County Council - Special Meeting

I want to welcome everyone here tonight. At this time, I will call to order the May 12th, 2026 York County Council public special called meeting. Um, this will be for our budget p public workshop. We're starting off really well. Um, at this time, I'm going to start us off with invocation and pledge of allegiance. Dear heavenly father, we thank you for the many blessings that you've given to us in this county. Um to live in a nation where we govern ourselves and have the ability to to get together and collectively meet to discuss our futures uh is something that we are all blessed and very thankful to be in. Lord, we ask you to protect those who serve us in uniform, locally, in state, and abroad. And we ask that you give protection to their families. At this time, as we take up the matters before us tonight, we ask for your wisdom and guidance, that you would help us to make wise decisions, and that our decisions would be in the best interest of our community and glorifying to you in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. Amen. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

First of all, I do have to say it it's always um nice when you have a group of folks that shows up to these meetings. Oftent times you we we come and have a bud budget public hearing and there's nobody here. Um, so we do we do appreciate you all for coming out. I will share with you the process is a little bit different this year. The manager um has has put us in uh we're going to be having the public hearing now. Um, previously we would have had um the opportunity for agencies to come speak to us um ahead of that in a separate, but we've combined those. And so some folks have asked me ahead of the meeting, how is this going to work? Is it different? And yes, it is going to be different because this is a public hearing and this is a situation where um we have no choice but to pass a budget, right? So, I'm not going to ask you do you do you are you here in support of a budget or are you here against a budget because we have to pass a budget. What I will do is I will simply open the floor to anyone who wants to address the council about the budget um once I read out um our our discussion here. And then um what I will also ask is this is a little bit different. So when you come our job is to sit here and listen. That's what a public hearing is for. It's for us to listen to your questions. We will have a workshop immediately after this once we complete the public hearing. That would be the time for council to ask questions of management. Um, sometimes, you know, a question or two to an agency might be warranted, but typically the process is you come, you share with us your information, we receive that information, and then we address it with um within the budget budget, the workshop. Um, so let me read this out. council to hold a public hearing on an ordinance to establish the operating and capital budgets for the operation of the county government of York County for the fiscal year commencing July 1st, 2026. To provide for the levy of taxes for York

County for the fiscal year commencing July 1st, 2026. To provide for the expenditure of tax revenues and other county funds. To establish a consolidated fee schedule for all existing county fees relative to the operation of county government, its boards, agencies, and departments. And to provide for other matters relating there, too. So, at this time, I will open the public hearing. Um, and anyone who wishes to come and speak, if you will please come forward to the podium, if you'll state your name and give your address before you start speaking. Um, and and we appreciate being here.

Good evening. I'm Julie Ward. I am the director of the York County Library. It's nice to see everybody again. I am just going to, if you'll look, well, don't look at the screen. Uh, I think you have it in front of you. I just want to go over very quickly the community impact that the money that we have been funded over the last year has made. Um just to let you know that we've done some fantastic things and reached a lot of people. Um we are talking about the number of materials that we have physical materials. We have connected users to stories and ideas uh by 924,351 people checking physical materials out. Um our DVDs and CDs are 89,934. That's a lot of business. You might be interested to know that our virtual library is expanding in use as well. Um, while physical materials are still important, everybody loves the choice of a virtual library where you can check out not only ebooks but audio books and films and TV series and uh magazines. And then we have some other things that you can check out with uh the budget that we have which are video games for families. That's a new one. You can check out hotspots. You can check out puzzles. And then you can check out things like hobby kits that we have where you can get little things for gardens or or baking. So, we like to offer a lot of things um to our community that successfully check out. And uh we also have a lot of visitors. We have 450,536 visitors over last year. And then Wi-Fi sessions are people who use the Wi-Fi internally and sometimes in our parking lot. And the people who accessed our Wi-Fi last year were 114,578 people. And then I will leave you with some numbers about our programs, which a lot of our budget goes to. Um, we're very

proud of our programs and we put them on for all ages. Last year alone, we put on 2,274 sessions and 52,619 people attended them. So, thank you very much for your past support and I hope that we will be able to continue this support in the coming year. I'd like to introduce our board treasurer, Dennis Getter, who will walk you through our budget request and let you know that Pam Miler, our finance manager, is here as well. Thank you. Good evening everybody. Uh this has been a real special year for the library as you know. We did some heavy lifting. We uh accomplished a new book collection policy which was quite uh in the beginning quite controversial and now has uh really no controversy associated with it at all. So I think we wrote a very very good policy and are looking at other policies. The other aspect that we're doing as you know is strategic planning where we're talking about uh we're right now in the process of a survey which I hope you've all filled out. We're going to be hiring a consultant to do some location identification for us because as we all know here, we don't need a consultant to tell us that we need more libraries as we grow the county. So, um that's part of the plan and actually you're going to see it in the budget. We're looking at um number one in terms of lowhanging fruit which I same story last year. Uh try to move the economic development out of uh the Baxter location to give us more library space. And then we're waiting for the consultant to come through and ind indicate the library uh numbers of new

libraries and locations which will best ser serve this community. So I'd like to go quickly through the budget. Right now we do are presenting a balanced budget and the revenues um again are somewhat set by our mill rate and the number of mills that we get and you'll see the county appropriations are in the $10 million area now. So we're talking a pretty big enterprise with other monies coming in totaling a little over 11 million operation. our personnel expenditures and salaries. And again, we're heavily personnel um oriented, as you can tell from the 6 million budget out of 11 going to personnel. Our other expenditures are all kind of in line uh with normal expenses with the increase that was allowed in the mill rate to be passed on. And a high point will be you'll notice that this is a year we're spending um over $2 million in library books and materials. And again, you could say, well, the library is filling up. And the answer is yes, they are. But we have a lot of books, as you know, out and that's the purpose of the library to to give people a chance of literacy. So we have a lot of books uh obviously in circulation which again allows us to continue to buy new materials. However, we do have a weeding process where older ones are discarded. So the the libraries right now are full very well overutilized and again we'll get into the uh development of some buildings here in the next slide. Um, this is the most significant change you're going to see from last year. Again, uh, we were, as the county grows, we're benefited with more funds, but,

uh, you can tell where we've are putting our money right now. We are really desperately telling the council, we want to have more buildings. So, in order to kind of start the seed, as you want to call, put the seed money in, this is the first year we're actually starting a building and renovation fund, and we're funding that with over a million dollars, which is about 10% of our budget. So, the idea with that fund is when the uh if and when the economic development moves out of the Baxter area, we'll have funds available to immediately renovate that area. though we're talking about some minimal renovation and we're also about talking about having some seed money available that if locations are identified, land needs to be p purchased, we'll have some money to move rather quickly. We are trying to say we're going to look at something in Fort Mill and I tell you every day there's less land available to buy in Fort Mill as you all know. So hopefully that'll be identified and we'll be able to move. Obviously, this is all going to take your approval, but uh we won't be having you say where are we going to get the funds. We also have some money as you know set aside um that's indicated from our not using our full uh allocation over the years. So, we have a little fund there and as you know we have a adequate uh fund balance which also allows us to draw funds. But again, I now want to uh speak for the uh strategic planning committee. Then they'll be presenting obviously something to council when and if the uh time is right. So in conclusion, we are presenting a balanced budget this year of 11,700,000 and thank you for all your support.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Anyone else who who wishes to address the council, you can just move forward. And

thank you, council, for having us tonight. I'm Dean Fail, president and CEO of the York County Chamber of Commerce and Chamber Foundation. Five years ago, I was hired to come in and repivot our organization to focus more on the needs of business specifically as it relates to their economic health and their number one priority, which is finding a sustainable quality and available workforce. So, we began that work with the assistance of council providing us some seed funding over three years, and we've completed that three-year work um to build that model out. that bottle has been um highly successful. On the screen, you can see some outcomes and ROI of that work already. Um we have partnerships with all four of our school districts that we do work with in career um awareness and different I programs. You'll hear Celeste talk about in a minute. We have a partnership with Winthrop University's honors college. We help them spearhead that. Um we were instrumental in bringing Laurel Institute to the Fort Mill TK campus that they have. Um and that's um you can see the property tax collected from them down at the bottom of of of right at $300,000 now and growing. Um we assisted Atrium Health with the York Tech Nursing Pathway and they've hired 29 nurses that are York County residents um already to the um Pineville Hospital through that particular effort. And we see several others. So far the um ROI on that work over the past three years is a $5.6 $6 million of annual wages already created and an annual revenue generated York County's economy of $8 million. From that, we have moved forward with developing a five-year strategic plan and we've provided the packets and y'all have the packets there in front of you um that lay out that five-year plan. Um in that five-year plan, it will allow us to expand the work that we've already begun. So, this is not new work. This is not something that hasn't been tried and

tested. It is simply expanding on the work that we've already created. I'll point out that the model that we have put in place and have begun, we've got communities across the Carolas that are beginning to duplicate or replicate that work. Um the Colombia um metro area and their chamber has hired someone to do similar work. One Spartanberg has hired someone in Spartanberg to do similar work. The Charleston metro has hired someone to do similar work. Wilmington, North Carolina has. And I could go on and on. I point that out because we all know that talent is is the foremost need of every business that's looking to locate here or they're already here.

And if we if we don't do this work and do it well, we're going to lose to the competition. And what I'm proposing to you is to be a part to be a partner with us and help us fund the next five years. Our next five years budget of this work is $300,000 a year. We have twothirds of that already secured and we'd like the county to help us with the other one-third. So, it's a small investment for work that needs to be done in in my opinion. And I'd like for Celeste to go through um some details of that five-year plan so you really kind of understand the scope of the work. So, thank you, Celeste.

Good evening. Um I was here the last few years kind of giving you an update on what we've got going on. It's pretty impressive of how far we have come. So our entire goal uh and purpose for existing through the lily foundation is to bring education, business and workforce partners together to create a high quality sustainable workforce solutions for the entire county. And so we have done that in several different ways. One, looking at advocacy, you know, what are those issues that are surrounding uh the barriers for our workforce to actually be employed? um looking at each individual sector that's important to the county as far as the industries that are coming in and we'll talk about that before we're done. Uh going into companies specifically and having that one-on-one conversation to make sure that they um are able to expand, they have the capacity they need um especially in that human capital piece and then the programming piece. So, we'll talk about those. Just want to give you a little bit of a sample. Um when Dean was kind of talking about working with all the school districts, um there's a lot of people in this space, a lot of partners that we're working with, this is just a sample of the entire ecosystem that we're working with both from state, public, local entities, our K through2, public and private, and then of course our post-secary um training facilities. So there's a lot of people working in this space, and we have we're proudly the conduit that's making a lot of these things happen. Um, I wanted to show you this because when we set out on this journey, we were trying to figure out what is our space in this look like. So, we wanted to make sure that we were looking at it from the suppliers of talent, whoever that might be, um, and the users of talent. This value stream that we've created, uh, we've decided and tried to figure out where do our programmatic work, what are the holes, what fits, what's needed, what are our schools needing help with, what are our employers needing help with, how do we bridge those gaps? And so, we've put this together. I want to be able to show it to you that we're doing programming from the career career or wellness side of things to career exploration and preparedness all the way to the recruitment and retention and onboarding of our employees. So that value stream

we're looking from the beginning when they go into the to the education to get prepared all the way until retirement. Um we've broken Lyft um which is our leadership institute for talent into two components. One being our education partner programs and there's a list of those for you. I will not go through all those for you tonight. I am going to talk about one specifically and that is WOW. Uh WOW is the world of work. Uh as we were working with our middle school counselors and our middle school principles, we were hearing that they were not ready. The students were not ready to go into high school and make that decision on what was that career, what was that path they wanted to go down. As we all know, uh in 8th grade, our students have to do an IGP or an individual graduation plan. But our students had not been able to touch and feel what does the career clusters look like? What does the world of work actually look like? And so we have actually taken this model with their um help and assistance, the guidance counselors, and we have taken a middle school conference to them called the world of work. And what we do is we have based it on the 14 career clusters that the state of South Carolina has adopted. Um this is actually an example that we did at York Middle School. So actually taking it into every single middle school uh in the county. Um, we have already reached over 1,600 middle school students just in the last three months. And so these students are meeting businesses that are in their backyard. So if we're in York, we're working with York businesses. If we're in Clover or Lake, we're working with Clover and Lake Wy businesses. So we want these students to understand it's more than what they can see on TV, what their mom or family member has done, uh, and more than what they drive by. We want them to know what's available, what their options are. Um this will continue into the fall and it will continue into the spring as well. The other piece of this that we've broken into is our talent recruitment and retention. Um that other part of the value stream, Matt, right from onboarding all the way into the retention. Um and so we've been working on this, but I wanted to highlight something that we're going to be focusing on in the fall, which is what we now have the capacity. We've hired

Dylan Bolton um through the funds that we've been able to to raise and your contributions as well um to be able to expand this work. And because of that, we actually are moving into our sector strategy work. So working specifically with our industry partners and understanding what is their needs. What's their demand for talent? What's the supply of talent? How do we create their job descriptions? How do we reach back further into the K through2 and that higher ed pipeline to create that sustainable workforce for them. Uh so some people ask us why the sector strategy? Why is that important to us? Well, it's data driven, right? and it's employerled and so they're making the decisions and they're doing all of the work through a structured process. These are our industry focus areas. So advanced manufacturing, hospitality, health care, our fintech professional services and of course our small businesses and we are launching this and kicking it off in September during workforce development month at our conference talent flow. Okay. All right. Um so that's what I have for you today. Dean, anything additional for us? All right. Perfect. Thank you all so much for listening to us.

Thank you Dean. It's a list. Good evening. Um, I'm Darren Wilson and this is Dr. Christina Dicki from the Rockill School District. Um, I currently serve as an assistant superintendent of operations with the district. Dr. Dicki serves as the student uh, excuse me, assistant superintendent of school performance and accountability.

Um, we're here tonight just to discuss a little bit about um, a hidden gem that's in our district, the Applied Technology Center. Um we are super proud of of what our applied technology center does for the county um and the uh pathway that it leads to uh support our workforce development. Uh our applied technology center uh prepares students for occupational pathways that lead directly into the workforce and I'm going to let Dr. Dicki discuss a little bit about the pathways that we currently have

and the previous pre presentation was the perfect segment to what we wanted to talk about tonight. But as the need for workforce development increases, so does the need for unique learning pathways and course offerings for our students. And in Rockill Schools, our our current offerings and our current needs are already um beyond capacity. We received nearly 30 3,000 requests um to participate in the various courses that are offered at ATC this year. And although we will be expanding our offer offerings by two courses next year, we still have to turn away hundreds of kids just because we don't yet have the capacity to accommodate all of the needs. We know that we want our students to meet the profile of the South Carolina graduate. And in Rock Hill Schools, we want our students to leave not only with a diploma, but with something else, a certification, a credential, um an associates degree. So really making sure that we're providing those opportunities for to make sure that they're college, career, military, and life ready is extremely important to us and that is our commitment. Okay. Um we are very early in the stages of evaluating our capital needs within the district. Um and the new career center would be in that discussion. Um that is one of the things that we are really uh focusing on. Um, our plans would be for that or our goal with that would be for the uh programs to house programs that um are directly in line with the uh York County economic development. Uh, we want to support that as best we can. U, we're not here tonight to ask for anything. We simply want to put this on your radar and make sure that you're aware that the district is in desire of a partnership with York County Economic Development as we move forward and pursue this endeavor. Thank you very much. We appreciate you coming out.

Thank you. Hi. Uh my name is John Lee. I live at 1398 Secret Path Drive for Mill. This is a public hearing. Like I can I'm confused by the the layout. I It's relate it's the budget public hearing relate to our budget.

Okay, perfect. Um, so first I'd like to thank the many dedicated county employees who serve our community every day, often in difficult and dangerous jobs. Uh, the fire departments that are represented behind me, particularly Thank you. The concerns I outline today are not directed at their service, but rather at the tone and leadership coming from the top levels of the county administration. Citizens are tired of watching this county government spend more money while delivering less accountability, less transparency, and a declining quality of life. The budget rollout perfectly captures the problem. It was a 200 It was a polished 200page budget book, but as council chair accurately accurately pointed out last week, this was just the appearance of transparency with none of the actual transparency. The visceral reaction from the public was not caused by a Facebook graphic, nor by a lack of understanding of governmental fund accounting. It was caused by years of destructive decisions and actions that have shattered public trust. Citizens continue watching roads, infrastructure, and core public needs deteriorate while county management devotes their attention and taxpayer funded resources toward the advancement of corporate interests. Throwing more taxpayer money into a dysfunctional government body is not bold or courageous leadership. Without reform, additional funding into this administrative government will only further erode the public's confidence in the governance of York County. At some point, this council has to decide whether it wants to keep managing the chaos or finally confront the bureaucracy that has been weaponized against the very community council claims to serve. I'll conclude with this one simple thought that is shared widely across the community that I live in. Time will not heal the things that

should have never begun. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. So, one of one of the things that we also ask in our public hearings, I neglected to say at the outset, and it is in order for this to be a safe space for anyone to come and express an opinion, whether it's something that is embraced by a large majority of the community or whether it's a single opinion, um, one of the things that's very important to this council is that everyone feel welcome and feel safe to come here and speak. What we'll ask folks to do in that vein is please refrain from um clapping and also refrain from booing. If there if you are here with a group that wants to be recognized, you can certainly say, "Hey, we're here. We have the same message." They can stand up. Um we find that that's just a better way to keep the quorum and um ensure that everyone feels safe. If they have a an opinion that's different than what the majority is here, that's the way we approach that. So, we ask for you to respect that rule. All right. Good evening. I'm Todd Wisner, fire chief of Flint Hill. Um, did you all get a packet from Karen from me earlier? Did you guys receive one?

You talking about it's on on our

They got one. Perfect. Thank you. Um, this request is not because department is failing. Our firefighters show up every day and do outstanding work. We are here because Flynn Hill Fire Department is planning ahead and want to be proactive into the future, coming up with a cooperative partnership with York County. Our goal is simple. As our economy or as our community continues to grow, we want to make sure our emergency services remain strong, reliable, safe, and maintain a level of service our residents expect. All right. Flint Hill Fire Department is one of the fastest growing areas in the county. Um, Flint Hill is not seeking to reduce the service or disrupt community relationships. We are seeking a a cooperative partnership that strengthens long-term stability, firefighter safety, and emergency response capabilities. Our current service area includes approximately 33,000 citizens and over a thousand businesses, both residential and commercial. We are no longer in a lowdensity suburban district. Our response area includes significant vertical heights and high-risisk developments. All right. We protect 42 buildings at over 100,000 square feet. We respond to multiple five-story buildings, over 40 large three-story apartment complexes, manufacturing plants, hotels, and a lot of major regional employers like Carowinds, Black & Decker, Ross, Brightex, and the Schaffler Group. These type of buildings increase emergency risk and require staffing and equipment models similar to that of an urban fire department. Our call volume is continuing to rise. We are the second busiest department in the county with Rockill being the first. In 2024, we responded to 2,886 incidents. In 25, we responded to 3,600 incidents. Basically, we respond to one out of every five incidents in York

County. All right. We also have a 16.5% increase in calls between 24 and 25. All right, put that in perspective. York County Fire has had 10% throughout the whole county. All right, one of the big issues we've had in 25 is we've had both of our engine companies tied up on a call 40 four 463 times. Mean engine one's on a call, a few minutes later, engine two's on the call, and now there's no protection in the district except for mutual aid, which is for fires only. There are no medical backups at that point. All right. This creates a real risk. Delayed responses relying on our mutual aid for district which pulls them out of their area and unit available dispatching. All right. Despite the challenges, we did have four confirmed CPR saves in 25 where those citizens are with their families today. With all this being said, our staffing model has not grown at the same pace as our call volume. All right. Right now, we currently operate with 21 full-time firefighters, 13 part-time firefighters. That's basically on our daily staffing. That's four on one engine, three on the three on another. When we have uh personnel, we will try to put our ladder in service. All right. Our current staffing model relies heavily on overtime, part-time staffing, and operational flexibility, which this model becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as call volume rises and members are taking vacation and calling out sick. The NFPA standard says there should be a minimum of four firefighters on an engine or ladder for response unless you're considered an urban area. Then it's five is recommendation. All right. And they're also recommending that we get 16 firefighters to show up on scene of a normal single family dwelling. Right now Flint Hill is averaging 13 firefighters and ask county mutual aid partners. When we fall below the threshold, it increase both a risk for the citizens and the firefighters responding to the

emergencies, impacts of firefighter safety, rescue capabilities, and overall response effectiveness during the incident. And it also can possibly open us up to legal and liability exposure following any serious incidents. One of the big reasons we are seeking a partnership with the county is funding to staff our ladder in 25 and 26 or 26 and 27. As density increases, arrow apparatus becomes essential. It's not an option no more. Over the past two years, we responded to 14 possible structure fires and did not have a ladder on any of those structure fires with eight of them being apartment complexes. This is not sustainable in a district with multi-story residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. A ladder truck now is not is a is not a luxury item or a shiny tool that's locked up in a bay. it becomes a critical safety piece of equipment. Ladder access saves lives and improves firefighter safety and it also extinguishes fires when we can no longer get a hose line in play. So, what is the uh what has been the road back for this over these this whole time, right? Of course, it's funding. Flint Hill has been capped at a 10 mil cap now for six years. We've only been able to increase our budget with the value of the mill going up. We have maximized local revenue options, but the rising costs of personnel and operational costs cannot be absorbed. Our operational stability is dependent on two things right now. Continue taking money out of fund balance and the direct assistance the county provides us. Our upcoming 2627 operating budget was set for 3 million, which is 91% personnel cost. That's 9% on operating cost. Because our budget's so tight, we requested 260,000 to come out of fund balance. which gave us an operating budget of 3.2 million. You figure in the $144,000 that we get at direct assistance, we're looking at a $3.4 million budget, which now we've increased our operating cost

to 20%. So we're looking at 80% personnel, 20% operating cost. All right, which is not sustainable. Again, this is not a sustainable financial structure for growing district and leaves little flexibility for future staff growth. So, as a county partnership, it's not just about funding. The proposal is about efficiency, consistency, and sustainability. A cooperative partnership would stabilize long-term funding, improve our staffing reliability, enhance firefighter and public safety, and reduce administrative duplication. All right. Right. So administrative services that we have to provide right now are HR, we provide payroll, we provide benefits, we are the IT, we are the risk management. And all this takes away from us being leaders in the department and focusing on the vision and the strategic plan. As a fire department, we do all those things ourselves. Last year, we spent $10,000 in payroll. All right? It would be nice to have HR, but the cost of providing HR is astronomical. So, we're using tax dollars to pay for payroll. Might have to look at tax dollars to pay for HR to give us protection. I am not an expert when it comes to all the FLSA rules, FMLA rules, disability rules, all those things that I need to know. All right. So, again, having HR experts helps prevent exposure to legal and liability issues again like the FMLA and FLSA laws. With a county partnership, what we'll see is faster and more consistent response times, better coverage during simultaneous calls, lot safer operations, long-term service sustainability. But kind of in my closing, I want to emphasize that this proposal about planning ahead, protecting our community, and supporting the people who respond to emergencies. Flint Hill Fire Department has served this area's dedication and professionalism for many years. Our firefighters are well trained, highly skilled, and committed to the people who

live and work here. The the request is not because the department is failing. It's because the community is growing faster and becoming more complex than our current structure was designed support. We're responding to the significantly more emergency calls, protecting larger and taller buildings, and dealing with risk that simply did not exist years ago. At the same time, we are operating within financial limits that make long-term sustainability a challenge. A cooperative partnership with York County offers a stable, responsible solution. It reduces duplication, improves coordination, and allows emergency services to be planned and funded in a way that is consistent with countywide growth. It also improves firefighter safety, ensures the public receives reliable emergency response when they need it most. For residents, it's important to be clear about what does and does not change. Flint Hill will still serve the citizens in the district and still have control the day-to-day. The firefighters responding to emergencies remain the same dedicated professionals as they are today. The commitment to this community does not go away. It just becomes stronger and more sustainable with a cooperative partnership. What changes our ability to meet future demands. Staffing becomes more reliable. Equipment and resources are planned for long-term needs rather than short-term fixes. Emergency response becomes more coordinated across the county, especially during large or complex incidents. Growth brings opportunity, but it also brings responsibility. Ensuring that public safety keeps pace with that growth is essential. This proposal is about protecting lives, supporting firefighters, and making thoughtful decisions that will benefit this community for years to come. Thank you for your time, your consideration, and your support of the public safety of York County.

