of taking them out of the organization and disbanding them from the organization. So it's an organization that holds the highest ethical standards and that we live by, and that's part of our code of ethics. So it is a tremendous professional organization, no different than NACO or FAC or any other organization. Same thing, we have a Florida Association of City and County Managers. I wholeheartedly support that. I mean, I don't know what else to say.

Picking on them is just wrong. Vince, hold on one second. Commissioner Letvala.

How much is that subscription?

I don't know.

It's based on your income.

Yeah, and it's capped at a certain amount, but we have a lot of our staff that are members of it. It's all my ACA, several department heads, and things like that. We can get that number.

We can. Okay. It was a question, so we can get the number.

Vince, go ahead. Thank you chair. Um, you know, I do support commissioner shares. Uh, I don't know if he's withdrawn his proposal, but. I would be supportive of that. Um, and then.

Yeah, so you're supporting his, uh, support of the thing.

Correct unless he's already went through it. Yeah, he did. Okay. Well. Good job, I guess. And then I don't have more. But but but the reserves that we're setting aside for the building to. You know, Barry and I, we talked about this in our one on one. It's really hard to accept how we're setting aside money, but we don't have, like, an exact cost. So, I just, I mean, if we're a few 1M dollars away from a full rollback. You know, I think we should really look at that. You really dial in on how much we're setting aside. Maybe we only set aside 2Million this year instead of 4Million. So, I mean, I would be in favor of something of that. And then I haven't really counted the votes on the sheriff, but Barry, do, you know, for the 2Million dollars. What percent of the sheriff's budget that would represent, like, 0.6% of his budget.

Pretty easy math to 2,000,000 out of 500,000,000. So whatever whatever that calculation is.

like 0.6%, maybe 0.7%. So, you know, 0.4. Okay. I was being more conservative, I guess. So, I mean, I support law enforcement. I'm the first person to say, you know, law enforcement should have more leisures of going after criminals and taking out the bad guys. Do we have any numbers on The sheriff's, like, taken positions or their lapse employment management. I mean. You know, we're not defunding the police if we don't approve a 2Million dollar budget increase, because the budget for the sheriff is still a 22Million dollar increase. Barry, go ahead.

Hold on. Hold on, Commissioner Nowicki. Go ahead, Barry.

So I've tried to address this with the sheriff before in terms of vacancy savings, his turnover rate, et cetera, and stuff. Obviously, when you have a post, if you have a post at the jail and you have a vacancy, they backfill that with overtime because you've got to have that post filled, right? Same thing out on the street. There's other positions where you don't necessarily have that, so you have turnover. However, what we don't fund is all the people that are gone at the police academy. So he uses those vacancy savings to fund his officers at the police academy while they're out at the police academy, but not on the street holding a post. He also overlaps them with a, I believe it's a 90 or 120 day field training officer before they're allowed to be out on the street by themselves. And so again, that's time where you don't have a fully functional officer. And so they use those funds. So the specifics of it, we don't have that type of detail in the budget, but that's how he's explained that to me in the past when we were looking at it, when I was applying it to all of our other departments. So beyond that, I can't give you more of an explanation, but I will tell you obviously that he has stated publicly that he doesn't support any further reductions.

Well, to be clear, it's not a reduction. It's he's still getting an increase.

It's a reduction in his increased budget proposal.

Yes. Right. So semantics, I guess. But yeah, I mean, I would just be curious if there's a way that a lot of other departments, I guess, are going down. A few percentages that it's just. Hard to believe you can't find a point. 4% efficiency somewhere. But I haven't seen the sheriff's budget, but I know he's doing a great job and. I support our sheriff, so if he says he, it's physically impossible. Then, I guess it's physically impossible. But with that, I'm sure Barry and I will go over more stuff in our 1 on 1 and.

Looking forward to a continued meeting and just I don't know if you were on when we were talking about that. We have a commission meeting next Thursday. uh... and then we have a commission meeting on the twenty fourth or twenty fifth the week before that we have a workshop where we could discuss so additional items in public together and make changes to the budget that we preliminarily advance from the first meeting correct we could make some changes on the fly for that the final hearing on the 25th we simply need a simple majority vote uh to advance out of the first public hearing and then the second will be where we have to go through details the different the different levels et cetera stuff so i have a question uh hold on commissioner nowicki uh just one thing barry and looking at the operating budget comparisons from 25 26 and 27 Again, I'm not picking on Karen, but I'm looking at the human services budget proposal on 26 versus 27. I'm sure there's some really good explanation why it's going up almost 100%, $200 million from 2016. 283 to 480.

That's that hospital transfer. The hospital we're transferring. The money from that we get there from the federal government and it's passed through, we bring it in, then we transfer it to the hospitals. Good grief. They are getting a boatload of money. but it's not us but it's reflecting it's reflected in our our cost basis it is reflected in our cost basis that's when we get criticized on budget you know nobody understands that those are grants those are this there's a they you're not going to see that administration I've been criticized on that many times, you know, yet their grants and their other things.

Well, I mean, that one just that one jumps out at you. Oh, yeah. I mean, you talk about but we're getting dollar for dollar on that, right? We're getting it's all pass through. It's just 200 million coming in, 200 million going out. Correct.

