Finance, Personnel & Insurance Committee - Regular Meeting

All right. I've got 4.30. If everyone would turn on their microphones. And is the recording going?

Yes.

All right. Well, I'll welcome you all to the regular Finance Personnel Insurance Committee meeting. Today is Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Are we in compliance with the open meeting law?

Yes, we are.

Thank you. Number two, we have an agenda. Does anyone want to move this?

Changes?

Questions? All right, so I'll put into a vote to approve the agenda as presented. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. That passes. Number three, we have two former minutes to approve. Do we do those together or separately?

So we have the draft minutes from the July 14th meeting and the July 21st meeting to approve.

From July 14th and July 21st, 2026 meetings, signify by saying aye. Aye.

Those opposed, same sign. It's passed. All right, number four, public comment. None here. So no public here, so we won't have any public comment. Number five, communications. No communications either. Thank you. No communications. We'll move on to number six, business items. Starting with the presentation of the Sauk County Medical Plan options by M3 Insurance.

Yeah, so I'll kick it off ever so briefly. So M3 was here last month, the month before, presented information on kind of where we were at with medical plan options looking for 2027 and beyond. So I've done some work with the M3 team, have some more numbers, information, some pieces where we're at as of today. Nothing is finalized yet as we go through the budget process. Lisa and I will continue to... work through plan design and what makes the most sense, but wanted to update the committee because this will ultimately be coming back through a resolution for 2027 plans next month in September. So that way we're not hopefully surprising you. We won't be too much here. So I'm just going to get them plugged in.

Probably would help to show it to you guys.

Thank you. Nice to see you all again. Ryan Pels with M3 Client Executive. I work closely with Lisa and MJ. As we presented last month, we kind of laid out the road map what it looks like for the county, what we're doing together in terms of marketing. So what you have in front of you is really an illustration of what's up here. So this is, we'll walk through the presentation on the TV as well, but this is the executive summary. So we did receive the renewal from Dean, the health insurance renewal from Dean, and it came out at 14.9%. And if you remember, for those of you that were in the room last month, we went through how you're running in terms of medical loss ratio, your experience, the high-cost payments. Probably not surprised based on that presentation a month ago, right? So 14.9%. Weren't super excited about that. I worked with Anna went back to Dean and was able to at least get one percentage point off So that is depicted on this screen here the other items that we talked about last month were Strategic planning that we've been working together on in terms of rounding out the benefit options within the county So we've always had the traditional low deductible option for employees. And it's always been the desire to add to that a high deductible health plan that can be paired with an HSA. So we will show you what that means to the district, excuse me, to the county as we walk through here. But any questions on the executive summary before we dive into the high deductible health plan options and what that looks like in terms of modeling? I know this is small. I apologize. Go ahead.

So after the meeting, I didn't want to give you too much in advance, but after the meeting, this is on everything they're going to present is a link via the website. So we will send this out to the committee so you will have all this information. So don't take crazy notes. We'll give this to you. We just didn't want to get you too far on the leads before we could give you a high level and run through it first.

Yeah, and I would say there's a lot of information on this link that will be sent out to you. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Anna and the team. We're happy to answer that. But this is really, we'll summarize all the information in here.

And as I'm going fast, I apologize.

We'll talk about quickly the dental renewal came in at plus 6% and just as a reminder that is a voluntary plan so that's no financial impact to the county but we want to at least let you know it's a 6% and I would say that's very common right now in the dental. We talked a little bit about that I think last month. Dental, we're seeing anywhere from 8% to 10% increases just based on marketplace and inflation, etc. So the voluntary dental plan came in at 6%. Your vision plan all the way to the right is 0%. That is in rate guarantee until 2030. So those lines I just wanted to chat about quick before we move into obviously the high end here, the medical modeling and the renewal.

And if you have additional questions or you want additional details on the dental and vision renewals, there are tabs at the top that you can see. When you get this, you can read through it all. There it is. A ton of information on there about how those plans are running and whatnot. So that's available to you to review. But we know we only have a short amount of time, so we want to focus on the medical today. Okay, so we'll just really quickly jump to this tab. We kind of already talked about it. Initial renewal was a 14.9. Ryan was able to go back and get a 13.9% increase right here in this box. Right there. You can see the calculated increase. So M3, our risk management team puts together an actuarial analysis. So we have what your prior year renewal calculated at. That means what Dean said. Hey, this is what they deserve for an increase. So if you'll remember, you got a 9.9 last year. Dean really should have given you a 27.84 just because of how you were running, how the county was running, I should say. So they gave you initial rate relief. Same thing this year, 32.5 is actually what was warranted. They came out at the 14.9, or they gave you 17.6% of rate relief is what we call it, and then the recommended increase was what they put out with, the 14.9. We have now gotten it down to 13.9. And then this side right here is what our risk management actuaries calculated. We would have said, based on how you're running, it would be a 34.45. And then the rate relief we would have given you was a 9.43 for various factors, credibility, things like that. But then our final renewal that our actuary team says was a 25. So that 13.9 might seem like a lot, but it's actually better than what M3 would have calculated as well. So we felt it was fair for the market. Any questions on that?