Thank you, sir. Good evening. My name is Taylor Thomas. I'm from Pathways Community Center, 424 Kills Avenue, Rockill, South Carolina. Thank you for your time tonight. Um, for those not familiar with Pathways, Pathways is a 8-year-old nonprofit organization um that is in Rock Hill, but serves all of York County. On our campus, we have 16 independent nonprofits that are all working together to serve those in need in our community. Just last year, we served 7,000 residents of the county. 24,000 bags of grocery, 19,000 hot meals were provided, 140 people were housed thanks to the collaboration that happens on our campus. And what makes Pathways special is truly the collaboration on our campus that makes it happen. Um, by all the things that are happening, we're reducing um duplication of efforts. So, our partners are working together and they agree not to provide a service that another partner is doing. We're making the life easier for the guests that we serve. We're one place to go that meets most of their needs and we can help guide them and direct them. They're not having to traverse the county to find the resources um that they need. But also, we're saving the county um funds that when folks are not in the ER, when they're not in jail, when they're not needing the services of other folks, um we're also s cost savings um to them as well. In our model, um, we are one big campus on a hundred-year-old school building, um, Weston Elementary School. And over the past eight years, we've invested 2.2 million into upgrading that building. But unfortunately, a hundred-y old building still has its challenges. And last fall, uh, we had a sewer line that went down in December. It was emergency situation, and we had to come out of our reserves $150,000 to replace one sewer line from a terracotta pipe that had give up its life. We now have that same situation approaching us again

and don't have the ability in our reserves to do that again. And so tonight, we're asking for consideration for a one-time help of a campaign project on campus, a capital project to help us meet that need that serves so many in our county uh in our community. We're just thankful for the council's support. We don't receive any funds from the county council, but we do receive it from several of you that support us directly. So, we're grateful for that support. Um, but just all the impact that we have on our campus truly changes the lives and those in our community and so many of our these 16 nonprofits are depending on our building operating to be able to provide services. So, we'd greatly appreciate any support. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. I'm Arthur Black from here, excuse me, from here in York, which I refer to as the center of the universe. And um I'm representing the Yorkville Agricultural and Education Society and we're looking to raise and build and restore a local 120 acres. And I have with me Kristen Kund. She is a Clemson extension person and she has 700 kids and she's brought a contingency of them here tonight to see how government works. So, um I'm going to turn this over to her and we've got a video and I think it'll be pretty explanational for all of you.

All right, before we get started, I did want to recognize those who are here with us. So, if you're here to support this project, if you'd stand or step forward. Um, we have Yeah, that get up. There you go. Perfect. Um, the Yorkville Agriculture and Education Society is here, members of the 4, members of the Soil and Water Conservation DIS District, local churches, local police officers, the Nation Ford Land Trust, Clemson Extension, FFA, the York County Arts Council, the York County Beekeepers Association, the Farm Bureau, local farms, local businesses, and a lot of people in our community. This project is imp impacting a lot of individuals and not just our 4ers and I just want to make sure that you're aware of there's a ton of support going on for this project. So, the Yorkville Agriculture and Education Society seeks to acquire the York Place property and transform it into a strategic hub that honors the legacy of York County's agricultural heritage, expands public education opportunities, strengthens the local economic resilience, and enhances the rich history of the culture and region. Um, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Once this is gone, we won't be able to to preserve it again. Um, and we're looking to really expand agricultural education, promote sustainability, um, and economic development and align it with the York County comprehensive plan and y'all's goals around the rural preservation, public recreation, workforce development, and balanced growth. And I will note that I was not supposed to give the presentation. Miss Brenda was prepared to be here. Um, but unfortunately she had a family in emergency and I found out this morning that I was giving the presentation. So bear with me. Um we are looking for uh to grow this property in a sustainable way with a shared vision. Um we're managing our growth responsibly while protecting the exceptional resources that we already have um and preserving the unique character of York County. Um we do want to kind of mirror what the

green space that we see in Fort Mill um and we see in Rock Hill, but the city of York doesn't have anything like that. So to have 120 acres inside the city limits for the the constituents who live in this area um will be really really awesome and it's a huge opportunity for us to reach those outside of the county to come in here on the western side as well. Um York County's growth is largely concentrated on the east side. So this will kind of be on the western side. Um and it's just a really really cool project. So I want to show you some more about it. So if you look around um we're experiencing a lot of growth and whether you're positive growth or negative growth whatever you believe it's happening and everybody can see it and because of that um we are losing a lot of our green space in our farmland that um get children outdoors get veterans outside. We um have a partnership with the veteran the fishing with veterans um so I don't know if they're society but the fishing with veterans um and they they come out and can um fish on our pond and we're super excited to just see all the people that this project can impact um here in the city. Um okay so this is what it looks like. It provides an a unique opportunity to strengthen tourism um bringing existing sites at Kings Mountain and historic Brattonville um and supporting local businesses in York's growing downtown. Um so it gives us an anchor point for agriculture, education, and ecoourism, filling the gap that currently exists west of Rock Hill. Currently, for the past almost two years, the 4 has been using the property and we're the only ones really on the property. Um, and we have 740 kids now in our program. Um, that is almost four times what any other county in South Carolina has. So, we have a lot of kids enjoying these programs who need a

space. Um, we this will also hopefully be a statewide footprint for the Clemson Extension um allowing them to grow into maybe a bigger space where they can host regional meetings. Um, Clemson Extension does have uh research centers across the state, but we don't have anything in this area. So, there's a gap in what Clemson Extension is providing that we can um help with. And we uh plan to use the facility to its full potential, but being strategic in the growth in what we're doing, making sure those who are coming onto the campus are mission-minded with us um to promote agriculture, education, and community. So, imagine for a second when you step onto the property at uh when the sun is rising that there's a farmers market that opens up for the community to come in and get fresh produce. Um then around 8:00 the preschool that's STEM focused opens up. Um the child development center is there for our children to um learn and grow and um eventually go into school. And then then we have seniors who are coming onto the property to enjoy maybe an exercise um class or maybe bingo or just gardening. Um and that happens around 10:00 and then maybe we have a fitness class. Then in the afternoon, the Clemson extension will provide um programs such as the master gardeners or the um we can work with the beekeepers or we do rural health and diabetes classes. So those kind of educational opportunities could be offered. And then um we will also have opportunities for afterchool care as well. So we have a gymnasium and a couple other buildings where kids will come after they're done with school and continue being able to enjoy the property. And the nice thing is that this already exists on the property. Some of y'all have been there. It's

wonderful. Um and so all we really need to do is purchase it and then um just kind of refurbish and paint some walls and things. So if you've been out there, you know it's 120 acres, 16 buildings. Um it was a Kings Mountain Military Academy turned into an orphanage uh and for the Episcopal Church and then a home for the emotionally challenged children. And then since 2015, it seems like nothing's been going on. Um, and in the past two years, 4 has kind of used it. Um, we have we are putting it in a conservation easement. So, a big about 80 acres of the property will go into a conservation easement and will never be developed. We're hoping to add some trails, maybe a picnic shelter around the pond, um, but an opportunity for our community to get outside and do green space. And then the other like 15 acres or so is developed currently, but we're going to strategically place people in the buildings that align with our mission um and maybe develop something that would benefit the community eventually, but um really not looking to develop anything, just kind of preserve what we have. So um I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Arthur Black to finish us up. Yeah. This has been a um journey for all of us. It's uh we've talked the upstate um Episcopal dascese into selling us the property for $4 million, which is a real buy. And u when we got started with them, we didn't know what fund raising was all about, but we we are learning pretty quickly now. Um, we have once we get it purchased, that's when the imaginations can start

for this deal that it's going to be for our community, for young people, older people, and all in between and folks that have a lot of interest in uh how things used to be in York. I'm a fifth generation farmer here here in York and I I take a lot of interest in this. Um it will enhance the minds of all the many people that are coming to York and York County. And as said before, we can't stop that. But we we'd like to enhance the growth. Let's make this a place that that more people that are coming in can say this is home. This is your this is the center of the universe. And with y'all's help and the uh restoration of uh $800,000 or a million dollars or $2 million if you we could find it. We think we can get all this done and we really appreciate your interest, your time and your effort and helping us get this project going. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. My name is Peter McVain. I live at 907 Lake Drive and I have the good fortune to be the chair of the Newport Fire Tax Board and I'm here to address the rural fire tax millage increase that was requested and apparently it was one mill and it's been cut in half. Uh you heard Todd from Flint Hill. A lot of what he has to say pertains to every single fire department in this county. There are 16 volunteer fire departments. They're all dependent on outside funding. Some of it has to come from the county, some comes from the state. Other donations and then of course we have the tax boards for several of the departments. Newport fire department is the one against about which I can speak. Our current chief, Carl Faulk, has been with that department for 55 years. If you want to talk about dedication, that's an excellent example of it. We would not be where we are with the service that we provide today without his dedication. We have an ISO class of four that helps tremendously with everyone in the Newport Fire Tax District with our fire insurance rates. Requirements for the fire department, whether it be medical or emergency services, trees down are going up every day, every month. It increases our cost. It increases the cost for all the rest

of the departments in the county. We happen to be one of the fastest growing counties in the country. We're part of the fastest growing state in the country. Because of that, I don't believe that we can rely on increased businesses and increased assessments with new houses and new housing going in in terms of building the county budget. I think it's time that we have to face as all of us that the county has to raise taxes here and there doesn't have to be drastic but without raising the taxes it is going to become drastic. Right now the rural tax millage increase was one that represents something akin to $20 a year for a $500,000 house. Pardon me. Yeah. If you look at a million dollar house, it's $40. And a million half dollar house, it's 60. $60 a year is the cost of a cup of Starbucks a month. If you cut that in half, it's half a cup of Starbucks a month. It's nothing in my opinion in terms of an increase. And yet it will go a long ways towards providing equipment and services for this county in terms of fire support. We have a fire services department that is rapidly changing has been increasing in its capabilities and its approach for the last year and a half two years with new county management. I do believe that it's time for all of

us to realize that taxes can go up, but they don't need to go up drastically. If you look at the potential of fire services going down and the ISO rating going higher in numbers instead of staying stable or lower, it means increased fire insurance for people and that's going to be a great deal more than $60 a year if your fire insurance goes up. We all know that our insurance rates have gone up drastically. I think as you look around, if you look at River Hills, they've had to turn over their emergency services to the county and Pedmont to provide them. They could no longer afford it. I ask that you consider replacing the 1 mil increase for the rural fire tax budget. I think it's drastically needed. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Good evening, Andy Clinton with Busy York County. Uh oh, there he is. He's being really good. I promised him a uh a milkshake if he stayed quiet. So, he's he he's doing pretty good right now. Um just wanted to say first off, just appreciate y'all support. You guys know who I am, know our organization, know it pretty well. I've sent you guys presentations, our annual report. Many of you were at our taste of tourism event. Um, so appreciate you guys, appreciate Josh. I think the the great thing about tourism, our organization, is that you can really see the the beauty of it. And it actually happened this past weekend. Um, we're for Mother's Day. My my wife, she had to figure out where all we were going. We went to we start off at Black's Peaches. While we were there, we saw a baseball team. Um, had to Google them, see where they're from. Youth baseball team. They're coming from Bluffton, South Carolina. They were here for a tournament. So, you and my eyes are always open. I'm tourism right in front of my eyes, right? Um, from there, we go to Carowinds, see the same thing where we see multiple basketball teams at Carowinds and they were here for a tournament. So, it's great to always see that. I was actually going to point out a few people uh here, but they already left. but you had three different people with our destination guide. So, I was gonna point that out as well. Um, so it's really cool to actually, you know, it's one thing for me to just share numbers with you and talk about page views and sessions, but I'm visually seeing the impact of what we're doing. Um, so once again, just want to say appreciate you guys, appreciate Josh. Um, I'm starting to see some of these dots connecting between us and York County, whether that's the government side, whether it's with Lisa, whether it's with Mission Economic Development,

Katherine Jones, and Parks and Rec. But I'm seeing that synergy take place with all those organizations. So, it's really cool to see see some of that taking place. Um, that's it for me. So, we're going to go and grab a milkshake. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I'm going with it. Need a milkshake. Good evening. Um, my name is Adrienne Woods. I'm from Safe Passage. And before I start a little bit, we have a short one minute video for you all. Um

in the next 60 seconds, a child will be hurt and no one will see it. A sexual assault may happen and the person won't know where to turn. A home will become unsafe behind closed doors. Someone will need help and not know where to go. But they don't have to face it alone. There is a safe place. There are people who will listen. There are people who will act.

What happens next depends on us. safe passage. There is hope in 2026. With you, for you. Donate, volunteer, be the difference.

And I have a handout for you. I did not get it to Karen beforehand, but it talks about our stats and what we have been able to accomplish in. And we could not have done that without the county council. Honestly, um I think I've told you this before, but when I talk to our sister agencies within this state, those organizations that provide domestic violence services, that provide sexual assault services, and that provide that access advocacy center, most of them don't receive county funding. And we all understand that it's the constituents in this county that need that funding, that need those supports, that need therapy, that needs advocacy. You'll see in this report that we served over seven um 714 children in our child advocacy center, which means that seven 714 children may have been abused or neglected. We provided 378 forensic interviews. Our numbers have continually climbed each year. Um, I estimate that we've seen a 15% increase and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse and neglect seeking services. Last year in York County alone, we provided services to 939 identified residents. When I say identified residents, there are some who won't identify the county, the city, anywhere, anything about their address. And people may find that strange, but it's a safety mechanism. If you're fleeing from domestic violence, if you're fleeing from sexual assault, you do not want your perpetrator to know where you live. Federal laws allow us, well, tell us. We cannot ask them. We cannot force them to provide that

information. So I actually think if we're being as 939 who've identified themselves as being a York County resident, it's probably closer to 1300. Honestly, 1300 residents who needed services and who received services last year. We provided over 12,458 services. That's staggering. Oftentimes I will come before you and tell you the stats for South Carolina. that one in three women during their lifetime will experience some type of intimate partner violence and that one in four men. And when we talk about intimate partner violence, we're talking about stalking, harassment, emotional abuse, physical abuse, rape, sexual assaults. I can give you some of the stats from the county. If you go to SLED's website, their TOPS um program in last year, law enforcement, York County Sheriff's Department responded to 802 cases of domestic violence. Statistics show that the majority of people who are victims, men and women, will not call law enforcement. They won't do it. That 82 cases of domestic violence does not include what happened in Rock Hill, Fort Mill, any of the local police departments. Those stats are there, but I pulled out just your county. There were 59 cases of sexual assault and 82 cases of family violence where juveniles were injured, seven cases of intimate partner violence for juveniles. And those are just the statistics. The numbers bear out the fact that we need services in this county and we need for those services to continue. I've listed some of our challenges and our achievements, but

what I really want to focus on is the fact that our constituents need services and services should not cost them. It shouldn't cost you $1,000 or $500 or 150 per session for a therapist to help you deal with the trauma that you've experienced. Victims should not have to pay for those services and we don't charge them. We don't charge them for anything. We were able to house in our emergency shelter last year 141 adults and children. What does that look like? That means you're coming in because you have nowhere else to go. and that your life may depend on it. There are statistics that show emergency shelters, rapid rehousing programs actually sla saves lives of survivors and that's just not men. I just not women, excuse me. We we actually serve men as well. On average, a shelter resident will stay 13 days. Some stay longer. And I'm going to end on this because not only do we do all these amazing things, and I'm biased. I'll admit I'm biased, but it's important. It means that we will stop generational problems on the front end. If we can get a child in counseling, last year we provided 403 child counseling sessions for free. We provided 688 adult counseling sessions for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse so that they could move forward and heal and that they would have someone who could do that with them. I don't if you have any questions for me, but I'm going to end on that note that we have seen progress. Um, we do it and we do it well. I will

put us up against and that's the competitive part of me. put us up against any other um domestic violence, sexual assault or child abuse program in this state and it's here located in York County. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you.

Hello, I'm Charles Palmer Fire Department. I'm a volunteer captain there. I'm also sitting on the board remember to talk about the partnership with the county some of the benefits that we see the reason why we moved that way. One of the main thing is what can we give to our community and give to our firefighters as we know I can tell you less than a year ago I stood right here and took an ult and told you I'm going to do the best I can to protect our community. Well, I feel this program is the best we can do. What it does it it opens up benefits to the firefighters and it also supplies faster times to the events the fire getting the apparatus out the door. The other thing it brings it brings community to the fire station. Last year alone we did 62 events where we brought the community in. The community needs to learn about the fire system. They do that through paid firefighters and volunteers. We are both we work together. Uh one thing that we have done and that we see the benefit is by the challenge of getting firefighters. There's not a fire lieutenant captain chief will tell you it's not a challenge to get a firefighter in your fire station because we all have different pay scales. So it is a competitive market to get your firefighters in the station. One thing that the county brings is a consistency down their future down the road. Consistency pay scale and a progression to each staff from being an engineer to a lieutenant to a captain to a chief. They have programs and training that will bring to us. We have an HR department, which I'm not an HR person, let me tell you. I've had some issues. So, what it brings is the HR. It brings a professional legal that trains us. It helps us keep our firefighters there. The gold is to be on be out there and protect our citizens. And that's I think sometimes forget how much is a valuable citizen worth. So, the worst thing that you can ever have is a piece of equipment apparatus in your firehouse and no one to put in it. And sometime that happened in our earlier we have great volunteers. I'm

one of them. But we all don't drive the apparatuses. So we had new equipment sitting there. They can't get out the door. By combining and working with the comm the county and being a volunteer fire station, you now have the best situation you can have. We're out the door and we're out the door 247. Our plan is to add three firefighters around the clock. We have successfully done that so far. We have openings, but to draw in firefighters, we need to partner with the county and bring in the benefits that you have to bring in the top-notch firefighters. And as this program matures and we balance out the pay and there's a progression area, all firefighters will be paid the same. There will be not that competition anymore because it's hard to get a good firefighter out there because they're all good. So, with that, that's I'm going to keep this short. Uh, as we know, Beth has now broke over a thousand calls. We did 1,60 last year. We're on target to break it again. Uh, we are experiencing more and more houses going up. Uh, getting through the area is is hard. Roads, uh, sometimes people look at the siren, but they don't move to the side. Uh, but what the county can bring, I'm gonna stay focused on that. That brings us the ability to give our community the best fire service you can have. And that's what it's about. When you lay your head on that pillow, who's going to come? And I'll tell you with this program, the firefighters I know have met through the counties, you can do that. But this program will help us even more. So, thank you.

