Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

This will be the first work session for our upcoming budget, and we'll turn it over.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Lisa Lynch. I'm the new CFO here for Camden County, and we've been working diligently, our finance department, to put together a budget for you. What we've done is we've tried to... take previous years, looking at all of the budget from last year, this year, and a couple of previous years, just to see what the history is and see where we're going for the future. I have only been here for 30 days, and Joey's new, and So we're all kind of in this together, so we want y'all to just be patient with us. We'll do the best we can. And commissioners, if you have questions, please stop me. We'll go through this. You know, we're going to go through the slide presentation is what we're going to do and kind of give an overview because, as you can see, this book is pretty thick. And we're not going to have time to go through page by page, so hopefully y'all have been able to read.

Are you sad about that?

But we'll go through this and as a overview, let me just show you where we are. So if you'll take a look at the slide presentation up here that we have for you. What we do here at Camden County is required by the Georgia statutes. It requires us to adopt and operate an annual budget for the general fund, special revenues, capital project funds, and each debt service fund in use by the local government. And it's balanced. What that means is the revenues and expenditures are equal, so it balances to zero. What we wanna show you here is what we did with all the departments. We met with, we've had four meetings, four different meetings. And I've only been a part of two of those because I wasn't here. But we met with each and every department in the county. We had each of them, and Joey's spoken to them about trying to do as many cuts as they could. And I think they've done a great job overall. But what we wanna show you here is, we're gonna show it two different ways. One slide is gonna show what has been requested by each department. And that's the total there. And then another slide will show you what we did a few of the cuts already. And so we want your input. We want the commissioner's input on how you would like to cut things as well. So it's just a general idea, and it's just a draft. It's a living document. So we want your input. We need your input. And that's what I want to preface that with. So requested expenditures is what each department has asked. That's the total, $51,482,701, and that is a $3.3 million increase from last year. And we're just talking about operating. So projected revenues, what I did was we don't have all the digest numbers in yet, so this is also a... kind of a preliminary estimate and really that's the best we can do right now because we don't have all the numbers. So we've, you know, I've spoken to Brian Bishop and we've worked on a 3% increase is what we're thinking for the ad valorem. Based on that and all the other revenues and taxes that we've received, that is the projected revenues for fiscal year 2027, $47,631,827. Now, that is a decrease from last year because as I was looking through all of the revenues and the different line items, it's a really big list of items. And you have to just kind of look at the history of all of those. Look what we've done over the past several years. And for this year, we don't even have all of the revenues yet. We've only really got through most of it March 31st, but we have some of April in there as well. But we'll still have some more drizzling in here and there from now to the end of the year. So... Had to go back and look at the historical for the past three years to see what we got those last three months You know to kind of make an estimate on that and that helps a little bit so based on that is just our lost revenue was really down this year and It's, you know, and that's just a result of the economy, I think, as you all know. So if sales taxes are down, then, you know, if people aren't out spending, they're having to buy food, buy gas. You know, living expenses are just a lot right now. And, pardon?

How much?

How much what? Are they down? Are they down for the lost? Let me pull that. Hold on just a second.

What were they?

All right, let's see. Let's see, last year's we had, the total activity was 6.1 million, and no, that's the previous year. Let's see, that was 23, 24, 24, 25 was 6.3. This year we've only collected 4.2 million.

If lost collections are down, does that also mean lost collections are down?

Well, I'm not really sure, to be honest. I'm not sure how those, Janice, do you?

Because it's the three pennies, right?

Right. Not looking at the history of it, no.

Yeah.

We were somewhere around 9 million at the end of February on the SPLOST, am I correct?

Yes.

Which basically, if you tally that up, we're going to end up somewhere around 81 million at the end of it. So I don't think we're down on the squads.