I have a question. I know there's a lot to that, but how do they come up with those figures? And how did you come up with your figures before them?

sure great question so that's a lot yeah it is a lot so and we touched on this i think last month to how carriers look at this and evaluate specific clients right so they're going to calculate that based on prior experience based on current experience and they can see when we chatted about high cost claims and known risk right they they can they know what the prognosis of that is So there's a lot of variables going forward, including the fact that they have a hospital here. So we chatted about that as well. Sauk County is an important client to them, so they're not going to release a 27.84%. They know it's not viable for you, but when they look at that, prior period, current period, and they walk that down, they will come to a business adjustment, which is that rate relief, to get to that 14.9%. So there's also the look at their manual rates. So if it was just that plan design, that $500 deductible plan design that you currently have here at the county, what would that be manually? And they'll compare that to your actual experience as well. There's a lot that goes in there from an actuarial standpoint.

I thought I heard you say that they're going back at what the county has in the past, correct? Are they also doing comparison to other counties and other organizations, similar size? Or is it mostly just based on what that county has?

No, they'll look at their pool performance as well. So you're in a pool at being powered by Medica, right? And how is that pool performing? And The larger you are and the longer you are with a carrier, the more credibility you have. So you're a fairly large district, and I don't have it in front of me, the excellent exhibit. They'll give you credibility to what Lex said earlier. You're not necessarily 100% credible, or maybe you are. I can't recall. And then they would... your experience is what they will go off of. They won't compare you to anything else because they know you have enough lives and they can trend that forward to how your performance is with them, if that makes sense. So all the way to the right, Lex mentioned the 34.45, the 9.43 initial rate relief, and the 25.02. How we come up with that is we have about 1,300 clients, employee benefit clients with health insurance, within the M3 family. So that's all the benchmarking in our data, if you will. So that's aggregated and averaged out, and then the actuaries do their math, and that's how they come up with that. It's not perfect, but it's generally speaking, client, your size, based on your geography, what are we seeing overall in the book of business for the most current period, if you will.

So we won't spend, we won't go through the high cost payments and stuff. We did that last time for those of you that were here. But again, you'll have that information that you can kind of look at when we talk about that. Last time we were here, we talked about how we were going to go to market, the different options we had, self-funding, ICRA, all those fun things. We determined let's just stick with fully insured because that's what made sense for your group in the county. And so we did. And unfortunately, all of the plans changed. or all of the carriers that we went to market for, so Group Health Cooperative, GHC, WPS Health Solutions, WCAGHT, which is Wisconsin County's Association Group Health Trust, and Quartz, they all denied. Now, Quartz, I will say, they really dated a lot of back and forth with us. We're really diving into some things. We gave them a lot of, you know, we had a lot of conversations, but ultimately, none of the carriers were able to provide more competitive rates than you have, than your renewal would be. So that's why they declined to quote.

Any questions on the marketing at all?

All right. I know there's a ton of stuff on here. But we'll walk you through it, and then, like I said, you guys will get this, and you can review it on your own. Do you want to start?

Yeah, sure. So the table up top here shows your current HMO spend, that dark blue bar. Lex will scroll over that. And then your renewal, so total premium with that 13.9%. results in, and then what we did was we asked Dean for some alternate plan options, knowing that we would really like to offer a high-deductible health plan that could be paired with an HSA, and so this shows total premium at the $1,750, $3,500 single-family deductible HSA option, the $2,000, $4,000 option, $35,700 option, and then the $4,800 option. In a couple just a couple pieces of information here option one 1750 3500 that is the minimum the IRS will allow for deductibles that qualify for HSAs 2000 4000 very common plan design if you will especially if you're just thinking about implementing an HSA and the reason for that is is Every year the IRS will up that minimum. So last year I think it was $1,700.34. They always up it like $50 a single, $100 a family. Every year that happens when we have clients with minimums, the employees say, why are you upping my deductible? It's not us, it's the IRS. So our strategy is always to increase that a little bit to $2,000, $4,000 so we can get away from that minimum increase from the IRS. So we really focused on this $2,000, $4,000 plan with Dean. if that makes sense. So go ahead, Lex.