Thanks, sir.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the council. Um, we want to thank the council for always being supportive of the fire service. Y'all got a hard job and I wouldn't want nothing to do with it. Um, it's hard for me to stand up here and say what I want to say with all fire departments has been before me. Um, I'm not coming up here with my hands out asking for anything. I'm just going to tell you the honest truth. A lot of people don't want to hear it. Communication is a big concern. County has never had a meeting with all tax districts together at one time. This has been oneonone divide and conquer approach leads to distrust and rumors. Some fire departments offered things but others not at all. It is open is it is not open and transparent made known to all Newport Fire Department. And I do want to make one correction. I might have misunderstood my tax chairman. I've been a member of Newport for 55 years, not 65. Fire department hadn't been organized but 72 years. But uh I've been around a long time. I've seen a lot, done a lot. But to get to where we are today, we followed one of the fire departments in the county was Flint Hill. They was the first to get a special tax district. We seen what it could do. We got out and got one. When we got our tax district, could we see what the county was going to be at that time? No, we couldn't. Uh but in the meantime, we rebuilt station one and built three

brand new substations with very little money that we had. We have bought as many as 10 trucks of our own uh and replace from time to time. Um kind of have to take steps one at a time. You can't jump out here, leap frog, and jump and do what you think you need to do. You have to slow down sometimes on the money you got. But the first I ever heard of my fire department was nonsense. the wrong place was when I heard the manager say on WHI radio last week that there has never been any information from the county to me to that effect. You would think I would know this before it's advertised to the whole county. We never seen a plan as to how to get unified service, let alone have we had a meeting together to help work uh through this. I mean, it shocked me with some of the neighbors that call wanted to know what's going on with Newport Fire Department. I said, I don't know. Uh yes, we're being overwhelmed by growth. Um, I wish there was something that y'all could do about it. I know uh some of you's been to the state. Um, but we really need to stop annexation because no matter how much you prepare a budget, city comes in and annexes, you lose that money. The fire department loses that money. I have been told from past managers in the county that the city is supposed to recoup the money that we lose.

They supposed to give it back to us. But one of the county managers uh was an assistant county manager and she got to working on 3 months passed. I went back to her and asked her how it came. He said, "I was told to keep my mouth shut." So that tells me there's something to it. Um, and that's what a lot of departments in the county are facing is annexation. The rural fire advisory board asked for a copy of the line item budget for rural fire and we never got it. We asked for it and never received it until it was posted online uh that we got the line item budget. It's not fair or transparent to offer some districts more than others. I'm sure all fire departments could use free staff paid for by the rural fire tax that answers to the fire chief that has never been offered or discussed. I imagine every single fire department would want and need that. How is this fair and sustainable? Y'all going to start hiring firemen to cover this fire, this county, you better get in your pockets real deep. I'm talking about millions of dollars. But my main question is, you got western departments that don't get as much as the center departments. How do you take money out of the rural fire tax that everybody pays but municipalities? How do you take that money out of the rural fire program and hire firemen to put somewhere else? Because you take from every fire department when you do that. and the western side. Uh, sure they not

growing like everybody else, but growth going to come because once Newport fills up, York's already filling up. Where's it going? It's going to the western side. They going to need more money, too. But how do you take out the rural fire tax and give to one department? when the special tax districts was created to do over and beyond what the county can do for us. That's what the rule of fire tax is for. Special fire taxes, excuse me. That's what the special fire tax is for these departments. Yes, we going to need to do a referendum and we working on getting our information together to do it because it's over and beyond what the county can supply. But now, if y'all got all this money, my hands up, I'm reaching out. Fill it. I want it. You go give the one. Let's give it to all. No matter how many calls they answer. If it's 75 or it's 3,000, they all deserve the same thing. We've had an equipment plan, replacement plan for years and it was rocking along good. Uh we got to the point we was down to one fire truck a year. Fire chiefs voted against one of the county managers several years back. council had a plan done. The study showed that we had too many firet trucks in this county. What happened? County quit buying fire trucks. So now we're playing catchup trying to buy them.

Um but we don't have an updated policy at this time on replacement. We need to have that in writing and justify so all can understand it. Um, what is the criteria to be met to get staffing help from the rural fire tax? We would like to know that and it is transparent to all. Like I say, I've been in fire service 55 years. I love it. I've seen a lot, done a lot, a lot of things I don't care to talk about. Uh, but we all got to come together. That's the only way we can make this thing work. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Hey everybody, Scott Cook, 122 West Oak Street in beautiful Whiteville Park neighborhood in downtown Fort Mill. Anyway, I'm here and u uh I just don't know what to say. I don't know how months ago you did not direct staff. There will be no tax increases. Uh so this is not staff's issue. Uh staff performed what they were designed to do. Council should have directed staff. It's an election year, y'all. There is no tax increases and staff could have performed their duties. So you have wasted their time. You've wasted our money by not directing staff correctly months ago. And then to sit here at the last meeting and not inform staff what was coming at them. Disgraceful. It's disgraceful how they were treated. It's just not how things work. I mean, there's no way that you can accept that that that you can I mean, you just threw that on them that how how are you going to manage that? It was um man, I've sat through 25 years of this and I have never ever seen uh staff being treated this way. That's along that line. So staff, I appreciate everything y'all done. I hate we've wasted your time. Wasted our taxpayer money on that. So that's how I feel about it. I do support the fire districts uh coming in for us. I support impact fees. Impact fees are growth paying for growth. We're getting fire districts in downtown Fort Mill. You know how we're getting them? Impact fees, not raising taxes. But that's what we need to do. Look at that kind of stuff. But staff, once again, I feel sorry for y'all that you wasted your time like that. So, thank you for your time. Carrie Bishop, Rockill, uh, stop giving companies like New Indie, QTS, and Silab

a 4% tax. Okay, they were at least paying six. we wouldn't have to cut the budget of these fine gentlemen or do impact fees. Millions and billions of dollars these companies make and we just let them keep it while we pay the difference while they pay the difference in suffering and not having benefits and things like that. It's a little ridiculous in my mind. Or better yet, they can pledge their investment now, give the money at the budget meeting, and we won't have to cut somebody's budget in half for the very departments that are going to respond if there's a catastrophic event at these facilities with all their chemicals, with all their servers, all this other BS. Okay. Thanks. There anyone else who wishes to address council? in the public hearing. Seeing no one moved, do we have a motion to

motion to close public hearing? Second. Motion and a second to close public hearing. Any discussion?

All those in favor say I. I. Any opposed? Hearing? None. The public hearing is closed. So folks, just so I'll reiterate the process today is not a day that council um debates or or determines any any item. We don't vote on anything. Um we will after that we'll take a quick break and then we'll resume with the county workshop where the council will have the opportunity to ask questions um in that forum. We will also not be taking any action. Um all of this was to receive information from the public through the public uh hearing process. So we do appreciate everyone coming out. Um as far as the public hearing is concerned, that is the only item of business that was for this special called meeting. So, do we have a motion to adjurnn?

Motion to adjurnn. Second. Motion and a second to adjurnn. All in favor say I. I. We are adjourned. At this time we'll take a 5minut break before our workshop.

Um, I will call to order the May 12th, 2026 County Council workshop. We are starting an hour and a half later than we normally do, but we appreciate um folks who were here to watch the workshop. Again, this is um this is an opportunity for council to uh ask questions about matters related to the budget and budget uh followup. This is not uh this is not the venue or the proper place for folks to debate issues or to make motions or to take action. We don't do that in this particular uh venue. All that we do is is ask questions and um get information. Uh is there anything that the management wishes to say before the process that I think is the best way to allow this to move forward is if there are questions and I know that a lot of us h have been asking questions individually. Um I think the manager suggested that everyone who had questions send them collectively and that he would share with share them uh with the whole council. Um but

I also have have asked questions u myself that I have sent um certainly there's that opportunity before we have second reading which will be Monday um to have second reading on the budget then uh let's see the way we're going to approach this is uh we'll allow each council member the floor to ask any questions that they want to ask or to follow up on that they don't believe that they've been uh able to get addressed before now or in other documents. And I think that's going to be the easiest way for us to approach that.

So, I actually have slides that answer all of y'all's questions that you've asked me since the last meeting. So, staff, we're prepared to go through answer your questions and have a conversation. So, so Madam Chair, uh I think what we heard at the at the first reading was four of you all very clearly share what what you want to see and and that was the first time that I had heard that. But what we as staff has tried to do is listen to y'all uh and then think about how do we come back and and share uh answers to your questions that inform a discussion to prepare us all for second reading. What I really hope is that at second reading, uh, we're able to answer these questions in advance and council as a whole can collaborate and talk through ideas that you have so that we can give y'all the information you need, uh, at second reading before it happens. And so, uh, one of the things I wanted to do is hearken back to August of last year. And I gave each of you this one pager when I met with you one on- one. And it talks about the key things for the year. And these are things that y'all told me were key things for the year. And they include everything we've been talking about at each of our meetings starting in February at the retreat through the workshops, which are it's all about fire. It's all about roads. Uh it's it's about utilities and capital projects. And as staff, we've worked all year on developing ideas to solve those problems. And that is why that's been such a crucial part to all these conversations throughout the year. the utility fund. Uh and and this is really where I I want to start the conversation and the motion. Uh you all reduced the rates of the utility fund. Uh the utility fund is an enterprise fund. The rates were were developed at that level to pay for the cost for next year. Uh we wanted to give y'all some feedback on what's included so we could

have a back and forth and answer y'all's questions. And so Eric uh Reett, our uh interimm assistant manager of infrastructure is going to share a little bit more about the utility rate increases and the impact uh not having those increases have uh on the fund.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Manager, and thank you council for uh giving us this opportunity to further explain these uh recommendations. Um so essentially the the rates as they are now are unsustainable to fund both capital projects and ongoing on and m um really so we we we have a fund balance or a net position in this in this fund and is decreasing that fund is it's an audited unrestricted fund balance at the end of fiscal year 25 of $21.5 million that fund is used to provide the funding for capital projects. So, we're doing we're aggressively um managing a number of projects currently and now we're going into the next year where we have a number of studies that are going to help us define a new 10-year capital plan like we've discussed um over this past year. Um this this capital plan is going to address capacity aging infrastructure compliance issues across the board and ultimately without any adequate increases we will not be able to fund projects going into fiscal year 28. Um we're pretty much at capacity in terms of our fund balance going through this next year in 27. So we really got started thinking about planning for the future with that. Um, slide

that. Can you get back these slides? Were these? This is the first time I've seen these slides. I just want to make sure. Were these sent to council before just now? No, we just got them done right before this meeting. Okay. I think that's one of one of the issues that I think is is a little bit difficult is is when questions get asked being provided information at a meeting instead of getting it ahead of the meeting. But I I do want to ask you this one question. Um you said that there's studies that will identify the new 10-year capital plan. Correct. Is that what studies are those?

So we have a our system is set up in east and west and then water and sewer. So we have an eastern sewer study, eastern water study, western sewer study, western water study, and one additional study that is specifically for Little Alice and Force Main which is the last on the western side that sends all waste water to the city of Rock Hill. In addition to the studies regarding the system, we are also in the process of a uh rate study as well. When do you expect that rate study to be done?

The rate study will be done uh winter of this year, late fall, winter of this year. And and we know that likely the rate study will recommend potentially three years of of increases. So, one of the things we're trying to do with this increase is get out ahead of a little bit uh and and make sure that those three years of increases aren't as high as they potentially would be if we didn't do this. Go ahead, Eric.

Okay. Uh, additionally, like I said, the the rates really don't fund our reoccurring O and M costs as well. Um, as with anything, there's increased material and labor labor costs coupled with our aging infrastructure and capacity issues. Um, essentially, uh, insufficient rates will decrease in services. Really not an option that we want to explore. Um, we have these these services are the leak repairs that we are out there doing every day. Um, addressing sanitary sewer overflows or capacity issues. Um and really any decrease in service would be a decrease in preventative maintenance and that's the last thing that we want to do uh with this system because we're trying to advance forward. Um couple that with the 8% raw kill sewer increase that was also proposed. Um so ultimately the just looking at the numbers a reduction up two to 3% for water and sewer from what was proposed the six and 10 will equal a two uh $2.5 million loss of revenue um resulting in both cap capital and on&m decreases. We'll have to find ways to decrease that out of the budget. Um so what really what we were trying to do knowing that we're finishing these studies, knowing that um we're having this rate study done that early projections show us it's going to result in significant rate increases to fund uh this future capital and future ongoing on&m trying to start with an incremental rate change here uh versus large infrequent increases that occur multiple years you know at a time and that's kind of displayed in this in this chart. chart right here. The important thing to look at the chart on the left is if you our last rate study was finished in 2017 and we implemented rates in 2018. So prior to that study um I don't remember the exact date but I don't think we had

raised rates since 2004. Uh so we come out of that rate study with if you look York County had increase rates for water at 25% and 29% for sewer. We're trying to alleviate that coming out of the next rate study um just to alleviate that shock and start to incrementally um add those increases in. If you look since then we've mostly for the most part only increased based on the Rockill pass through of their increased uh water and sewer treatment rates. Now, there's some small anomalies in there, but largely we really only had that pass through for a number of years leading up until this year where they're proposing 8% and we're doing 10 on sewer and six on water was our original proposal. Um, looking at the other two charts, I think it's important just to show the the impact on the customer. Um the the top chart is the uh 6% and 10% um including also the base fees uh increase that you have a low medium high usage average usage. So those are your impacts. Uh the medium being a $12 $12.7 impact monthly. So about $144 a year and the 3% um conversely is at the bottom in the bottom chart. And last, I really want to show um this is a rate comparison amongst all the other utility providers within York County. So, it's mostly the municipalities. And if you I'm sorry this is busy, but if you address the bottom of this, it shows that same low, medium, and high usage. Uh anything in yellow is where our rates are still less

than those. Um, so with the exception of Rock Hill inside, who they obviously treat their own water and we buy our water and sewer service from, uh, we are and the Clover Inside, we are less than, um, our neighboring partners. So, and and just to we printed this for you all so it's in your folder so you can see it better, but this is important. This is what happens when you don't consistently raise rates. Others in our region have consistently raised rates. We haven't. So, we're behind and our fund balance shows it. That's going to prohibit us from making capital investments. When we look at it, it's really in 28 2028 that we have problems affording some of the capital investments we need to. So, at that point, you're left to uh to debt to fund this work. And I think that's where we're going towards if we if we don't uh raise rates. Uh we're going to have to raise rates just to pay for the debt. Uh but um you know this is a function of we no longer have the fund balance to do to act like a pay as you go uh utility.

Can we maybe maybe what we need to do is is is allow each council member instead of waiting till the end. Let's let's let's talk about the rate study and we'll let each council member ask some questions before we get I don't typically jump ahead but I do want to ask a couple of questions. So basically what what council's been advised is that city of Rockill this year has has proposed 0% on their water and um they've proposed 8% increase on their water I mean their sewer. Is that correct? Okay. Um and what the county proposed was that 6% water incur in rate increase. Is that right? Yes. And you proposed 10% which would be 2% more than what the pass through would be for the sewer. Is that right?

Yes. And so, so clearly, you know, addressing the the pass through piece is is has to be done. But I guess just to clarify where we are, um the county requested that increase. Um 6% is actually the increase on water and you're asking for a 2% increase on top of the pass through for Rockill for the sewer. Correct. Okay. The the and the rate study is not going to be done until winter. Correct. All right. For the next budget year. Yes. Okay. Uh has there been a rate study that's been done before now? No. Okay. Um I also understand

that's what led to the big increase. So the the last rate study was done what year? 17. 17. So that's that was right. But there hasn't been a I guess I'm asking there hadn't been a rate study that y'all done since 2017. So we're our rate study is going to be done in in winter of this year. Okay. The other increase request was to increase the base. Uh basically every every water user gets charged a base rate um per month like a flat charge. And y'all requested to increase that to

2.47 uh $247 for water and $147 for sewer. So that's in addition to the rate increase. Yes. Okay. I I noticed before that you said there was 21 million in the uh reserve account for that. There there was at the end of FY25. Okay. It what what are the proposed projects for what's the amount or number or have you do you have a spreadsheet of the proposed projects for uh fiscal year 27? I

I think real quick that I think Eric can answer 27, but what I want to tell you is there's projects in FY26. So you got to take the 21 million and you got to subtract the projects we're doing currently which is going to be anywhere between 13 and 15 million. Then you have to look at the projects we're looking forward to in in 27. So that that's really the fundamental I mean I guess that's what I'm asking of projects that have to come out of that. Can you ask can you pro provide that information the project list and what those are? Uh in fiscal year 27 the proposed projects are $13.6 6 million and that I'm sorry 13.6 million in in 27

and and it's also what what is the portion that we've got to reappropriate from that fund balance for 26 fiscal year ending 26. So the the capital projects are on page 90 of the budget document. There's a list of all the capital projects but we can scan that for you. But have those been completed? Are you saying those are completed and will have to be funed? No, these are the FY27. That was your original question. Okay. But you just said there's 26 FY26 project. I guess I'm asking what fiscal year 26 projects have not been completed yet

with the with the exception of $2 million in 27 of that 13.6 that we're requesting in 27. Those are all projects that have started in this current fiscal year that continue on and are funded in addition in the next in the following fiscal year. Right now it's looking at about like year end at 13 to 14 million and but without having that we don't have that audited financial at the end until the end of this fiscal year. Have you been able to project what you think that this uh the base rate is going to generate? Yes. The base rate would generate um somewhere it's $817,000 for which one?

Total. Okay. Total remaining. The total the base rate will the base rate increase will generate $817,000. Yes. Okay. Between water and sewer. And you guys, I know that there were capital projects that we we started doing the quarterly report for the capital projects online. I didn't see any of the water and sewer com. Do you have that?

I'm sorry. I told you this on on the phone the other day, Madam Chair, but u my goal and Eric's goal is to incorporate utility projects in the next quarter. So, we should have the the latest quarterly update available to council tomorrow or Wednesday. Tom's reading the draft right now. Look at that. Thanks, Tom. So, he's editing the draft right now. Is that going to include the water and sewer project? No, it won't, but the next will. So, that's something that So, we're not I guess I'm just I'm just trying to figure out how do we get a list of the of the water and sewer projects budget on page 90, but you want the current list as well, the fiscal year 26. And we can provide that. Yes. Yes,

ma'am. C can we also have a future list because I think there's a list of projects proposed for FY 28, 29, and 30. Is that not right? Right now, because of the studies not being complete, what we have for 28 and maybe even the 29 are really just multi-year projects that have already started or will start in 27. Do you have So that's all we've identified. So it's an actual smaller number than what will be proposed later. Um but the that's all we included in this because we're waiting to rep prioritize after the studies. Do you can you estimate what the dollar value would be? Can I that's Can I finish my question? No, we're all going to get a chance to ask. Let me finish mine, then you can have you can have the floor.

I'm just adding to your question. Just the future years, the expenses all in. I just want to make sure we're not going we're not doing it three or four times. Well, that's where conversations take place though. I think I think with the utility the utility rate the utility positions when I looked through this. I'm just curious to get your feedback on it looks like there were how many positions? Hang on, let me find my sheet. Are are we having trouble filling the utility positions because I noticed the vacancies which contribute to the surplus are in there as well and it looked like there were at least 12 maybe 16 utility vacancies. Yes, that is definitely something we identified and we we are working to fill those positions right now

and that's one of the priorities of the new utilities director and it's one of the reasons holistically why we needed a second HR position to help with hiring. We have one hiring position for this entire organization. So, one of the positions y'all took out was a second hiring person. But if we don't have enough people to help hire people, then we're going to have a lot of vacancies. And so, there is a cyclical thing that happens. So, we're committed to filling those vacancies. One of the first things Eric identified when he started his interm was that there were way too many vacancies in utilities. And for that reason, we didn't ask for any new frontline uh positions in utilities this year because we we have work to do to fill those. And once we fill those, you're going to see a big difference in our trouble areas of the county as well in terms of infrastructure. So, we're committed to filling those. We need a little help in HR so we can do that across all of our departments. Uh, but that's one of the first things Erica identified.

That's all I have. Thank you, Eric. Okay, Mr. Huckabe. Sure. I'll go right quick. So, um, thank you for everything you've shared thus far. So, go backwards just for one second to make sure I'm following. So when we're talking about water and sewer, we're talking about two different increases for each. So let's talk about the base rate first. So the base rate for water, hope I didn't erase that. Yeah, I did. So the base rate for water currently is $9 some $953 and we're talking about increasing it $247 a month. Is that correct? That is correct.

Okay. So, that's the base rate for water. The base rate for sewer, what was proposed? We we're currently paying $853. We're going to increase it $147 a month. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Now, you were asking for a 6% increase. Um, and I and I was trying to keep up with what you were saying, but the 6% increase to finish out FY26, not FY25, FY26, you still have 13.6 million left. Is that correct? Roughly, 13.456, something like that. Yes. Okay, sounds right.

All right. And then for FY27, what do you need to complete your projects? Dollar value, that's 13.6 as well. an additional 13.6. An additional 13.6 26. All right. And then for do you have an estimate for FY27 or you're saying you don't really have that yet? I mean FY28. No, I do not have that yet. No, sir.

Okay. Let me ask it this way. Do you anticipate that we're going to have similar capital expenditures in FY28, 29, and 30 just like we're having in 26 and 27? And if so, why? Similar, but most likely increased more somewhere on the Yeah, somewhere near 15 to 20 million annually. Okay. So then if we reduce this from six to three this year you and I I I tried to write this down but you said that's 2 million 600 and what did you say? 600 2,654,000.

Okay. So if we reduce if we if we the motion that was made would cost your department $2,654,000. It would cost you 2,6 It would cost you $2,654,000 in this upcoming budget. It would cost you 2.6 in FY28's budget and you're going to ask for more money in 28 to do the projects we need to do. So, we're going to be 5 million plus dollars behind with cutting this from six to three. Is that right? Am I thinking through this correctly?