Yeah, okay. Well, that's, you know, and that's just one of those, the lost and the ad valorma are two biggest revenue sources. And those are the ones that you really need to know those numbers. So the rest of them are, you know, some are large, some are not. But it's pretty difficult to predict those. But you just have to base it off historical and then go from there. But, you know, there's economic factors now and we, And those are things that you can't overlook as well. So that basically, from requested to what we're projecting our revenues, that's a shortfall of 3.8 million. What we're seeing is, I think, and I'll just be honest, we want to be transparent about this, what's happened, I think, over the past several years is that we've not increased the millage rate, or we've done the rollback rate, those kind of things. And it's just at some point it's gonna catch up with you. As COVID came in, just those are other economic factors, but where COVID was here, we got a lot of funding. We got a lot of grant funding. We got ARPA funds and those are running out at the end of this year. We've already got those earmarked for the projects that we're going to have, but you can't, you know, those are not funds you can replace. That was $10 million. That's something you can't, you know, that's just not something that'll appear because those were very unusual circumstances. And our FEMA money's run out for, you know, hurricanes. There's been no hurricanes, which, thankfully, that's a good thing. But then again, there's money that's run out that you had for other projects, so... Just to let you know, those are, you know, the economic factors that are there. It's just, it's a tough economy out there right now. And so, I mean, I don't have to tell you all that. You all are aware of that. So anyway, that's that slide. So let me move on. So here is what we've done. We did some reductions already, and that's what's going to be in the book that you have. If you'll open up the dark blue book, we have what she's put here is the comparison. See at the top of the columns, comparison one budget. That's what the department's requested. That's the first column. And then the comparison two is the

Is that the number that you compared to the previous budget? That's the difference? That would be after we had meetings.

Okay, sorry. I left out the first column. The first column is the parent budget. It's 25-26 adopted. Do you all see that column there? Okay. And then the second column is the comparison one. So that is what we've got requested for next fiscal year. That's what all the departments requested. So if you take those and take the difference between those, she did a comparison, one is to the parent budget, so that's the difference there. And then if you'll go all the way to the right and then come in a column, the other highlighted, these three highlighted columns are what you wanna look at. The comparison to budget is the 26-27 draft. Those are the numbers that we made some budget cuts on. So those are really important numbers to look at, and what I'm going to do is give an overview here of these numbers so that you can then ask questions. We'll just go through it slide by slide, and you all stop me if you have questions along the way. Sound good?

So with this figure here, you guys have reduced it by about $831,000. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, so let's get here. All right, this is our general fund revenues by classification. So that's the number that I broke down for you in that first slide that I'll show you. So what we had was ad valorem last year, and it shows you 26 to 27. And the estimate of, you know, until we get the final number, and I'm hoping that Brian will have some numbers for me this week and Beth. If I get those numbers from them, we can project it a little bit better, but I'm still waiting on those numbers. They're having a little difficulty getting those. And once we project that, I don't think it's going to make a huge difference, but it could change it a little bit. So if you'll see those two columns there, the 26 and 27, you can compare those taxes that we've received, licenses and permits. And that bottom from the total, the lineup from the total is the proceeds carried forward. That was what we had to, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Tiffany. That's what we had to pull from fund balance last year. in order to balance the budget. So as you can see, I did want to show you this slide here. Let's see if I have that. Oh, this is the one I wanted to show you. So this is where, this is our general fund balance, and this is where our ad valorems go. If you'll see through the years, 21, 22, 23, and 24, Those were the years where we got the ARPA funds, hurricane funds, those kind of things, and that, you know, it kind of inflated that number, but if you go to 25, you know, we start to reduce because we had to pull from fund balance, and you really don't want to get into the general practice of taking out of that fund just for your operating because it's just not a, we want to keep 25% in there. as a general rule so that in case we have a hurricane or something else comes along, we'll have fund balance available. You don't really want to draw down from that every year. You really need to just use what funds you have there, what revenues that you receive instead of pulling from there. It's okay every now and then or for a special circumstance, but to make that a regular practice is not really a good idea.

What is the current amount of our fund balance?