I think we put a small administrative fee on of, you know, 150,000. So, okay. Yuck.

Thank you. That's kind of the stuff that's embedded in our budget when we look at the millage rate that covers the costs.

Yeah. That's the reason you just got to look at the millage rate because the others are, even on the chart that we have, you know, you see the blip and that's the reason we put on there, that's the CARES funding. Yeah. And it took us several years to spend that down. Understand.

Did you have something else?

Okay. Okay, you good for now? Okay. So commissioners, I got one-on-ones with you next week. So I'm sure that'll be part of figuring out where everybody's at, where we're going. So we'll have more discussion then. Feel free to send any additional questions. We'll try to answer them as we've been doing and get those out to the entire board. and then we do have the Next Thursday the first budget public hearing Then we will have a work session on the 17th and on the 24th the second public budget hearing We'll get the script Yeah, we need to meet with you and go through the script and all that stuff.

Yeah.

Okay. Somebody said, I thought I was supposed to already have it.

I thought I was supposed to already have it. He does already have it.

Okay.

You do need to reverse it.

You're just holding it back, Chris. But, you know, commissioners, I can't let this go. You know, if you look on the last page, the red... where general government's going down 8.52%, county administrative departments going down four point. That includes raises. And Chris and I didn't do that. It's everybody out here in the audience. It's all of our department heads I mean they went back and looked at their budget and they dug deeper and they brought additional cuts to you Because we asked them to and so I just can't let that go unnoticed and to say thank you for I mean they Truly care about trying to meet your goals, which is trying to balance Providing services to our residents but doing it at the lowest cost possible and keep the tax rate low and so they delivered and They've delivered for you repeatedly, year after year. And so I just wanted to thank them publicly for all their efforts because they truly are trying to do the best job that they can and meet all the competing needs.

Yeah, it's a great point, Barry, and I see a lot of directors and others over there and It certainly doesn't go unnoticed, perhaps not said enough thank you for what you all have done this year. It's not an easy time for any of us, and it includes all of you. You guys are doing the heavy lifting to give us these options on a piece of paper. Echoing your comments, and I'm glad you said that. Thank you to everybody. We are jumping into, oh, we go from budgets to potable irrigation meters. and Jeremy Watt better be coming ready to... We wanted to do budget first.

We didn't want you in a bad mood before we got to budget.

Jeremy, you're on.

I'm making sure that I had lots of tables with numbers so you could evaluate more numbers. Jeremy Wall, Utilities Director. You guys asked me to go back and look at the feasibility of potable irrigation meters. So I just want to give you an update of where we're at with that review. So as I understood the question, we have certain residents that do not have reclaimed water service to their house yet are still irrigating their lawns using potable water. And several other municipalities and water companies allow separate meters for irrigation water. So essentially the way it works under today in Pinellas County Utilities, if you water your lawn using your potable water meter, you are paying sewer charges on water that are going on your lawn. So. Is there a way to ease that burden on those specific customers? For reference, I put down here just at the bottom line, today, under the current rate structure, at 10,000 gallons of water usage, you no longer get charged sewer charges. So you're capped. So if you use 100,000 gallons a month because you're an over-irrigator, you are still capped at 10,000 gallons.

But you're still using the more expensive potable water.

You are absolutely using more potable water, and we only have availability to about 17,000 customers for reclaimed water. So reclaimed water is not even available to all 100,000 plus water customers. So I wanted to guide, and I'm sorry this is going to be math here and numbers, but I do want to just walk you through how this applies to different people. On average, we use about 83 gallons per day per person of potable water. In Pinellas County Utilities, 20 years ago, that was about 100 gallons per day. As soon as 10 years ago, we were down to 85 gallons a day, and now our last count two years ago, we were about 83 gallons a day. So we are showing water conservation measures working in Pinellas County, but even at 83 gallons a day, that's about 2,500 gallons a month, which rounds up to 3,000 gallons of billing. For our billing rules, we bill by the thousands. So if you're a single person, you may or may not use irrigation at your house. So you can see the first row there has zero dollars. So this is someone who lives in a condo or a house without irrigation system. And then there's different levels of irrigating. Different people use different levels of irrigation, as you're aware. So I kind of tabulated here for a household that doesn't use irrigation, that has a single person, they may use 3,000 gallons of water on a monthly basis. And then if you're standard water user or for irrigation, 12,000 gallons of irrigation, you might use a total of 15,000 gallons a month. You add to that, from a sewer charging standpoint, we have a sewer base rate, and then up to 10,000 gallons you are charged per thousand gallons of water used at your house that goes and adds to the sewer bill. So what I showed here in the last column, and again I apologize for all the numbers, it's going to get worse here in a minute, but if you are a non-irrigator using a per capita normal usage rate for a single person, your sewer bill and current bill charges is about $46 a month. If you are an irrigator using potable water, your bill would be more on the range of $102 just on the sewer side. We're not talking about water bill, this is just the sewer bill. And you can see that as you increase the irrigation, your sewer bill does not increase. So I just wanted to walk through that as a single person household and how irrigating affects the bill you receive at home on a monthly basis.