I was just gonna say, this chart right here, all this is is just a chart version of what's above. So we've shown a lot of it multiple ways for people that like to see it different ways. Same thing with the point of service plan, exactly what Ryan talked about. 10 people on the point of service plan with the county. So for the purpose of this, we really won't focus much on the point of service plan, but that will continue to be offered. That's not going away. It's just there's only 10 people, so it's minimal spend and it's minimal. We'll talk about it.

I have a question. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So those, I couldn't actually see the numbers of how much we'd be spending for each. the people who are currently enrolled?

Yep. So that's current elections as of today, or when we sent this over, that your team provided us a census, and we sent that over. And keep in mind, on this tab, we're looking at the total as a whole. That's not just the county spent. So the county pays 88% of the HMO, and... of the point of service. So that breakdown is a little bit further in the presentation, but this is looking at just the total premiums as a whole. And on this page, this total renewal annual and total current annual, those numbers include both employee and employer contributions. So that's a total combined blended. But we'll get to the breakdown, yeah. Okay.

So this screen here, what we did is very conservative adoption of the HSA. We don't think that half of your staff is going to elect the HSA. It's a different plan design. It's got different nuances, if you will. So we like to be very conservative about If we do implement an HDHP, what does that mean? How does it look? So on the left here, you can see 10% adoption. What does that mean? To your question before, we showed that minus 7.04% on that $2,000, $4,000. That's if everybody goes into that plan design. It's not going to happen. So 10%, what is the result for 10%? You can see basically it is $110,000 savings to the county. And how we derived at that is the premium differential, that minus 7.04%. But then we're going to give the employees an incentive to enroll in this, right? It's an HSA qualified plan. $1,500 per single, $3,000 per family would go into an HSA. The county would contribute that to their account. When you roll all that up, there still is a savings of $110,000 to the county.

And keep in mind, this modeling on this page is based off the $2,000, $4,000 deductible plan and the... We're kind of, our idea behind why we decided to do a $1,500, $3,000 contribution to the HSA is so that the HSA plan would still feel like your $500,000 plan, right? So you're deductible minus the HRA contributions. would be about that so we wanted to keep it equitable but that said this is not set in stone like anna said none of this is set in stone this is just what we model because that's what we're seeing as far as benchmarking and that's what people typically do first year again if we decide to go down this route we can talk a lot more about it but we wouldn't necessarily say that Every single year the county would give $1,500, $3,000. It might just be a first year you give that and then going forward it's a little bit less to adjustment. That's kind of the strategy that we see with a good number of our clients that do roll out a high deductible health plan option. is that maybe the first year to help them seed their HSA a little bit more. Because those people that don't use the doctor, they're going to have a nice slush fund in their HSA that rolls over year after year. Because remember, it's not like an FSA. It's their money that they get to keep and that will stay in that account. Yeah.

So you talked about that 10% adoption, meaning 10% of the employees might do that. Is there a profile of who does that?

I don't think that's perfect, but in general, I think we talked about this last month. It's individuals. It might be the younger generation that doesn't go to the doctor, that would like their premiums to be lower, but also would like to save for retirement. It could be an older person that's close to retirement that wants to stock some money away as well. It's just a general rule of thumb. Working with our actuaries... And Dean Health Plan, what they see when clients implement this, it's about 10% just across the board. I don't think there's really a profile there in general, generally speaking.

Okay, so we modeled it 10%, 20%, 30%. You can see the more adoption, the more savings, right? That just makes sense. If we scroll, actually we want to go to the next page. So this is where I think it's going to answer a lot more questions. So the first over here on the left in the red. That's if nobody goes, right? If we have nobody to take you up on the offer of the high deductible health plan, right, we know what your numbers are, okay? 10% migration, remember that we would have saved 110%. The HSA funding would be 123. We're just estimating, right, 10% on both plans that 140 employees only, Oh, I'm sorry, 16 employee only and 33 families go over to the high deductible health plan. On the 10%, the point of service has such low enrollment, it's unlike, you know, we don't really show that. You'll see that there's maybe some more numbers in that. So, again, this is actually the breakdown between what the county pays and what the employees pay is on here. So we'll just scroll down, point of service. Oh, I'm sorry. It's actually on this page. Sorry. This is where you see the breakdown between employee and employer cost. So keep in mind today, the county pays 88% of the employee's HMO and then 77% of the point of service plan. So if... This is the full renewal, so meaning that you just took, you stayed with your renewal, you had no adoption in the HSA. The county's cost would be $10,859,152. And that's assuming every single person in the single plan and every single person in the family plan enrolls in the same type today. Employee's cost is that 12%, so you can just see that number here. And then this is the maximum savings. So if you had that 30% migration over, again, that might be pretty high. So we don't want to sit here and tell you that's what's going to happen. That's just your maximum that you could save would be $327,000. And keep in mind that not only is the county saving on the high deductible health plan, but also the employee is too. In a sense that that 12% that the employee pays out of their paycheck will be lower because the rates on the high deductible health plan are lower. And then they will also be getting the HSA contribution. So the employee is saving too. It's not just about the county.