Well, it was 14. Do we know what it is now? We haven't. Well, yeah, we really won't know because we're not finished with the fiscal year until June 30th. And then once we close the books, we can determine what those amounts will be. But we won't know that for now. Okay. Any other questions? That was what it was in our, yeah, that's what we had projected. That's our estimated number, so, but it could give or take up or down a little bit, but.

Gentlemen, you've got to remember that the fund balance is a snapshot in time. It's not funds sitting at a bank somewhere.

Okay.

You can go back to slide five real quick.

Back to five, okay, yep.

The proceeds carrying forward, 1.678 million, what is that?

That is the money that we had to take out last year to balance the budget.

That's the fund balance distribution we took for last year. Okay, got you. Thanks. Yep.

So as you can see, the local option up there, if you'll see that, 6.4. 6.2 is what we've, these are the budgeted numbers. So 6.2 is what we budgeted, but as you remember, 4.2 is what we've gotten so far this year. So we are, and I really don't see, I don't see in two months' time that you're going to collect another $2 million. So, you know. Again, you're just estimating. When you're doing budgeting, you're estimating. You don't know what economic factors are going to be out there because you just don't know what's going to be happening.

Is that what you would attribute it to, people spending less, you think?

Absolutely. Any questions on that? I don't want to go too fast for you all, so just tell me to slow down if you need me to. Okay, this is a really good pie chart. Tiffany did this one, not sure. What it shows is we just kind of wanted to give you a snapshot. I'm a visual person. I like to see things in charts and that kind of thing. What we want to show there is the big red piece right there. That is our ad valorem taxes, and that's the biggest part of our revenues. So you can see that really helps fund all our operating expenses. The next biggest is that little blue slide next to it to the left. That is the local option sales taxes. So if you'll see that between, let me do this, do my little, see this part all the way around to here. Those are pretty big numbers for how the government operates. So you have all these other fees in there, and you have grants in there and that kind of thing, but basically you're funded by your local option sales tax and your ad valorem. So just kind of wanted you to see the visual of that. Okay. That was, we already went through that one. So right here is where we want to show just some major changes that some of the things that have been We've got our expenditures projected at 2.4 million above last year, which is a 5% increase. And then also we wanted to show what the increase is in the payroll, so security tax and retirement. Salaries are a big part of our budget, and if you'll see those numbers there, the total increase is 1.1 for all funds reflecting, and that's a breakdown kind of of where they are. And E911 had a reduction there, but everybody else was an increase. And what we've seen here, we've had requests from different departments for different increases, and what we're really asking is for all employees just a 2.5%, and that's really inflationary. Um, but we've had the, um, the sheriff's office and the fire rescue have asked for more than that. Um, and so we are suggesting just two and a half, but so that would be five for them. Um, and that's some, something else that we'll need your input on as well. Any questions on that?

Okay.

So on our insurance, that's another, you know, you have personal costs at home, your insurance rates go up, our insurance rates go up. Employee health insurance, as y'all are aware, we are self-funded, and that has worked out great. Mike's done a great job with, you know, we have four different plans to choose from, and we have the clinic going on, which is a great help, a great savings to the county, I don't even know how you would calculate the savings you have there because we have our own pharmacy there, we have our own nurse practitioner there that can see patients for physicals, small things, and that's probably a huge savings for the county. Now we do have, there is a, we don't have the exact amounts, Mike correct me if I'm wrong. We don't have the, we can estimate here in Lance. We've got the employee health insurance. What happens with those are we have Claims that we really don't know what claims are gonna be. You kinda can only estimate those as well, cuz you're not sure who's gonna get sick and what kinda things they're gonna have going on. And also the stop loss fees, that changes as well. I mean, we have an increase in that because what happens is when we get to, what's the dollar amount on the health insurance? Does it depend on which plan you're on for the stop loss? $150,000 of each plane the county owns, and then the stop loss picks up anything above that? Yeah. So we're picking up up to $150,000. So the stop loss are for those extra large, different kind of diseases and things people can have. Increasing $205,000 for those two items, mostly. Then workers comp had, it's not a huge increase, but 10,571 for claims and stop loss coverage. Then the property equipment and auto and liability insurance, those had two different rate increases. The property and equipment is predicted at 20% and the auto and liability is 17.75, so that's about 350,000, but we're also awaiting the final quotes on that. That's just kind of a summary of the insurance charges. We run just like a household would run. You have to look at the budget the way you would run your household. You have all of these costs and they're increasing. There's not a lot you can do to stop those. We're kind of at the mercy of I think Mike's done a great job because if we had regular health insurance through a company, we'd be paying out millions of dollars. And so I think he's done a great job keeping the cost down because we are self-funded.