Because you've already gone over the 10,000 gallons per month of potable.

Correct.

So the sewer doesn't come into play.

So the sewer no longer adds more to the bill.

Is that for all potable?

All potable, yes.

All potable.

Only for residential. They're on a different rate structure, yes. But it can be similar. I don't have that. I could get that if you want more detail there. So what I wanted to describe with this in detail to show you, because on the next chart, I don't want you to have to dive into all this detail. There are multiple types of households in Pinellas County Utilities customer base. So I just showed you the example of a single person who irrigates and doesn't irrigate their lawn, but you might imagine a two person household, a three person household, some six, seven person households. And what it nuts down to is that on the last column here, as you have more people in your household, whether you irrigate or not, doesn't really impact your sewer bill. Because just your normal water usage, tubs, showers, dishwashers, clothes dryers, those type of thing, uses past the cap of the sewer bill. But if you're a lower person household who also irrigates, you're absolutely impacted by the way the current rate structure exists. So I just highlighted the single person and two person households. If you're a single person who irrigates to the minimum recommended level, it's about a $60 a month impact on your sewer bill. So the question that was brought to me, should we do something to help? Possibly. There's definitely an impact to a certain segment of our population. One of the difficulties that arises here, I don't know how many single person households we have in our customer base. I have meter data, so I don't go and poll and ask people. You have people getting married, divorced, kids moving in and out. It's too dynamic to really understand how many people actually live and use water in a specific house on a specific day or year or month.

But we have meter readings.

All I have is water usage data.

But that could also be made of somebody filling up their pool.

So under the current historical methods, you're correct. There's no way for me to distinguish someone who washes a lot of cars or fills up their pool or has one time water. They hired a bouncy house with a water slide like I did for my daughter's birthday. We used a lot of water that day. wasn't made for adults. That's a lesson learned. So I wanted to just present, because when this question was brought to me, I tried to explain how our current rate structures are built. And aside from providing a potable irrigation meter, were there other methods that might accomplish the same goal? And I tried to talk through that from the podium, and I know that it was very confusing. It's hard just to talk to numbers in abstract. So historically how our rates are built, uh... we cap the sewer charges at ten thousand gallons of potable water use we have a base rate and we have a per thousand gallons rate so if the intent for those uh... customers are greatly affected by irrigating on their sewer bill option one would be using a historical method where we just change the limits we change the base rates and you change the burden the sewer costs right the overall sewer revenues generated by just manipulating those three numbers. It doesn't require a lot of analysis. It doesn't require any contextual to who's living in what household. It basically shifts the burden more evenly. So if you are an irrigator as a single person, your bill might go down $10, $7, just by changing these limits. So there's nothing magic to the numbers I showed in red there. I just picked some numbers out of the blue that were net neutral from a revenue basis. So we can do a manipulation of the costs and fees like this, keep the revenue the same. So my costs in this model have not changed. It still costs the same amount of money to process sewer. It's just how that money is being charged and collected from the customer base. So this would be a historical method. I just wanted to show this that that's what I was trying to explain when Commissioner Eggers was asking me questions and I was trying to describe back, well, what if we just change the limit and shrink it from 10,000 to 6,000? It would have an impact or raise the base rates. So this is an option that would provide some relief to irrigators using potable water. But I would also just point out that you do see that, say, if I'm not an irrigator, then my sewer costs went up. And maybe that's fair because right now the irrigators are taking a portion of the cost of running the sewer because they're paying for the irrigation water to run the sewer system, which we just admitted the irrigation water doesn't go into the sewer.

I'm sorry. Yes. Excuse me, Chair. How do you determine the number of persons in a household?

I don't. Okay.

Do you fill it out on a form?

No. Okay. And as you might expect, that's so dynamic that even capturing that data when an account is made would be irrelevant a month later.

I thought that you were going to use the numbers to determine their sewer fee.