At that 10% adoption level, the $110,000 savings, is that after factoring in if you were to contribute to an HSA for them? That's factoring in that 15.3 HSA. Good question.

Yeah, so then if we go down here, this is more ways to show you the same stuff, right? It's helpful to see. HMO point of service down here. The combined total, so assuming, this is where I was trying to get to earlier, was the combined, if HMO and point of service had 10%, you'll see the savings of the 110. 20%, 221, and then the 30% is 337. That was a lot.

I mean, that is a lot. It's a lot. And, you know, we opened with this. This is a work in progress. We're still working with Anna and team, you know, to model some options out for the county. But this is where we are today with the renewal. We didn't have any bidders, right, from our marketing events. So we do have options within the Dean health plan. But we wanted to show you. your current HMO, and then what it would look like with the HSA plan as well. So we'll continue to do this based on the conversation you all have and support the county in any way we can.

Why would there be no bidders? What would be the reason for the no bid?

They're looking at your most recent experience and then your prior experience. And so when they put that through their quoting system, all things equal, I think Lex said this, they can't produce a competitive bid. So then it's very industry typical that they'll just decline to quote. Okay. So all those carriers that Lex mentioned declined to quote. But they're looking at the county's specific experience. So they would have known that 13.9 would be offered? Yeah, they will. Once that renewal comes out, it's shared with them. And again, that's industry standard as well.

Any other questions? I guess thoughts on the high deductible health plan. Do we want to talk about the health? So we gave you a bunch of information about high deductible health plans. Now if you guys are like, you know what, we don't have the appetite for that right now. we do have other options to tweak your current plan. So that current $500,000 plan, we do have options for that. So yeah, if we went to this plan, increasing the deductible slightly, $750 single, $1,500 family, then that would get you to about 11.62%. So that would drop it a few points down. Then if you want to alternate to that would be a one thousand two thousand dollar deductible Which would get you to a nine point one seven percent increase So what we wanted to also show you is our benchmarking so m3 is We talk a lot about EDGE, right? So our education and government entities. We pulled our benchmarking just for that book of business. So we have 223 plans in that book of business. You'll notice that where you're at today, that $500 deductible, you're beating out most of our book of business, right? There's 16% of our EDGE clients that are within that $500 deductible. And what we suggested, all those plans that we suggested would still be less than the most popular. popular, if you will, plan offering within our edge book. So typically we're seeing between $1,501 to $2,000. So you would either be at with that high deductible health plan or below with any of those options that we talked about. So Sauk County will still keep their amazing benefits that they have with the medical, but we understand that at some point it may not be affordable to the county or their employees anymore. So that's a lot to think about, but I wanted to make sure we kind of talked about that. You can see current is $500. Even if you jump to the $1,000, you're still $1,300 below the average deductible, which is $2,300. Yeah. Yeah.

And we could do that and the HSA. Correct. So we could make that change, both changes.

What was the minimum deductible you need for the high deductible health plan? $1750. Yep.

And one thing I will say, the way the high deductible health plan is set up, the deductible and the max out-of-pocket are the same because there's 100% co-insurance in-network. There's 100% co-insurance. So that means if you picked a 2-4, right, like if you went to the 2-4 high deductible health plan, That would mean that your plan today has a $1,750, $3,500 max out-of-pocket. Your high deductible health plan max out-of-pocket will be $2,000, $4,000. So you would be $250 and $500 more on the max out-of-pocket. So even if you move to the $750, $1,500 plan, the max out-of-pocket is a $2,400. So it would kind of keep things a little bit more in line if you bumped up to that $750, $1,500. Not saying that you have to, right? But if you were going to implement a 2-4, then it would be easier to say. The plans work differently, right? On a high deductible health plan, there's no co-pays. You're paying everything out of pocket. You asked a little bit earlier about kind of what's the profile maybe of somebody that uses it. Somebody that is using their plan and maxing out their plan anyway, they might take you up on the HSA or the Hyderabad plan with the HSA because that HSA contribution is going to pay for their... They're deductible, but it's also their max out-of-pocket on a high deductible quality plan.

I was thinking more of it as compared to a weight scale because if you're not making a lot of money, people tend to take the lowest deductible. But yeah, there are advantages to those to the HSAs that you can take advantage of but you also kind of need to have a wage Where you can afford to pay that bill? Yeah, I guess that's that's kind of was getting at is is there any kind of breakdown in those categories?