One question? Yeah. The $350 deductible for vehicle claims, that's with the sheriff's office? That's from the maneuvers and stuff? Am I correct?

Historically...

Lance could you come to the microphone just for the people watching? Thank you Yes

I apologize, I've been losing my voice, so I'm a little raspy. That was from our previous carrier and the historical data from two and three years ago, actually three or four years ago. Since we've been with Safety National from the inception, it was a $350,000 deductible per claim for liability. There's no indication that that's going to go down, but there's no indication it's going to go up at this point either right now. To Lisa's point, I truly will not have a quote until probably the end of May because the carriers will hold off as long as they can to give us a quote before the beginning of the new year.

I keep forgetting as well.

I'm sorry. Well, that was definitely a huge part of it, but auto claims in general, any kind of auto claim where we were liable, that would include that. But for a couple of years, we did have a fair amount of claims related to the sheriff's office at that point in time.

But before this, we were at like $150, am I correct?

With travelers, our deductible for auto liability was $0. Okay. Right, so we went from a zero deductible straight to the $350,000 deductible when Travelers decided to not renew our claim or our coverage, and we had to go to Safety National.

Okay. As the risk manager, do you keep up with the number of incidents that obviously need to have a claim filed?

Yes, and not all claims. I don't need to really let our carriers know about all claims. If our damages are below our damage deductible of $25,000, we do keep up with it, but those are more handled in-house. So essentially, we're self-insured. up to the 350 or up to the 25,000 as far as damages go. But if there's other people involved, if there's a possibility of suits, then yes, our carriers know everything.

I guess my question, has there been a reduction in the number of those incidents?

Yes, yes, we have very few issues with the Sheriff's Office as far as their processes It's almost cyclical. You know this last year. We've had a couple of instances with fire rescue Not necessarily our fault, but but claims nonetheless Pardon, thank you. All right. Thank you anything else I

Of course, you're going to continue to negotiate that, am I correct?

Absolutely, yes, yes. Our third-party administrator, along with the attorneys that we use here locally, they do a phenomenal job with the negotiations when need be, yes.

Thanks, Lance. Okay, anything else? Move on to the next slide. So this is just a graph to show you what, I think Nancy showed this one last year. Kind of show you where our insurance premiums have gone. It's just, you know, you can see that right there. 257% increase since 2018. So, you know, I don't know. There's not a lot you can do about that insurance increasing. It's just something you got to pay. So it's just a cost to run the county. And just wanted you to see the graphic there. All right, so I'm gonna summarize a few things here that we've seen with the requests from the departments. Our Sheriff's Office Patrol Division, they were requesting a 7.5% increase across the board, and then we are recommending a 5% increase. They've also increased their contracted services by 201,000 and supplies by 100,000. The Joint Development Authority, any questions on that?

You okay? What are the contracted services?

We have to look at that. Hang on just a second. We can pull that up. Okay. Let's see. They have software cost under there.

Let's see what else.

It might be something Debbie can explain. Debbie, what is that software maintenance? What software is that for? Yeah, you want to come up and explain that?

One more time.

It's the public safety software.

Well, no, it's pretty ambiguous. So what kind of public safety software?