Not in the current model. Right. But it's a good, I'm going to address that. So option two, or sorry, before I get into option two, so some of the problems we have with this. FIRST OFF, THE ASSUMPTION THAT 83 GALLONS A DAY PER PERSON, THAT'S OUR HISTORICAL AVERAGE. SO WE JUST TAKE THE POPULATION FROM CENSUS DATA, DIVIDE IT BY THE NUMBER OF TOTAL GALLONS USED, SAY YOU'VE GOT A MILLION PEOPLE AS CUSTOMERS AND YOU USE 83 MILLION GALLONS, YOU'VE GOT 83 GALLONS PER PERSON, RIGHT? SO THAT'S HOW THAT NUMBER IS DEVELOPED AT 83 GALLONS PER DAY. THAT IS NOT A REAL USAGE DATA AND IT ACTUALLY BAKES IN irrigation water is baked in the 83 gallons per day because it's a total system-wide usage divided by a total census data of number of population of people so it's potable oh you're talking about using potable on irrigation because there's a whole lot of people using reclaimed 17 000-ish so out of the 100 000 customers it's a small percentage 17 yeah So, bottom line, 83 gallons a day is really a rule of thumb, but it's the best data we have to produce some estimates. So, that's how our rates have been based historically. Another question, so kind of the last bullet there, we have 100,000 water customers, ballpark. We could do an individualized analysis of every single account. But doing that through our historical methods is tremendously difficult. Even if you did 100 accounts a day, it would take a single person 1,000 days to evaluate every customer. So over three years working around the clock, And by the time you got done with the whole thing, you'd be outdated by someone who moved in and moved out. So an individual analysis of every account isn't feasible through historical methods. But there is some good news. We now have AMI digital data. And we've recently purchased some machine learning and AI tools that can process that amount of data. We're building it now. So I tried to get it ready for this meeting. I don't have it ready to show you the machine learning model that can do this. Within a couple months, we'll have an AI model that will be able to segregate how many people live in how many house just by their 15 minute user data. Most people aren't up at 4 a.m., so I know when there's water going, it's probably a sprinkler and the machine can figure all that out. That kind of answers your question. We're working to get a better estimate on who lives in what type of house. So the second option, aside from just doing rate manipulation, is providing a separate irrigation meter that itemizes and separates out what water is going down the sewage, which should be applicable to sewer fees, and what water is going on a lawn. So we just got some generalized costs of what it would cost us to install a meter. We've talked to several of our partner agencies, so City of Dunedin, City of St. Pete, Hillsborough County, and others, Pasco County, and talked about how they've implemented similar programs, because they do have these programs. And essentially it comes down to about a $3,000 install cost. We have to purchase the meter, so we don't have an extra 20,000 meters sitting around. So we have to purchase the material. We have to have the manpower to go install it. You have to go and tap the pipes. You have to connect the meter to a water pipe. And those aren't conveniently just in the yard. Sometimes they're under sidewalks, they're under trees, they're under roads, or you have to get around manholes. So there's a one-time installation cost and whether or not we would absorb that as a utility and just pass it through all the rates or the individual requester would pay that for themselves. But at a $3,000 cost, IF YOU HAD A $40,000 A MONTH SAVING, IT WOULD BE A SIX-YEAR PAYBACK PER METER INSTALLED IN THE SYSTEM. THE OTHER COST THAT YOU MIGHT WANT TO THINK ABOUT IS WHAT WOULD IT COST US TO BILL SEPARATELY AN IRRIGATION METER AND A POTABLE METER ON THE SAME ACCOUNT AND IT'S REALLY NOMINAL, SO A DOLLAR PER BILL. SO WE DID LOOK AT THAT TO SEE WHAT THAT WOULD MEAN FOR US. AND THE HARD COPY IS A LITTLE HIGHER BECAUSE YOU HAVE STAMPS AND POSTAGE AND ALL THAT STUFF. Part of the difficulties here, the cost of running the sewer system does not decrease just because you put a potable irrigation meter in the field. The sewer system gets the same amount of water it always did. We still have to treat the same amount of water, turn it into reclaim and distribute it. Because I don't know the population of people that would be affected, how many people would want an irrigation meter? Is it one person, 10,000 people, 20,000 people? I don't know. But if there were 10,000 people, which is about a tenth of my customer base, which that might be a reasonable assumption, that this program would benefit about a tenth of the people, a 40% savings or reduction in their water bill would mean, for me, almost $5 million loss of revenue on the sewer system. So the sewer system has the same amount of costs, and I took $5 million out of the money coming in because it's going off on the irrigation lawns. So that revenue would have to be made up back through other rate structure, right? We would increase our... non irrigatable water potable bill would go up the base rate on the sewer would go up something would have to recover that extra five million dollars so just kind of highlighting those points um also i think you know the second bullet there If we are going to pursue borrowing in the future, I would have to understand that gap in revenues before going before lending institutions and saying, hey, well, you know, I got this $5 million shortfall. So it's not impossible or implausible. It's just we would need to understand it before we go and start talking to financial institutions that we know what our revenues are. There's some certainty around our input and output. Jeremy?

So some of the smaller users, the lower users, are the ones being more affected today. The larger users have that cap on sewage at 10,000, was it 10,000 gallons? Correct, today. So when they use more, they're using 15, 20,000 gallons per month of sewer charge. The other folks are kind of in the system paying for that. I mean, those folks are getting a break on a cost. And I'm not suggesting that we go raise our rates or anything. I'm just saying there is kind of a, we're trying to balance all of this out, right? So some folks that are the higher users are getting a bigger break, so to speak, on the system than the lower users on the system. And I think that's the part that we need to try to... They're getting a break on... Well, they're not getting charged for the gallons that are going down, being used in the sewer system.

They're getting charged for the water. So they still get charged for the water. But not the sewer. What I'm talking about is just the sewer rates. And if it's going on the lawn, it's not going through the sewer anyway. So the question is, how do you distinguish between how much water that is going on the lawn should be captured as part of a sewage rate? Because I don't know if it's going in the sewer or going on the lawn when it comes through your water meter. All I know is you took the water, right? And where does it go from there? I don't know. Did it go in your pool? Did it go in your car? I don't know. And so that 10,000-gallon cap that we put is an attempt to capture the... a distribution of a single person household and a four person household. So the four person household who irrigates their lawn does not pay a dime of water or dime of money towards the sewer fund for the irrigation. The single person who waters their lawn is paying money for the sewer system for water that does not go into the sewer. So the 10,000 gallon cap

limits that and so this is what the option one question is should we just lower the cap or raise the cap or do something with how the rate structure was built that didn't answer your question i can no no i'm i'm i'm trying to make sure that that everybody's being charged a fair amount and when the system is you keep saying the system if you reduce it somewhere in reducing the overall system and somehow you got to make it up.