Yeah, I think that's some degree. That's why you want to get out ahead of it and start saving money. So you can shave the peak off the cost. And that's a theme you'll see in the fire discussion and and capital maintenance for that for that matter. Okay. And in your capital fund, what what's the most logical balance you need to maintain in that fund for emergency purposes? Things you didn't even anticipate. What's what's a comfortable number? I'd be I'd be comfortable with somewhere around 20 million.

20 million. Okay. All right. Okay. So, it's realistic to assume that for FY 26 2728, we probably have north of $40 million worth of projects we need to do with water and sewer. Yes. If that's if Well, it's not if. I mean, if we don't have the 6%, we don't have the 10%. And we don't have the base increase of $247 and 147, then we're going to be behind the eightball. And what does that mean? If we're behind the eightball, what's not getting done for York County? I I think the big thing, and I'll speak to this first, is solving the capacity issues we're having where the growth is occurring. Okay?

And we're not replacing aged infrastructure at the at the speed we want to. Specifically, what areas of the county? Think of where the commercial growth is occurring right now. And that's so 161 274 that's where we're having capacity issues where we have projects but we're going to have to slow those projects down if we're running out of fund balance which is what we utilize for capital projects until we issue debt and start utilizing debt. Talk about our debt capacity then right quick if you don't mind since you mentioned that.

I'll I'll hand it out off to to Eric and Tom. But I think what what the important thing to do is to first before we talk about that is to really generate the holistic picture of of uh the next five years. And so recently Moody's reached out to me and we had a conversation about what we're looking at in the future. Uh and what they want to know is what projects we need to do in the next five years. Uh so uh we do intend to have conversations with our bond rating agencies in the fall and into next winter after we have a rate schedule uh update based on the the rate study because what they want to see are those are those big uh studies completed and then how we plan to fund them and then they'll adjust our bond rating accordingly based on our plan and our financial situation.

So that what I'm hearing you say is there's a delicate balance between revenue, capital, and hand, and debt. And right now, we have a AAA rating. We have a double A plus rating. And so, the better your rating, the better your borrowing power, the less interest or or rate you're going to pay to borrow money. So at some point, whatever that threshold is, our lack of capital reserves, our amount borrowed could not only affect our ratings, bond ratings in particular, um, but it could affect the rate that we achieve in borrowing money. Is that correct? I I think the our fund balance was utilized to purchase other systems and so uh what we have to do is replenish the fund balance so that we can invest in our system now. Uh and that's really important. Uh one opportunity is to make sure we continue the financial sustainability of the utility fund and strengthen it and get out ahead of what we're trying to tell y'all is is an impending situation that we don't want to be a part of. So that when we go and engage with the bond rating agencies, it's clear to them that York County Council and this organization is committed to having the money necessary to to keep up with our 22,000 customers. If that's the case, we could get a bond rating increase uh in the utility fund. But there is a reason why our utility fund is rated lower than our organization. And that's why as staff and thanks to Eric's help and finance's help, we are committed to figuring this out and how to build strength in this fund because it is an enterprise fund. It is not a fund we should be losing money in.

So to and I'm going to hurry up. Replenish fund balance. How how much do you feel like we need professionally speaking to replenish the fund balance? I I think that's a longer conversation as we build out the rate study. uh you know utility funds and enterprise funds are different because you're looking at net position instead of fund balance but there still is unrestricted fund balances we call it unrestricted net positions in the cafer and that's the number you really want to look at is what is that number and to Eric's point end of FY25 that number is 21.5 million okay we want that number going up not going down it's it's about where to Eric's point 20 million where it needs to be okay

when it goes below that we've got to strengthen our cash position because we want to be in a position where we're improving our system, not being reactive. Preventative maintenance is key, which is why you see the the operating costs go up in the utility fund. Y'all have have blessed this us with more positions in the utility fund and those folks need to be doing preventative maintenance that costs money. If we if we uh go backwards and start, you know, give that 2.6 6 million back. We are going to become much more of a reactive organization again and that's not okay. Quick question about blue granite. So blue does blue granite have an impact on what we're talking about tonight this year and future years

in this year and f the the the acquisition of blue granite ultimately had an impact in in where we are today. Yeah. Yes. So so the liabilities the infrastructure liabilities that exist I correct me if I'm wrong that would be River Hills and I think Regent Park. Is that correct? Or is that that's not Blue Granite, is it? That's not Blue Granite. No, Blue Granite is confined to the western side. Um, but even outside of River Hills is a major neighborhood. Yes. In that system, but it also leads to capacity issues along uh 55 557 uh number of other areas in that in that whole entire Lake Wy area. So, when we bought blue granite, we also accepted a significant liability and that was in when when did we buy blue granets? before my time on council. I know that 23

23 23 and the 24. Okay. But when we bought it, we bought it knowing there was a significant liability there of infrastructure. Correct. Yes. And we borrowed we we did borrow some money to address that infrastructure, but the the the needs exceed what was planned at that time. Right. So your your suggested future budgets for us will include the infrastructure improvements needed and almost required for the blue granite infrastructure in River Hills in particular. Is that correct? Yes, that yeah that is being studied in the two studies or actually three studies on the western side

and then additionally over in Regent Park where they have the same type of infrastructure issues. Money is going to need to be spent over there to correct that. Yes, correct. systemwide there's there there's opportunity for improvements across the board. All right. So, when you mentioned the 13 point I don't know four million, five million, six million, I'm going to back up to look at it for 13.6 million. Did that include the repair cost for Blue Granite and Regent Park? Yes. And very specifically, there's two big projects in each one of those areas. Okay. water line replacement in uh River Hills and a um sewer line replacement in the region park area.

Okay, that's probably all I'm going to ask on water sewer right now. But I do want to say this. So, um I know I sent a email over on Sunday, the first one. I followed up with a follow-up email when I got in from out of town Sunday night. And then I had phone calls from staff today and last night asking questions about asking me, "What questions do you have about the budget?" So, I'm not defending them. I'm just simply saying number one, I've said this before and I'm gonna say it again because it is worth saying. Our staff is communicating better with us than I've ever been communicated with on council. Our staff is doing an enormous job keeping us informed and asking us, "What questions do you have of us?" So, to their defense, I don't think there's any way I got off the phone with one assist county manager. Um, I don't know, I got out of a meeting. It was at 3:34. No, it was at uh this morning. 12:00, 11 o'clock. I don't know. But I don't know how they could have gotten this out to us anyway for us to see it. But good news is we're not voting on anything tonight. We're talking through this. We're having a conversation about this, which is what we should be having. We should be going back and forth. One person asks a question, another person, you'll think of a question to ask related to what they ask. That's how conversations take place. But anyway, appreciative of everything you put together. Are we going to have to digest this? Yes. But um we have needs and unfortunately those needs are going to cost us and I know somebody's going to comment on that so I'll just hush. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Can we can we go back to the slide that just shows the rate increases that that Rock Hills put on us over the last I Karen Well, I asked Karen to print off a copy because it's hard to go back and forth, but yeah.

Everybody I'm I'm very familiar with the increases we've seen in water and sewer over the years. Um, I'm very familiar with how we've shouldered not passing those costs along to our customers, our citizens. You know, you look when you see where for years we saw increases by Rock Hill, we didn't do anything on water or sewer. There's no reason in this day and time we should be absorbing costs from Rock Hill and not passing those on because we are pass through. We at least have to cover the cost of what it's going to cost us first. Then we have to look forward at to what we're going to have to put aside for those infrastructure improvements for our administrative side. You wouldn't dare run a business and not pass costs alone. If goods and services cost you, you're not going to say, "Well, I'm just going to absorb that and pass that off off to the pass that savings off to a customer. Especially in an enterprise fund where the user should pay for the services, the user should pay for the improvements. This is not a tax on people who are not using the service. This is not a fee on people who are not using the service. This is directly related to those who are using the services and we took a big leap of faith in purchasing blue granite. We we still have to shoulder the cost of capital improvements to the systems that we already had in place. There's no way we should just pull a number out of the air and say, "Hey, cut that rate from 6% to 3%." without knowing what's behind the reason it needs to be 6%. and not knowing what a six what a 3% rate would do on the back end. You you we just shouldn't do that. Maybe we

should have asked a question, hey, what if we cut this to 3%. What does that look like? And let staff answer that question before we make amendments to just solely cut it and then say, "Oh, I didn't I didn't know that's how that worked." because that's exactly where we at right now saying, "Oh, we didn't know that was all behind the 6%."

You know, I could and that's one of the that's one of the things that I said last week that I support some of the amendments. This is one that I said we can't do because for years we we've we've absorbed those increases. And I commend this council for wanting to do it, but at the end of the day, we're letting things suffer. Things are going to suffer down the road if we don't take the increase now because we have to put money back aside for future needs. There's no way we run uh enterprise fund uh at a deficit and we hear about money coming back or or um extra money coming back. We have to start putting back for our projects. We have to start at least having um some additional funds because things are going to happen to the system that we didn't plan to do. Things are going to break, things are going to fail that's not on schedule to be repaired. Where do we get those funds from? We can't all of a sudden in the middle of the year say, "Oh gosh, we we we're short. We can't even fix that. We can't fix it one because we hadn't even charged enough to cover the costs that we're being charged." So, how do you come up with additional money to fix unexpected repairs? Because it's going to happen. We have an aging system. We're trying to put things on a schedule to to be prepared to do. But I I think the the motion to go from six to three was premature. And we shouldn't even be arguing back and well, not arguing, we shouldn't even be really deliberating. Should we be at the 6% versus the 3%. Because when you look at this schedule and for years we've absorbed those costs. If we forego any increase at the 6% just like Councilman Huckabe mentioned, we're going to cut ourselves short 2.456

this year. We're going to be short 2.56 next year and the year after. We're going to play catchup somewhere. And if we defer that right now, we're digging ourselves even in a further hole because I don't want to see a year where we have to come up and slap 25%. 15%. 29% on one. If we can't absorb 6% now, which council member up here is going to say 29% is going to be the right move four years down the road when we need 29%. It's not going to happen. And God forbid somebody's in an election year, they're going to be, "Oh, no. I I can't support that. Election year or not, I don't know who's on the on the on the ballot in 2018, and we did a 29%. That had to take some courage. I don't want to be in that position ever. Why can't we incrementally go up as needed to absorb the cost upfront? That's the reality of it. Either we're going to provide a good quality service with good infrastructure and be prepared or we just going to sit back and wait and say, "Oh, we got to do it now." I don't want to be in that predicament. So, when it comes to the the increase at 3% or 6%, we definitely need to follow staff's recommendation of making it to at least cover the cost and put a little bit to the side. There's not a whole lot of fluff here. Even after we go through these next couple projects, we're not going to have a lot of money just sitting. It may look 21 sounds a lot now, but when you take out 13 million that's coming down the pipe and another 13 million and some more, that's nothing there. There's not going to be anything there. I wouldn't def I definitely wouldn't run my household this lean and this thin paying for and basically if you ran your

household like this, you'd be putting everything on credit cards. there's no way to do it. So, we got to get this get out 6% and I'm not even sure 6% is enough. But if that staff's recommendation 6%, we can't come in and just pull a number out the air and say 3%. So, that's all I got on on this part of the presentation. So, so we just passed around uh the the page from the budget document that shows the utility capital projects. So, the 13.6 I was talking about is FY27, but you can see how as Eric was sharing, those FY27 projects are continuations of current year projects.

So, at the end of fiscal year 26, you have 6.4. Is that completed? Is none of that done? Those are currently being worked on to Eric's point. Uh the um the the projects that are listed is 6.44 million. But was there money budgeted aside from the reserve? Because the balance, the reserve balance, the unrestricted fund balance is 21.5. That's our point. I guess what I'm asking you though, if you take the 26 and the 27, you still have 5 million left. I guess my question is, did we not put any money in fiscal 26 to cover those to cover those fun projects? I mean, yeah,

that I can't see what you're looking at actually. So yeah, that's part of the problem. I think that's fine. I think we get it. I don't I don't want to belver. I think we've seen this is the project project list and that marries with the we also got a copy of the presentation y'all are doing tonight. But but in this current year's budget, I think the answer to your question, Madam Chair, is we we were are utilizing appropriation from fund balance. Absolutely. For the capital project. Yes. So that is our

right. I understand that. All right. We'll keep going down the line. Are there any and I I agree with a lot of comments that have been made and I think that's the purpose of doing this but I think for purposes of workshops I think the question is uh folks folk any folks who have questions of staff not necessarily debating but you could say what you want each council member gets the floor Mr. Mr. it. Are we still talking? Oh, we're still talking. You can't just ignore me. No, I just want to make sure we stay, right? We're still on water and sewer. We haven't finished that yet. Any other questions or comments?

Listen, I don't have any question. I, you know, I understand what they're doing, what they're trying to do, but I do want to bring up some information that hasn't been brought up for y'all. Uh, you know, when you do these rate studies, as you saw, you know, in two years, it was a what was it? a 33% increase in water and then no more increases after that. Uh we lost a whole lot of uh room and now we're back in a hole again. at least on the sewer side after the 30 42% increase in two years uh on the sewer at least we we kind of stayed with them other than a couple years but you know in 2021 we took a 15% uh cut in the budget on uh the water and then we went out and bought blue granite which as we found out and as Councilman Huckabe and Councilman Rody have discussed is a nightmare. Um, with just the water improvements, all the sewer is busted up up there. There are constant leaks. And I mean, without getting that stuff fixed, I mean, it's fine. We can keep bandating it together like we do our roads. You know, you'll you know, everybody I get complaints all the time about the water leaks up there. And uh I don't know about in the rest of y'all's districts, we have a lot of water leaks and they cause the roads to fail, ends up costing more money. Uh I was told today we have 36 open leaks. That's not just in Lake Wy area. There's 36 open. They're three or four months behind uh on some of the lower priority stuff. You know, I guess the the residents can just get used to seeing water running down the road just like they're used to the potholes in the road. Um I mean, we can do that. It's not the recommended thing. Um but uh and I guess we can also just not improve any of the infrastructure. That's one way to stop growth. I mean, if we don't have the infrastructure to get there, we can't build any any new

stuff, can we? So maybe there is rhyme or reason for why we're where we're at with the water and sewer. But uh you know, we're still far, but we're we're running up, you know, running too lean. They need to be able to get that stuff fixed. You know, every day that the water runs in a leak is costing us money because we're buying it from somewhere. And so for every thousand gallons it runs out on the side of the road, we're paying Rockill, I don't know what we pay on what, $5 per thousand, $6 per thousand. And uh and that's what we're losing for because we don't fund enough people and enough equipment to get out there and fix everything. And we aren't funding the infrastructure to get it improved. You know, I get complaints now, you know, for sewer stuff. I'm glad that we're keeping up with the sewer increases because that is one item that keeps going up in cost to treat the stuff to keep people, you know, from having to smell. You drive down 274, put the new force man in, and it smells to high heavens in many of the places from the air release valves. I don't know how people live near them. It's disgusting. But you know what? We're fixing them. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, we keep cutting stuff. I guess those people just enjoy it. Anyway, I support staff on this rate increase. And when the when the rate study gets done, they're probably going to come out with we're going to need four or five years of 10 or 15% increases. I would rather start now and do incremental increases than do like they did in 2018. and go, "All right, y'all need a 40% increase in your bill because we didn't want to hit y'all up with it all the previous years for two or 3%." That's what I have.

Any other question? Any other questions on the the water and sewer? Yeah. So, a couple quick questions. Um, so the baseline the base rate increases roughly $817,000 a year total, you said. Yes. Okay. Did was there an increase to the base? I can't remember last year. Did we have an increase in the last rate study in 2018 or Yeah. So the base rate I know we we're talking about an increase of 247 and 147 which you were saying I think it's 817,000 increase for the we have never done an increase in the base rate since the last rate study in 2018. 2018. So this is the first time we we've raised that. So 817,000

which is why we're so far behind our peers up there. So, um, and then just so I understand the numbers right, we've got 640 6, uh, 6,400,000 estimate roughly to pay off the 90 the 2026 cost correct for our projects. is that

so I thought now that I have a copy of this what this is only showing are the projects that also continue on into the next fiscal year. So yes, we do have a balance of six million going into the that will be carried over into that. Um but that's not that's not showing the cost of the projects in fiscal year 26 in its entirety. This is only showing the projects that are moving on. For instance, Crowder's Creek uh pump station is not on here. We finished that project this year. Okay.

The tune of $8 million. Um but yeah, so these are just showing the projects that are are a continuation into fiscal year 27 just to illustrate the the total cost of that project. Okay. And we're happy to get that full list of projects that are finishing this year, too. Okay. Okay. Okay. And the last last question I have is um was there a change in the past? Was there a change just recently with Rock Hill and what they're asking for increases or was this

So Rock Hill has provided one letter so far um basically saying that their proposal is an 8% increase in sewer and then 0% in water. uh what has happened in the past and you'll if you look sometimes we'll get a that that's subject to their council approving those rate changes. So um sometimes that can and has been revised has been revised upwards and has been revised downwards. Um but we can only go on with what we received to date. Gotcha. And do do we know when they're are supposedly voting on their letters the official increase until we hear otherwise? Yes. It was

right, but they changed it. So, I guess the question is, have they have they finally adopted their budget? Because we've seen that letter change before. I'm I'm happy to call Mr. Bagley and ask him Bagley and find out there at least when potential change on the horizon. Yeah, exec we at least I thought was this was different than what he originally had shown. So, I'm just curious is there is there going to be something that will change on this? So, I guess the letter the letter came out, but I appreciate you asking. Okay, I have something. That's it. That's all I got. Thank you.

Okay. Um, so I saw um the increase I on residential. I did not see an increase on corporations. What's happening with that? So the the volumetric rate the the percentage rate increases 6 10 three whatever you call it that applies across to all um both residential commercial and wholesale those are our three designations. Okay. So a corporation such as Sil Fab is that wholesale or think is that wholesale? That's commercial.

Just commercial. Okay. Because their 1.2 2 million gallons of water a day equal 4,000 homes. Just a little tidbit there. So, we should be Are you when you come up with all your figures and everything, did you include their uh rate also in QTS? are yes, their rate is included in in what we're projecting for revenue based on their current usage and and we use past us, you know, usage over the past two, three years, but then also thinking about anything that new that might be coming on as well.

And so that's that is included in all these figures we're getting and everything. Yes. Any future projections. Now, not to not to that total amount that you just said. Um, in regards to Well, you should because that's what it is, but we don't we can only base it on what we're currently sending, right? So, when they when they get their uh willingness and capability letter, uh just let y'all know, they ask for what their projected use is. I have yet to see an industry hit 75% of that usage. They make projections to make sure that they're getting there. Um,

well, they haven't been, it's hadn't been a secret. They have always said 1.2 million gallons of water a day. Everybody says that they never make it. What about QTS? I'm not familiar with that. QTS what I can share is the the the email I shared today which is an article in the rock her rock hill herald I know they're having a meeting right now um I think UTS has shared some of the estimates of how much wire they expect to use and it's a closed loop system so it's not as much as people think the article speaks to I don't I didn't memorize the article but I sent it to you today uh and and I would encourage you know all of us to reach out to QTS and ask more specifics but

but it's in the article that's what they shared with the reporter. Madam Chair, I would think we'd want to be careful calling out specific businesses in York County when we should be looking at everybody as a whole. In my opinion, I done

point taken for the rest of the council. I think one of the questions though that I would I think does the county have the flexibility to to distinguish rates between commercial users and residential users or or are they required to stick to the same rate regardless of who they are and regardless of how much water they use? Yeah, the current rate currently there is separate rates for residential and commercial but it that and and wholesale those are the only three designations with three different rate structures. Now that is the the structure of the rates is also being um evaluated through the rate study. Um they can come back with um you know depending on demand and usage they could up the rates if you're using x amount more. Um there's there's plenty of different rate structures that they'll come with recommendations for us to consider if we want.

I guess the question I'm asking is you're saying there's three different categories. There's and they're charged different rates. Yes. I guess my question is you y'all have proposed an across the board rate increase and haven't distinguished between any between commercial, between residential, between wholesale. the well the same rate is applied the same whatever percentage is applied to all three of those different rates.

I think what I'm what I'm asking is more more of a legal question and I'll just pose it and we can move on. Does the does the council does the county have have the ability to control the rate setting structure um and distinguish between users whether through the amount um through the base rate and through the amount of of water that they actually use. And I'm not asking for an answer for that right now. I'm just asking that I would like to have that before before we meet because I Any other questions on the We still have other issues to address, but any other questions on the water and sewer? I'm just speed up everything y'all said right quick. Cost go up. I have one question, please. Can we go back to the slide before rate comparison?

When you do the slide before rate comparison. So, when you look at this slide and you look at Rockill increases, the Rockill increases is cumulatively 78%. That's an average of 6% a year over the 13-year period. Uh York County responded with um we had 59% increases with an average of 4.53. Then you look at the next column on sewer. Rock Hills cumulative increases were 87%. We responded with a 72% increase. But look at this. This is like the health insurance when when the state went through COVID. Why do we not issue rate increases during COVID when nobody was having claims and then we come out of COVID and we hammer us? That's not good for budgets. You look at tax year 2018 29 ARPA funds

were designed to address that because there were issues people weren't working. Yeah. But that it did make a bit of sense. Anyway, did make it sense to our budget that year when we got hit. But anyway, my question is this. The average the average is on the on the water is 6% average over 13 years for Rock Hill. We were at 4.53. Why wouldn't we budget say a 6% increase? We already know 13 years running it's a 6% average increase for the city of Rock Hill. Why would we not budget for that for the increase instead of zeros and then hammer people? Well, I think that's on on the sewer. I think that's not really a question.