The New World? Yeah.

What does that do?

I'm just asking. It's okay. It runs all the public safety. I mean, everybody uses it. Fire rescue, the sheriff's office, the jail, 911. It's all of it.

Is it like a CAD system? Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. And then the 7.5%, is that the 2.5% for the step-up in pay? Is that included?

That's included in that number, yes. Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, Joint Development Authority is, I'm not sure if everybody's aware, but we do have a memory ending of understanding MOU with them. And I'm not sure when that, y'all may know a better, y'all might have a better idea of when that was instigated, I don't know. But it's, they're receiving a half a million dollar increase, and that's every year, so. That's just, that was an agreement that was made. And then we have the transfers out of special appropriations, which would be for capital improvements of 559 and E911 supplement funding 596. Some other changes, EMS, that changed a little bit. That's what that show in there is the change from 88%. This is the unincorporated portion of EMS and fire. That went from 88 to 86, and then the fire went from 12 to 14. That's just the, that's only the unincorporated portion. And then we wanted to show also that where you see the county attorney, that decreased by 169,000. We removed that budgeting for contingencies and settlements because that is an unknown number. You have no idea what, you know, that's just an unknown. So we really can't budget for that. And then we also had the coroner, he's requesting a full-time position. He's a part-time employee now, which should be an increase of 34%. And also the county-wide library, they are asking additional funding for the Woodbine Library of 13,477 to increase the hours for the branch manager there. Any questions there? Okay, this is just gonna give, this is another spreadsheet that shows the breakdown by, this is our general government, and as you can see, we've got the previous year adopted, the new year proposed, and then with all of the variances there, and the percentage, that would be percentage changes, so. Do you have any questions on that? We do have, I will note, I'll give a shout to Joey over there, his administration, he reduced his budget by 25%, so that's pretty good.

What's the secret, Joey?

Lead by example, that's right. And IT did a really good job, too. He went, he reduced his budget 116,000, which is really good for IT, so that was impressive. Thank you. Okay. Next is these are just the courts, just a breakdown of the proposed budgets for the courts. The Superior Court, she reduced hers by quite a bit, $50,000, so $52,000. And the others are pretty flat. Most of them, they're not big changes there.

I do have a question looking back. Yeah. So what is the, I'm just asking because it's like the third largest, what is the $67,000 increase in finance?

Let me go back. It's a software program. Software program, yeah. What's happening is we're on Tyler Technologies, and it's a company out of Texas, and it's very widely used for finance projects It houses our payroll, it houses our accounts payable, all of our finance. And so what's happening with that is they're gonna be phasing out the server and everything's going to the cloud.

So their subscription went up? I got you.

Yeah, so, well, and going to the cloud, it increases your features and your connectivity. Yeah, so that's the biggest thing on the connectivity because when you're in the cloud, say you have a hurricane, you know, and you don't have... power in your you can be working from anywhere basically in the cloud so you know if we had to work from home or other places like that we would be able to still produce payroll and those kind of things which are you know in what curbside yeah oh it does curbside as well yeah so curbsides included on that too and HR yeah okay So, yeah, so Tyler's a big, it's a big software, and there's not a lot of choice you have in that. I mean, if they phase out stuff and you have to stay, that's one thing I spoke to Willie about. That's, IT's not something that you really want to cut back on because you can't, you know, you just have to stay with the times. That's what they do, so.

And then the $70,000 for facilities maintenance, is that because we took over county parks, maintaining county parks?

Was that facilities? No.

Hang on just a second.

I'm back a slide. Sorry.

No, that's okay. That's okay. County parks is unincorporated.

Okay.

Parks is in the unincorporated. Which one were you looking at again?

Facilities management. I saw there was an increase of $70,402. Okay.

with everything added together, that's salaries, that's... Can we increase that?

So...

So the increase in that for salaries was $24,202. For contracted services, it's a $1,700 increase. Supplies is $4,500, $2,000. And capital, no capital. That's just those three line items. It's the $71,000. That's on...

Is that like hiring a part-time person or a full-time, the 24,000?

No, that should just be the 2.5% in there, right? Oh, he's got something.

Increase in repairs and maintenance buildings. Okay.

Thanks, Alex. Thanks.

But yeah, the supplies are just the baseline for taking over the parks.

Right.

And then the other increase was the 2.5% for the... Oh, okay.

I got you. I got you now. Thank you. So 24,000 is 2.5% increase? Yeah. Anything else? No, that was it. And thank all of you guys for being here to answer questions. Obviously, you are the expert in your department, so thank you.

Absolutely. Okay, let's go to, let's see, Superior Court, I got that. Okay, this is Public Safety. Let's go to that one next.

Let's see. Okay.

Okay, so this is a breakdown of all our departments that are housed within public safety, which that's the sheriff's office, the corrections in jail, juvenile justice, EMS, coroner, animal control, emergency management, and the radio system. And the SROs, which we do receive, on the SROs we do receive some monies from the school district for that. They do help pay for that. And then, so that's what the, going from 20 million to 22 million, which was a $1.6 million increase overall. Any questions on any of those there?

So there's a set cost for adult probation and juvenile justice, is that?

Yeah, I think that doesn't – why does that not change every year, do you know? That kind of stays flat.

Or is it like with Cumberland Patrol where we get reimbursed?

That's not the one that we do in-house, but it hasn't changed much here. Yeah. It's just utilities and stuff.

We don't have much in there. There's not salaries or anything in that one.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, you're over here. They said it hasn't changed. It's usually like utilities in there, so that's why it's such a low cost.

Question. Yeah. Cumberland Patrol. It's my understanding that two of those guys are paid by us, and two of them are paid by the Navy. Am I correct?

Two and two, or is it just two? No?

There's two, and they're both hourly.

There's four guys, right?

I think we get reimbursed for the item. Come on up, Debbie.

There is a net zero there, like he said, so I just wondered where the other two went.

Two of them are on Marine Patrol under $3,300 patrol budget, and two of them are paid for through Cumberland.

Thank you. Welcome.

There you go. That was an easy answer. Thank you, Debbie. All right, let's see. All right, here we've got Public Works and Health and Welfare here. Those are the numbers for the changes in their budget. Public Works from 1.8 to 1.9, and then Fleet Services from 411 to 426, and that's the total there. And then you've got the adopted for your Health and Welfare, which includes Health Department, Mosquito Control, Family and Children Services, and the Senior Center. So a couple of those didn't change. Family and Children's Services didn't change, and Health Department did not as well. And then this gives the culture and recreation, the libraries included there, both that and the historical library are in that category. And I'm not sure, Mike, what was the reason for the historical library? It decreased a little bit. Do you know what the reason was for that? Come on up.

This is just a salary one. Our full-time archivist left recently, and we've promoted the part-time archivist to the full-time archivist, and we are now recruiting for the part-time archivist. The full-time archivist that is new now does not make as much money as the one that left. So there's a little bit of a decrease in salary just because it's somebody without the experience that the previous person had.

Perfect. I like to report decreases, every little bit helps. Okay, planning and development we've got there. Any questions on that? I think Cassie's here. Forestry stayed flat. The JDA's in there, I already spoke about that. Code enforcement had a little increase, but overall not much. Planning and development. Cassie, did you know what the increase is on that one? Can you speak to that a little bit?

So we have a new employee that we transferred from tax assessors to planning and development. We also have our joint comprehensive plan coming up, so we had to budget for that as well.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay, so that gives our total expenses there for general fund is 48, or for all of our departments is, the adopted last year was 48,195,616, and the proposal amount is 50,651,430. So that is a difference of 2.4 million. So that's what we're asking your help in, to come up with a solution for how we can balance that out. This slide is a really good slide. Tiffany did this one. It gives another snapshot of what your expenditures are by the function. Your sheriff's office is at the bottom in the green. It's 27% of the budget. The general government is 30%. EMS is 17%, and let's see, the other functions are much smaller. We just wanted to show you how the monies are spent. And if you look over there to the right, it kind of gives the dollar amount as well. You can see what's spent there. Take a look at that. Any questions on that? It's kind of a good representation, though, just to show you where our dollars go. I think she did a good job on that. The next one is going to be your curbside collections. I think we're working on that as far as rates go. I'm not sure what we're going to do on that, Joey.

We are looking into different options on those fees. I know Meridian is asking for an increase in their rates, so we're We're looking at that to make sure everything's in line. So we will report back to you on that.

Okay. Are we checking local as well?

Well, we're under contract with them, and it ends next June. So we will be putting out the RFP any day now for that next one.

That's the curbside collection contract?

Yes, that is correct, yes.

I'll tell you, until you get into working in county government, I don't think you realize what the cost of some of our capital equipment is. Just those solid waste trucks are phenomenal in cost. I mean, they do a lot, but those are things that really, you know, they cost a lot of money and you have to maintain them as well. So I think vehicles is a big expense as far as capital for the county. And we'll be looking at capital expenditures. We decided not to do that tonight because it's just a much bigger thing that we just figured we would do operating tonight, give you an overview of that and let you digest that first. And then we'll go to capital next week and talk about that. But that's the curbside collections. They have their revenues that come in and then any interest and then their expenses. They don't have a lot, but it's salaries. They have some contracted services, supplies. I think the contracted services is the... That's Meridian. That's Meridian. That's the cost for that. So we have the fees coming in, but then we also have to pay out for the services. So that's basically there. Let's go to the next one. And this is our emergency 911. The proposed on that is the same. It remained flat. And then salaries and benefits have actually gone down a little bit. contracted services is relatively flat there and supplies went up a little bit so now this is an unincorporated this is a good slide to show you This is just a portion of, so we have the revenues at the top. If you'll see at the very top, that line that says total revenue, and I apologize, this is kind of hard to read, and I didn't get a chance to get that highlighted up there, but you'll see the total revenue line, and then if you look all the way at the bottom, the total expense, so it does balance out. The 4.3 million is the revenues, and then The expenses are the same at the bottom, and that's split between fire service, public works, and recreation. They're unincorporated. That's their portion there. Let's see. Any questions on that?

So even picking up the park maintenance, we're still... We have a 28% decrease in revenue and a 28% increase in expenses.

And this is our solid waste budget. They operate as a enterprise fund, and so they basically can cover their cost, which is great for the county. As you can see, there's the commission and fees that they collect there and any interest that we receive on that. And then at the bottom are just their expenditures there. The contracted services is obviously what they pay out, what we pay for services. But they do pretty well. Solid waste does pretty well. Went for the cost of all the trucks. And the next steps, this is just our calendar of what's coming up next. We'll have another budget work session next week. And May 18th, we'll have one more if it's necessary. Next week, we plan to bring before you the capital expenditures and just show you that budget to see what we can do. And then after that, we'll have, we have the regular hearings that's required by law to do that and advertise in there, and that'll be in June. So those are the days coming up.

What day are we doing capital projects?

That'll be the next meeting, the 12th, May 12th, next week.

Is that also the opportunity where if we identify cuts here, we can bring them back to you?

Absolutely, yes. We want your input, please.

I see May 18th says additional budget work session if needed. I think we need that. Yeah, we probably will. I think it's already scheduled. Yeah, it's scheduled. But instead of if needed, we are going to need that.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is the first work session. We have two more. Yes. It gives the board a couple of weeks to really dig down into this. Yes. We need another one between May 18th and the – adoption, we still have time. So I think we need to make sure we have time. Yes, absolutely. This is the first time we've seen it. Just give us time and I think go ahead and add in the 18th work session, which is already added.

Yes, it's on the calendar. Maybe have an option to do one more before. It's on the calendar, yeah.

We'll work through that.

Yes, absolutely.

If I could as well, I know we all probably received a document from Joey. It was the original budget request before any cuts were made by staff. I think it might be really helpful to see that with what you've cut so we can see what's available, what's left to be cut if there are cuts available.

Forgive me for going backwards, but can we go back to slide 21 just for a second? Sure. So I think the big changes are because we took over the parks, correct? And if you look down at the contract services, we're at 448% increase. Just clarify where that is and what that's for.

Is that for the park?

Yeah, right here for public works.

Yeah, I don't know why that is. Let me look.

I'm sorry, what was the question?

I just want to clarify on the contracted services line item, the increase is 441%. It's only 83,000, but percentage-wise it's big, so just can you clarify what that's for?

So that contracted services is the... janitorial services. Okay. So when we originally estimated, we had a certain scope. That scope was found that we were not cleaning the bathrooms as often as they needed to be cleaned and did not service them as much as we needed to. So we re-identified that service and then expanding it from our original six-month estimate to the full year. That's where we're getting a lot of that additional. Okay. Thanks. No worries. Because you got to remember the number that we have there As are proposed, that was a six-month estimate. So that's not giving you what we thought it would be for a full year.

And that's mainly on the parks. Yeah.

So the parks, the park expenses are here.

They're under $6,000 for recreation. It's included in that line item. That's where the funding for the PSA.

Recreation is the parks. Yes, gotcha.

If I could ask, since you've taken over the parks, how has it been? Are you seeing a change in the level of quality that's being performed out there? I can tell you I have.

For the county itself, it's a renewed interest in doing it ourselves, taking pride in our work in our county, just like we do with our roads and our right-of-ways and that. We want to make sure that when people go to our parks that they're proud of what we have. Again, I've been transparent from the beginning that the budget that we originally got was doing nothing really but just to do status quo of what PSA had until we figure out as a county exactly how much we want to invest and change the product that we have in our parks. But I think we've targeted a lot of grossly neglected areas. We really went in and cleaned up areas that just have not been taken care of for years. And a lot of the Safety issues and hazards that we found, we took care of right away, and we've been working forward from there.

Well, I just want to let you know I've definitely noticed a difference.

Well, I appreciate that.

Yeah, I can tell you the rural parks I've been to, phenomenal job. Thank you. A lot better than it started. And I know it costs a lot of money, but you're doing the right thing here. Thank you. You should be proud. We are. And your whole group should be proud. We are.

Like I said, we pride ourselves in the job, you know, and that we leave it better than what we would have at our own house.

It's certainly going that direction.

Thank you.

One more question. The disc golf at Howard Peoples, we kind of talked about adding 18 holes or putting another one in at one time. Am I correct?

At one point, yeah. We talked, if I'm not mistaken, there's 36 holes there now. They have enough disc golf baskets for 18 of them. and they rotate them. Um, we did discuss purchasing an additional 18 baskets. So then all 36 holes would be usable at all times. Um, and then I know that, um, the gentleman that runs the disc golf program and you have talked and his passion is to try to get a, another disc golf 18 holes, um, preferably at a different park. Um, because, because right now, you know, we're kind of max space there and you know, it would be better if you could spread out, you know, the, the courses on that if there was another course in the county. And I know that he was actively looking at, in his contacts, on maybe getting a grant. And if it was a grant, it would need to be more of a fresh course, not adding to an additional.

Okay. That's not in your budget, though, right? No. Okay.

All right, thank you.

So do you all have any more questions for us? Or you want to digest? That's a lot of information, I know. It's a lot.

Thanks for a good summary.

Yeah.

It's been a lot of hard work, and I appreciate you all.

Yeah, I have a great department. Finance is awesome. Everybody's willing to pitch in and help, so it's been great.

Well, you've got the A-team, so what more do you want? Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Any more questions? I think it's just time for the board to dig in, see what we can do. If not, we'll adjourn.