Yeah, the operational costs are not affected at all by any of this model. The cost it takes to operate the sewer system is known and it is unaffected by how we build.

The variable portion is different, right?

Right. And so then the last complication here with the option two, is we haven't really accounted for if I add more meters in the ground, that is more infrastructure, that is increasing the utility footprint. And I just use the same assumption with 10,000 customers, right? Because if we made it available to one customer, we'd want to create a program and make it available to anyone that it could benefit. That's about a 10,000 potable meter increase to my infrastructure. which is about a 10% increase to my overall meter footprint. So right now I have six, seven staff whose full-time job it is to go out between the different divisions, install the meters, change the meters, turn the meters on and off. Every time someone moves out, they would wanna turn on and off their irrigation meter and their potable meter. We do about 50 of those a day currently. on a bad day. So that's just staff whose job it is will be to drive around the company and manage 10% more assets, including every time there's an error, a billing error, back end computer stuff that we just deal with on a daily basis. So other jurisdictions and water utilities have this program. Anecdotally, when we talked with them, There is mixed participation. Some customers are deferred by the payback period. If I know I'm renting a house for a year, I don't want to buy something that's going to take a six-year payback. One of the jurisdictions, I think it was Hillsborough County, maybe St. Pete actually had a calculator on their website that said, hey, before you decide to buy this, here's what it'll mean to you financially. So if you're staying here for more than six years in this home, you should probably do it. If you're not, you might not want to do it. But in my opinion, I would really want to understand what this ongoing operational increase footprint would mean before I could recommend that we should do this as a program.

And you're presuming that we're paying for that meter install?

My recommendation was that the customer would pay for that install. But that would be a policy decision.

I understand. And the people that I've talked to said they're willing to pay. I'm not talking to the number that you're talking about, but not a representative sample either. But the ones that I've talked to said, oh, yeah, no, I'll pay for the meter install and everything else.

But I think part of that is a misunderstanding. And I've had those conversations with customers as well. I think that's a misunderstanding in the amount of savings they think they're going to get. If I said it would take six years to pay back that $3,000 cost, is this truly worth it to you? Someone who's going to be in their house for 20 years may say, heck yes. And other people's like, well, no, it's not really. Because they think that they're going to save hundreds of dollars a month when I'm telling you, they're going to save, you know, six.

And that's fair. And so when somebody comes in to inquire about that meter, it's also smart of them to look at that. And we should have, you know, I think of Mike Twitty and his, he creates a formula for everything in his department. So you can go on there and figure, you know, and maybe there's something we should put on there that shows what that savings really is and that it is a six-year payback and, you know, and maybe there is a rethinking from folks I mean, it just makes sense that we're trying to accommodate our customers. I mean, that's what we're supposed to do.

And in order to, and I alluded to this, if we decided this was the right move for our customers, then it would be the right move for all of the customers in that same category. And I would want to go promote to, hey, you didn't know, but I could save you $40 a month or $60 a month if you enrolled in this program. So I don't want to, we shouldn't do it, in my mind, as a one-off for one or two or ten people that just want... the savings. If there's 10,000 people that we helped, we should go help them whether or not they know they want to be helped or not.

I'm sorry, Chair. Yes, Commissioner. Is it possible you could finance it for the customers? charge them every month, charge them for the payback on the meters?

So the upfront cost would come through the water revenues, so the rate structure that everyone pays would then be financed. If Jeremy's not financing them, the county's not financing them, the other customers would be paying for that financial cost. So I would pay the $3,000, 100,000 customers would share the burden in that $3,000 upfront cost. No, I mean...

each individual bill, if they get a meter and it's $6,000 cost, then monthly you could have them pay back that.

Right, but that upfront $6,000 monthly cost has to come. So that's not budgeted in. We don't have revenues to cover that today. So that would be an extra $6,000 cost so the entire customer base would share that burden to finance that meter over the next six years for that specific customer that got the upfront cost. If I gave you $6,000 today, the entire customer base would have to pay their share of that because that capital must come out of my bank account to pay for the meter and it gets recovered over one year, two years, 10 years. The entire customer, everyone's rate would go up just a little bit to cover that $6,000 meter.

Okay, I'm not understanding why it has to be that way, but okay, I'll take it.

The revenues have to come from somewhere. Right. So my revenues come from water rates. So the only way to pay for the capital expense is to increase the rates on the entire base to cover the program of upfront financing of the meters.

Yeah, I don't think you have a whole lot of people taking advantage of the program, but I think it's something that we ought to look at.

Did we get... I mean, Jeremy, you're trying to pitch two options, and you got a lot of information here, and I'm just wondering if he can accomplish the same thing through an adjustment to the base rate, correct? And I think that's kind of getting lost in this.