That's the debate that I think council's got to make that decision at the next. I'm just making I'm just making a comment, a logical comment. Why do we have on sewer three, four, five, five years out of 13 we had no increase, right? And we're talking about people's individual budgets. I mean, let's be considerate of people's budgets. Let's issue an increase every year. I think we need to relook at this and relook at an annual increase to water and sewer so people don't get hit with these significant increases in these outlier years. Doesn't make any sense to me. I think that's what that's what we're being asked to do in the budget. I do have one followup question. Under this base um charge increase, what is the percentage of that increase based on what it is now?

Uh to do the math, but it's currently the water is 953 and it's going to 12 and sewer is 853 and it's going to 10. So we're looking at about a 20 15% increase. Yes.

15 to 20% increase on base charges. I just have a a comment. Can can staff not look to do an ordinance that says when we're when Rockill increases when our wholesaler increases our rate that we have a minimum of a match plus a percent 2% quarter percent. That way we will stay ahead always of whatever that increase that's coming to us. And it kind of takes us out of the political game because it will be governed by our ordinance that says if we get a 6% increase from Rockill on water, our increase to our customers will be 6% plus whatever staff deems necessary for the administrative side that we have to cover outside of the rate because that would take it out of debate and we'll know if we get a 3% increase, our increase is going to be 3% plus whatever administrative that's attached to it. It it eliminates it would eliminate this whole conversation if we had something in place like that that rates are tied to an ordinance that's in place that's based on what our wholesalers are charging us. It'll be automatic. We wouldn't have to debate on whether we're doing 6% 3% absorbing the cost. We will always be by the ordinance that will cover that cost plus whatever administrative percent half percent. We're not looking to hammer customers to say whatever we're passed on at 6% now we're going to charge 8% or 2% increase. We just need enough to cover the pass through plus whatever administrative and um possible um uh additional funding to set aside that helps our system.

That makes sense. I think I think clearly there needs to be a pass through um at a minimum. Um but this again I'm trying real hard not to get into debate because we're I'm telling everybody not to debate it. I do think it's a function what you charge folks those is a function of your capital plan. You've got to make sure you have have a capital plan in place. You got to have the list of projects. You've got to have rate studies that are consistently done. and um you've got to be you've got to be doing the projects that you put on your budget to do at that particular time. So I mean I think all of this is right for our discussion at second reading. Um if we want to move on to the next item.

Yes. So you know another one of the major conversations we've had throughout the year uh and this this started at our strategic plan meeting when I first got here uh and and we've carried it through over two years. Uh we worked really hard with the addition of David Garner as our assistant county manager for public safety to develop a path forward for both fire and EMS. Uh we worked hard with the chiefs to develop a strategic plan. Uh previous administrations had hired a consultant to do a study like that and we all remember how that went. Well, I wasn't here but I I I've heard how that went. Our opportunity has really been to work with the chiefs. We had a great strategic planning session where where everybody was invited. We had conversations about how we move forward. That was followed by a 10-year vision that JPS adopted and brought forward as a committee to the full council and council adopted our 10-year vision for fire. When you have a vision, it's one thing to have it, but it's another thing to implement it. Uh, and I thank staff uh in in our fire services department uh in our in our budget staff and David and his leadership for outlining how we could go about doing that. Uh and and what we're really trying to do is take a step forward. This is not the full jump. This is a step forward. Uh and and though it might not feel incremental, it is an incremental step that we're excited about because it shows progress and forward movement uh to be the fire system we believe we need. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to David.

Thank you, Mr. Manager. So, I'll start off um and I want to root this back into our long-term vision. And one of the things that Chairwoman Cox um mentioned at our last meeting was tying this back into that vision and also the the steps that we take along the way to achieve that. Uh so, starting off with our long-term vision, you know, this is where we look out way in the future of what we want to establish across the county. Uh and that is some type of funding model that unifies our tax district. Um that would be a countywide rate. Uh but we're very cognizant about maintaining that local fire department identity. Uh the countywide level of service standards. Uh that means that every resident in the county should be able to reasonably expect and anticipate the level of service that they're going to receive regardless of where they live in the county. And finally, equitable funding and staffing. Uh and that's one that that we really tried to adjust in this budget. Now, some of the challenges as we seek to address that 10-year uh long-term vision are uh millage caps and referendums obviously uh with the implementation of special tax districts. Uh the employee competition and variation between departments uh not just uh regionally but even within the county. our facilities and conditions uh of those facilities and what are their capabilities of actually housing uh staff not just volunteers as we need to consider career staffing across the county in a strategic way. That does not mean putting staff in every single department 24 hours a day. But it does mean putting them in places where they are needed and where they need to augment the volunteer system. And then finally, our capital replacement and fund balance. I'm going to speak on that on the on the very final slide and give you a full capture and understanding of uh the significance of that fund balance statement. So in our fiscal year 27 the proposed solutions what we're trying to address with that obviously is the request for a millage increase but is also that hybrid staffing model and as

we as we met with tax districts uh collectively at our training that we had in January of this year and then also meeting with them individually is proposing to them this model by which we can uh take their employees on as county employees that helps stabilize the pay standardize the benefits uh and also it's voluntary it's it's uh something that was offered to to each of them and it's a voluntary basis but we did view that that was a solution that we could offer them immediately particularly those areas that are capped on their millillage um but I want to draw back in and remind that uh we've had squads for uh roughly seven or eight years now and they've largely been located on the western side of the county uh in fire departments and that's where their primary base has been largely the tax districts have been located on the eastern side so they have been self-sufficient for the longest time. Uh but due to those millage caps, growth in the areas as has been mentioned, uh that has kind of run its course where most of those have hit their their peak capacity. Uh so without legislation change or referendums, which take up to two years to actually implement, uh they've kind of been stuck and some of those districts have been stuck for a long time. Uh again, some of the other solutions, our facility and capital needs assessment, uh hearkening back to the challenges of what are do our facilities actually need, what do they need to look like, what do they need to be able to house, uh and are they safe, do they meet OSHA standards, do they are they NFPA compliant, that they're in the proper areas and hearkening back to those ISO standards and making sure that their uh water flow, everything that feeds into that ISO level are adequate. uh the funding model. Uh this is one that is that is a multi-year process. As we talk about that unified funding model, we have to study it to determine what the best the best solution is for that. We don't necessarily have an answer in year one, but we have some ideas. Uh we need to test those hypothesis and those ideas before we bring them uh to a committee or to

council to say this is the direction that we think we need to go in long term and actually putting some amounts to that. But that is stuff that we're working That's a multi-year process. Um, going back to our our revised capital replacement strategy. Uh, so replacing the trucks when they're needed. Uh, not just replacing to replace, what is costing us the most? Uh, what spends the most time in the shop, downtime. Additionally, what trucks are actually running the most calls, what's getting the highest usage, and making sure that we're maximizing the lifespan of each of those. U I believe as councilman Huckabe has has mentioned to me a couple times you know 141 apparatus in the county that's a lot of apparatus to maintain so but what is actually needed to maintain an effective uh framework effective response framework and it's not just one answer for every department that's individual to the district and what the needs of that community are. Uh again in this next year we we're discussing the stipen program uh stabilizing that where it's not such a volatile to give you an example. Uh the stipen program is a set number in the budget. If the co county runs more calls than it did the previous year each firefighter is compensated a little bit less for that call. Uh the next year if they run less calls than they did the previous year then that number goes up. There's no stability to it. So it almost deincentivizes, if you want to be frank about it, for the more calls that you run that you're going to have less of a pool to pull from. And that's a concern. That's a problem. So we need to readress that and come up with a more stable solution. And finally, one of the specific requests was the uh assistance with association dues. As 1% funding uh was was reallocated across the county uh by the state statutory formula, uh some specific requests were made for assisting with state association dues. And that's one thing that we felt that we could accomplish in this budget. Uh, one of the requirements of that is a recruitment and retention program as well. You're good. Keep going. So, uh,

rooting this back into our short-term plan. So, we had six goals that we established on a countywide, uh, basis, working with our fire chiefs, working with tax districts, and also with our, uh, staff and employees internally. I'm not going to read those six goals. Uh but I wanted to bring to your attention some of those strategic plan initiatives that we'll continue with this next year and we'll begin uh moving on. So our planning sessions, we've gotten great feedback from planning sessions that we've had either with individual chiefs or tax districts or even as a collective. Uh I think one statement that was made in a meeting last week was, "Hey, we're rural. We're very volunteer. I'm sorry. We're very uh we're rural areas. We're not a tax district." uh sometimes our problems are much different. We would appreciate smaller groups. So, we're going to continue that. That was great feedback that we received from that. Our fire service uh briefs along the same line. And then our feasibility study, I've already mentioned that we want to refine our special operations teams. We feel like there's better uh there's opportunity for better alignment uh even with our municipal partners with Rockfield, TIGK, and others that may not be specifically part of the fire service. Uh but we can work with them. They also have some capabilities and regional teams that we feel like could augment the county. Uh looking at our response standards, uh and I already mentioned the other three. Uh so the meat and potatoes will be on this last slide and I'll spend most of my time here. So bringing your attention, there's a lot of information here, so I'm going to try and take it one one piece at a time. Uh but I know you're going to have questions about it as a whole. Uh so our fund balance in 2026 is uh sitting currently at 45%. Now that's down from 180% uh in years past. One of the reasons you may ask is number one, why did it get so high? And number two, why did it get so low so quickly? Well, largely that's due in part to the timing

of apparatus purchase. Historically over the last at least four if not six years apparatus have been three to four year timeline on delivery. As we came in we noticed that that timeline was was very unstable. It was volatile and it made planning for future budgets very difficult. Do you continue just to spend money in the future budgets or do you try to seek to normalize it? So internally we we revised our strategy of how we would replace capital and we began to start looking at what was on the ground. what could we get quickly you know rather than three to four year time frame what could we achieve within a 9 to 12 month time frame that led us to stock units uh a consequence of that is the timing of that came together where we were spending current funding that was budgeted in this year's budget but we were also still taking delivery of trucks that were ordered back in 2022 and 2021 those two coming together drew down our fund balance quite significantly uh and then we move into next year and the same thing was was going to continue to happen. So the the first number the fiscal year 27 that 16% fund balance that was with our original proposal in the budget and I know what you're going to what you're going to ask. So after the what was proposed at the second reading and this is the the half a mill is it being higher? So obviously the question is how does the fund balance go higher with having half a mill less? Well, the reason was because out in the future as we look in projecting out to five years, that draws so quickly from 16% down into the negative that we had to go and seek to make some drastic reductions. Some of those reductions that we that we pulled out of there to stabilize that. And then I'll talk about the the uh five-year numbers in the future. You know, decreasing some of our radio equipment uh purchases, repairs to the training center. Our training center is uh state-of-the-art facility, but it requires a lot of upkeep as as you burn it and actually have the the training events there. There's a lot of upkeep that has to go to maintain that

facility. Uh our equipment allocation. So, in next year's budget, we were proposing trying to increase each department's equipment allocation uh by 5,000. So, from 20,000 to 25,000. We had to work that back down because that's over uh I believe, don't quote me, it's $80,000 across the county. Um decreasing uniforms, but the big one is that capital equipment and apparatus as we continue to budget and and work through that capital replacement program. Uh that's obviously our biggest cost out of a total budget. Uh that is roughly 35 to 40% of the cost in our budget every year. Uh so so working that back down so that we're not just to dip into that fund balance. So, I wanted to provide you with a projection. And this five-year projection is without an increase. And when I say without an increase, you see the half mill built in there. Uh this is what our fund balance would look like without any increases in the future. Uh 45% and 33% this year, but then you can see how quickly it starts to dip below what's sustainable. And I consider personally sustainable uh the county's policy is 25%. And that's 25% of your operating budget. Uh so that dips to 14% in 28, 4% in 29 and then you're actually dropping to the negative by 2030 without ever adjusting the millillage and that's continuing on trying to replace capital and knowing of the built-in increases uh roughly three and a half% for personnel and things like that built into that. Uh so one of the specific requests as we built this were well what do future years look like and trying to map that out for you. So, in order to shore up that fund balance and make sure that we're not dipping to unsustainable levels, this is kind of just a projected fund uh millage proposal out in the future. And you can see the actual specific uh fund balance out beside there and then a percentage of that. But what I want to hearken to is what will that accomplish? And that

goes back to our first slide of the long-term vision. These are not just one monumental step towards achieving that vision. These are incremental steps towards achieving that division that that uh vision. The hybrid staffing model, increasing staff support, that's our mechanics, that's our fire marshals, that's every support service that we provide to the fire departments and to the county and citizens. Our continued apparatus replacement, direct volunteer assistance, that's the direct assistance that we provide to them. That's staffing and that is also the stipen program that's included in there. Um but really by 2030 as we get close to that eight mills and beyond we really need to be considering uh what is our next step. We need to be eyeing and hoping that 2031 is a date that we look to implement that unified tax district model. Uh that's plenty of time to build up to it. That's plenty of time for us to uh look at the solutions and options that we're investigating now. have the study completed so that we can actually look at the consequence to each individual department and the county as a whole but then be able to present those solutions individually to the fire advisory committee to the JPS to county council solicits everyone's input because that is a monumental step to get there but we can't just continue to punt until we get to that point we've got to take some incremental steps to maintain sustainability and level of service without taking a step backwards um one of the things related to the hybrid staffing model. Uh you we anticipate that growing and expanding. Uh we we met with all the tax districts, provided them with a proposal, and even in the proposal, it says that this model provides a way for county supplementation. Historically, like I said at the beginning, our squads have been located on the western side. They've been in fire departments on the western side, but we know that tax districts have and are going to continue to have needs that they can't necessarily meet with their millage

caps. We would like to help them and avoid referendums which can be volatile as we all know. We would like to actually have a stable path forward that we can present to them and say here's how we can meet your immediate need now and continue working towards our vision in the future of unification. We'll solve it in the long run but we got to meet the challenges in the immediate term as well. Uh so I know I've said a lot but I want to answer any questions or specific data that you may request. So, I think the the problem that I'm having with this and and really I think the is is I've attended some of the meetings um is that there's a millage increase that's proposed, but then council is learning after the fact and we're getting calls from folks saying why I mean clearly Flint Hill needs some help that I think they've been discouraged from increasing their or doing a referendum because my understanding is that uh management has gone out and suggested that they not do that and that we use rule fireboard money to help supplement that. I think the concern is do we have a plan that actually shows that if you spend this money that at least at this other point that all of the all of the services are going to be met and we don't have that practical plan. everything is still so up here, but we're raising and we're asking taxpayers to agree to a tax increase, but we don't have a practical plan that says we're going to get there. So, I guess one of one of the concerns that I've seen is that, you know, the first time that the western side ever had a a group meeting was after first reading of our budget. That's the first time they've ever met together. Um my understanding is that special tax district boards have never met collectively together. They've been met with individually. And I think what that

has done is that has bred some rumors. That has bred some um concerns about why is the first time that I'm hearing that three out of the four of the firefighter, the new firefighters we want to hire are going to a very specific uh location and that they'll be reporting to folks when previously we were told we can't do that. That they were roaming and now I'm hearing that there are changes to that. I think part of the concern as council is I don't feel like we have a handle or that there has actually been input because I'm hearing from our fire departments as to how are we getting there. So I guess my question is really more about what is the criteria? What's the criteria that y'all are using as a county? I've seen Flint Hills justification, but I would like to know what's the criteria that you are using to determine when um a special tax district or any other district is allowed to have the the personnel.

So, I want to back up real quick. So, we have had joint meetings. We have, you know, joint trainings with the fire tax districts. Uh but then getting five members from seven districts together every time to meet and discuss this, it's just not feasible. when so many are left out. So that's why we've met with them individually. Um to that point as we move through the budgeting process, we've worked with volunteer departments to try and uh get a better handle on their direct assistance and communicating with them. Uh but we've also met with them individually here and there. So you know having these large meetings altogether as frequently as as you know like a county council meeting it we we miss a lot of people in the process of that. Now, we're trying to address that in the future and do better with it, but we have had those meetings kind of what what you've referenced. Um, going back to the criteria that that you asked for. So, Flint Hill is a good example. you know,

you you've had you've had group meetings with all of the special tax district together showing them their plan of how you're going to fund sta like they already knew that that you were proposing staff be dedicated to a certain fire department and that you're my understanding was the last I heard we we have five vacancies in the firefighter department and we're now changing again to do a different pilot program because all of those firefighters left. So we're not changing anything with that. No, that's that's not the Well, they were roaming before, weren't they? They were. So, we changed that six months ago. And we talked to y'all about that at our retreat, our budget retreat and at the workshops, right? David David has brought this up. I think the main I do have to just clarify that David has shared this.

I think he's answering that. I just I I've been told that there was no group Western side and there's not been a group special tax district meeting to be able to talk through, hey, let's just be straight up. This is what we're aiming for and this is where we're going to end up. This is who we're going to fund this year. this is who we're going to fund next year.

So, you're correct. So, when we first started down this path and realized that this was a viable option was in January and we first discussed that not formally, but we proposed that this is something that we're going to come around and talk to you about collectively at the fire uh tax district um training that we do for all the board members in in January. And that's where we kicked off and started meeting with them individually. Um to the point about the the western side of the county, you're you are correct and that's why that meeting was so pertinent. Um you know, frankly wish I would have done it sooner. Uh but the feedback that we got from that meeting was hey this was a very significant meeting for us because we have shared issues that we want to address with you. We want to make this more regular and we said yes we do too. And so we're actually establishing that now moving forward. So yes, we we had not done that to that point, but no, we have done that with fire tax districts. Um, you know, is there a platform and need in the future to do it with those chiefs? Probably because I imagine tax district uh issues are very similar just like western district issues are the same. But to your point, we don't want to create uh division and dissension among them. So, we try to strike the balance with uh limited time from volunteers and paid staff of of putting them together, uh making sure that we're being adequate, you know, of of meeting with them frequently enough, but not overburdening them so that we just lose all of their input. Um, but then there's others meetings that happen throughout the the month as well, uh, that have a collection of those groups. So, I guess getting back to my main question is have has the county developed a criteria that it's going to that it that it is using to determine when a tax district is eligible to receive assistance from the rural fire board in terms of paid staff because I do appreciate the comments that have been made that, you know, I can't

imagine a fire district that that would turn away if if they were offered help um providing ing manpower assistance through the rural fire board and they were permanently stationed at a specific fire district and they report through the chain of command so that there's no issue with chain of command there through that fire district. I can't imagine any fire department rejecting that. So I guess my what I'm asking is is there a criteria clearly Flint Hill has put together their their information that says this is why we need this. This is where we are. or I guess I'm asking the county, have y'all put together a criteria list that determines when a a uh special tax district or any of the other districts will be eligible to receive that same benefit.

So, yes, to this point, it's a needs assessment and there's a lot of things. Is that in writing?

It's not it. It's it's a lot of it's an amalgamation of a lot of data uh similar to what Flint Hill has has provided. Uh but number one, and I'll use Bethlin as as an example, uh Bethl is not capped on their millillage. They're sitting at four mills out of 10. So obviously they have millage cap within their district that they need to work within before they were to approach the county with staff. So our first challenge with this is making sure that we help them maximize their budget for everything that it's worth within the confines of their millillage cap if they if they well they all have one special tax districts. So that's number one. And then number two is you know the same thing that that what Flint Hill mentioned earlier of uh the call volume in the area the hazard risk the profile is their staffing and it's also not a defined answer and this is why it's hard to write down a specific policy to gauge that which we are working towards but uh how do you measure a volunteer base uh I actually heard it referenced earlier this morning uh that that one department that's a combination department you know they they have a roster over 60 volunteers. Uh but they had a structure fire uh sometime in the last month or so and they put their four career personnel on scene and one volunteer was was on scene. Obviously that's not adequate. So those are the things we have to measure. There's a lot of data that we have to pull and measure. What's the proper timing? When do they need them? What does it look like as far as when is the volunteer unavailable? And we've got a lot of that data through our dashboard. So that's those are our metrics that we're using to evaluate what is your need working with and that's not something that we just decide by ourselves. That's working with the district, the chief, the officers and the tax board because they should be involved in in knowing what that looks like as well so that they can formalize their request to us and we evaluate it for inclusion into our budget. Uh that's something that we're going to continue to do moving forward. Uh and and again we're going to make that available to anyone. We have made that available to

anyone. uh this is not exclusive and just picking and choosing who we're going to offer that to.

I think I think reducing the criteria for eligibility for service is is critical. I think it's critical for council to be able to justify it, for council to understand the forward plan and for the fire departments to equally be be aware of at what point do you become eligible. If you're saying that it's just when you reach the max of your millage cap, I'm a little bit concerned about that because stepping in and encouraging folks not to increase their millage cap, which may maybe we aren't there yet if in if in five years we can't get to the point where we have fire service because Flint Hill has 24 folks and there's there's uh many of the fire departments who who don't have any that are paid and um the level so I guess I'm getting back to my main questions. the level of service. Um, have y'all identified the appropriate level of service across the county yet? Have y'all?

Yeah. So, what we've what we've established so far are the benchmarks and that's the NFPA standards. That's 10 minutes in in an urban area, 13 minutes in a suburban. Um, that's what we hope to accomplish, but that's not necessarily one-sizefits-all. We have to take the county in chunks with that and helping them meet those. But that also doesn't capture some of the other data like second and third call outs. There's a lot of other components outside of just response times uh that we have to actually formalize and establish across the county. So yes, we have some of those, but we need to refine them further so that everyone is measured against a similar ruler.

I think that's that I think having a an understanding of what is the acceptable level of service countywide is critical before you start raising. You have you have critical needs that happen first. But I'm saying how is this fit into the plan of is the level of service not meet the criteria? Is the level of service not meeting the criteria for Flint Hill? Are they not meeting that currently? So no. Are there any other departments who are not meeting that? There probably would be as we dive into it, but because we have not had that specific request from them, we haven't evaluated it to see if that's something that we should fill in. So, we haven't evaluated the other departments to see if they meet the level of service.

That isn't that that's one of the things that our fire dashboard has some of that data. See, that's we're willing to decision if they want to have this is I think the if the county is going to be funding these departments. I think it's incumbent upon us to determine what's the level of service and is it being met and how do we go about addressing that need versus when some somebody comes to you and asks you for that. But I I think the other question I have is do we have anything in writing that that is our current equipment replacement fund? Uh yes, one that was adopted, forgive me, I believe the year was 2015 or 2014. Yes, we do. Uh are you still using that?

We try to follow it as much as we can. But again, keep in mind it just did next up. It did not take in any of the conditions that I mentioned earlier of uh the usage, the number of calls that it's running, its lifespan, the time that it spends in the shop. It's just a next up on the list. Uh, and establishing a, you know, still operating in 2026 off of a list that was established in 2014. Is it is it current? No, not by any means. So, we don't have an equipment replacement policy. We have one, but I'm telling you it's outdated. I guess I'm asking you, do we follow that these last two years? Because we we are we basically spent a lot of money. Yes.

Those last two years. That's what dropped the fund balance. Can you provide to council the criteria and the the level of service document as well as the equipment replacement policy that's currently in place? Those three things.

So there is no policy with it. There is just that schedule. And again, that was created 12 years ago. That's what I'm saying in this next year. We have to update that and actually take into all account into account all of those variables to revise that. uh because we're just replacing next up on the list and a truck may be going to a station that it's not necessarily needed at just because it's arbitrarily next up on the list. And when you have a multi-year plan and a 10-year vision, things happen one year at a time. Not everything's decided in the first year of a 10-year plan. Did the rule of fire budget get get presented? Was there any discussion at all at the rule advisory board? I

did y'all talk through the budget at all? I don't believe so. Um, yeah, I do. Can you tell me why we need 180,000 for another study that's in the rule fireboard?

Everything that I just mentioned related to the equipment replacement. Um, that's something that we do somewhat inhouse and we have a lot of the data, but um, what it's not tied into is that effective response framework. what is the hazard risk profile of an area? What is the actual response? You know, we can look at call volumes, but measuring that against the risk profile of an area. That's something that requires a much higher um processing level that our GIS just is not necessarily capable of right now.

And I and I do so say I I do believe that the cost will be significantly cheaper than that. Can can you help me understand why we have so many vacancies in in the fire? I mean, we council has budgeted a number of uh positions previously for firefighters. My understanding is that we have at least in the vacancy list I got, we have three firefighters, a firefighter paramedic, suppression supervisor, senior fire prevention tech, PT, training officer. That all of those are still vacant. Is that right? No, not all of them. Okay. Which one?

So, we've hired a training officer. Um, the senior prevention tech is a reclassification in this next next year. Okay.

Um, that would be over more of a logistics manager. Uh, but then the other five in the suppression side. So, we have someone doing interim services for a suppression supervisor. Um, that was a recent, so three of those were recent resignations within the last two or three weeks. Um, so they haven't been vacant for a long period of time. Those were uh personnel that went on and moved to another department. Um, I believe they went to Rock Hill. Um, and two of those positions, the paramedics were mid-year reclasses that we are interviewing for now. So, we're seeking to fill every single one of those uh before the end of this budget year.

So, the firefighter positions, how many are vacant now? So, four squads and then one is a supervisor. So, there's five vacancies right now. Yes. Okay. Do you have do you is there a reason why we we're having trouble with that? I wouldn't call it trouble. It's just recent resignations. We haven't had resignations out of the out of the squad. They all five resigned at the same time. No. Well, keep in mind the two were new positions that came in that were approved this year that were reclasses. So, those were two that we're filling right now. The other three were recent resignations. The two that the two that we approved last year, we haven't filled those, but the other three we did a mid-year reclass of of those.

The other three uh firefighters, they resigned at the same around the same time. Is there any issue with that? Do you know if there was they each they each left for uh other jobs. Okay. Any other questions though related to fire? I didn't know if other people have questions. Well, I'm gonna go I'm going to do mine and then I'm going to let it ready. I'm go I have mine listed out. Um, are these budget questions or these policies? I mean, these sound like HR type questions. Some of those work. I think my questions are related to why why do we have the increase in the budget? I mean, tell we have a vacancy. Why do we need them? Why we have a vacancy? It's not a budget question. Mr. Rody, I'm going to get I'm going to open up the floor. You can ask your questions.

No, I'm not I don't have any questions. My question is, are these related to the budget? We're supposed to be a budget. I think they're directly related to the budget and whether or not we have policies in place that are getting us to where we need to get. Um, I mean, I'm not going to sit at 10:00 and go through this. Not on things that that are not related. Okay. Um, there's also 130,000 of overtime in the current budget. Do you anticipate needing that in addition to adding the additional So, that is one thing that uh our fire service director immediately recognized was the use of overtime. Uh, so he has put measures in place to kind of restrict the use of overtime. A lot of it was for ad hoc training. So we've clawed some of that back. So you that's why you have not seen a significant amount of that over time.

So what's bud budgeted for that can be amended or no? So yes, but we're also trying to implement part-time staff in the next budget year because what we don't have similar to to uh some of the other departments that have spoken is when we have call outs or vacation or sick, uh we have no one to backfill that. So that either puts one firefighter in a station or that puts uh a squad down. So we would also like to have a part-time roster to backfield those positions so that we don't have to shut trucks down. Okay. Thank you, sir. Yes, ma'am. Anybody else?

Yeah, I'll go right quick. Be glad to. I'll hurry. Um, all right. Uh, number one, I sit on the uh justice and public safety committee and appreciate you all keeping us aware of the progress that we're moving towards for York Fire One. Um, when I think about the end goal in mind, which what you all have shared with us is a 10-year goal. And all due respect for the firefighters in York County, all due respect for what you all have done, 55 years of service is commendable. And the rest of you for everything you're doing and the volunteers, I mean, we we couldn't protect our county without you. It's extremely appreciative. So, I don't mean to offend anybody in what I'm about to say, but I'm going to be kind of blunt. All right? So you look out 10 years and you say, "Okay, where do we want to be 10 years from now?" Which is the conversation we're having right now. It's a one-year increment to get to 10 years. So let's look at where we are right now. If I'm not mistaken, we have 35 stations. We have 141 trucks. I don't know how many personnel we have. I didn't do that analysis. I may be off by one on both of those because we bought a truck or two cents and gave one to Cherokee County. Nonetheless, so right now 35 and 141 vehicles. I know one of my stations actually is right surrounded by Rock Hill. So we it doesn't really handle the service coming uh east. It's handling west and somewhat north and somewhat south. So when you look at what we're trying to achieve and we're talking about taxpayers monies, right? This is a hard conversation, but it is what it is. When you look at unincorporated York County, if if you were to map out unincorporated York County, and you can't see this from over there, I'm sure, but I've mapped out 12 locations for future fire departments. if you were

to map them out and well place them and and I'm not sure if if a five mile radius around a fire department with a six minute response time at 35 miles an hour is appropriate, but that's what this does pretty much. So 12 locations. Now what I don't know is if you're going from 35 locations to 12 locations, that's efficiency. It's better response times. It's equipping each location probably better than what we have now. It's It's utilizing your vehicles more efficiently. We we just I think we just spent a million dollars 1.3 1.4 on I don't know if it was an engine ladder truck. I'm not sure. But anyway, these are expensive vehicles. So, we might have a hundred and 100 plus million dollars in inventory for the fire department, right? Because there's like five different categories of vehicles that they have on their property. My point is when you look at where we are and you look at where we need to go to accommodate the needs for future unincorporated York County and you look at the end goal in mind, then I can appreciate your questions. But what I hear you saying and what I've heard you saying in our committee meetings is this is a step-by-step process to take us from where we are to ultimately where we say we might want to be, which is I think what council has agreed to. So 10 years from now, we're looking at one fire department basically with many locations, maintaining their identity in their locations, uh so that we can ultimately achieve the greatest efficiency and save the taxpayers as much money. But the problem is you have to start from where you are and you have to work your way through the process which is going to be expensive at first until you begin to I would guess identify the locations where the new fire departments are going to go and then you figure out the details of how you migrate from where you are to where you're going and that could be expensive

but there's some offsetting costs there too. So am I on am I on par here with what I'm saying? So yes, and to that point, we're particularly in this budget trying to find ways to meet current and immediate needs uh that that have in some situations been expressed for upwards of five five or six years towards taking those incremental steps to get there. Um so yes, it can't be one sweeping change. Uh and and to your point though with the facilities, that's why we do have to have someone to study that and tell us what is the appropriate response framework for each community and each department. Um the the one correction I will make is is versus a countywide department. It's a countywide fire service with individual departments concentrating and making up that retaining their autonom or their their individuality. Um correct.

But yes, you you're correct. Okay. I I hate to ask this, but I would like to that point. The last fire study that I remember us having, the only one said that we didn't need new fire stations. So now we need new fire stations or we need a study to figure out if we need new fire stations. So in some places, yes, you do need new fire stations. In other places, do you have you identified where those are? No, that's part of the the facility. We need them, but you don't know where they need to be. I have some suspicions, but I can't tell you with 100% confidence where exactly they should be. But some of those may be working within stations that we have. That's why you have to assess the the condition of it actually what it needs to locate and house there. It's not just one across the board answer.

Questions? I I do I have a little comic relief since my guys are here. They're gonna love me for this. Okay. Um and Eric, you might need to be in on this conversation. They Flint Hill needs a new sewer line. Do y'all know that? Yes, ma'am. Okay. We need to get them proper, you know, equipment in there. They need to be updated because they live there. So, that their bathroom needs to be updated. So, we need a new sewer line at Flint Hill. Okay. And there's a Penn there's a Penny's project right there. So,

yeah. And that's why I'm saying pennies is right there so it can tie in. That's why water and sewer funding is so important though. Yeah. I mean it's just kind of all tying in together. I don't know. It doesn't sound like they're going to get it. We're cutting the rates. We haven't made it through the rest of the So do we did you Oh, so I had a you talking

No, no, I'm waiting. Uh, I just had so in the event that we uh we cut this millillage down to down to a half, I see we've reduced uh some equipment. Uh, and in the event that we don't get it next year, I see that we have a up to a one and a half mil increase uh by 2030. If we don't get those increases, will you end up having to cut back on like the additional firefighters for Flint Hill? Uh what changes would you make in the event to to do this? Would you pull a squad from the western side or what's your contingency plan, I guess, is what I'm asking.

We would not pull a squad from the western side to accomplish that. No. Um but we would have to begin cutting level of service that we're trying to meet or exceed. um through staffing, we would have to significantly claw back on our apparatus replacement, the equipment. Um there's there's a lot of places that that cut would have to be dispersed throughout. Um and as part of that staffing need, you said y'all haven't done a needs assessment for every district yet. So maybe they get cut back some or just live with what they have. Um, is there a possibility I guess some of the other districts would also have to be short staffed or I guess they could pick up millage hopefully.

Well, hopefully, but again, keep in mind that we provide direct assistance to each one of them as well. And so, as as those costs go up, that direct assistance is a, you know, roughly 10 to 15% of the county budget as well. So, that direct assistance could conceivably take a hit as well. Okay. So, when this when this budget was put together to ask for the millillage increase, how many firefighters were we short? How many paid individuals were we short? Because I just heard you say we had some people that moved on, moved out at that time, two.

And now we're at five. Would it be wise or I'll just say it wouldn't be wise to say, "Hey, since we are now five short, we take that back out of the budget because I know we're going to hire, we're actively trying to hire for those positions, right?" Absolutely. So to to to denote that they're unfilled doesn't really affect what we're trying to do or what we should be trying to do. Correct.

Going forward and saying, "But we don't have these five people. Why are we asking for this money? we asking for this money because we know we want to fill these five positions. If we were cutting those positions, then you say cut the millage because we don't need the the individuals which in turn lowers the cost to run the department. Now, I heard something about rotating who gets which personnel. Are we still using that rotating system with the squad, so to speak? So, well, yes, but they're assigned to specific stations, but they do cover a large geographic area. So, they don't, you know, if they're in uh Bethesda, for example, or Smyrna, uh they'll respond beyond just that district as well. I know we we've had some talks over the years about at some point York County is going to have to go all paid service. And if we're struggling with trying to realize what we need to do with volunteers, imagine what the cost is going to be to this county when we're having pretty much a paid fire service because I think over the years we've seen some of the the numbers may be shrinking. Um, and our volunteers provide a huge cost savings to us right now. And there there's going to come a time where we're not going to be able to lean solely or we're going to have to put more paid people eventually. And this council, whoever sits up here, is going to have to make some tough decisions as to how to keep track with the millillage. How do you fund these departments? Because if we lose half the volunteers, that's a huge cost. is going to be shifted to the millillage that we're going to have to pay people to do this. So, I appreciate

what Call and and Bill and everybody else who puts on that that uniform, who gives their time and their service and their talents to help keep us able to offer these services without really impacting the property taxes the way that municipalities have to govern and manage to pay for these services. So, just wanted to make that comment and in appreciation for the the guys who who do give that that time and that effort um on that level. But um we we've had some challenges. I remember years ago it was a big thing about uh making sure we get good proper fitting turnout gear for our stations. I don't think that's been a big topic of conversation recently because we realize we got to get the good turnout. We got to get the good equipment. Fire trucks. What's the average cost of a firet truck nowadays built from Brandon?

Uh, an an engine is roughly 1.1 1.2 million.

A ladder truck is over 2 million. So these are some big ticket items and you know in saying that we shouldn't or we don't need to have certain increases and and I asked you during the break or in between sessions or whatever about our inventory. We're good on inventory but what come up after that? Well, we have good inventory but we have agent inventory. So, at some point, we're going to have to start turning over and replacing some of these ladder trucks, engines, you know. So, we we can't just continue to, you know, say not not increase certain things because ladder trucks, fire engine, they're not getting any cheaper. I mean, that's a big that's a big ticket item. Um, so I just want to make sure and I put a lot of stock in what you guys recommend for his budget because a lot of times we don't know the full plan. There's no way each council member can keep up with whether it's the uh the fire service plan, whether it's the sports and recck funding, whether it's the uh public works. I'll be the first to say we don't know every intricate detail about the plan going forward. A lot of times we get a lot of the backstories about what's being planned and to be able to digest it sitting up here. So it is not good for us to challenge staff on every single turn when we didn't know the the every single turn a month ago when two months ago, three months ago when these plans are being formulated because no one sitting up here knows every intricate detail about every aspect of what we have to decide, what we have to go through. You know, some people that dive deep into fire service, they know fire

service. Some people that dive deep into w funding, no wreck funding. Some people that dive into what the sheriff does or public works, they know that. But nobody sitting up here knows every single detail. I didn't know we just lost several people within the last couple weeks. I'm not that deep into fire service, but I know certain things that make sense when it comes to budgeting and what we're going to have to prepare for. That's the that's the main job of somebody that's sitting in the seat. Not to know who got fired two weeks ago, not to know who resigned, you know, those are are right now issues, but when we and the reason why I asked the question about when this budget was prepared, how many did we have on staff? How many did we lose? Because those things are going to happen. I'm sure we lost people in public works. We see people res resign, retire in the sheriff departments. Those things are fluid. Those things are fluid. But one thing that's not fluid is the personnel that we need going forward that's been budgeted for. Whether that person's on staff and we've we've we've had several examples of different departments that at the end of the year they didn't fill those positions. That money comes back. That money goes into um some goes to reserve, some goes to general fund. Not everybody up here knows how the intricate parts of the financial part of this county works until they've had an opportunity to sit down and dive deep into it. Say, "Oh, I didn't know that money that came back part went into the reserves 25% the other part goes to general." It takes a while to grasp how all this stuff works and plays a part in it. And we're kidding ourselves if we come off as if we know every single thing about every single move by every single department this county does. I've been here quite a while. I still don't know it all. I don't sit up here to profess I know it all. I don't have

time to know it all. But we have full-time people. County manager, county attorney, clerks, assistant county manager, public works, procurement. Those are the professionals. Those are the boots on the grounds. I feel like we're more of a support system and the Q&A part to kind of somewhat keep those checks and balances in place, not for them to keep us in checks and balances. I think sometimes maybe some of us overstep our bounds with telling them that they're wrong. If we we tell them wrong by voting against it, but don't tell them wrong by their assessments of what they put in a budget of what we need going forward. I I just totally don't think that's the proper position for these seats to do. If you don't like it, vote against it. But don't say their professional opinion of what we pay them good money. I've seen the salaries. They make good money to do what they're doing. And here we come up here on a Monday night or Tuesday night and we don't like it. We saying they're wrong. No, say that. Say that they're wrong by voting against it. But their assessment of what we need to do is what we pay them to do. And like I I'll say it again, some of us were blown away by what some of our staff members make. I'm particularly one of them. But I know we got good people. We pay them good but we should respect their professional opinion. It's not just a job that these people are doing. These department is these are careers. These are career oriented people. And that's why we see so many people from York County get pulled out of our system not because the next employer likes them. They like what they know. They like what they do. They like what they can bring to the table. And here we are left still constantly plugging holes

because talent has left us to go somewhere else. Not sure if they were looking, but they got recruited away from us and we suffer when assistants leave, department heads leaves, attorneys leave. We got to make sure that we are we're staying in our lanes as council members holding those accountable who's making these department head decisions, these budget decisions. We're here. I view my role. I can't speak for anybody else. I'm just speaking of my role when it comes to all the things that we have to decide. I'll never call a department head up and challenge them. I'll ask them, verify, justify, explain to me why we need this. If I don't like that answer, I'm a no vote when it comes to that particular part in the budget.

So, I I just think we we're losing some of the sight, some of the focus. And I I know these are big responsibility positions, but sometimes we make them bigger than what they really are. And I would I appreciate that. And what I would add to that going back in this conversation is if somebody from outside the organization reaches out to you to tell you their side of the story, I I hope you give David and I the benefit of the doubt to hear our side of the story because we're in it every day and and and to your point, uh, y'all pay us to do this. Uh, so I would hope you wouldn't wait till this meeting to ask us questions that you could have called the day you heard from somebody outside the organization. Any other questions related to fire before we move on?

Yeah, I've got one question. Well, a couple a comment and then a question. So, um, looking at the value of this one mil, I think it's roughly 1.3 million roughly. Yes, sir.

Right. So, we've got, you know, we we've heard comments that say that, you know, we're we're cutting funds. Well, well, first of all, we haven't cut a dime out of the funds of the fire department. We've actually given them a a $650,000 increase uh based on this. So, the question I have is that when I look at $650,000 and I look at what the ask is in general, I think a lot of it this had to do with filling positions. Um, knowing that we currently have some open seats too that we're, you know, funded already currently that we're looking to fill. Um, the end goal of using 650,000 should more than accomplish that. So, so explain to me why I we would need to increase the budget by more than two uh 650,000.

Sure. That's that's a great question. So, largely is the personnel are not that significant of a cost. Um they're are recurring cost. The more significant of the cost is the capital equipment and the replacement um because they they are such high dollar um items and they almost become an operational expense. even though they're capital in one time, it's almost operational because of how large our fleet is and how often we're having to replace things. We have to schedule it every year because we have so many departments. So, that's the big ticket and and that's where having to reduce that in the long run has the the further down the line effects of of pushing out that capital replacement plan even farther down the line because that that's where the biggest amount of the budget is. Um, so that's where the most significant impact would be. the other smaller cuts to your point are are probably less significant. Um I think you're right in that but the biggest impact would be that that equipment the capital replacement. Okay. Um the other the other question I have I know that we recently had um you know in um consent we had a request for a firetruck and I think it was at 1.4 million. I think we put it on hold. I guess I need to understand

that was a mobile command post that was not mobile command post. Okay. That's the emergency management. That's totally separate of anything related to the rural fire budget. So there's not that not so because it it appeared there was a difference in what was funded as opposed to what? Right. Correct. And where would that where would those funds I guess? Well, so that's emergency management that's not related to this but to that question. Uh most of that is already budgeted and then any remainder we've scheduled in 14 20 and 27.

Okay. Uh last just statement in general I think that you know in general like I when we've gone through this exercise I you know the the the conversations we've had was that you know these fire departments would would make a choice right do they want to come on to you know the county or do they want to continue to keep um in the capacity they are and I think that um when you look at such a large endeavor I think that it's to me when when you look to expand a a government role in changing it drastically like we're ac trying to with what's happening here is that I think that some people get pushed to the side. I think some of these rural fire departments again this is just my vision here what I'm seeing where they want to keep independent and I think that um this is a it can be a slippery slope and I think it can create friction as we move forward with something like this. So, I think that um as we talk about these things, I think we got to be conscious and I'm not saying you're not. I'm just saying that we have to understand the needs of all uh the fire departments and understanding really where they want to be and how they want to do business. So, this is a comment

agreed to that point. That's why we've made an emphasis on the fact that this is not an operational um takeover. This is not a command and control decision. This is strictly a administrative and continuing to support because York County Fire Service is largely a support organization of each individual fire department. So to to your point, yes, we are very mindful of that. That's it for me. You guys have

Thanks, Tony. Any other questions? This next section, we're going to move a little quicker. Oh, did I hear somebody? No. Okay. This next section, we're going to move a little quicker. Uh so you know one of the motions was to reduce uh the millillage increase for our our maintenance fund our capital maintenance fund. All right. So what I would say is you know okay you know staff is open to this conversation and we want to work with y'all through this to figure out what that means. Uh and and so what we're wanting to show you is the the long-term implication of that. But in the current year, if that's something the council wants to continue on, uh I think it's it's a it's a potential solution. But I wanted to give some context for everybody. We didn't just come up with this millage increase. Uh what we tried to do was to get it as low as possible, but also keep the the financial sustainability of the capital maintenance fund. Eric's going to give some background on that fund. But if we would have kept all the projects in that fund, we would be talking about a millage rate of 5.4. Okay, that's how many projects we have that need to be funded. But what we did as staff, because y'all pay us to do this, is we moved projects out of there that it could not actually sustain. And we're going to share some of those projects like the historic courthouse HVAC system. But we moved out two large projects in the amount of 11.9 million because this fund could not sustain those projects. Those are the type of capital maintenance projects of current buildings that we're dealing with. Uh we also were able to up the county road funding from 2 to 4 million. Part of the way we did that was a 1.5 million transfer from the general fund. So in council member Odette's motion, he asked for an additional 1.38 million transfer from the capital fund. We have that money in our capital fund fund balance.

Uh at the end of the fiscal year, we had about 78.8 million. That does not include the 20 million designated for the sheriff's office that they've set aside over the years to help pay for the MOS justice center and other future capital projects. All that to say, staff worked really hard to reduce this millage to what we put forward. There was a lot of work behind the scenes that got to this. I don't take lightly any mill rate increase, but it truly could have been a 5.4s. With that, uh, I want to start with roads. One of the follow-up questions we received from council was what's on the roads list. We've talked about the roads plan at all of our budget meetings. We talked about it last August and we've worked on it ever since. Uh, and with that, I'm going to hand it off to our assistant county manager, uh, Tom Couch.

Thank you, Mr. County Manager. Good evening, council. Uh this particular slide will be uh brief and less complex than the previous matters we we've discussed so far. And county management thought it was a good idea just to do a little bit of a refresher on the five-year roads plan that we discussed during the budget retreat. So what I merely wanted to do is u draw your attention to a couple of things. First, I want to focus on targets that were established uh to be reached by the end of fiscal year 2031. And one was staff oriented uh particularly by engineering and public works. And the second was council oriented by the virtue of your strategic plan. But at the staff level, u as you know, engineering did an evaluation of all the roads. They considered uh the ratings in their pavement condition index and they've also considered uh traffic counts which have been accumulating since your request last fall. Although by uh the nature of and in and the volume of the local roads that we we possess, uh the traffic counts aren't always going to make a significant or they're not going to be a significant influence on the way the roads that are rated. But there may be exceptions from time to time. Certain parts of of the county are going to grow and we're going to monitor traffic counts over time as we will with the pavement condition index. So ultimately, you may recall, not only in the budget retreat, but in early workshop, I think back in the

fall, Patrick Hamilton talked about condition ratings. And what we're trying to achieve, and there were three categories. Uh they were poor, fair, and good. And baseline that we want to try to accomplish is approximately 70 because that puts you at the cusp of saying either fair We're good. And uh when we I think at the budget retreat I had a handout that had a a schedule uh proposed for five years of uh road improvements. And of course we're going to be using different types of pavement techniques you see in this FY27 list, which by the way is only distinguished and colorcoded if you uh look the green cells. Uh those are the roads that are proposed to be done inhouse by public works and the the rest will be contracted if uh this list and the budget is approved. So I think what to focus on is that you also had a target within by the end of the fiveyear period that you wanted to peak and sustain 15 miles of improvements per year. So in this first year uh we start at approximately seven seven and a half and that's in in the table down below as far as annual funding needs uh to meet the targets and again this was uh previously discussed in uh the budget retrieve from FY27 through FY31 in order to get the 15 mile peak peak level and sustaining that you want. It is going to require some compounding of

funding. So if $4 million, as county manager has explained with the U transfer from the general fund into the capital reserve fund, uh we will have to continue our momentum o over the next or over the following four years if we're going to get to that 15 mile benchmark, which If we can do that, that will help us achieve the 70 70 plus ratings that we want to have on all of our county roads. So whether we're doing milling fill or in some cases uh pavement preservation, whether it's crack seal or other methods which helps preserve pavement life for a few years until it's time to come back and and do bill and fill or some kind of alternative resurfacing. We're going to have to keep investing over time. Uh so we think we've developed a a good financial baseline for this year, but if approved when we go into FY28 through FY31, we're going to have to reme remember the compounding effect if we're going to reach these goals,

right? And I think our if y'all choose to just do a transfer from 1420 this year, that won't be a long-term solution as we try to achieve y'all's long-term goals. Potentially, what we do is we adjust our county road goals to meet the the funding goals that council has, and that's a future conversation we can have next year. But we're just in year one of this uh and it's straining straining this fund. All right. So with that, real quick, Eric's going to run us through the capital reserve fund, which we are funding county roads through to Tom's point.

So I just wanted to run through the process real quick and what this plan is. Um, it is a living document. It's created in 2018 to funny to fund the county infrastructure projects and that's all facilities, roads, and it as well. Um the county has 48 plus facilities and managed 1.3 million square feet of facility space. So um this plan was initially built out of facility condition assessments both done inhouse and through consultants. Um and it is continuously updated. That's what I mean by the living document. Uh we thoroughly evaluate this thing continuously, but most importantly during the budget process, we sit down collaboratively between public works um all the way down to our maintenance folks, even the people that occupy or use those spaces and get their input to further prioritize the projects that were identified in this plan. And then we'll update cost estimates as well and decide whether or not we're going to fund that project. if it needs to be funded in that year, can we push it out? There's a lot of thought that goes in that and that's my whole point in in basically reminding you of the process of what goes into this actual plan. So, county manager kind of went over most of this as well. There were some changes in this year that led to this U millage increase recommendation and and that one was increasing the county road funding. Um, but we also did that $ 1.5 million transfer from general fund. um as well as the uh two projects being removed and uh and transferred over to the 1420. Um so we recognize that those projects were they that they basically weren't they didn't fit in this 1422 plan anymore just the cost alone and that's the historic courthouse project as well as a moss justice um waterline replacement project. These are the water

lines within the building. Um, so those are two large projects that were removed and and already put into the 1420 capital project account. Uh, but one one big thing I want to point out is since since we began this program in 2018, um, I I'll be vulnerable in saying that, you know, we could have improved on project delivery and we recognize that. So, we made some reorganizational changes within the department. um hired a capital projects manager. Uh we're now moving forward with a lot of projects um and and getting projects out. So we built this fund balance over uh since 2018, but now we are we are now using that fund bal that fund balance is decreasing. Uh we're doing what the plan was uh designed to do. Uh before I get into that, um I do want to point out just the the taxpayer impact. you know, this this increase is um is equal to $2.40 per $100,000 of home value. Um so I just wanted to uh put that out there and make sure you're aware of that. So this kind of points out the scenarios. Uh what you have here in the in this top graph is status quo. If we did nothing going into this next year, we have a 2.9 uh millage. Um you'll see you know the bottom line is our ending fund balance. Um in 2028 we then are negative and we continue to go negative. Um if you go down to the second one down you'll see that this was our original proposed millillage which I will point out that it was 3.5. So it was a point 6 um in this current fiscal year going into 27. But there was an additional that would have had to happen to maintain that $1 million fund balance at the end of the year. Um it's it's also important to point out

here that you'll notice that the ending fund balance uh both status quo in 27 and the proposed is is significant. What we were doing is planning for the future. um you know if you're looking out these these these projects are planned out a minimum of three years and so we took a big hit in 28 so we were starting to build that fund balance for that. Uh the final uh bottom graph shows what the amendment essentially was at least for 2027. It was to not is to decrease it uh or eliminate the 6 mil increase um and then transfer from capital which um which works uh especially in 27 uh but it's point you would have to continue doing that out the following years by those amounts shown in the yellow highlight. With that being said, these aren't the only three scenarios. It could be a combination of any of these and we're we want to work with you all uh to develop the best, you know, scenario going out the transfer and then we can continue to pro uh uh potential milling increase in 28. Um or the last and final option, which we don't really recommend, is remove or push out projects even further. But like I said in the beginning, we've already went through that exercise.

Um but um that's essentially where we land here. Um I'm taking any questions regarding that. What's the total what's the total fund balance right now for 1420 1422? Total balance now without transfers out. That's all I wanted to know.

So two separate funds and so that's what I shared earlier in the slide here. Uh, and I'll let Eric speak to 1422, but um 78.8 million is what the fund balance is for 1420 at the end of FY25. However, if you go to the budget document where we outline what we're doing this year and next year, those funds are being utilized to build capital projects like the coroner's office, uh, like moss justice center and the animal shelter. So, we 78.8 is 1420. If you go back to the slide um wrong way forward

uh yes these so the be um the beginning fund balance in 27 which would be the end of this fiscal year will be 6.4 4 million

and and for the first time on the 1420 capital fund in your budget document, you have a a solid 5-year CIP and that CIP can be funded utilizing the reserves from 1420 and additional funds that go into 1420. So, I would say this this government's done a great job with our capital fun. However, the general capital maintenance fund is is in worse shape. So, what I don't want to see happen is we we bring down the quality of of the capital fund to support the general maintenance fund and then all of a sudden we have two funds that don't have enough money for infrastructure.

Back in the previous slide, you said that there was a reduction because of the motion that was made to like 1.38. That was directly related to the facilities maintenance study that was projected, right? No, that's that's different. So that was so the 1.38 is based on y'all's motion uh from first reading and that's because council member Rodet said to reduce the millage increase down to zero

and pay for that with a transfer from the capital fund. That's what he said uh in his motion. And so that 1.3 is an additional funding taking out of 1420 and moving it over to 1422, which both Eric and I have said that's great for one year. We're worried about year two, three, four, and five. But that was to pay for that facilities plan. That was like 1.3 million,

1.2 million for a facility space study, but we were paying for that out of general fund fund balance appropriation. So y'all y'all all took that out, but that just means we could pay for something else from fund balance appropriation and staff. We're willing to work with y'all to figure out what that is if you want to reduce the general fund more to meet your goals in your first motion. But that's where we got to have a conversation with you all to understand what you want to do so that staff can actually give you all ideas that that might help you achieve that. So the 1.2 wasn't in the millillage. It was coming out of the general fund anyway. That's right. So those who thought that 1.2 two was going to be included in the millage increase. That was wrong.

Yeah, the one Yeah, the 1.2 was out of general fund fund balance because it's a huge onetime expense. So, we didn't put that in operating and I would hope you would expect your county manager not to do that, but nobody asked me. And and if we remove the 6, we have to move we have to transfer 1.3 out of the capital 1420 to offset not doing the 6, right? Which we can do for one year. It's doable, but it doesn't help us. As you can see from the bottom chart,

our goal is to have at least a million dollars in in fund balance. And our former CFO, that was his goal, and we're trying to carry that on. But you can see on the annual transfer from 1420 to capital, we're in the 50,000s. So you're going to have to up that. And the bottom chart also does not include increasing money for county roads every year. So we're going to be stuck at 4 million for the next five years. And so that's really a question for council. How aggressive do you want to be in county roads in the future? We can cover the four million this year, but there's some hard choices in the out years that we want to just make everybody aware of. That makes it that makes it even that much more difficult to even get to our 15 miles per year if we're snatching money out of it now. Oh, we'll never get there.

And then saying that we want to increase the mileage up to 15 and we're only at 7 whatever now. That fund will never be able to do 15. So, with the projected uh expenses in 1420, which is uh Moss Justice Center, um animal shelter, some of the other things, corner,

um then we're going to take road money out of it. How long is 1420? How long can it last? Can it last to 2030 with those appropriations? It doesn't sound like it. Well, and so this is this really goes to one of the the points I think Madam Chair made at first reading, which I think is a great conversation to have long term with y'all. Part of the way you fund your capital plan is related to savings at the end of the year that falls into it. And so that's what's happened historically, which is why we have a healthy fund balance in our capital fund. And a lot of governments do that. you don't know how many vacancies you're going to have and you don't know how much revenue you're going to have in a given year. And you have to be conservative in those estimates for for a lot of different reasons. Uh we think, you know, in theory that about $8 million a year might fall into that capital fund. And so what we did was we projected that out in the out years to make sure that over the next five years we can afford what was in 1420. If we begin pulling more out of 1420 for other things, it's like a bank account. You have multiple bank accounts and and you got one that you use for for trips or something, you save a little bit every month,

but you start using that for something other than trips. You're not going to have money to go on a trip. And so, we're not going to have money to build new buildings if we move all that money to pay for county roads. And we just have to decide what we want to be and what we want to do. And that's part of the uh facility study, correct? is to make sure that the buildings that we're currently using still are needed to be used or that we could abandon some or that some are too expensive to use. I mean, I I'm I'm going back. I know we've already approved this whole thing for the historic courthouse, but do we really need to use it? I mean, we're going without it now. Maybe we could save that $6 million and just it'll look pretty on the outside and we can just maintain that.

I don't care. They don't have They're not using the cord. I know. So we don't even we won't even use it. We don't use it now if it don't have air. So we could just wherever they're using it doing now. Probate judge should be in the in that courtroom, right? I didn't think they were using because we got So we do have we do have a slide related to this. We So Madam Chair asked about the courthouse. Do you want to go back? Do you want to go back before we answer Madam Chair's question about the courthouse? Deb, did you have a question? Yeah. Okay.

I I want somebody to address what's going on with the animal control shelter, the new animal control shelter that we voted on. And I was under the understanding that we had um farmed that out to a group that was already bump. Don't you remember? Yeah. What's your understanding? Yeah. So, Eric's prepared to give you all a quick update. Obviously, this is being worked through the public works committee, but we're currently working uh with with our contractor to to in this next step. Eric, you want to share where we're at? We're excited about what's coming.

Yeah, we're under contract with both the owner rep um and as well as an architect. Uh we are in the due diligence phase. uh going through some looking at the sites um the both current site and and a proposed site um and looking at what the best options would be. At the same time, concurrently, we're working with the architect to start that preliminary conceptual design. Um and we we've been moving forward with regular meetings and uh we'll be ready to come to council within probably the next two months with a recommendation of you know which direction we're going to be going uh whether and then proceed into that next phase of design but it is under contract for design as we speak.

So when do we think we'll be ready for our public works committee meeting? Probably within two months to come. Okay. Did I hear current location? That that's a So, we're providing options to either renovate and expand our current location or build on a Greenfield site. And one of the reasons the last estimate was so high when this was looked at previously was it was only looked at the current location. And so, in order to find an option that might be cheaper, you have to look at more than just our current site because it's expensive to retrofit a building that's not working currently. Yeah, I thought we pushed the current location off the tape.

We're we're looking at any option that will achieve y'all's goal on reducing the cost of this building. I'll say go ahead.

I got a quick question and this is just general around the amount of money or revenue etc. When we look at these dollar figures um and this is something you can take away as a as a question. Okay. Um, but the question I have is, can you send out uh what we took in for tax revenue um year-to- date last year or for the full uh budget cycle and then what we've taken in for this year. I'd like to see the the difference because, you know, when we look at people coming into the community, it naturally raises up the amount of money that you have coming in because you have more people paying into the coffer. I just want to find out what was the intake of taxes last year compared to what the intake is this year or what we've received in and again I just I want to have a full cycle you know so I can compare it to

you're talking total total revenue total revenue of taxes coming in sure yeah we got so from from last year to you know this year um maybe even the previous year before I'm just curious of what is our increase as we grow as a community in the amount of revenue we have coming in for taxes. That That's my end goal.

So So one interesting thing, you know, 20 years ago when I was in NPA school, uh and it's there's research that backs this up. Every neighborhood that that's built, we lose money on. We're not the services that we have to provide in unincorporated neighborhoods is so expensive and and where we get revenue is really commercial and businesses. And so our ability to provide services without losing money is dependent on recruiting businesses and having commercial well development that has sales tax. Okay. So so you can't just look at property tax increases because we're losing money when a new neighborhood gets built. Well, and I'm not just speaking of just residential. I'm talking about business in totality.

We need as many businesses we can Yeah. So worried about about you know Yeah. I just want I want to see how how we are trending from a county you know for both business and resident total taxation. So, any other questions before moving on? I just want to make a comment about the animal control shelter and that project and public works committee. Obviously,

there's a lot to be flushed out before it comes back to committee before we even have a discussion because if we would have met last week, last month, nothing new has been put forth for us, the committee to even consider to work through. So, you know, even the location, we don't know if we're going to be on the same site or we going to find a um offsite that we have to go out and purchase to do all this stuff. So, um we knew this wasn't going to be a fasttrack project because we basically started over because the proposals that we heard initially, all of us said, "No, we're not spending 20 plus million on this thing." It went back to the drawing board. Started from from zero. So, um, would I like to see it move faster? Of course, for the people that work over there, for the animals that's housed there. Uh, but this is one of those projects that it's probably time well spent on the money that we're going to spend. So, we can either rush and build something and be over budget. And I don't think that's why we go out and hire um what what you call the rep to to to owners rep doesn't make sense to go out and hire owners rep then rush through it and overspend over bill or under

we did yeah I thought we had determined we've hired him but we hadn't nothing since the last committee meeting nothing has come back from that I'm just making a point here I'm making a point that nothing has come back and so you know a lot of more projects have been put on the books and we can't even get the old we have made good headway And I don't think y'all should take the the fact that you haven't heard anything that work's not being done. So, we're we're excited about updating y'all on that. Last year, we budgeted for two capital project folks in engineering, right? Yeah. We don't have we don't have either one of those filled and we are getting our projects that we funded done.

We have to at least own that. Come on, let's own it. Yeah. And and one I'm recommending to move out of engineering and I'm going to own it myself. But we've had the two two positions in order to move these projects forward. And the animal shelter has been languishing for four years now. And now we're talking about historical courthouse being shut down already a year and it's not even going to be open until December because of an HBAC replacement. I mean, we had we budgeting these people and it's not getting done. We aren't getting updates on them.

So So what I would say the historical courthouse is a little bit different. So, I I will own the fact that there's two positions in engineering that haven't been filled, but it's not because we're not trying. Uh and and I'm committed to to moving one of those positions uh to make sure that it's utilized properly. On the courthouse, this is what happens when you value engineer a project and you have a HVAC that was was cheap. And then in this situation, you've got to rip the whole place up to figure out if you have mold and other damage because the system wasn't working. And so, we're committed to do is fixing this with the right system that will last. And what you'll see in all the projects we're doing now, whether that be the emergency management building when we replace HVAC or planning, we're putting in the system it should have gotten originally. And we're, you know, just like we did in this room right here. It's a new system and we think it's going to work and it's worth the money. Uh, and we're going to get our return on investment back. That's why this is such a long project. We can go more detail at a time when it's not getting late, but we've mapped out the timeline and it's currently under design and this work is going to be done, but it's complicated and when you're adding such a big piece of equipment, you cannot rush this. This is also not an engineering department's project. Our our current building projects are done by our public works department and they do an amazing job on project delivery, which Eric outlined earlier. Anything else on the historical courthouse? No, but I want to make a quick comment before we move forward. And that is when you're when you're reporting these numbers like $247 a month for the water and 147 a month for the sewer, make sure you're putting monthly or annually because going back four or five slides, there was a on the 610 of a mill. Um it was I think it was two I think ironically it was $247, but I think that was annually. So when the citizens are reading through this, if they do, they're not going to know

whether it's annual or monthly. So we need to identify that. So it's very clear. We need to know that too. So we don't have to ask that question. Yeah. And and I think adding the percentage of increase on that too, Eric would be important. Yeah. Water, but the other one I think is annual. All right. So, so moving on real quick, this page, and I'm not going to go through this, but I think it's really important that folks know

staff put in a lot of hard work to go from 53 position requests down to 22 recommended positions. We haven't had a number that low in the past five years. That's the lowest number of requests in the past five years. We did a lot of hard work to get this list. And so, one of our challenges was with that motion was without having conversation about the why behind these positions. They were cut. I would love the opportunity to have that conversation. If you all choose not to have that conversation, I understand what you're trying to achieve holistically. But staff has a lot of ideas of how you could do this without cutting these new position requests to help us achieve our broader goals, but also achieve the goal you're trying to achieve, which is a zero net tax increase. without asking us our ideas, you're left to cut new positions that could have had a huge impact. For example, the accounting manager in the utility fund. We really need somebody who's looking at the accounting in our utilities fund. We don't have that. So, what am I going to do? I'm going to have to figure out something uh to to make sure we do that. Our EMS director, we're trying to lower response times in Western York County on EMS calls. We need somebody who can can govern that and look at that every single day to make sure we're improving. Each of these positions are very important. Uh what I would say, we have one person doing recruitment for our county and we have all sorts of vacancies. We would love to have two people. You would see a huge turnaround. One of the uh the reasons behind uh project delivery taking a long time is we have one person whose job it is to review contracts. Most counties our size have more than one. we're asking for a second person that would create amazing turnaround time that we don't have right now. So all these positions I would claim create huge efficiency for our organization and a return of impact that's greater than the cost of the position. And so adding

efficiencies actually saves you money long term. And each of these positions that were taken out uh I could speak to that if I had time but I want to make sure people get home tonight. Josh, of the 22 positions, four EMS. Is one of those four the EMS director? Fire. Six. Six are fired. So, there's only one EMS. Uh, and this would be the first EMS position and probably the only one we need for a long time because it is looking at the entire system. Okay. So, of the 22 positions, I read there were four EMS. I read that somewhere. No, four EMS. No, the four were fire. The the one singular position EMS director.

Okay. not included in that in in the in the county fire budget. So, six fire services, four fire six fire services, four firefighters, three parks and wreck, two park rangers, three sheriff's deputies, and four EMS. No, I don't know where I got that. And a fortress and a pear tree. The six is total in fire service. I can correct that one. So, it's not six and four. It's six total. Thank you. All right. And we got that all spelled out and we couldn't Whoops. So, um, Josh, so I think I'm hearing you say you're coming back with a proposal that would bring us to a net zero tax increase.

If if that's what you all want to achieve, my my what I share with you is we're ready to help you figure out how to do that in a way that can do that. We'll we'll limit the number of positions that are being reduced. I think you know just building upon that there is no way I can do my job without a CFO and a budget director and that is the biggest concern I have in that motion. Uh this will hamstring the organization. Uh this will limit our ability to be good financial stewards. This chart up here shows our peers and who has a CFO and who has a finance director. You see people either have a CFO or a finance director. But if that motion stays, we're the only organization that has neither. Uh and and we can't do that. York County is a big county. Uh we're doing amazing things. But if we don't have a CFO or a finance director, we're in a lot of trouble, y'all. We're in a lot of trouble. I spent a lot of time in finance now as your county manager. I'm not a CFO. I'm not a finance director. Uh the other thing I would show is your county, if you get rid of the CFO, has eight people in finance. Every other county on this list has a lot more. So, we're not asking for a lot. We're asking for one position to make it nine. That's that's not a big ask. And y'all approved it two months ago midyear. Then I would also share our budget director does strategic planning, runs the strategic plan for the organization, implementing y'all's key priorities and goals. and to take away our budget director who leads the strategic plan and the development of the budget and works with departments to transfer funds midyear and figure out how to pay for things as they come up in the agenda process. I don't know how I'm going to do my job when you take away these two positions. So, if you change anything in your motion, I would beg you to change this. Take away all the big positions you

want, but taking away current positions will set us backwards five, six, seven years. Quick question to the staff to to direct it to county manager. Is it even possible with all the things that we've we've approved and said this county wants to do in our strategic plan from supporting the sheriff to the road pavs to fire service to water sewer infrastructure. Is it even possible for you to bring back a budget that has zero net increase? That's what's been asked for this staff to do. Is that even possible?

I I I can't answer that question, but I'll try if given the opportunity. I think for me the the opportunity and the conversation and how we might do that is what makes this place better and then and then you've got to weigh. So, what we've done as staff and as professionals is we've tried to figure that out. But be but because so much was dedicated to sheriff's pay increases, there really wasn't a way to figure it out. The Motorola contract was another mid-year change that we had to throw $3 million at. All these things came up and thank goodness there was a value of mill increase because we wouldn't have been able to afford these things. The sheriff's office would not have gotten that 10% raise and another three and a half%. But we were able to utilize that to thank our sheriff's officers and make it more competitive. And man, are they filling their vacancies. So, you know what? Less money is going to fall out of that budget because they're filling their vacancies because the pay is more competitive. It's all good news, y'all. This is all good news. It's not bad news. We're getting more people in patrol cars because we were able to use the value of the mill increase to pay sheriff's office more. But that limits us in our ability to achieve long-term things because the first full fiscal year impact is next fiscal year. It just does. And so I think we'll struggle to achieve that goal, but I would cherish the opportunity to at least try because I haven't been given that opportunity.

Any questions on on personnel? All right. So, this is an awkward transition, but we're going to talk aircraft real quick because y'all asked this question and Ryan has been here, our auditor for this entire meeting. And I I apologize, Ryan, that this is t near the end. Usually I do that to Mitch Miller, our economic development director. Uh but he wasn't in the slide deck. So Ryan has a couple slides because we want to answer this question. We got it last year. I didn't answer it, but this year I was like, Ryan, you're new. We're going to answer this question. That'll hand it off to you, sir.

And I know I'm going last, so I'll go really quickly. Um I'm presenting two slides tonight. And everything on these slides is something that some of you have asked about. Um the first thing I want to show you guys is um someone asked about an ordinance. Um 2003 your county adopted an ordinance um to go from 10 and a half% which is the highest allowed by law ratio to go down to 4%. And you guys did this because you wanted to make your market competitive with your neighbors around you. As you can see in the graph beside you, green is for the 4% counties. Is a 4% county. There's two counties that are 6% and there's only five left in the entire state that are at um 10 and a half percent. What's happening is is businesses have gotten smart and realize they can park their airplanes as it's called situs in a lower mill county and so and it's hard to um to to tax those airplanes when they're doing that but they're doing what's in within the law and this would allow by the department of revenue. So go to the next slide please. So this next slide um we are still collecting for two 2025 tax year. So I presented 2024 slides because these were the final numbers. Um some of you guys asked about hey how many planes do we even have? So we had 178 airplanes countywide that were taxed. As you can see throughout the color chart, um only 28,000 of the $172,000 that were build actually goes to the county. That's the general fund, your your capital, your your library. So, it's a very small number because our airplanes that we do have in York County, um there's a misconception about the airport. You see a lot of those big jets at airport, a lot of those big jets are companies that are just flying in and out. Those are not taxed by York County. Um, and so the ones we are left with are old 1970 models, 80 models who have depreciated

over 30, 40 years, and we're not making a lot of money off of airplanes or aircraft at the time. But the good news is, and I was off before I go back, as you can see, the school district eats up a lot of that uh that's collected. But the good news is u because you guys have asked about the airplanes, I personally went to the airport and met with the airport director back in April. Super nice guy. He's very friendly and he's able to work with me on a lot of things because I want to make it better for York County. Um, we established a new partnership to we're going to share our FAA list that we get each year from the Department of Revenue. He's going to he's also on the flip side going to give us his list of airplanes that he knows has been there for over six months, which we call the majority of the time. And that way we know we can actually go after some of those airplanes that might not be taxed on our FAA list, but we should be getting because they are sitting in York County as businesses. Um he also uh brought to my attention that um square footage they're building three new hangers um on the facility. These are going to start this year. The ground groundbreaking should all be completed by 20 29. These hangers are going to be they're going after the big commercial like u um business uh jets. Um not just your average Cessnas or stuff that you see at the airport. These are they're going after the big ones and they're more private jets. And uh this will bring a lot more revenue to us eventually, especially if we can bring these million-doll multi-million dollar jets here. Um that's going to really boost our revenue in the long run. Um the overall goal with the airport of course you can see the final thing is is to increase capacity, attract more aircraft and continue to support the growth in corporate business and aviation. And again as you can see the planes that we have right now the county is you know collecting hardly nothing out of it at at the end of the day. School districts getting the most. Uh the municipalities are getting some. Um

you know the fire departments are hardly getting anything. Special districts. Um, but like again, the good news is with the new hangers that are being built to attract these new bigger airplanes, uh, we should see our revenue boost in the next three years. And so, I hope that answers all your questions about this because these are some of the stuff particularly that y'all were asking for. If there's anything I left off, I'll be glad to ask or answer anything I possibly can. One question. So, we collect 28,87 We collected $28,872 in revenue. What do we allocate to the airport and put me on the spot? How much do we invest in the airport annually roughly? We we have that in our budget document. We can look that up. I think it was about 560. Yeah, it went up this year. It was about 560,000.

560,000. It's one of the higher years we've had. It was about three or 400,000 last year. So, we need a we need a strategy to come up with a costneutral plan here. Whether I don't even know if you can charge a fee per plane that comes through. We need to figure out a way to make this neutral. No, I think we should just uh dump it. It's a bigger conversation we need to have. I think we should just dump the airport. Quit giving it money. Uh raise the increase of the taxes back to what generally everybody else is paying around here. Uh because as you say, you can attract a bigger jet, but they're going to fly it out of the uh airport anyway on the December 31st. So what's the point in attracting them? This thing's a money scene.

Money pit. Is there a way I know um I'm sure there are some planes up in North Carolina. How can we be competitive? I know we recruit companies to come here away from other areas. Do we have a plan that recruits jet owners to say, "Hey, you're right across the line in North Carolina. It's a little cheaper to store your plane here versus what North Carolina is charging you if you're at the in the Charlotte area.

Yes, sir. And I actually had that conversation with the airport director and that's something that he mentioned. That's why they're they're building these new hangers to attract that. Um easier airports, easier runways to get to and out of uh easier um parking. There's a lot of incentives to the Rock Hill area airport that they don't have in the Charlotte area because it's just too congested. But that is one reason they are wanting to build these hangers. And they actually got some there's smaller hangers being built right now as well. I don't know if you guys have anybody's been out there lately, but they got a lot of projects going on out there and they're trying their best to attract these other states, these other because what's happening is a lot of these business owners again have gotten smart and a lot of them are are through Delaware or through New Hampshire which are not taxed. And so these LLC's are getting smart. That's why we're trying our best work with this airport uh manager because he's trying his best to get more tax income coming in and I'm trying my best to work with him with our FAA list and his list um because we need to be taxing everything that is actually supposed to be taxed in York County um that is coming here.

What's the largest size jet hanger that we can hold? I don't know. I know for Okay. Yeah, I can definitely I could talk to to Steve and definitely get you. I'm looking at getting a jet and I want to make sure I get the right size. Is that your retirement plan? I mean, I hate to look at the my residents and with their I mean boats finally got a little bit lower, but we got campers out there. We got heavy duty trucks at 10 and a half%. But if you own an airplane, again, if you're rich, you can get out of paying stuff. Get out of paying it. Uh that's not what we should be doing around here. I hate I wouldn't want to raise taxes on anybody. I'd rather cut everybody else's taxes down to 4% and go with it. But we're not going to have that opportunity. So, we do have this opportunity to make things a little more fair and uh get rid of this money.

Yes, sir. And again, I think that's the misconception. Everybody, you know, they say, "Oh, he's got an airplane." Well, the airplane's a 1970 Cessna that's been depreciated for 40 something years. It's the taxes only like 100 bucks. 300 bucks, but it's still worth 200,000 because I look at them on the Facebook marketplace. Yeah, exactly. So, so the tax base is really hard. That's why again they are trying their best to track more aircraft, track bigger um companies to come in and um and just look at their plane over there. It's a really really big job they got going on right now. Anybody's got a chance to go over there and check it out. It's really nice and uh to talk to him. But um but again um hope this answered the questions that you all specifically asked because I think that covered everything that was asked of me.

Um yeah and and Ryan Ryan Thomas is our our auditor y'all and he's doing an amazing job. we are building an exceptional team and and he's brought so much to the organization. Uh you know, he served as both an auditor and a treasurer during his time with Cherokee County and he brought all that experience here and he's an amazing team player. He was a part of the budget process and and helped out. He's he's a team player and we had a great collaborative process because of employees like him. So, we appreciate that, Ryan. Sorry you had to stay till 9, but it was well worth it. I don't mind a bit. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you.

So, so the the last thing we had, y'all had asked to talk about agency funding. I I think this is where we're going to just look to y'all to see how you all want to work through this and what your process is going to be. Uh but but you know, we've shared this already at a previous workshop. Y'all have had this information. Uh and and kind of looking to y'all kind of inform us how you want to work through this. personally like it to add $25,000 back for safe passage. Um, and then that has us expending the same amount of money we that we expended in FY2026. And then looking forward, I think we need to take this next year and establish a criteria for how we're going to generate the revenue. Um, if you take 155 million out of our budget, so 560US 155, you got 405. uh take a quarter of a percent maybe uh take that money, set it aside. Let's create a grant program where people can request money for uh special needs, one-time needs, not ongoing revenue like uh Pathways came in tonight. I think you mentioned $150,000 to help with this sewer issue that they weren't expecting to have. So, we we take the time to put a um formula together on who's eligible, how they apply. We did this for Hax and it worked really well. Um and then create the funding model, which I just throw out quarter of a point. I know we're not voting on anything tonight, but that's what I suggest. So we can we can actually I mean we got nine entities that allocate money to and we had and we had nine come tonight that aren't even on this list. So there are plenty of not forprofits in our county that do significant things. U Adrien Woods made a good point. We say passage if we weren't here what's it going to cost the county to provide these

services? I know Christians feed the hungry. Practically every single week, Ronald King gets a phone call from 911 asking to come get somebody and put him in a hotel. But we don't help him pay for the hotel, pay for the person's meals or transportation. He's he's left figuring that out. I'm not saying we need to we need to fund him, but I am saying that we need to come up with a better strategy on how we identify who's eligible and how we allocate the money and and how we generate the money. So, the question I have is is on the uh county and city airport again. Can you explain to me again why there's a 52% increase on this?

Yeah, one thing we could do is we could send you the the page from the budget book that addresses it, but but in theory, this goes to supporting their capital investment and there's a IGMO with the city of Rock Hill that basically splits those needs. So, Every year we we find out how much we need to contribute and the city of Rock Hill does the same. Uh and so that goes to their capital projects. So they have a huge year of capital projects and we can resend all that information tomorrow.

But but basically they have a huge year of of investment. I know Council Member Coner was there at the annual lunchon uh with me and she heard about all those projects that they're doing, but it's there's a lot of construction. I don't think anybody else was outline all this project. So, we'll send that to you. Yeah, please do because again based on what Watts is asking for, I mean to to increase that back up to safe passage back up to 125, you know, based on what they got last year and take it out of that budget, I have I would have no problem doing that because that that's a much to me a much better investment.

Yeah. And I think for y'all something to think about, I heard council member Huckby begin to talk about this is creating some level of a threshold for next year during the year because when you get new requests from new agencies, how do you handle that? We we don't necessarily have additional money to look to. I mean, y'all are already cutting positions that we badly need. Uh and so so what what's occurring when you add new agencies on top of these is our our organization is is is losing out on what we need because there's others that need it. And I get the need out in the community, but we shouldn't have to to sacrifice what what we need to to accomplish some of these requests. So, I think somehow thinking about what that cap is and we can develop an even better process to help score these as they come in for you all. Uh, and we can do all sorts of things that really help achieve our strategic plan. So, is there a way to weigh these against our strategic plan in a more meaningful way? Maybe that's part of this.

Well, I I I'll say this. I know going back and I always refer back to 10, 11, 12 years ago when we had a whole laundry list of people coming that was receiving funding from this this council and this government and we started cutting back. We started cutting back. Um, but we can't not help fund agencies that do things that a county government should be doing. I think our money should be going to organizations that are filling the gaps to where we don't have to start up a whole new department to address these issues on the county level. Um it our money goes a long way when we can assist other organizations that's doing stuff to keep us out of the game like direct funding. We're not into direct. It's better for us to fund municipalities to help fund the wreck versus us starting a wreck department to start little league baseball, little league basketball, little league soccer. We assist those municipalities in doing that. And so I I look at that the same way of uh border disabilities, York County Council on Aging. Um some of the different organizations that we do help fund, they're helping fill those gaps that if they weren't doing it, that's definitely a service that I think we would probably be looking to try to do something with it. But we can take a little bit of money to help those organizations to further achieve where we are lacking because we couldn't go out and start up all these different groups of organizations to fill the gaps. So we we're there to to help. Um I remember it was millions of dollars that we just had a whole laundry list of

people that were lining up and the more that we give the more people are going to want to come and get funding from us. We saw some new requests coming up tonight that we haven't seen in to this date. So, how do we handle new organizations coming into the fold that yeah, they can do some good to help facilitate some needs in this community? Um, it's it's it's always going to be tough and and I hate to pick the winners and losers of who gets the money, who doesn't, but we got to have some kind of criteria. um before we start start lineup again.

Um and it would take some of the the guesswork out, take some of the political politics out if they meet this criteria and and and what had a good experience with this on the what's Xax committee where you had you had to apply. You had to meet certain criterias before and you didn't get probably all that you requested. You know, there were some that, oh, they got 30%, they got 40%, 60% of what they were asking for, but I wouldn't want this council to I mean, we do it on the small project grant funding, but that's only $20,000 a year. We and Pathways is getting help from some of the council members. um um Habitat for Humanity comes, they've g they've gotten some of those funds from council members, uh different organizations throughout um we try to help them fill those gaps throughout the community, but we can only scratch that money so far. And we and we definitely can't be funding outside agencies at a high level, then turn around and cut our staff to provide services for our community. That's not the way. That's not the balance approach to do that. You know, if we're funding and getting what we need on this end and if there's funding left to do some other things. Yeah. But I wouldn't put funding any of this in front of funding CFO, treasurer, EMS, some of the things that our staff has indicated that they need to be successful as a county government. How do we put the funding on this and act staff to take less and cut personnel? I don't think that would be a good good fit going forward. But all the ones that's on this list we've supported in

the past. Um just look curious as to why safe passage after we increase them uh over the prior year that they go back down and lose what? 25,000. Yeah, we we could get you that information. Okay. Follow.

Well, let me just say that I'm going to be the bad guy and point out that I don't think we should fund any of these or most of them until we fund our own government and our own uh needs first. I'm It's great that they're doing things for the community. Don't get me wrong. I support them all. I appreciate all that they do. But we have operations that we have to do here that we are not doing. But we're going to give out money to all these organizations with no accountability, no uh rhyme or reason, and we're we're funding their some of them. We're funding their operations. You know, if we're funding one-time deals, that's one thing. And just like the 140,000 that's uh discretionary funds, we've cut positions and studies that we need so we can have money to give to charities. That's not what we're here for. We're here to do the county business. And anybody that says they're a fiscal conservative and worried about the money uh should really take that to heart and uh and should comment on it. I've gotten plenty of comments that we shouldn't that the county shouldn't be funding these things because we can't do our own stuff. Can't fix our own roads. We got water leaks out there we can't take care of. So, you know, and again, there's plenty of other charities in this county that we could fund that could use this funding way, you know, as much or more than these can. So, I'm willing to cut it all to get the county to be where it needs to be. So, our staff has what they need so we have the we can be as efficient as we can be before we go off and start funding all these other agencies. You know, I feel the same way about the uh schools and all the other tax line items that are on our taxes.

One closing time. They're uh they're all getting their money. They're not cutting taxes. When they look at the tax when the residents look at the tax bill, they go, "Oh, $200 or $200,000 in taxes. Oh, it all goes to the county." But it doesn't. But we're taking the hit. our constituents are losing out on services so that somebody else doesn't have to uh reduce their services and it's just a poor way for us to run this county. Anyone else?

Yes, please. Um I think that our county is a little different than the federal and state government. So I I'm reading what people are doing to compare what we're doing versus what the state and federal does. State and federal level typically if you're going to an expense, you score it. That means that you reduce it somewhere else. So, yeah, you can add it, but you got to pay for it by cutting something else. We don't necessarily have that luxury here in York County. Another thing I want to mention is that we do somewhat, but we do not compared to state and federal governments. Um, in my opinion, I do think that as county council members, we're always going to be sensitive to our constituents and our citizens here in the county, which makes it tough to issue tax increases. Um, and there's a growing trend for this all over the United States from what I'm reading. Uh, with that said, you look at other states like Florida and other areas that have have cut taxes. You can cut taxes, but you got to make it up somewhere else. You You've got to pay for your growth. I mean, your county, they say 25 years from now, we're going to grow. We're going to double in size 20 25 years from now. So, how are you going to pay for that? Well, one thing I suggest that we take a look at is, and I don't mean no discussion tonight, but I mean for the 2028 year, we need to be thinking about the possibility of a one-cent sales tax. You wouldn't go to referendum until 2028. you wouldn't get the money till 2036. That's a long time off. But if if council is going to be adverse to increasing taxes to cover the needs of the county, um then we need to look at a different strategy and a 1 cent sales tax getting that second penny and using it wisely, investing it in our roads, our infrastructure, economic development, and other things would be a wise thing for us to consider. Uh that way everybody is contributing towards your tax base and that's what's happening

around the United States. You don't want to increase property taxes. Uh and that's one way they're doing it is you're collecting it through a sales tax. Another penny and I think we need to consider it. It could be tremendously impactful for York County in the long run. That's a tax increase. It is for everybody. Everybody that comes through York County and everybody that lives here. I agree. I said we just cut services until there's nothing. Sorry. Well, then just let the municipalities annex. So, I think in closing, you know, if I could, I'm trying to read the room. Seems like we're ready to go. Um,

as staff, if there's anything council as a whole wants us to work on in the leadup to second reading, you know, that would be my final question to y'all at, you know, we really want council to be working all together on the budget. And so anything y'all think as a collective that we can work on in leadup and get you information prior to the vote Monday night, uh, you know, we're here ready to do that. So yeah, I've got two things again. Uh, come back to me with a zero net zero budget, no tax increase proposal that you have. Yeah.

Just to clarify, and this is one of the things that we were as staff confused about the motion. My thought in trying to do that for you is to look at what it would take to to afford through cuts in the general fund to offset upping the rural fire millage from 0.5 to one. Is that is that what I'm hearing you say? Because well, you're just talking when I say net zero impact, I mean net zero impact. everything load and balance across the board and it ends up with be no tax related to the but but here's the clarity that we need as staff and this is why I'm glad we're having this conversation

in relation to what we're asking for for the capital millillage as well as the rural fire increase. Yes, those two. Yeah. Yeah. Everything across the board all lumped together. Okay. And then the other thing was that but but not water and sewer because as we explained water and sewer is fee based and very different and not something that we could really utilize in that and the other asked is again um I'm interested to see what our revenue intake is from businesses and and residents from a taxation perspective over the last two years. We'll work on that or three. Yeah. Or three if you can get the last I want to see the trends and that's business and res. Anybody else? Motion to good second.

All act. All right. Thanks for sticking around.