I would also say though that the high deductible health point that premium is lower so if you are savvy enough to say, okay, let's say there's a delta of $50 a month. I don't know what it is off the top of my head, of $50 a month. If I say, okay, I'm going to put that extra $50 into my HSA, then I save that for the rainy day when I do have a plane, plus what the county contributes. But again, it's consumerism, right? So you have to be a good consumer. But keep in mind on the high deductible health plan, your preventive visits are covered at no cost. As long as they're preventive, you know how that goes. So make sure they're coded as preventive. But that annual preventive visit is covered. So if that's all people are going to in the doctor and maybe an urgent care visit, You can use the telehealth for certain things, and that will help cut back on costs as well. So it's education, definitely.

Yeah, and kind of asking what motivates people to want to get what plan. It's a great question and great point. I think it does come down to that premium, too, right? So to Lex's point, that HDHP is going to be much cheaper. So if you did save that in your HSA, you're no worse off, right? I always describe it this way. I feel like HSA plans are like pay-as-you-go, where a traditional plan is a prepaid plan, right? You have those co-pays. You can predict what that out-of-pocket is. But for those plans, you're going to be much more expensive. So it all depends on how the bath shakes out.

Do you guys have a... a tool available where the employees could go in and kind of do some prediction against that. And the reason I ask is my, you know, my daughter started with her company, and so I was really, because she's generally healthy, right? I said, hey, you know, tried to point out to the advantages for her to take the high deductible plan. and capitalize on being able to save that HSA. Because if she's healthy, especially if she's, what, 24 years old, maybe she doesn't use it for 15, 16 years, she's building that nest egg that has a lot of flexibility for her later in life. Absolutely. And she was getting it, right? And I think leaning towards that. Then when her package came out, she was able to log online. We were able to do some real-time, go, okay, so... You go in for your physical, you do this, you do that. Let's say you have an accident, you've got to go to the emergency room. You can plug that all in and then it came back and told her what her out-of-pocket costs were going to be across the board on three different plans, which then really kind of... motivated her to understand some of the selection options she had and where she wanted to go.

Yeah, it sounds to me that's a decision support tool that's built into maybe an HRIS system. Now we're going to get into all of our jargon over here, but that's probably what that is. I would tell you that we don't currently have something. The county doesn't currently have something like that. It's generally probably harder to do. With a provider-owned HMO, I would say you could probably do it better on the pharmacy side with your pharmacies because that's where the biggest difference is. And in the self-funded market, it's easier to do because you have a wider market. array of providers to access. In other words, an MRI, an open MRI might be $595 versus here in town, it might be $4,200. That's where the consumerism comes in. But that sounds like just a decision support tool that's out there and they're helpful, super helpful. But generally speaking, no, we don't have anything like that. And I would say, If you do have medical needs, you can always access your EOBs and kind of figure that out on your own as well. I know that's not probably the answer you're looking for.

No, I was just wondering, and I understand Sam's concern makes a lot of sense, right? We don't want lower wage employees taking advantage of it, particularly if they do have health issues. You want them to get into the maximum, right? But to the other side of it, you have a young, healthy... male or female, cruising along and they're not going to have a medical need for another 20 years. That high deductible plan is really a great alternative. It is.

I would say too, sorry to cut you off. As long as the HSA. I would say that was part of the strategy behind how we designed this with Anna and team is if you think about that $2,000, $4,000 and what that seeded HSA contribution is, at that $1,500 or $3,000, it still feels like your current plan to a certain extent. So you can anticipate that even if you have the worst year out there, it's going to cost you that $500 out of pocket or that $1,000 for a family. So, I mean, it's not just, you're right, there are a lot of individuals that will just choose the cheapest and they don't know how it works and that's a situation that we don't want to be in. We would want to do the education up front, but still having that HSA contribution really does support that incentive to, you know, increase participation in that HDHPA.

We don't necessarily have a support pool where they can go in and say, I take this, I go to the doctor this many times. But we do have modeling that we can put together that says, okay, I'm a low utilizer. I go in for my physical, and I maybe have an urgent care visit or an office visit a year, and then we can show how that would look. Or like a medium utilizer, like, Okay, we all go in for preventive care. We maybe have one ER visit a year, two office visits under spitballing, and then a high-utilizer. I take an expensive medicine, I go in to the doctor.

My FSA was gone by the end of January.

Yeah, exactly. So keep in mind, it's easy on the HMO. You're going to get your max out of pocket. You know what your maximum exposure is. So it's easier to model that way, and then we can... put in whatever the HSA contributions are. So we can model that. It's just not able to be customized by the employee that would be looking at it.