Yeah, and that's what the option... If the intent is to help a specific customer with a specific problem, then I would not recommend a programmatic solution that I would then promote to all possibly 10,000 other people that this could help. The intent is to reshift the burden of water that's going out for irrigation funding the sewer operations. That's what's happening right now. Irrigation water is funding portions of the sewer system. That's how the rate structure is built. So if we just want to adjust that burden so that sewer water pays for the sewer cost, then perhaps we just change the in the option one style, we just change how the base rates are built so that less water used for irrigation funds portions of the sewer.

Yeah. I think that's attractive, I think. I mean, I haven't run this by the folks that are experiencing the issue. I think some of it's philosophical and some of it's practical. So if you're addressing at least the practical side, philosophically, it may not be the freedom or whatever that they'd like to see, but at least practically, you're showing that it's not significant. If we're able to adjust those.

And if you do that, then they don't have that $3,000 for an additional meter.

No, I understand.

Right.

Under the option one, there's no footprint increase. We don't change any staffing or asset levels. We don't have to create a new program and track financing separately like we would have to do through an irrigation meter program. So that's essentially my recommendation. is that we need to, in my mind, delay this until I can have better data. Let me go see if I can parse out how many one single person households we have versus how many four. I think that would be valuable information. Because we may find out there's 30,000 customers that would benefit from this program. And if that's the case, that changes how the numbers work. We are currently supplying water to customers who are not our sewer customers. So a different city or a different utility collects the sewer and we provide the water. So if I put a potable irrigation meter at that house, I've impacted the city of St. Pete Beach sewer system or the Largo revenue. We would want to understand with our stakeholders before I go impact all of their revenue projections because they've built out their own models. So I think that would be an important step to do. And then we're currently underway with our new rate study. I could commit, we're not scheduled to come back with final recommendations up until spring of next year, but I could come back this winter and give you a better update on how the numbers work, maybe a more refined model of option one. That was just me throwing numbers in a spreadsheet that wasn't scientific. But if that's the will of the board, or you could say implement today and we'll go build up potable irrigation meters.

I like the idea of doing further investigation on here, but I also like the idea of thinking about what that rate adjustment would be and how that would make sense to a particular person. On the practical side, I said there's practical, there's philosophical, right? We may not be able to ever deal with the philosophical side, but at least on the practical side, we've narrowed that gap a little bit. I think that makes sense to me. I don't know. Anybody else want to weigh in on this? Want to do his recommendation, which is to do a little more study number one and maybe take a look at some rate adjustments in that rate study that you're talking about at the lower end so that we can make sure that those folks are getting their If some people are getting a break because they're capped at 10,000 gallons and they're actually using 15,000 gallons, then maybe there's a break at the other end for those customers.

And I haven't postulated this, but since you just brought it up, we don't do a tiered system. Maybe we have a more tiered system on the sewer side as well. So the sewer side is 10,000 gallons is the limit. On the water side, you have different tiers of usage. So 0 to 4,000 is this rate, 4 to 6,000 is this rate, et cetera. Yeah.

Thank you. Appreciate it. We're obviously going to take a break here. If we can hold for a second. I had about five or six things I needed to go over when we're done with the agenda briefing. Commissioners need to be here for some of that. Do you want me to just touch on those real quick? And then we could take a break for lunch and then make sure, just making sure. There was a PSTA letter that I received regarding a grant that they want to go after federal transit administration bus and bus facilities grant. They're requesting $2 million to expand where PSTA can construct bus bays. Locations where bus can pull out of the travel lane for boarding and disembarking which I would just love Those buses make me drive me crazy when you get trapped behind them And then they don't they get rid of their one customer and then they sit there for a little bit They tell me they don't sit there, but I've been behind them before And to meet the grant deadline we need a letter of support and would you be willing to provide a signed letter of support for the project i'm glad to do that if the will of the commission is to do that and i wanted to make sure that our psta folks uh yes i'm definitely in favor of bus bay okay okay so do i have consensus then among here for me to go ahead and send that letter of support okay thank you that's that's great um The sheriff has gotten back to us and he's willing to well, he can't be at the work session this month. Um, he's out of town, um, as, as the head of the sheriff's association, but he's willing to come on October 8th work session to discuss this, uh, the flock technology. I'm calling it flock technology and the policies and that kind of thing. And I know commissioner, no wiki had submitted something. And I was just really going to want to put that on hold until we have the sheriff come in here and talk to us in a work session. So we'll make sure everybody's comfortable with that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Any discussion about Commissioner Nowicki was talking about getting rid of the flock cameras. This would just be putting that discussion on hold until we have that session with the sheriff.

I think that's prudent, but I did request our county attorney to, I sent her a list of questions regarding that, and I'd like her to keep moving on.

No, that's fine. I think that's fine, but I think it's good for us to have that discussion. I mean, if anybody listened to his session, he had a... Talk with the press I guess yesterday and so there was it was an hour long and it's probably be good for everybody to look at that before our meeting.

Did you have a comment? Yeah, thank you Mr. Chair. Yeah, back in July I brought this up and asked Barry and staff to work on a on a white paper on that as well. So where are we?

So we've been working on the white paper where I want to get a final review of that. It'll identify like. I don't know how many cameras and different things like that. It also provides some background information about what others have done in neighboring counties and things like that. We can finalize that, submit that out to the commission. You can read that prior to the sheriff coming, so you'll have all the information available for you at that time. So we can finalize that in the next couple weeks, get that out to you well ahead of that meeting. Great. I think that's important. Keep moving. Commissioner Flower.

I just want to share that. Um, I was on with a conversation yesterday and there is a great potential that a specific new, um, legislative person will be actually submitting bill language surrounding flock cameras.

So, um, well, that's a whole nother.

Yeah, but I'm just sharing. So, yeah.

So anyway, that conversation I think we'll have and then we can kind of kind of collectively decide if we want to do something on the cameras that are at our right of ways versus the state right of ways that. Does that make sense here?

It makes total sense to me, and I'm really glad the sheriff is coming in, because I think just out of courtesy and respect for an independently elected constitutional officer and a law enforcement professional, that we have a conversation with him.

I mean, it's such a... Well, anyway, it's an incredible conversation to have. I had one with a gentleman, one of our residents, and it was really a great conversation. There just didn't seem to be a... It's either, you know, the rights of the, you know, the bill of rights and the constitution on one side and public safety on the other side. And they're near the twain shall meet unless it's your kid that got kidnapped. And then you're like, I turn them all on. So I want to find them right away. So I think that conversation is going to be a good one to have after the sheriff weighs in. So if we're okay with that, then we'll, we'll put that, um, conversation on hold. Um, Barry's evaluation, um, We'll be at the November 12th workshop and then followed up by November 17th at our meeting to vote on his review and raise. And so all of that, just making sure everybody's good with that. That's the best we're going to do. So just letting you know that. We're talking about an investiture meeting on the 17th. for the three new commissioners that are elected. That would be prior, it would be here probably around 11 o'clock prior to our workshop. We have a commission meeting that day. So that's the best we can do. I think we were talking to Jewel about needing about a two week window, if you want to speak to that.

For any of the county commissioners elected, your new term begins two weeks after election day. And I was talking with Stacy about coordinating a date. The election gets certified 10 days out, so obviously 14 days is beyond that. Assuming everything goes according to plan, the election should be certified, and you all should be perfectly fine to have the investiture then. But that is the day that the new term starts.

So that's kind of where we're heading at this point. And then the county attorney, I've kind of come to the end of my negotiations with Don, and I think that's been sent out to everybody. Yes, so everybody should have gotten that package of information, and what I'll be bringing forward is submitted in that contract, but I wanted to bring other information that not only respected the 12-member board that said we wanted to show total compensation, but also the will that you guys said we want to show the details so that when we're comparing to other counties, we have a good comparison. So you have both, and that'll be part of that package. It should be when you're looking. I just want to make sure that that you guys got that.

So I just have one other thing. More on a personal level. So if you'll indulge me. I'm just really wanting to take an opportunity to share a little bit of a personal journey that I'm going through. I've let the commission know this weekend, but I also wanted to let my colleagues, the staff know if anybody's, those thousands of people that are watching our commission meeting, our workshop will know, but, and I don't see the press here today, but I'm just gonna read because I don't know that I could do it otherwise. But, so, I've been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and started treatment in mid-July, and the final prognosis was given to me in early August. My team of doctors are from Moffitt, and they, along with the tumor board, have given me, with this key word, a path to cure, because there's other paths that weren't quite as attractive. for me. It's a path to cure, which was a great bit of news. It has been an emotional month or two, and I know there will be some ups and downs along the way, but I'm doing well. I feel great, which is the irony of all of it, and I too am optimistic. I have a good support from Anna, my life partner, my family, my friends, and all of you as colleagues, and a deep spiritual belief that God has plans for me, and I have to be on board with whatever they are. Don't know those yet, but hopefully they'll be the ones that I'm hoping for. I love serving the people of Pinellas County, working on regional issues and meeting with residents and business owners in North County and beyond. I plan on continuing to serve them and work with you. As an aside, I certainly don't want this disease defining my life or who I am. I was seven years into my 10-year cycle of getting a colonoscopy. So I still had three years, but it came up sooner than we expected. All I would say is listen to your inner voice, and if something isn't quite right, get checked out. It's a one-day process. It's miserable, but I can tell you the alternative isn't very fun. So the idea is just taking charge of your life. It's worth it. And with that, I really don't have anything else. I just want to thank you for listening and indulging me, continuing to be my colleagues and friends. That's all I need, really. And the process will take a few months ahead for sure. First thing, I'm going through now. I'm going through a procedure now, and I'll have one in November, and then I'll probably have one in March again, all with the intent at the end of it to be having non-detectable cancer in my system. But I just wanted to share that with you today. And with that, we'll take a break for lunch. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