Sure, no. That would be a great, I think, supplement if we make some choices and we roll these out so employees can see them. I mean, that's pretty good. Makes them better educated on their choices. Because a lot of them, you say... You didn't get through the whole world of insurance. You got to insure and their eyes blazed open.

I didn't understand that when I went to the pharmacy on the HDHP that it was going to cost me $300 for my prescription, right? I mean, those are the biggest changes, I should say, when you think about there's no dollar one coverage on an HSA qualified plan except for preventive care. That includes pharmacy. So if you're on a high-end specialty pharmacy or prescription, sometimes it's beneficial because you can hit that max right away. Other times it might not be dependent on the plant design.

Any other questions? I have a question about would people be allowed to pick what... bank or place they would hold their HSA? Or would we suggest that?

That would be something we work with the HR team on. So it's easy from the employee standpoint and the county in terms of payroll deductions and contributions from the county. So it's just, it's easy. There's vendors out there that make it super easy on the consumer and the client.

One of the most common is, I don't know if you've ever dealt with a company called TASC out of Madison. They offer both. So, you know, from our standpoint, it's a one-shot stop. So I don't know if M3 has it, but

Today you have FSA with EBC. EBC also does HSA. So that would be the route we would probably suggest. But again, we haven't gotten that far with all of that. But ATAS does a great job. EBC does a great job. They do the same stuff. Also both. randomly located in Madison and Milton, so we have the two largest administrative plan offerings.

And Lexi's right, my wife's one, and we get both, and you just don't know the difference. But we're not holding the money, it's gone to a third party.

Yep. All right.

Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having us.

Why don't you come up to the table.

All right Stacey is my transportation supervisor for the ADRC and Troy Garwood is our transportation coordinator so I brought them with because they know more about the transportation program and the resolution but as you can tell the resolution has been brought to you and basically What happens is we have, I guess you would say, a fleet of vehicles that we utilize to transport individuals to medical appointments. They have to be 60 and over or have a disability. And the way that our transportation department works is that Stacy applies for two different grants every year. One is a state grant, 8521, and then the 5310 is a federal grant that is administered by the state. And there are reports that are done quarterly. And so with our grant, a lot of times we are allowed any money that is not spent throughout the year can go into our DOT trust fund. and that DOT trust fund can't have more than $80,000 in it at any given time. And so we have been fortunate enough that with our fleet of vehicles that we use, we have been able to, when they meet, what do you call it? End of useful life. End of useful life. That they are sent to auction. So Troy just sent one of our vans to auction because it had, more than the mileage that is considered useful life. And so that's still at auction, right, for another week or so. And so whatever we get from that then goes back into our... program but basically we took that one to auction and we had money in our DOT trust fund and so we're looking at replacing that vehicle and so that's what this resolution is about again there is no additional tax levy that we're asking the money comes from our grants that go into our DOT trust fund and then we utilize that money to purchase a new vehicle Troy does all of the checking into vehicles that are handicap accessible and getting bids. So he worked on that prior and then that went to our ADRC board. And so they were able to see which vans were looked at. But we typically like these vans the best. Our drivers like these vans the best. They came in the best price. But again, we did look at other options. We work with A&J Mobility, which helps to retrofit the vehicle so that they're wheelchair accessible. And I don't know, do you have anything to add? Because again, it's not my program. Thanks, Gwen. Any questions?

No, I would make motion to approve.

I think I was on the board when we approved this vehicle ever.

Your useful life is.

All right, so we have a motion and a second final offer. Any other discussion?

And I know because it's specially equipped, it's probably not worthy. Is there any thought process to turning these vehicles over, possibly a year older, maybe 25,000 miles sooner, get a little higher resale value? I don't think so. I know, that's what I'm saying. Because it's specially equipped, I don't know if we would.

And just so I understand what you're asking, selling them earlier so we get more money out of them or trading them back? Yeah. That would be fine. I don't think it would increase what we get out of them as opposed to how much we get out of them as far as revenue and use.

Yeah, that's what I was curious because I know like with our squads, if we can dump one at 50,000 miles versus 75,000 miles, they're significant.

And anecdotally, the last van we sold was about the same mileage and we got about $14,400. This one is going about the same pace as the other one did. We may not get as much just because times are a little different. But it's a decent... worthwhile suggestion, but we get a lot of life out of these vans and trying to buy one every, I mean, 50,000 miles, honestly. Oh, I wouldn't say 50,000.

I would say five years versus seven years, for example. Is there value in that or not?

And it all depends on if we have money in our DOT trust fund because, again, that, you know, not every year do we have, and these vehicles are obviously quite expensive, especially after they have to be retrofitted and all of that, so That would be the only other thought. We don't always have the funds in our DOT trust fund, and we utilize that so that there is no tax levy used in order to purchase these.

All right, well, we have a motion and a second. I'll call for the vote. All those in favor of sending the resolution to purchase vehicle for the ADRC transportation program and amend the 2026 budget to the county board, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, same sign. That passed unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. All right, 6C, presentation of quarterly accounts receivable reports.

So the four departments that we look at there, quarterly accounts receivable are attached and granted. Yes, that's for their second quarter of the year, ending June 30th, 2026. Anybody have any questions over here at this point?

All right. We'll move on. 6D, budget update.

So I just wanted to give an update of where we're at with the budget. July 31st was our deadline for the departments to get in their initial budget requests. And then last week and this week, as an admin team, so Lisa, Anna, myself, Tara, and then Louis from our MIS department have been sitting down with the departments individually going over what they submitted, just talking to them about it. The plan is then to bring everything together and see where we're at. I will say we got estimates from the Department of Revenue last week, and I ran estimated numbers. More of the details of the numbers are on my accounting monthly report later in the agenda, but I won't get into all of the numbers and the figures. But the preliminary estimates that we're getting from the Department of Revenue for net new construction increases are not looking great. It's down from prior years, so we're looking at our tax levy that we are not going to be able to increase it very much, maybe about $490,000. Again, that's an estimate right now. We don't have the final numbers, so I can't say if that's the final number or not yet. So just looking at, you know, we just heard from the health insurance increases there. The department asked that are coming in. We're looking at. what we need to put together. I think we're going to start brainstorming some ideas and putting it all together before we bring the full budget presentation to you. But I just wanted to let you know kind of where we're at right now. I don't know if Lisa had anything she wanted to add to it.

The bad news?

Yeah, well.

The bad news is this. The shocker before the sheriff came in today, because I hadn't looked at the bottom line yet, we have no union negotiated contract yet, so to speak. We are $10 million over what we can actually levy right now. So we are going to have to make some pretty hard choices, folks, going into this next budget cycle. Because when we look at the revenues that we're allowed to increase, we're talking to folks that haven't touched their fee schedules in 10 years to really start to look at whether or not we're covering our costs. But trying to push sales tax and interest investment, I mean, we're getting to a point where there's very little we can pull out of that anymore. So it is going to be the departments really starting to look at their programs, their services, us figuring out if we can do some tweaks with the health insurance program. Not really where I wanted to hear we were this morning, but I'm optimistic that we will get there. I just think we're going to have to be a little creative and innovative.

Thank you, Stephanie. So we've got, finally, 6E, the financial report.

Okay, and those are attached in Granicus. The first page just has some notable lines that we pull out. Those numbers all look in line with where we should be at this time of the year. The second page summarizes sales tax, and Lisa touched on it a little bit. The May sales tax figures we got at the end of July, I was a little disappointed those didn't come in very good. We're still slightly ahead of where we were at last year, but not much. So I just don't know what sales tax looks like. I mean, we'll see how the rest of the year goes, but sales tax looks like it's kind of leveling off. It's been increasing quite a bit every year. Since that COVID year, that threw everything in a wrench and everything. But I don't know. Sales tax right now is looking like it's staying kind of steady with what it was last year. I think interest rates, this isn't on this page, but I think interest rates, too, are kind of leveling off, hopefully staying where they're at this year and not dropping. Moving on to pages three and four, this is looking at all the revenues and expenses by functional areas. Not a lot outstanding here. Again, our grant numbers, grant revenues maybe don't look so great compared, but that's a lot of times our expenses are coming in and then we have to apply for the revenue afterwards. So grants do always tend to, grant revenue always tends to lag the expenses. And I know like, for example, well, one thing like the license and permits number for the Health and Human Service area, that looks ahead of schedule, but that's mainly due to annual food licenses are due June 30th. So most of that food licensing money that comes in into that area has already come in for the year. So that's why that line looks a little ahead of schedule. And in the last two pages, it's kind of a breakdown more by the department areas, and nobody was really jumping out at this point of the year, looking unusual. So did anybody have any questions about the financials?

One question for Stephanie on that. Okay, thank you.

Thanks. Number 7A, Personnel and Insurance Department. I'll just let you run with it. Sounds good.