the agenda. Barry, go ahead. All right, you got some presentations and awards, citizens to be heard, clerk of court, miscellaneous stuff. First real item is item 11, declaring surplus equipment for the county, 53 lots to be sold. The list of equipment is in your packet. Item 12 is an award of bid. This is for, let's see, Philippi Park Wastewater Collection System. I should have read this at the break. So this is a Philippi Park collection system, so it replaces four on-site separate collection systems and to connect to the city's safety harbor. Onto the regular agenda, first items is operating an agreement with Allegiant Airlines for the new five-year agreement. Mark represents 61% increased over the prior agreement. Item 14 is an award of bid to Hubbard Construction. This is for airfield pavement rehabilitation. Item 15, the First Amendment to an MSTU. This is for the Whispering Souls African American Cemetery to support the establishment of irrigation infrastructure and a storage shed. Item 16, the First Amendment to an MSTU. This is for Keep Tierra Verde Beautiful. This is for median enhancements within the certain neighborhoods that are listed there. This extends the grant timeline. until 2027. Has no fiscal impact. Item 17 is a resolution designating and approve the updated list of code inspectors. This is a statutory requirement. Item 18 is an agreement with 211 Tampa Bay for adult emergency financial assistance you talked about previously. One minute.

Ryan, do you have any other questions about this? I know you've kind of brought them up.

I mean, not at the moment. I'm going to drill down into some of the supporting documents on this a little bit. Okay. And see if I have any other questions for our next meeting. But I appreciate that.

And Karen is available if you want to, you know, meet with her.

Yeah, and I'll reach out to Karen.

Item 19, our agreements with St. Vincent Paul and 211 Tampa Bay Cares for the Rapid Rehousing Provider Services and the Rapid Rehousing Financial Services. Assistant Collaborative Rapid Rehousing Program. Item 20, funding recommendation from the Substance Abuse Advisory Board for the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Trust Fund. And the recommendations are listed below. Item 21 letters of agreement and questionnaires and substantially of fame form is required to allow to participate in the hospital. Something to marry pay program for local hospitals. So this is the amount that you were talking about before that spikes the budgets. Item 22 is revised authorizing agent approval form for hazard mitigation grant program with Florida Department of Emergency Management for the North booster pump station hardening project. So the project was rescoped and therefore we have to resubmit.

Under item 23, this is a request to add some funds into a contract with outside counsel. If you all recall, this is related to the lawsuit in which we did conduct a shade meeting not long ago. Please do not ask me any questions here about the ongoing litigation. If you wish to do so, please contact me outside of this meeting. But this is an amendment to the agreement to get us through trial should that be necessary. I do not currently anticipate anything under county attorney reports.

I'M SURE I'LL HAVE A COUNTY ADMINISTRATOR'S REPORT. ITEM 26 WILL BE APPOINTMENTS TO THE YOUTH ADVISORY COMMITTEE. ITEM 27 IS APPOINTMENTS TO THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES ADVISORY COUNCIL. YOU HAVE A COUPLE OF APPOINTMENTS AND A REAPPOINTMENT. ON TO THE PUBLIC HEARINGS. ITEM 29 IS AMENDMENT TO THIS ORDINANCY EXEMPTION FROM THE ASSESSMENT REQUIREMENT FOR CERTAIN NONPUBLIC HOSPITAL FACILITIES. What is this? I don't even remember it. Even though you briefed me on it. Yeah, Karen, come up and say what this is. I'm sure it was explained to me, but I forgot. So, Karen?

So, this is the hospital-directed payment program that changes, I will say, every single year. We have not had one year that is the same. So, this is a new process where hospitals can request to be waived from the assessment, but they would still receive the benefit of the amount. And so, this is an ordinance change that is required so that if CMS approves those waivers, those hospitals can be exempted from paying into the amount.

So this is a companion item to 21.

Yes, it's kind of a whole process, and then the resolution will come forward once we have the actual model from the consultants. The consultants will be here for the public hearing, and I believe several hospital CEOs will also come to talk about the impact.

Mr. Chair, if you don't mind. Yeah, go ahead. Commissioner Flowers. When this item comes up, if we could just have that brief presentation before the public so they can understand exactly what this is. Sure. Okay. Thank you.

Great. Yeah, remind me of that when we get to it. We were going to get a presentation from them, from staff.

Then item 30 is the adoption of tenant millage rates and the first public budget hearing. So if we can go ahead and pass that now, will we get, no, I'm kidding.

And I think we probably will have a little bit more discussion during this first. Hopefully when he gets to the last one, we will have minimal discussion, but still some. So between that and our workshop, you know, we'll have another opportunity to bring this in for a landing, hopefully. Yeah.

I mean, just my read, you know, we do have to get to five. And so, you know, I'll be talking to individually. Then we can have that discussion at the meeting. I'm going to, you know, in response to your question, I want to try to show what that extra half of the millage does over the next 10 years. So that way you can make it an educated judgment on what you choose to do. And so we'll try to get that to you before next Thursday. And then, you know, wait for your direction.

Sounds good. Anything else from the commission before we adjourn? Yep, it was a good day. Good day. Commissioner Scheer, thank you for your inquiries. Commissioner Scott as well. Commissioner Flowers, you always bring good stuff to the table. So we have some work to do still, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. All right, thank you. We are adjourned.

We'll be right back.