Yep, so 7A is the safety report. Busy with safety, I will call out that our property claims year to date are a little high, seeing that we've had eight claims this year so far, and last year it was nine, and the year before it was 10. So we've just had some unfortunate incidents. We've hit two deer with the sheriff's office, so that was two of the claims. We had a couple plow trucks that were hit. Our plow trucks did not hit. Our plow trucks were hit. I just want to very specify, in unfortunate circumstances, that was two of the highways. So we just had some, the deers are kind of a common thing, but the highway trucks getting hit is not common. So that's the property claims. Continue to work through those liability claims. And then the workers' comp is kind of trending, not that I want it to trend, but I don't see anything concerning related to those numbers at this point. And then 7B, benefits report, similar, just kind of trending where we have been previously. We did have a little jump in healthcare center turnover, which caused for our overall turnover to increase a little bit, but we're still sitting at 10% year-to-date. We do typically see some turnover kind of in the summer months just with retirements and folks changing jobs. It's a good time to change jobs. I always said that as a recruiter because kids are out of school and you can kind of adjust and then get back into the swing of things before kids get back into school. And so summer turnover, there's always a little bit of that that happens. And 7C report is the rest of the department report. So recruitment numbers working through three open positions right now with the county excluding the health care center. Page two of that report, we did have a little bit of health care center turnover, although we've had, as I said, we've had some good hires, though, too, recently. Four hires last month, two rehires. So busy with recruitment. busy with some activities for the employees. Page three of that report have not had any additional security breaches and investigations for this year. And our goals are all in progress. 7D, yeah, I will, I will. Those are the big reports, so I just like to pause. 7D budget report, we're right where we should be, a little more than halfway through, so I don't have any concerns with where our budget sits. I do have an open risk safety coordinator under that risk management insurance piece, so that position is mostly vacant. She's working a little bit still for me, so that will continue to trend a little bit lower. and through the end of the year, just because we're going to have a vacancy for a bit. And then the last piece, 7E, invoices, looking for approval of invoices of $4,313.68 for this month. Motion to approve. Second. Favorite.

Any questions on the invoices? Okay. All those in favor of paying invoices of $4,313.68, say aye.

Aye. Any opposed?

Same sign.

All right, first is my monthly report. We've just been obviously busy with tax collection and still continue to work on tax foreclosure and then budget. Our average rate for investments has gone down this year. There are some shorter-term investments that are going up above four, but those are more of the 13-week voids. That's really something I've been trying to look for the 2027 budget, but I just, unless someone has a globe that they can tell me what's gonna happen, a magic ball. Currently we have 1,008 parcels that I turned delinquent, which equals about 1.9 million. So hopefully that number goes down a little bit before I do tax certificates end of this month. Those delinquent notices went out this morning, so we'll be fielding calls for the next couple days. Budget report, everything looks normal. Investments are on pace for this year, so we should be good with that. I have the investment report attached. And then my final thing is my invoices, which is always a fun month. $47,262,871.64.

I will make a motion to approve and I will make a motion to approve and I will make a motion to approve and I will make a motion to approve and

So my accounting update is attached in Granicus. We've been having a busy month. On July 30th, the auditors released a clean audit opinion. It's on the website, and I believe Lisa sent that out to all the county board members. But it's also on the website if you need to look at that for our 2025 audit statements, or financial statements. We've also been working on, this is a newer audit requirement. The state DHS requires nursing homes to have another audit, so we've been working on that with our independent auditors and along with health care center employees. And then we've also been working on getting ready for the single audit, which gets released in the fall. So we've been working on that. And budget, we've been getting really busy in budget. Capital Improvement Plan Committee met in July. I already kind of mentioned, I won't go through these numbers there in the report, but I included numbers in here that you can read in your free time about where we're looking at our levy for this year. And then upcoming, we just have a lot more budget to work on. And then I've got my other numbers on there. Nothing's out of the ordinary for the accounting update. Also attached is my year-to-date budget report. Those numbers for the accounting department are also in line with where we should be at this time of year. Then item 9B, reviewing the accounting department's invoices. I have invoices attached for $7,699.00.

Any questions for Stephanie? Sorry, who seconded? Walden. So all those in favor of paying the monthly invoices in the amount of $7,699, please signify by saying aye. Opposed, same sign. Passes as well.

And then we also have approval for the county board and committee payments in the amount of $16,379.28. Motion approved. Second.

All those in favor of paying the committee payments, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, sign. All right. By number 10, our next meeting will be September 8th at 4.30 p.m.

Although I should, for the record, we have to read that. Pardon me? You have to read that. I have to read it first, yes. Sorry about that. I jumped the gun.

It is anticipated that the Finance Personnel and Insurance Committee may adjourn to closed session pursuant to Wisconsin Statute S19.85, Paragraph 1, Paragraph 8. Deliberating or negotiating the purchasing of public properties, investing in public funds, or conducting other specified public business whenever competitive or bargaining reasons require a closed session. A roll call vote will be taken to go into closed session and to return to open session. So this is on the approval to purchase property at 515 Broadway Street in Baraboo. Move to vote in closed session. Thank you. I have a motion to have a second.

No second.

Thank you. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye.