Agriculture, Planning, Tourism & Community Development - Regular Meeting

Yes. I call the planning meeting to order.

First order of business of seven minutes of the May 19th meeting. Do I have the motion? I move it. I ask you second by Sue. Any omissions or corrections? All in favor? Aye. Carried. Next, Chris Crailing from Conservation Programs Manager, Farmland Protection.

That's me. Good morning, everybody. I thought you'd run. Good morning, everybody.

Chris Crailing, Conservation Programs Manager with Agricultural Storage Association.

Thanks for adding me to today's agenda for the meeting. I just wanted to kind of report back to the committee on a little bit of the experiences we're having with the Farmland Protection Grants Program with Ag and Markets, but also just an overview of the organization as well for anybody who's not familiar with us. We're a land trust with offices in Greenwich that do working lands conservation in Washington County. So we do administer the state's farmland protection grants program, but we also do working lands in general, working forests as well. With regards to the state grant program, we've been working with the county for a number of years to implement those grant programs that purchase conservation easements on farmland. And we've been pretty successful in that regard. This past December, the latest grant round opened up right at the end of December. It was three days before Christmas before we got word that the grant round opened. So we were able to submit seven grant applications in total, four of which are located in Washington County. We are still waiting to hear back from the state on any awards for applications that have been submitted. Statewide, to our knowledge, there have only been four grant applications that have been actually awarded. So we're still working through a lot of the comments and feedback that we've received back from Ag and Markets. And we're experiencing whole new level of scrutiny in these applications. Every application that we submitted has been returned with significant changes in site planning, meaning building envelopes, excluding areas. And it's not only ASA. It appears to be statewide. We're in contact with other land trusts across the state, and every organization is receiving this level of scrutiny. And this, as I mentioned, is brand new. We always try to anticipate any kind of changes and meet with the landowners in that regard. Some of the challenges that we are experiencing right now are requirements of deed restrictions on additional lands owned by landowners, which really would trump home rule, town regulations, site planning, that sort of thing. Requirements of cutting out woodlots that buffer the farmlands. providing additional, providing copies of purchase contracts, deeds, family member-owned parcels, things that we've not experienced before. And we are still working through a lot of that feedback. We've had a couple of parcels that have withdrawn from the applications. We still have a few landowners that are considering whether or not they want to continue on just because of these higher levels of requirements and restrictions that are being placed.

So I'm curious, what do they say is causing this higher level of improvement?

One aspect of that is an increased attention to non-farm land, non-farming neighbors, I should say. So there really seems to be a heightened awareness and protection of neighbors that own land next to a farm that are non-farming neighbors to try to mitigate future potential complaints of enforcing right to farm law, ag districts law, that sort of thing. So that seems to be a renewed focus and attention in that regard. But it's gotten to the In our opinion, it got to the point where it's really detrimental to actually conserving the farmland and more of the focus is on non-farm neighbors. That's part of it.

On the non-farm neighbors in what way?

Trying to mitigate any potential enforcement of right-to-farm law for farm complaints, like manure spreading, equipment on the roads, that sort of thing. So Ag and Markets is getting the phone calls from non-farm neighbors complaining about the farm operations, and evidently they're inundated with complaints. So it appears that they're trying to mitigate that partially through this program.

I'm sitting here for Brian, so I'm going to do my Brian speech. I'm saying the state's out of money and they don't want to spend it, so they're not approving anything to keep the money. That's my Brian comment. And I don't get, what's the other one about excluding the forests?

That's new.

They don't want it?

So there seems to, there's still some inconsistency and we're trying to get through some of this. We have one project where in the county, where we're being directed to exclude 75 acres of wooded area that is on the periphery of the property under the statement that why should the state pay for protecting land that is not agricultural. But yet, on the other side, the other complaint is, or the other guess consideration or conflict with that statement is that um in other cases they want to buffer the projects the easement properties from non-farm labor complaints which the woodlands in the forested areas wouldn't do so so we are working our way through this. This is difficult. Rene Bouclon, our executive director, and I met with the commissioner, a couple deputy commissioners, a couple months ago with other land trust organizations, relayed this information. I provided copies of the direct feedback I got back from the applications, and it really didn't seem to make any difference.

Well, it seems to me that most of these people bought the land when there was farms there. They knew what it was. They knew what happened. No farm on rights. It just sounds to me like someone's trying to force farmers out, period.

It is not. It certainly does not appear to be in the spirit of the program. It is not in, well, Trying to be careful of speaking for the organization.

They're forcing them to go to solar.

No, I don't think that's it. There are enough restrictions in the easements that really limit the amount of solar. No, no, no, no.

I mean, if you can't conserve the land, if that was one option as your retirement or you're maintaining the future, that was one option for an infusion of cash was to conserve your land. Now, when you don't get that option, you don't get that infusion, you don't get that security. And then now you've opened the door, because even though they don't want solar, if they need the money, then it's an option for solar. I don't really know, but it doesn't make sense.

There's a lot of things. Yeah, there's a lot of things that don't make sense that .

We've sat around the table and discussed farming and land, different things that have come up, so that we can kind of live together. I think it's like the forestry, the historic house, How can you still have this gene on the X? Well, if you can add 78 to the house, and that's forestry. Is that part of it with the house? Because sometimes when you conserve land, the house comes with it. Sure, absolutely. And the house goes and brings no value back to the community. But it has value in its historic nature. It has value in its ability to house people. And the ASA knows how to be accommodating to folks. Right. These discussions are .

It's less about, say, the building envelopes or where the house is. In those particular cases, usually there is a house with the center of the operation. A lot of the exclusions and issues we're running into with exclusions and by exclusions, I mean areas that are just cut out of the projects entirely. They're more so the wooded areas that are on the back 40 or back corner of the property. Or we try to accommodate for, say, even if it's a vacant parcel, we try to allow for a building envelope to be put on there. 100 years from now, it could be a small farm operation. But in some of those cases, we're also being directed that say, you know, some of the comments are, you know, it's support land now, it'll always be support land, no building envelope on this property. So it's going to be, you know, just support land with the potential for some ag structures, but couldn't put a house on it. So each one is very different. It's, I mean, there's a Overall trend, and there's a high level scrutiny, there's a lot of challenges that we're working through to the extent where even though we've submitted seven applications, we have a second kind of group of applications that we want to submit, and there is still funding available. But so much of our time right now has been spent dealing with these applications that we've submitted, trying to work through these issues, being with the landowners, Um, and also because these are, these are new, I don't been doing this for 17 years. I don't know how to, don't know what to say to landowners right now with some of these, these, these, uh, these requirements. Um, another, I guess, potential, you know, cause of this is, uh, recently the comptroller's office did not know that again markets and of the farmland protection program. I read the audit, but it was more so of just funding eligibility statewide, the eligibility of different regions, say like New York City, things like that. None of the audit discussed the actual implementation of the program, the levels of reviews, those sorts of things, but I don't find it also any coincidence that those have come together in pretty short sequence, too. But I'm still trying to find out why, and there's just not a lot of communication. So we are experiencing some challenges with the applications to the level that we have never seen before, and we're still trying to work our way through that.

If your current group you're working with, some are starting to back out, then that doesn't bode well for the next group. It does not. If they're looking at the scrutiny they're being put under, and it sounds to me like they're trying to protect the non-farmland owners and stop protecting the farmlands, and that doesn't bode well for Washington County agriculture or any agriculture.

No, it does not. And that's almost exactly what I said to one of the actual... Why didn't you offer, I remember.

Why didn't you offer?

Always run for solar.

I already did you for that.

She made you do it.

I did you for they didn't approve any because they didn't have any money in the state. They were using the money. I got you on that one, and I got you on solar.

First, they said that only large farmers have any money. Then after putting other farmers out of business, they go back and say, oops, we made a mistake. It's not the big farmers. It's the small farmers who made money. Mm-hmm.

There have been some changes in the program to where they're much more open to different types of farm operations, sizes of operations, and things like that. No, I wouldn't say that. We submitted the applications based on our experience, based on our anticipation of how The projects, the applications, the site plans would be reviewed and never anticipated some of this. And you're right, this is going to impact future landowners. You know, oftentimes landowners say, well, you know, ASA is making me do this or ASA is you know, telling me to do this. And it's not. Oftentimes it's ag and markets rendered kind of their directive in some of these scenarios. But the landowners see ASA's logo all over that. And it is going to, it's going to question, bring into question the legitimacy of the state farmland protection. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So it's amazing how much you have concerns and how many acres in Washington County are concerned. You know, and Washington County only has so many acres.

Not making any more.

They're not making any more. And so the amount of work that you've done over the last 17 years has brought us along the way. Is there a lot more land in Washington County to conserve?

So, yes. You know, we... All these programs that we work with are all voluntary programs. The landowners come to us. We have public workshops and that sort of thing. But every time we go through our pre-application process, which is an internal process that we go through to vet any interested landowner that wants to apply for the state farmland protection program. So we do this probably every two years in anticipation of the next round of funding. Every time we do that, we get two dozen landowners. It's in the two-county area, but we always seem to have more in Washington County than Rensselaer County, but we get 15, 18 landowners in Washington County that want to participate in this program, want to do this. Variety of types of operations, sizes of operations, locations, the whole gamut. So the demand is still there. And in fact, we are this week, we are applying for two ag and markets and opened up an additional grant round, but for farmland protection capacity. So for ASA to actually hire a staff person, thank you for the letter of support, by the way. So we hope to actually add another staff person for farmland protection. Demand is there. We also want to increase some of our work to the northern versions of the county where we haven't been quite as active. We'd like to increase our outreach for farmland protection, but also, again, the working forest aspects. But there's plenty of demand, and there's plenty of demand statewide.

Senator Zell, the states now recognize, you mentioned 75 acres on one farm. Does the state still recognize the ag-exempt sugar

To my knowledge, they do. Do they use that as ammunition to fight one or the other? If there is some level of production, whether it's silvopasture, maple production, that could then be included under a category for state farmland protection. But if it's a woodlot that's just used for, say, commercial timber or firewood or something like that, or even managed for wildlife, then that is not eligible. So then that's where they start carving pieces out. We do have a current project in Rensselaer County that is a maple operation. It is predominantly a handful of acres of hayfield, but it's predominantly managed for maple, and that is a state farmland protection program. Prior project, rather.

For a sugarbush, how many caps are required to make it go from hobby to commercial operation?

So there's no hard quantitative numbers to answer that. Just as, say, even with a dairy operation, there's no production, there's no minimum production eligibility criteria. Really, the criteria is, is it a commercial operation? So if it's somebody that's boiling some sap for their own use, that would not be eligible. But as long as there's some commercial aspect to that, then that's accepted.

So if somebody has a sugarbush at 75 acres, whatever that site is, and they are selling sap off it to a commercial producer, then that would be under the hang-off. Yes. So one bucket then, they're selling staff for the county community, for the law operation. Correct.

Brian, your turn. The reality is to what this really is, this was never really set up, in my mind, to really help farmers. This was a way of getting green space. It was cheap. This is a state program. Government didn't vote for this for the good of the farmer. There's nothing in the state budget. The federal budget, it's for the good of the farmer. Even the farm bill is all about SNAP, all your social programs. This is the same thing as the Adirondack Park type deal. This is a way of getting land not developed. The farmer gets the least out of this. The one that makes the most money in this is the person that actually buys the property, donates the rights and has a huge write-off in the millions against his taxes. And they can, it's over years, right? That they're allowed to actually write that off. So the farmer, John Rick told us this years ago, he said, the farmer gets the least of anybody in all of this. And he's really true. I kind of didn't believe him when he first told it, but I've watched it over the years. And all you really do, it's a one-time thing for the farm.

You,

bail them out, and then there's nothing to bail them out the second time. I mean, it really helps them get a push to begin with, but after that, there's nothing. This really wasn't implemented for farmers. The votes don't come from farmers. You can't pass anything from any part of the rural part of New York State down in Albany. How does this pass? Because it's not about farmers. It's not about rural. That's the bottom line here. So it's being sold as this feel-good thing that we're helping farmers, and it can, but it's very minimal that it ever does.

A lot of farmers feel that they're putting their hands tied and they take a system from France or USA. Yeah. The payback is to them, isn't it?

It's a wolf in sheep's clothing. It really is. I feel bad that it became that, but. They had lots of opportunities where they could have done things for the farmers over the years. This was the best they could do because it's not about farmers. It's the reality of the politics of the world right now.

Are there cases where it's better to develop the land so we can have some economic growth? We don't know.

Just a Be clear, though, too, that the Farmland Protection Program, it's not a subsidy program or anything like that. It is, at its heart, a real estate transaction. So it wouldn't be any different than a windfall of selling off a portion of the property. So it's the same sort of, I guess, payment structure, if you want to call it that. But it is a one-time.

It is a subsidy. We pay it in taxes. Well, I did.

Maybe subsidy was the wrong word, but it's not structured out over. It's a subsidy. But it's not an annual. You're right in that it's not an annual payment.

It's a one-time thing, and then it's over and done, and the next time, you know, you're done. It's a reality.

So happy to answer any more questions, but those are some of the challenges that we're running into with ag and markets with these applications. Like I said, it's a level that – We have not run into before. So I do have a few copies of our land conservation plan. If anybody's interested, I don't have a ton, but I also have some copies of our organizational vision statement as well. If anybody cares to have them, I'll have them over here on the side. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.

There she is.

Right here. I snuck in. I'm sorry.

I saw you sneak in. I just lost track of you. What do you want? Okay.

thought she should we've been on Dave. Absolutely. Good morning.

I'm Shella Smith. I'm Executive Director of the Learning Employment Assistance and Partnership. We are a

private nonprofit serving Washington County, Community Action Agency, Head Start, and workforce development. And workforce development is why I'm here today. We are subcontractors for Washington County as part of the Saratoga-Warren Washington Workforce Development Board. And so we are Washington County's career center. The other two counties run the career centers at the county level. They are county departments. Washington County is often not to do that. Contracts with us to run the career center. And so that's why I report to you. So just some basic data here. I've tried to put in an easy to digest format. And this is, I'm reporting in February through May because I did not come a couple months ago when I normally would have. We had a total, I'm trying to give you a little perspective here on what the center looks like as far as the traffic, as well as outcomes. So the total who came to the center over that time, just right downstairs in the basement here, were 281 people. 154 of those were adults and 127 were dislocated workers. So this actually doesn't include youth here, but we do have youth services as well. Of those, 209 of the 281 received intensive services and 72 received basic services. For our purposes, the difference between intensive services and basic services is, well, it's simple. Basic services might mean somebody's just coming in to use the computer or to... or to make some copies or even some phone calls to apply for jobs, that sort of thing. But they're really kind of doing some independent stuff. They just need the space and the resources to do it. Intensive services are things like resume development, assistance with job searches, anything that someone is meeting with a career counselor and getting some one-on-one time for. So 209 individuals from February through May received those intensive services right downstairs in our center.

Okay. Yeah. Is there a way, how many of these people just walk in on their own and they know the services are there versus how many people maybe the social services say, go downstairs and just go out?

I probably could get that number. We have been working very closely also with the SS, with the able-bodied adults without dependence changes. We are seeing a greater number of people that are being referred and are coming because of that. And we've been working closely with social services to do that. I didn't look for a number of those referrals, but I'd be happy to get that.

So in your opinion, do you think with their program of increased the girls numbers are similar to last year.

They are, they're a little bit higher. Um, the data I've been comparing the data year over year for the last few months. And part of the reason I've been doing that is that we are cleaning up our data. So one of the things that we've discovered was that, um, some of the data was actually being duplicated. So we're looking at it now and comparing to try to make sure it's apples to apples, that we're looking at unduplicated individuals all the time when we're counting individuals, not services. When we're counting individuals, we want to make sure it's unduplicated. So last year's data at this time, there were some duplicated individuals. So I don't have a hard number for that. But we're looking at the trends and sifting through that old data. I do see a small increase in that.

Yeah. Do we know where these people live or are they homeless?

We know that, again, is something that I can get. We ask those questions on intake. We get an address on that sort of thing. I don't have that right now. I think most of them are housed. But that's just my perception. I would have to actually run that filter on a report to find it.

I was just curious, with the basic services, they come in for the resources? Yeah. In order to join the plant for a job, they have an address? Yeah. And they don't have an address. Are they using here?

They're not using LEAP. They're not using the career center for their address. That's what I know. Yeah. Previous jobs, I've gone that route before and discovered it's not helpful to anybody, including the job seeker. It tends to be a transient population. Use something like that for an address, and then it's hard to get things that they need. So I'm not sure, but let me see what I can find out here. Thank you. I'm sorry. Sam?

Yeah, my question kind of goes into that. So it is possible there's 154 adult workers. We have individuals that could be homeless. They're referred down from the Department of Social Services, but are actually living. We put them in a place to live. Yes. They could still be in these numbers here, but they're actually homeless and still are because we're just subsidizing them to stay here until they can get back on their feet. So I'm not so sure this gives us a real good picture of what we actually, the population is being serviced. Right.

I can run some of that data, and I'll be back. I don't usually report two months in a row, but I will be back next month because we'll be bringing the workforce development board budget for consideration. So I'm happy at that time I've made notes to talk about some of these.

I think what would be helpful is, as we evaluate the effectiveness of social services, how many of those people actually get sent out to LEAP to provide the service they contract for.

That also helps. I should clear that out, the data, for us to actually know how many people are in your department. Because before, we might have been thinking this was a great program because there were so many people. But in all honesty, you said that there's duplication.

Last year, there was. These are accurate this year numbers, unduplicated. I just have a, I am inferring about it's, comparison to this time last year, because last year's wasn't purely unduplicated. But these are hard, real numbers.

How many people got jobs?

How many people got jobs?

Did I miss it someplace?

No, it's not on here. It's not on here. It is something that we track. And we have to. It's part of the WIOA. WIOA is the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act. That's what funds the Workforce Development Board and all its activities. That's what all of the funding that supports this is. It comes to the Workforce Development Board. From there, it goes to the counties and then from Washington County to us to do this work. And so we do track all of that, but it's a much more longitudinal kind of tracking. It's not an It's longitudinal in that we call them, they're called exiters in the system. We have to use a system called OSOS, the one-stop operating system. We're required by Department of Labor to use that system for all the whole request development for collecting data. Exiters are people who have either gotten a job or stopped using our services, and then we are required to follow up with them and try to get that information, whether or not they got a job, how long they've held on to it, how much they're making, all of that kind of thing. One of the biggest struggles with that is once somebody doesn't need our services anymore, they don't want to talk to us anymore. So we can call them and we can follow up, but we can't make them answer us. So that is a harder number to get because it depends upon the individuals reporting back the information. Even if they got a job. Because they don't go through us to get the job. We work with them on resume development and all of that sort of thing. We're not a middleman for the job seeker and the employer. So neither one of them has an obligation to report to us whether or not the job was got.

Some do. So the other thing that might be useful is you said that these are non-duplicated numbers in your localities. I think it would still be interesting to know how many you were serving in that month. Because if you have 38 non-duplicated, that means there's 38 that weren't in the month before. So are you serving 38 or are you serving 38 plus the 43 for the month before? You see what I'm saying? Yeah. The true picture is- Yeah, you'd have a running tally plus the amount- If you serve really non-duplicated numbers, then the total in the program is bigger than that.

So total unduplicated new plus-

So in March, did you have 38 people or did you have 38 plus the 43 from the month before? So over those four months, the 154 people, there could be a point in your center's activity that there was 144 people in process. If they're unduplicated.

What the actual head count is.

If the 38 is unduplicated, that doesn't include the feasible that were there for the month before. That may be helpful.

My memory serves me correctly. The question Bill asked, if I remember, you brought us a sheet the last time that said the number of jobs, how many still had the job like six months later, like dropped 50% or less. So you can give them a job. It's like leading a horse to water. You can't make them drink or you can only give them to drink so long.

And we do have, like I said, in the one-stop operating system, we do have those numbers.

Yeah. So we've seen them, but yeah, if you saw them all the time to see whether we're going, whether we're getting better or getting worse, like to know that we're improving, but that doesn't mean we are.

No, it's the success of the program.

And we, and we do have those numbers. Yeah. Like I said, for, for my part, I, I find it because it is a self-report measure. It's, it is not a, it doesn't feel like an accurate representation of what we do, but it is an outcome that is, that is important. And if it's data that you'd want to see, I will, this is all really helpful because I would like to be bringing you consistent things that you can follow from month to month, quarter to quarter. So you can see the progress, but knowing exactly what you'd like to see and how to, get it presented has been something I've been working through. So this is all helpful.

I'd like to see how many are employed. I'd like to see how many go from homeless to in the park. Get them on the way back, you know what I mean?

Homeless to housed. I'm not sure that's data we have, but I will look into it. Yeah, we might be able to get it from DSS.

I've got it like she said. been done talking at the end, you know, sometimes get back to you. Sue.

Like those questions, and that would be an important thing for all of us to know. The other thing is, does LEAP do referrals, or do they come through GSM? Referrals, say, to get them in there, you recognize that maybe 1H, you know, development will be delayed, substance abuse. Do you do referrals out to have them get the help they need so they can come back and get a job? We do.

We'll do referrals for anybody that walks in the suite, whether it's workforce development, emergency services, we do those things in Head Start too. Thank you. Any other questions on the adult and dislocated? The next graph is just GED. So it's very simple. It's very basic. But I was trying to show the progression of what we've seen this year. We've actually had some really great success this year with our GED program. So we started in January with 11 enrolled, seven at that time were actively testing, which means four of them weren't ready to test yet. They're just sort of coming to the weekly classes. And then in February, we had one who completed testing, got their GED, same in March. So that's why the enrolled number went down to 10. Actually, it should have gone down to nine in April. My fault there. At the end of May, We still had nine enrolled, not 10. And four actively testing. One more GED obtained. We have actually gotten one more. One more took their test in June and got it. But I'm not presenting on June numbers today because June hasn't wrapped up yet. But we did get one more. So we have graduated four GED students so far this year.

And that's across all of Washington County.

That's all the students, out of all the students that come to us, we have very limited capacity because the GDD classes are taught in, well.

So this isn't throughout the county? This isn't throughout the county. This is just LEAP related.

This is LEAP related specifically.

I was going to say, it's a pretty low number for the whole county.

We work with BOCES. The classes are held right downstairs in the Youth Bureau, in the Youth Bureau, and the capacity is huge. extremely limited. I think max capacity is, I think it is 11. It's either 11 or 12 that we can have. We usually have a waiting list. We actually just purchased software that is going to, it's called Aztec. It's something that's going to help us to be able to serve more young people than what we can fit in that space, preparing them for the GED, because it's like a It's a GED prep software. They would have our staff member not directly teach. It's for the students that can't get into the class or either for transportation or whatever other problems or because we're full. Rather than putting them on a wait list, they can do this self-guided thing through this software with one of our staff members overseeing and checking it on. So we're hoping to see those numbers go up.

So what differentiates between them doing this at the school level, the BOCES level, or the LEAP level?

It's all the same outcome. No, no.

It's the same outcome. Why are they at LEAP instead of at BOCES or the regular homeschool? I'm not sure.

It might just be this is where they're, you know, where they're referred to. This is where they came in. there are a lot of outlets for young people who want to work on a GED.

Which I mean, I'm just surprised.

And we do contract with BOCES. It's actually a BOCES instructor that teaches our class.

How do you typify your age range? You keep saying young people. Are they all young people, or are these?

In GED, well, no. I mean, anyone who wanted to pursue their GED.

Well, I understand. What are you getting, though? Well, the nine in there now. Right. Are they all 20 years old? Are they all 40 years old?

They're all under 24. We really do have all young people right now. And youth for WIOA is up to 24.

They're all younger than the chairman of the board. So is everybody else.

Yeah. Absolutely, serve adults in the GED program. We just don't happen to have any right now. We do have all the young people.

And what about your wheel of funding? What did we ever determine on that? Or have we? About what's going to happen with it? Yeah, is it actually coming, not coming?

Well, we've gotten it for this year. It has been proposed by the administration for the 27 budget to be largely changed, focusing a lot more on apprenticeships and that sort of thing, and a lot more on actual job placement than some of the development pieces of the supportive services and so forth. But it's going to take a while to get through Congress before we know. So for this year, it maintained. Next year, The funding level, as our next program year, actually, which starts this program year, starts July. It starts July 1 for WIOA. We did, as a system, get a 12.32, I believe, reduction in funding. And that is already in place. Nothing we can do about that.

Follow up on that. Last time Gary Deak was here, he was talking about consolidations of districts.

Yes.

Is there any more on that?

Nothing more solid. I know that there is a committee that is looking into that opportunity. And we're sitting on it, correct? Right. A committee of the Workforce Development Board that is exploring the options for consolidation The recommendation that Gretchen had made, Gretchen Steffen had made, was that Saratoga-Warren and Washington consolidate that we merge with Capital Region Workforce Development Board, which right now is three counties, but is taking on Columbia Green. Columbia Green Workforce Development is also merging with CAF Region. So they will be five counties. at some point in the relatively near future. Last I checked, there was not a solid date for the completion of that. So a merger with them would mean eight counties. It would make the resulting region an eight-county region. I've heard differing things. There's a lot. Gretchen talks a lot about the economies of scale and the things that CAP region has access to that we don't necessarily have access to in this region, different employers and things like that, that are accessible to the capital region that are not as easily accessible to us, but also being able to spread the cost of operation over eight counties instead of just three. These are some of the reasons she has recommended consolidation. Again, the committee's looking at this. I know some of the other things that have been discussed are perhaps separating Saratoga from Warren and Washington and Saratoga, going with Cap Region and Warren and Washington doing something else, maybe merging with the Northern, which I believe is Essex and Hamilton. But I don't know how much that's all being discussed. Those are all ideas I've thrown out there. Did you have some of that?

So we have a workforce board meeting tomorrow morning. The budget and the proposal was sent out at 5 o'clock last night, so I haven't really had a chance to do it. But what appears to be in the proposal is a slight reduction of the overall workforce board budget, a temporary contract with the existing executive director of the Capital Region Workforce Board, promotion of the current deputy director to executive director and the retirement of the current executive director in two months so again the board has not voted on this that vote is tomorrow morning um again we all got this packet at nine o'clock last night so um i would imagine there's going to be some light with a discussion tomorrow but the as shelly mentioned we know a year begins July 1st. So what happened last year is all the career centers and board were technically operating without a budget for three months, but Department of Labor continued to fund. So I would hope if this discussion continues, that that funding still continues to flow. Because as of right now, if the board votes on it tomorrow and Shelley could bring that budget back to this committee in July for approval, or It doesn't get approved and countless don't approve it and it continues to go on for discussion. So don't know what will happen yet. But again, from what I saw briefly from what was served out last night, there are some substantial changes posed. I also did speak with both Columbia and Greene counties. After two years of discussion, they tell me that they are still in long ways away from the actual legal merging of the districts. I think the reason that it was proposed that Brian, who is the executive director of Capital Region, act on a contract basis is sort of a year to get to understand what the impediments and concerns, what the benefits would be, how it could operate over time. So it was seen as an interim solution. Again, we will kind of expect more tomorrow.

If I go back to your recap, recap is that The assistant director becomes the executive director.

That's what it appears to me.

Then we're contracting out for someone else to run.

Oh. So again, I just.

Why are we doing two people do the same job?

I don't Google here tomorrow. So I don't know. That's surprising to me.

That was not funny. That's a. We got a little. We will have that. And I'll be present at that meeting too, obviously. Laura's very in the know there as being a board member, but I will be present.

So I see questions. Basically, what you're talking about is that if Columbia Green's two years away, we're three to four years away.

Possibly. So you may recall, so when Gary was here and they presented the board budget, this committee made it clear that when the federal WIO was reduced, right, and it was about, as Shelley said, the original proposal suggested that the three career centers reduce their budgets, but the board did not. So this committee said, we would like to see a reduction commensurate with what the career centers are having to do with these So I did it again. I looked at the budget last night. It appears to be reduced by about 10%. So I don't yet know how that affects the Career Center budget, that that money, that reduction in 10% goes back to the Career Center.

We haven't heard anything. We don't get those materials. I'm here to be more than you. Tomorrow I'll have more information.

So, yeah. As we go forward, it seems like we're being pushed in either direction. So can we think ahead and try to get pros and cons to both what would be if we went with Essex County or what we went with Capital Region? I mean, right now we're talking workforce development. It seems like the opportunities are south of us. for people that are taking jobs, going somewhere to work, and getting education, seems to be satisfied.

What is offered at the Illinois? And I think that that's some of what the committee is exploring, right? Is that kind of thing?

And realistically, it says.

Maybe. I can only tell you that we were told, so there was a committee meeting on May 26th that some discussions had occurred with the North Country Board. So one of the things that happened is all of the Workforce Board budgets were reduced across the state. Near as I can tell, it wasn't an equivalency in terms of percentage by which they were reduced. So we were told that North Country was reduced by substantially more than Capital Region. So other than a quick discussion that those who had the conversations You don't want to be in our best interest.

It didn't go very far. OK. So that's helpful. And that's information that I haven't had yet either.

So this is all with Chris and the ASA and more scrutiny, more scrutiny. Then we're looking at, and that's forcing people to choose to get out of the program or stop their application. Here we are, Workforce Development, in a county that is suffering from loss of jobs, over 600 jobs in the past year. And, you know, we need to be able to increase our ability to reach out and help people, increase our ability to reach out and talk to employers, work with employers to find jobs and stuff like that, which is one thing to talk to anyone, reach out to the employer and go in to see them. But, you know, here, Almost seems like we've been forced to the side. Less and less resources applied to Washington County.

Well, I will start. What was discussed at the main meeting was a contract with the Apo Saratoga region. I think part of the thinking behind that, I think that's not a permanent solution, and there's still time to explore what other options would be. But in terms of an immediate discussion about a merger with any region, what I'm hearing, the thinking is, is that half of the region looks best, but this would be like a one-year contract, so far as I know, which would give the board more time to explore. As well as the fact that we still don't know if there's going to be any funding for .

Exactly. So there's a lot still to, to be for the board to consider. There's a lot still to come from the government and all we can do right now is check the options and prepare for whatever may come down the road. I do have some things for you as far as outreach and that sort of thing too. Did anybody else, is there any other questions?

So an extremely probably unpopular opinion it might not be the worst thing in the world if we were funding one way. Because I'd be very interested in the metric that the supervisor asked for earlier. Because so much of the money that is flowing through the three counties and the Workforce Development Board are being used for the administration of those programs and not as much for the actual program. So if we find that we're getting, as a three-county area, I don't remember what our award is. Is it 3 million, 5 million, whatever the number is. Are we investing $5 million of taxpayer funds and we got five people back to work? To me, that return on the investment is not there. So I don't know that the WIOA funds, as they currently are being used, is the best use of taxpayer funds, depending on the answer to your question. What I've seen... and my involvement on both, you know, this side of the coin and my involvement with LEED for a period of time, I'm always concerned and, you know, Laura, Laura went through a tumultuous time with me on whether the return on the investment is really there. And is there a better place that we can direct those monies for the people who need those services? Is there another way to deliver that service? Or are you never going to get the return on that and you just it's one of those programs that if you have one person it was worth, I don't see, I haven't seen the return in the past.

We do have more numbers that show, we do have more data that showed some more broad numbers for the system as a whole, but also Washington County's part in that, that I'm planning to bring you next month. I'm still ironing out some more specifics and this different data that I brought you before, but you know, That's the big question, right? Even at the federal level, is WIOA even effective in what it's supposed to do? And that decision will be made at the federal level. In the meantime, we can only do the work that we are here to do and do the best that we can to do it. I know at LEAP, we focus very much on the individual. And the people before us trying to make sure their needs are met and that we're working with them toward their goals. It is not a, our goal is always the whole person and to try to help make them more sustainable and reach their own goals.

And please understand my opinion is not a reflection on your agency, but the program.

Yeah, I do understand. And I just, Yes.

The goal is actually to go towards an apprenticeship that is more like a public-private partnership, too. We're actually going to the employer to make this work. Because you need an employer for an apprenticeship. Exactly. That makes some sense, too.

The only way that WIOA right now can work with an apprenticeship is with a New York State registered apprenticeship, which is their only... very difficult thing, but there is a lot of momentum building to try to get more and more employers to be accepted as whether that changes so that they don't have to be New York State registered or get more employers as New York State registered. We really, I think my personal opinion, which, you know, nobody outside this room really cares about, obviously the federal government is listening to me, but... is that apprenticeships are a great way to go. If we can get more and more people into that kind of thing where they're learning trades and they're learning hands-on and they're learning on the job, we can support employers and we can support job seekers that way and maybe make a more lasting change. But we do the best that we can with that system.

When promoting apprenticeship programs, increase our reach out to employees.

It would, and we're doing a lot of that anyway. I know you and I have talked about that. So we have, I've been talking with our, working with our team a lot to get them out. And so we have one of the things that we have coming up July 7th, I believe it is. It's the day we decided on. Our entire team is going to tour Fort Millen Group. Going to go talk with them. get to understand that business a little bit better. I'm going with them. I'm looking forward to it. I won't always go with them on these tours, but we have several other tours that we're working on. We don't have scheduled yet, but other businesses in the county where we're going to them. And as we reach out, my message to the businesses has been, we want to understand your needs as a business, as a Washington County business, so that we can better partner with you in filling you know, slots that you need to fill or in supporting, even we can even support staff that they have if somebody needs upscaling a little bit or they need, you know, supportive services for something, we can do that. So we want to just make sure that we understand the businesses and they know what we do and how we can help. That's our goal.

So you just touched on something very interesting. Do you have a feel for the possible disconnect between what the businesses in Washington County need and the workforce that we have to offer. If we have businesses that need people who can make widgets, we have a workforce that doesn't know what a widget is, there's a disconnect, right? Yeah. So do we have a grasp on, right, we might not have the workforce that our businesses need, so how do we bridge that gap, right?

And I think these conversations are going to help that. Sure. The more we know of we lead, I'm speaking in this regard, the more we know about these businesses, the more that we can help steer people into whatever training or equipping they need for those particular jobs. And transportation continues to be a barrier. It always is. That's no surprise to anybody in Washington County. But we do try to help people find and be equipped for employment that they can actually get to because that's a part of sustaining the jobs. We have

Thank you. We have a lot more to go on. Good discussion.

Anything with dropout rates? 2016, it's dropout is full.

Some of them are. I will find out what they are. All right. And I will get out of your way. If you have any more questions for me, feel free to email me. I'm happy to answer anything that I can.

But of course, asset pairs are more important than education. Lauren?

You have 300 years of vitamins.

That's the way to celebrate 250 years.

All right. So as alluded to, this is not the first time we've discussed this at committee. Sure. So six years.

We have been working on updating the DEC-required solid waste management plan. We produced the report. We send it to DEC. They have somebody read it. They send it back and say, make these changes. We make the changes. We send it back. They say, make new changes, and so on, so on, so on. This has been going on for six years.

And then they say, change it back. Like a one-plane map. Yeah.

So, you know, in reality, one of the concerns has been that because the county does not own the process of solid waste, we privatized it. Part of it, I think, has been a little bit of, let's say, arm twisting to consider getting back into the solid waste management business. So because the way the solid waste management plans are structured is they assume that you have control over what's going into the solid waste stream, how you're recycling, how you're managing it, which is very hard to quantify that if you don't know the process. So we worked on putting together what we could reasonably do as per the DEC requirements that met the requirements of the plan and are financially feasible and able to do. What I just gave to you is what is the implementation matrix. So as of right now, the plan is close to 400 pages. This tells you how much we've worked on it. But the critical piece of it is this implementation plan. This is essentially what we've said that we will do. And again, we've discussed at this committee, this has not changed significantly in the many times it has been presented to this committee. But I want to give it to you as a reminder because what we have now gotten is a letter from DEC saying they are willing to accept the solid waste management plan as structured. What that means is that we have to adopt solid waste management plan. Once it's adopted, we're required by DEC to update on our progress, which is essentially It doesn't mean that we have to achieve all of the tasks that are in this implementation table. What it says is that we have to have considered the items, move forward, take an action, or rejected an item, whatever the next step is. We have to give them an update in two years. And then in 2020, we start the whole process all over again because this is taken.

2020. 2020.

I mean in 2029, sorry.

This was a 2020 plan.

And so we're now into 2026, so we'll have room for one two-year update, and then the whole plan has to be started over. So what will happen from here is my request to the committee is to move forward with adopting the solid waste manna plan. I am then going to transfer this to DPW. So DPW will then effectively be the manager of the plan, and Deb is more than aware of this. We've had many discussions over the years. It will then be up to her to decide her and her teams. So for example, we've had discussions about should we re-implement hauler permits? Some of these tasks are very simple. They were going to put recycling information on websites. You know, planning department will help DPW with that. So there are certain things that are fairly simple. They do educate. They do hopefully improve or reduce, let's say, the amount of waste going into the stream. And there may be things that DPW decides that they want to investigate that are not necessarily on this table, but what we have to update on is what's on this table.

Somebody having this report doesn't make any difference on what's happening.

Correct. All we are required to do is say... On the economic development web pages, we said we're going to add information about the New York Farm to Food Bank tax credits, right? So we can do that. We have not taken any of these steps because we have been waiting for DEC to approve this plan before we moved forward, took the steps, and then checked them off the list, said, yes, we did that. We've made some progress. So there are a number of things that will be fairly simple to do, others that will require more complex steps. strategy thought cost analysis etc that will be up to cbw's leadership to decide what um they want to engage with the board on in terms of what makes sense can we give this back to the state i don't know if someone wants to see it again but never mind is there a way to get this back to the state they always put stuff down i'd like to put those on good luck so again you know we We will turn implementation and production of the next cycle of reports over to DPW, but they will certainly have our help to do this.

So it goes from here to the full board?

Yes, because you're adopting a plan.

I'm going to entertain a motion to adopt and move by Brian, seconded by Sue. Thank you for the discussion. All in favor? Married? Yes.

I didn't have permission going through this.

Is there interns available to do this work? So that is one of the things that Deb will most likely want to explore because yes, DEC has partial funding to hire a recycling coordinator. So that's a cost analysis. You have to look at what is it going to cost us? How much can DEC reimburse? What is that going to achieve? It's something to explore. All we've said in this implementation is we will evaluate it. We haven't said we're going too big.

It's a good job for AI. This is an FBI threat.

I don't think if you don't adopt the plan.

So we've had that discussion several times. So it is a state law. It is a state requirement. So there's no specific penalty, but the state could, in fact, withhold other funding streams of us until we comply with adopting it. What they would or wouldn't do is speculative, but there is no specific penalty for not adopting it. It's simply state requirement to have one.

Okay. Any more questions?

Next.

That means the next time we see this, it's going to come through DPW.

And then discussion about what happens Okay, the part that I'm passing out now just to make everybody aware Consolidated funding applications finally notice CFA is right now open so over the years what is the CFA program originally a was conceived, I don't know, maybe 12 years ago, as take all of these various state grants and put them together in one pot, apply for them to one time during the year so that there aren't, you know, you're not trying to figure out what state agencies to go to. Slowly over time, that's reversed out, and there are fewer and fewer actual grant funds that go through the CFA, but what's on the list is what is currently applied for through the CFA. They are due July 31st. These are, this is basically your Empire State, you know, several communities apply for a number of these grants. Regional Planning Board has worked with many communities on some of these. So for example, the New York BRICS grant, oh, it's BRICS, no, it's KICS, sorry. They don't have BRICS in business here. Again, there's the CDBG programs, et cetera, in here. So this is to make you and your communities aware that the CFA's are open. But there are also other grant applications that are budgeted that have not been announced yet. That would be things like the Shared Services Program, the New York Forward and the DRI programs. They should be coming out. There's also a number of EFC programs, which would be where your water and wastewater projects are. And then there's some Ag and Markets programs coming out. There will be another meat processing brand that should be coming out fairly soon. So this is just a reminder to you and your communities that they are open. Any applications, be aware that if they're going through the CFA, they're due July 31st.

Question, Donna?

Yeah, 31st.

Does it mean the Hunger Games is now turned into famine?

What they do is they, so some of the same state agencies that are always in there, but the programs, some of them are consistent. They're there every year. Some of the funding has been reduced. Some of it has been put into new programs that have come in. Like I said, what really seems to have changed over the years is instead of it all going through a once a year, everybody has to drop everything that they're doing and work on these applications, they've split them out so that various state agencies have due dates at different times. Thanks.

Next, Rodney.

Broadband. So a reminder, well, actually, first of all, we have ARPA broadband funding. As you recall, we have somewhere around half a million dollars left. We had discussions at this committee. We recommended that a contract be given to Slick Network Solutions, which The proposal was for $457,000, which will comprise 70 new passings that are distributed in the towns of Cambridge, Greenwich, Argyle, and Granville. So SLIC has been, they have a lot on their plate. I do not have a contract from them yet, but they continue to assure me that the work will be done. We will have a contract in hand because our requirement through ARPA is that this work has to be done and it has to be billed out by the end of the year. So I'm not sure what else I can say. You know, I'm waiting for this contract. They tell me it's coming and it will all be good, but I do not have it in hand as of yet. But my update to you is that it's still happening.

The contract has to be done or the work has to be done?

The work has to be done. They have to be paid by the end of the year. SLIC is more than aware of that. So on the bead funding. So again, during the Biden administration, New York State was awarded $391 million to deploy what was expected to be across the remaining unserved constituents throughout the state. So in Washington County, our count at the time is we were estimating that there were approximately 1,200 unserved households. I have not personally looked at or reviewed this in the last year and a half because I haven't had access to the GIS software. But under the Biden administration, New York put out a proposal for Washington County that included, it said that we had 1,020 unserved. It was going to award 234 passings. And again, these are fiber to Verizon and 786 passings to Starlink. So what happened is the FCC under the Trump administration said that the cost per passing to deploy fiber across all of the United States was way too expensive. And they created what's called the benefit of the bargain route. So they went back to every state and said, do it again. So New York resubmitted to the FCC their application. And again, I have passed this out before just to show you what this looked like. This was what the New York State Awards originally looked like. Everything in brown is satellite. There's sort of a dark blue, which is very minimalist fiber, and then a lighter blue is licensed fixed wireless. So this is what New York State was asked to resubmit. I fully expected, because one of the things that the FCC did is they said the cost per passing for fiber was way too high. So of those 234 awards to Verizon, the cost per passing was about $26,000. I fully expected ConnectAll to eliminate those and give everything to Starlink, but they did not. They only eliminated some of them. We are now at, what they keep doing is they keep saying more and more are served. So we're now down to, they think we have 964 total unserved. 220 are going to go to Verizon and 744 to Starlink. What they did is they reduced the allocation and asked the fiber providers to basically pony up more money. So they got a smaller award. But the awards are basically still in the same area. It's just for fiber, it went from 234 to 220. And these are basically in the Hampton, Whitehall, and Franville areas. So those particular passings will be getting fiber. Everybody else gets Starlink. So one of the questions that's happened with Starlink, is that the federal rules said that you had to, again, anticipating that it was fiber, that the companies, which would be Spectrum, Verizon, all of those that have fiber, would be deploying the fiber and then would be hooking up to the individual households. Starlink immediately went back to the FCC and said, we're not hooking anybody up. We will provide the equipment. We'll mail it to them. But you're going to have to find your own installer. And as near as I can tell, I haven't seen a final answer it, but I believe that New York State has agreed to that. So essentially, if any household that is currently unserved, that is not in this Randall-Whitehall-Hampton area, that wants internet, we'll call Starlink and we'll get the equipment, but they will have to pay for installations.

Is it something they can install themselves or not? Likely. People do it every day. That's what I'm thinking.

For the most part. Yeah. So basically it's an antenna that will likely have to be mounted on a roof. So if you're 80 years old, you're probably not going to call for all on your roof, but maybe. And then there's an app that goes on your phone. So you have to have some skill with technology because that's what aligns the antenna to the sky and, And then downloads the software. So, you know, for the most part, many people do this on their own, but there will probably be some who need help.

There could be a family member or anybody. Right.

Because you're not, you know, basically it's an antenna that goes on a roof, some software. It's not pulling fiber across holes.

Any other questions on that?

One other point, and that is that for the fiber, what ConnectAll, which is the state broadband office, is doing right now is negotiating all of the final contracts. Fiber providers will have four years from the date of signing to get fiber installed. That doesn't mean that's how long it's going to take. That just says that's a maximum amount. Okay.

So in the next four years, I can look for somebody digging up the roadside and they have fiber cord and white all again.

Unless it's going on a pole. It will either be on a pole or buried, depending on what Verizon says. And I'd have to look at the passings to see what they're doing. And again, I don't have access to the software anymore to tell me, nor do I have a plan for Verizon.

191 days, you won't get the complexity.

So I have one other quick plug under other, and that is a reminder that the 250th celebrations at the fairground are on July 11th and 12th. We've actually had just a lot of people who are fairly excited about what's on the schedule. So Mr. Lincoln will be wandering around on Saturday and Mr. Washington will be wandering around on Sunday and engaging with the kids and the people who attend. We've got people coming from quite a distance away to do the reenactments. Our beloved chairman of the board gets to fire a cannon that makes him happy. I'm going now. Sasquatch hasn't contacted us to ask to attend, but he would love to. I'm sure he's been around since the revolution.

That's all I have. Thank you.

Anything else? Any other questions?

Anything else?

Did you have a land bank update? Did I miss that?

Yes, I did.

Okay, I forgot. Land bank. Yeah, that's on the second page there.

Sorry. Yes. So it took a little over three months, but we finally have our certificate of incorporation from New York State. So we are now an official organization. We have an application for an EIN. We got to have an EIN, an employer account number, and we're going to have a bank account. There is an application that has been submitted to the state looking for funding. We've asked for $200,000 in operating money and $2 million in capital. We have, as a board, started reviewing the properties currently owned by the county to determine where there are houses, what's actually a teardown, what we might be able to rehab, and where we can go from here. There are a couple on the list that may suit, but we haven't finished going through the list. There's also some legal questions that probably have to be resolved before we bring anything back to this committee and the board to request transfer of title. We do also have the website active now. It is where all the agendas and meeting minutes and everything will be posted. It is Washington, all one word, WashingtonCountyLandBank.org. So we are expecting that we will hear on the funding certainly within the next month. Once we have that operating funding and we have some legal questions answered, we should be able to move forward fairly quickly with a selection of properties that the land may might be able to start work on. We are also partnering with the Regional Planning Board There is some brownfields money that was awarded to the regional planning board that will enable us. So, you know, some of the properties that are likely to request are the link properties in Salem. Properties like that that might have previous contamination will require a phase one through EPA. So the brownfields funding that has available will, if we can spend some of that money on pre-development work, It allows us to save the land bank funding for more direct investment into the capital projects. So that's what I have.

The only thing I wanted to add was from discussion with you was the land bank isn't looking to, they can do two to three a year possibly.

Well, depending on how much money we have.

Right. So we're looking to maybe move eight or 10 properties or something. Correct. To one, because we're going to have to hear this two or three times before we get this through our head. Oh, yes. How this works. So we're going to move a whole group is what the idea is, even though we haven't heard exactly yet.

Right, because we haven't. So we have, I have, Nicole has, several of us have been driving up to the properties, taking pictures, trying to assess. Because the pictures that we have on IMO may be 20 years old. And so what looks like it might be salvageable, when you actually stand in front of it, you realize it's a lot of boards that are left. So some of them, again, will be just teardowns. Some of them we might be able to do rehabilitation on. We just haven't finished going through the list yet.

And neither one of us put people out of their homes.

Well, and that is one of the considerations, is that for the land bank to take a property, the land bank will not give it to people.

And we usually don't either.

So that's part of the legal question that has to be. solved in terms of, you know, county policy discussion.

There's a lot more to come on this.

Well, we always said it wasn't going to be an overnight process. There's a lot to handle and we want to make sure that, you know, we create benefit for the county as benefit for the residents of the county and the community.

Okay.

Now we'll go away.

Any other? We're adjourned.

Hey, we're convening the IT committee meeting on Tuesday, June 23rd. And let's see, Jen, Nicole, set minutes. All right. Minutes from the 19 May meeting. Motion by Sam. Do we have a second? We have a second from John. Discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? 18 minutes approved. Okay. IT technology. Let's turn to Terri MacMillan.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. So I just wanted for the projects report, which I think is the first one you have in, they're just projects that are something you need to go. There's nothing new and nothing that's come off this month. I don't know if anyone has any questions on those at all. And then the next report, I believe, is the ticketing report or cybersecurity.

A ticketing report is the next one.

Does anyone have any questions on ticketing reports?

Yes. What's that? Yeah. That's the email.

So that should have been lumped into IT. Sometimes we have tickets that come in from somebody that's not the ticketing system, and so it improperly classifies it. Yeah, that's a great question, though. Thank you. Usually I catch that and put it in, but I missed it this month.

It looks like you've got a spike in real property. Is this a problem?

A spike? It's not so much a spike.

It's higher than the last one, isn't it?

Yeah, it just depends on what we're working on. So I have to think what we're working on currently with real property.

There's nothing broken there.

Nothing broken. Nope. Nope. I can't recall what. Oh, tax bills. We had tax bills. The village tax bills. You don't want that, though. No. That's what the spike is, though. Because we have our computer programmers that have to massage the data constantly. get them all ready for printing.

What about the machines for the early voting, that type of stuff?

We do a lot with that. That's really Board of Elections. I mean, we help them with getting everything set up originally, but they really maintain that system themselves. We do have some actions after the fact, like after the voting, to bring in time data and bring in some of the data that'll happen.

Probably if there's a problem, they probably have to get the... The manufacturer right now does.

Yeah, and we help them with anything that they need. And we're, of course, on call during the election too, but it's usually pretty straightforward. They do a good job over there. Any other questions on that report? Cybersecurity. All right, and then cybersecurity report. We have our statistics on that. And then the item of note, and I just wanted to kind of draw attention to that, is maybe something old that you have heard before, but I don't think it ever becomes irrelevant. And that is passwords. We really chose to put this in place or put this as our note for this month because passwords are so important. And so we just really wanted everyone to think about that again, think about how long the passwords are that you all are using. Think about where you're using them, you know, really trying to discourage people from using a certain password for their personal life and then utilizing that same password for their accounting life because once one account gets compromised, they're going to hit all your accounts. So if you have the same password for your banking account and then the same password for like, you know, say TMV or, you know, social media like Facebook or something like that, any of those gets compromised, they're going to come after all of your other accounts. And it's very easy for them to take them over. So if a personal password were to get expired, if you use that for the county, the first thing they're going to look at is socially, where does this person work? What do they do? And then they'll start to come after your county accounts here. Long passwords are really important. And you will see in the very near future, we're looking to put a change the password policy for the county. So we are going to require 16 character passwords for the county. I don't want that to scare anybody. because there are very easy ways and we're going to have a little attachment with that to tell you the easy ways to make a 16 character password that's easy for you to remember and difficult for people to find. But the direction everything is going is for a more complex 16 character password, but then only having to change it like once a year. Because when you have to change them really often, People put a one or, you know, they don't really change it, you know? And so it's, it doesn't become anything different. So less changes and longer passwords are the direction that things are going.

You're not supposed to write them down.

Well, you're not, but sometimes.

But you always like yourself on if you don't.

Right.

So. And it defeats purpose.

One thing that we feel is really important. I don't know how many of you are familiar with password managers. but that is something that's very critical and something we'll be looking to roll out to the county in the near future. Um, we're hoping to get grant funding to at least help us with the rollout and implementation of it. We do utilize it in the IT department now, but.

Well, my phones use it, right? Same idea, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It just depends where they're kept. So with a password manager or something like, I know Apple does have their, have one built in, you know, we use one here in the county, um, I guess I shouldn't say the names, but there are several out there. There's LastPass and Keeper are some of the more popular ones that are out there. And what they allow you to do is have that long password to get into the software along with multi-factor authentication. And then inside there are all your other passwords. And so that way you don't have to remember them, and they can still be unique to every single account.

And it's really the best way to figure it out. You try to use a different one in this, though. Right. You're left to forgive Brian. He's one of our 16 characters. And there is 16 characters now, so that's perfect.

Well, and even if your computer breaks, you can still get to it from your phone or from a different computer because you can just go online and get them.

That doesn't always work. I found that out with my town website. Oh. If you log in with your phone, you can't log in with your computer. So you've got to go back to the computer and go through the whole thing again.

Interesting. It's very interesting. Yeah. I hope Charlie remembered how many eggs he had for breakfast. Yeah.

So that's something you can use as a password. How many eggs did I have for breakfast? Just saying, you know.

Yeah.

I don't know. Some things like that.

Chairman. Who are these password managers? Because it seems like that's going to be something that I just put in my report. So when they were pushing on that. Yeah. Seems to me like then you only need one. when you got to figure out one password to get all the rest of your passwords. Exactly. So it seems like it would be easier than less. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it is.

I mean, I've been using them for years now. Yeah. As long as you're there and I use the word protection. Am I the only one that doesn't know what edge protection is?

Edge protection? Yeah. So edge protection is for when you're talking about email. I'm assuming you saw that in the report. So the edge protection is Bad email that we know for a fact is bad that stopped at the edge, never even makes it to the stand filter or anything else. Just gets blocked right on the outside. Yeah. Went over the edge.

Okay. Other business. I have a little other.

Yeah.

Terry, since I only got a couple months to be a nuisance to you, just curious, what do you see for hurdles for 27 for your department? It's not too early to start planting those seeds. Brian and I had a conversation that really, after my financial report last month, it's kind of an unofficial kickoff to the 27 budget. We start now those conversations. So I don't think it's too early to kind of start sharing with the board the things that I mean, you share every month very successfully your current hurdles. It would be nice to maybe have Brian start knowing what's ahead for 27 because the number out of the gate isn't really enjoyable yet. Right.

So I think, you know, from the IP perspective, some of the other that I have to talk about will apply a little bit to 27, a little bit this year as well that I wanted to kind of bring up. So I might as well talk about that a little bit now as well. But the AI, we always talk about AI and uses within the county. I wanted to bring that up a little bit today because I know that you're going to hear a little bit about it tomorrow in Health and Human Services. And I wanted you to know that they have my support in terms of the direction they're looking to move forward. They're looking to put a phone bot, for lack of a better term, in place to be able to help with some of their repetitive tasks, right? So that's where AI really can help us with some immediate relief is anything that is repeatable and has to happen all the time. And so I'll let Dwayne talk more about that tomorrow in terms of the specifics and how it relates to his department. But from an IT perspective, essentially what it is is a tap into our phone system that allows calls that come in that they are certain they're required right now to have a person read like a 15 or 30 minute long blurb essentially to every single person that they talk to over and over again. And so this particular AI bot, Eva is her name, will be doing that reading, if you will, but also is interactive, doesn't get emotional, you know, and is able to provide that same experience to everybody. I think you'll see some, some efficiencies from that. So that's something we're hoping to have come this year. And then also possibly expand it out to other departments even next year. I know one that we've talked a little bit about is DMV. And they're in the process of developing that model right now where it's something, you know, I know DMV is a struggle, you know, with them trying to service everybody that walks in and answer all the phone calls. So we're hoping that maybe by taking some of those and being able to alleviate some of that load on our people that we can provide that. Now it's not an end all and people aren't going to be stuck with only using the AI bot. So I want to make sure you all know that, you know, our goal as a County is to service people and provide that service, you know, to all of the members of Washington County and even beyond. And I think this will just help us to improve that and be able to provide better service. But if they want to get out of the AI bot, they just push a number and it sends them to a live person. So they're, It's not going to be one of those endless phone loops that drives everybody insane.

Right. So in finance school, they talked about this actual thing that Dwayne's trying to implement in the pilot county. I don't know if they were misinformed, uninformed, or just on their own. They did it with veterans also.

Yeah.

And it worked great, I guess. So that was. That's another area. So, and it's probably a different message. The bonds give us the same idea, it must be.

Yeah.

And they thought it was great to be able to do it with both. It almost seemed like there was another department, but those are the two I remember.

Yeah, there are a bunch of departments that they're currently working with in the state of New York, but other counties. And this came up a lot at the IT Directors Conference. We had some good conversation with other counties that are using it. And so, you know, we talk about budget for next year. It's something that I'm hopeful we can take a look at. You know, that'll be something that will... It's not going to be free, of course, but I think you'll find the efficiencies on the other side and the ability to improve customer service, you know, and be able to improve how we service people. So that's something that's out there in addition to a chat bot on our website. It's another thing that is another piece of AI that we could look at for people to interact with our website and be able to get answers for things that they may not find otherwise.

all fun and games until Eva becomes self-aware. Right. Speaking of AI, you got a chance to meet with Mayor Sweeney. We did.

Yeah, it was a very nice meeting.

Yeah, all I heard is that he found other people who speak AI, and I was hoping they were going to put it in English.

Yeah, yeah, it was a very interesting conversation. I think there's a lot more to come on that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. And then just to answer a little more about Al's question for next year, I think the biggest thing from an IT perspective is the transition from a capital expenditure to an operating expense. And I just want I know I've talked about that before, but that is the direction that the entire industry has gone. You know, gone are the days where we could buy a copy of Microsoft Office and install it on 100 computers. And no, we didn't have to buy that again for another five or 10 years until it just stopped working. You know, all of the software companies now have moved to an operating expense model so that they're all subscriptions with monthly recurring costs. So because of that, the cost, when you see them in the budget, they're not going to go down. You know, I don't ever see the IT expenses going down, unfortunately. The software companies are never going to get less expensive. And with the AI revolution, if you will, and all of that data center space is now becoming more expensive. which makes it even worse, you know, in some respect to be able to, because you have all the competition to be able to have the servers and be able to provide the services out there. So I don't anticipate huge increases, you know, not any more than a normal increase, which we try very hard to keep between three and 5%, but that's a realistic number that we get from the software companies. And typically when vendors go beyond that, if I can't lock them in contract, you know, with those type of, increases, then if they go much over that, we typically will look for another vendor, honestly, because we can't 10% increase every year is not sustainable for any of us. Not that even three or 5% is in this particular landscape, but I don't see any large software projects on for next year or large capital replacements. I think most of our stuff is done and, you know, so yeah, so knock on wood. You know, that part is what I feel we have some control over is what we decide to implement new, you know, and be able to do.

Yeah. When you can't hire the AI, it's a great alternative to fill some gaps.

Some.

Some of the bots or something.

Right.

If you have to cut the way for it, that's a worse situation.

Right. And I don't know that you'll be able to correlate a one for one, like, oh, put this bot in and we can cut these bodies. I think. I look at it more, at least from my perspective, about improving our service level than necessarily cutting bodies because I don't know that there's a point.

And that's what's changed. When I first came in, you added more computers and you had less people. Every department did that.

Yeah, I don't think we're at a bodice equal to like 0.1 FTEs. Right, right. Now it's changed totally.

And the computers, I think, improve that. And the initial, because you had people that were manually doing math on a calculator, but then they were going to do a spreadsheet.

You know, a stack of papers and you don't anymore. And so it's changed totally, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, Sue, please.

Just as we're thinking ahead, we talked about shared services with the town, with IT. And so you start looking at the subscriptions each of us pay. You know, you look at the help that is required to set up all these different things. maybe it's time to have a look at a shared service in the towns.

I still think it's on the table for this year.

Excellent.

Yeah, I do feel that. We're very, very close. We're just trying to get all of our ducks in a row. We don't want to do a row. Yeah.

Everyone has to provide the revenue source to do that.

But they're probably paying somebody else now, or hopefully they are. So we're hopeful that from the town's perspective, it might save a little bit. and if they're not then you know the towns really do need to look at having something in the budget for it you know my hope is that we'll be able to come in and do an analysis for your town take a look at where you're at and help you all provide a road map you know we know you may it may not all happen in one year but because you need to know what to plan for right you know how to get to the next level and how to be able to appropriate that in your town's budget schedule whenever you are okay well good we're going to be looking for some people that want to do some Be the test candidates.

All right. Anything else for Terry here? Otherwise, we're going to adjourn. We'll cut to a station break. And when you come back, we'll have government ops.

Minutes, except the minutes of May 19th. May 2nd. All in favor? Aye. Before we proceed with the agenda, I was asked by Sam to extend his heartfelt thanks to the whole board that everybody participated in his presentation last Thursday. And I'm telling you, this man was cool. And just on behalf of Sam, thank you. Moving on. Mr. Jones. You're heading on the agenda.

All right. Just have updates. Our 4 AM project, the roof, it's finally been fixed. It's leak free. We've got a couple of weeks of no leaks, which is great news. The water pressure pumps for the sprinkler system and the potable water are both scheduled this month to start the install of those. That's all I have for the projects right now. If you've been up on the roof, look at the flashing work. This time, I haven't been up since they just flashed it, but they said they did, the company that did it is Greenwood. I made them pay Greenwood to do it instead of them doing it themselves. And they do a report with all the pitchers. So I, you know. Yeah, fuel system. What are we in there? Fuel system, you would probably best ask Jeff and Dan. Because that's in their, that's in their part right now. So, Dan talked this week. I did, I was going to call them and get an update, but .

Is that the fuel in the garage? Yes. Yeah, so Dan's going to meet with Jeff Beyer to update about that.

Have you seen one?

I don't think he's going to give me a date. OK.

Thank you. I'll reach out to Jeff and see if I can push it in from our end.

Yeah, I think that's just keeping me updated, but it is in their court. Thank you. I don't have any more for those. But parts, they're actually going pretty smooth so far this year. We did have a little bowl of water to start the season. So if you were up around Eulands and Lake George and went to bring some signs, you know that basically, you know, maybe that first weekend we didn't have swimming. That's all. They are instructed and they know like when they can start opening up and how much time you should be in the water. There are safety issues too. to swim in really cold water. So other than that, I think we're up to temperature and everything seems to be going small.

I have, I had a request. So I will ask you here at this committee, this is where we should start. Free passes for veterans at the park. I don't know if the state has, I don't know if they did that, if we've ever undertaken that.

Well, we're not on the state thing, but Hewlett's is free all the time. Okay. down at the Lauderdale, it's $2 parking. And I'm sure we can set up something, you know, like we sell season passes, but if a veteran or somebody wanted to come or, and then we have made things in the past, not through the state, but like here's a pass for parking, you know, if it's, you know, if it's something reasonable like that. We work with the schools when they bring their trips, you know, we don't charge for all that. So, you know, our reimbursement for the parks is pretty small, you know, compared to anyways, and we realize they're a community thing. So we do our best to, you know, support any of the local veterans, you know, anybody. I'll talk to Jen and, you know, if you want to, I don't know how we go about, but if they wanted to, you know, in the past, I think they have like a thing that comes from the state. And I told our manager to accept that, you know, because they get a free admission to any state park. So the only one would be Lauderdale. And I said, well, if you see that, just let them work. It's not a big deal. So it's $2 a car.

Chairman.

I was over there this weekend, over to Lauderdale. Yep. Very busy. Yep. Very clean park. It was great this year. And that roof is really nice. They did a great job on that roof.

Yeah. So we're working here shortly with them to hopefully collect some more money for, you know, next year and what project they want on that. You know, as long as they want to keep putting money into that building, which they did, you know, they backed up what they said they were going to do, you know, then it'll work fine for our lifeguards to use, you know, throughout the season. So I'm glad that they decided to start putting the money in. with that.

We should have had him do the roof before the end.

Well, that was my guy. That was our guy. It's not the state that did it, but so we will, yeah. It's not false. One thing about the parks that just came, you know, you talk about losing some information when you switch a department and you go from one to another. We've been paying for a speedies permit, which is a state pollutant discharge for both parks for, well, since I've been here, which is like nine years. So 10 years ago, our speedies permit ran out for both parks. So that was before I started. But they still send a bill every year. So we've just been paying the bill assuming that we have it. So I got a call from DDC last month saying that you don't have a, you know, a speedies permit for either park. And I was like, okay, like, we'll just renew it and this and that. We're like, well, you haven't had one for over 10 years. So it's a 10-year permit. So you renew it once every 10 years. And I believe that it's, so before it came to me, it was Jen. And she was like, no, we've been paying for 10 years. Well, that's a different division of the state that collects the money. So we didn't have one. We assumed we had one, but we didn't have one. And it's a 10-year permit. So the problem is I'm going to have to start over. Like, they're not going to let me renew the one that's 11 years old. So I've worked with Terry and I've dealt with Deb and stuff. And now the attorneys, I have to get set up with a DEC, GovID account to be able to even start the process. And hopefully I can go through the archives and find the engineering for all the septics at the two, which I believe I can.

Have you contacted the other division of the state?

You get it re-launched for 10 years. That's all Jen did. She did. So I don't know where that is right now. They don't get money back. There's a very slim hope. That's what paid for the roof.

Yeah.

But it is funny that we've been paying real long for both parks, $200 and something dollars every year as a normal thing, and we didn't even have to permit. Just so you know that. DEC has been calling me once every three days right now about it. So I asked, well, what's going to happen? Well, we don't really enforce. So I don't know. So who enforces? Well, they said, well, I don't. So they don't really know what to do other than I said, I will take care of it. I said, now I have to get into the state system. He said, well, I'm not that department either. So you have to figure it out. He just calls. He calls like he didn't pay your bill. He has been helpful. I am working with him. He's out of Warrensburg. Yes, he has called every three days, but I am working with him to try to get it wrapped up and done.

It's amazing. What's the cost of re-application?

I don't know. I haven't been able to get to the application yet.

That's what they all say.

I haven't been able to get to the application yet. I don't have the right account. So when I sign into my GovID account, I go to my retirement account, and that's not where I get the permit for it. So I think Bob has an account that he has to do some stuff on. I believe Deb has an account, and then Al has an account, a GovID account too, but they want me to have my own to do the, And I'm pretty sure Harrison never had an account. So it may actually have skipped. Because he didn't do it, right? So he didn't do it. So it may have been somebody before him that did the last one. Yeah, like I think it was actually 20 years ago since it was actually done. Because we haven't had one and it's 10 years rent. So it's been 20 years since it's applied for.

So maybe we did win that time.

We'll find out. Hopefully I don't have to report on that again. It's just something easy, but I know like on my jobs, all the speedy permits are dropped by the architect or engineer because they also do the stormwater and stuff at the different projects we do, but I've never been the one that's actually had to apply for it. The architect engineer always did that for us. All right. I don't know if I'm barred from nothing. Nope, I'm good. Um, one thing I've been working with, uh, let's say another department heads, um, space needs, and I just want, we don't have any answers. We don't have really a lot to report other than we are working on it. So if you hear departments, um, you know, talking to you about getting more space or upgrades or this or that, um, we are, we are currently, you know, moving the Phoenix shell around, trying to figure out how to, you know, fit everybody's needs. And if there's something, we'll come back to government office before anything's done.

And the meetings that we set up with the departments, it's a direct result of public safety, right? Saying that they need more space for the communication officers. So then, you know, it just brought to what we can't, you know, start thinking about taking and moving offices until we know what everybody's needs are. So we've met with, I don't know, probably four different departments so far. Um, It's just a matter of trying to figure out where you move that all under the shelf kind of thing.

And one of the questions that came up in multiple meetings was, well, we've made cuts with budget with staff. So why are we still short space? I said, well, the sheriff, public works, buildings and ground were the major cuts, and our employees didn't use office space. DSS also made cuts. if you bend down in their areas, it's big bullpen areas. So it's not, it's not a one-to-one, you know, you cut, now there's an office space, you know, we don't move public safety into the bullpen of DSS, you know, or something like that. So there's a lot to be, when it comes to space, you know, and most has been diving into, and I think understand that well now, like it's not one for one, like an empty space on the second floor, does not help public safety in the basement. So people can only move certain ways and their operations might require them to be in the same area and not spread out throughout the building.

And in the same regard, we don't want to displace the department whose location is working very well with them, who the public is accessing. And you don't want to just move them just because of a need of another department. So we've got to take it all into consideration and see what works. I guess for the county in the long run.

Like veterans and OFA are close together and that works very well. It's the first floor public, you know, area. Like you don't want to displace one of them to the basement and all of a sudden you're carrying assignments and your citizens and veterans, you know, goose chase through the building to get where they're going. So it's not as, it is getting complex.

Yeah, being involved in that, I'm seeing more and more of what Matt's been dealing with for the last several years as far as departments and their needs and their wants. And it's not easy. make them all happy.

And I think having been involved in some of the meetings, thank you for going to them. Public safety, you know, it is, you know, I talked to them yesterday about some of this. And, you know, it's interesting because what they are there, they're 24 hours a day. So they're having their own entrance. You know, during that storm, which was not that long, they had 87 calls. And some of them are life-threatening, some are going across the road, you know, somebody's driveway. But it's continual. It's 24 hours a day. It's seven days a week. Having your own entrance, having potential space to breathe in, no windows, you know, have been an issue. They keep bringing it up. So I don't know, you know, I don't think they would bring it up if it wasn't a big deal. So I thank you for your dive deep discussion. Yes, it is. You know, it's big.

Any other questions about kind of space? I mean, we're so kind of preliminary into it, but it is driven by the need of the needs of Glenn and Kim. So really, it would be yes, it can start here. But it's really a discussion in public safety committee, you know, why and what they need for space. And then it'd be, it's really gone past what level I can, you know, I don't go into other people's department and say, well, this is how you operate, or this is not how you operate. They just give us needs and we don't have what they need, what they're telling us they need, we don't have. So, you know, it's, that's where we're at right now. That's it. All right. We're going to plan football.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, but then it's not your own. Yeah, right. It's not you. That's right. It's leadership. Buildings and grounds just within our department had some pretty big losses. We just had a retirement. I've been here 30 years that ran this building. It is one of the positions that we cut through attrition, you know, a budget, so. That's, you know, we're going to be a down guy and a real important guy. We do have a young guy that's, you know, stepped in and taken his place. I got to pull the influence in. But there's transition things just like, you know, when I started and anybody else started. But we are downhill. And we're also just lost one of our best mechanics out of the garage just to another job. So we are... between the cuts, you know, from budget last year, we are short staff, which was expected. So, you know, I remember that by the time we just saying, you know, expectations have to be reasonable and it's never more, it brings true right now, like expectations of what you see in how often the grass gets cut. You know, we also cut, you know, summer out through our budget. So we're getting there, we're getting stuff done, but we tend to be in like a, We're in a maintenance mode. So the guys I have now, our hours and our time and our resources are going to be maintaining the building as it is. You may not see projects getting done or stuff like that. You might not be able to step in. You may have to hire something out now and then. But that's just real. That's not anything that I didn't expect, you know, coming out of budget season. So I just like everybody to keep that in, you know, in mind when you see the guys.

I wanted to put that in context with the discussion you were just having about extra space and doing more. It all just adds up to more money. So I don't know what that expense would be if you've got to add, you know, you have to add on to the building. There's no more, you know, you can't create parts.

We don't, that's right.

Well, I know the post he built this for sale. No, they don't know that we want to fight that off right now. I mean, there's all sorts of things that, it was in last year's budget message, you know, when we started growing to this size, it was surprising to see that we got as big as we were when Pleasant Valley was part of it. We had a huge employment there. So we had grown to a size that I'm not sure we can maintain. I don't know. But everybody wants more services. It looks like the federal government's got to cut some of those. So let me take care of some of it. It's just impressive. I mean, it's nice to want, and we all like things to be better and the best they can be, but I just don't know what to look for. And I know I'm already starting to hear from people that, you know, they don't want 20% again. And I don't know that under the situation we're under, it's not 20% for three to five years. especially as you hear the things we're discussing and trying to accomplish. It's pretty hard to cut back. We'll add on at the same time. So that's what I tried to prevent last year was people growing the department where we were making cuts and others, because that just makes bad feelings throughout the whole building. I don't think there's any department that's real happy right now. I hope we can get there. I just don't know. We have to look at public safety in a different light. They brought up all their calls that they handle, but yet very few of them were emergency calls. Is there a better way to handle the non-emergency calls? Is there a way to outsource them or something? Do we actually need more space or just take better care of the people we have? I don't know the answer to that. It's going to be interesting to see what they have to say to that because It's their own breakdown and calls that I was looking at. And I think, wow, that's kind of interesting. I was kind of shocked the way they broke them down because you don't need a dispatcher to handle a non-emergency call, basically. It may turn into something that the dispatcher has to handle, but then you'd have that group called the dispatcher. So there's all sorts of ways to skin a cat, but just growing every part of it. What do you expect from it? It's going to be, it's going to be more money. I mean, it's like true with your household. If you keep making the house bigger, you're going to have more bills. You've got more to clean up, more to maintain. So it's a, this is a big, big question. And I don't know that there's a great answer to any of it, but you need to look at it in detail.

Well, I think that whole point is, that he's just trying to work within a certain box that he has to put all the pieces in the proper place.

And I think that's all you can do. That's all I can do. And I think it deserves a public safety discussion with that committee. I don't want to be the one that's presenting for Glenn and Tim. I don't know their operation like they know it. They need to come to you. And then the bigger picture, you know, what I'll tell you is we don't have the space on what they want or need right now in our building. Not without displacing another department that has no place to go. So, sure, you may have solved their problem. Maybe one or two more. We're creating another problem for another department that I think definitely way above my priority to say this one's more important than that one or vice versa. That's definitely your core.

Because that just creates problems that we don't need.

So it's a bigger discussion. And one thing we've asked every department as we've talked with them is if they had any outside funding, you know, for us or something, you know, and we've also asked them like, you need to be at this location versus an outside location, you know, like, is there funding? I know. We've used ILA money for public defender, you know, to move that.

We didn't have enough room, so it was able to help us keep the number lower, but we couldn't even hire people for the number we had.

So, yeah, there's a lot of internal stuff there, but, like, we do ask that. So if there is a department that says, you know, there was, oh, there was a rent money for this, this, this, you know, or they just have it in their mind that, hey, that might help solve a, you know, problem, you know, down the road, you know, whether it's at least space versus, you know, just giving them space. We also, you know, I know you've been in talks with LEAP, so we don't know where that program's going, you know, and I won't comment on that at all. But that space that we give.

We tried to consolidate that once. That didn't work out.

And I think the other thing, too, is for every department head, the only thing they're going to be concerned about is their own department.

Right.

And that is the most important department in their mind. Yeah. You know, so we can sit here and speculate which one's a more valuable part of that, but they're all valuable to that whole department. It should be.

Yeah. And also, I mean, you know, they know, they know their departments better than any of us do sitting around this table. Um, that's why we hired this department to do their jobs, but in looking and talking with public safety, a key component that I walked away from is that being 24 hour service. to our taxpayers for 911 calls. It's a turn on, turn off thing. They've got to be set up, ready to go, and be shut down.

Matt has discussed that.

So it's interesting. It's an interesting, there's a lot to it. Looking broader into it, how we navigate that.

Just keep at it, Matt.

Yeah, you're doing a good job. Thanks, Matt.

So, yeah, that does lead in. I mean, just here's my tangent with our budget and coming up. And we just got the email right before I came up here today. And I've been hearing talks about, you know, next year's. The last few years, we followed the directions in our department. We've gone from having, you know, breakage every year that went back to general fund to a real number after last year's budget. So we've done that. And I think nobody can say we haven't. We're right there. And what it creates is, and I don't disagree with the policy at all, is we don't pay unless we have money in that account. It used to be like you get close to the end of the year and you know you have this much breakage in this one and it'd fly. Well, now that we budgeted all the way down, I can tell you last January, we spent hours and hours robbing this line out of our budget to put $300 because this bill wasn't going to get paid in this line. So we're at the We're at the bottom, and I just saw what you guys passed at the full board last week, and that's the first kind of shot I saw of what we did go over a little bit in or what we didn't. So that's our first true shot at looking at that. We're not a department that's way over at all, but just we're there, and I don't see us being able to do that again. Just as a heads up, because our electric bills are fuel bills. We pay a lot of things that are out of our control. Maintenance costs of the buildings. We don't set the price of a pump when it goes bad. We don't set the price of electricity coming into the building. For the first time, I think, since Dan Shaw was, this will be the first time that we haven't been able to talk or hold steady. I don't see any way looking at it now because we're just in June and I'm already looking at it being like, Boy, I don't know. You're going to be right down the wire. Yeah. We're going to be down through the wire again. And that goes to a lot of the expectations of maintaining versus improving. As much as we all and myself included, I look out the window and I walk through this building and I know what people see and I know what can be improved. But I also know that all the equipment in the basements That's millions and millions of dollars worth that has to operate for the building to operate. And the power has to come on. So when it comes to choices in budgets, that's what we're trying to do. And we just try to make sure that everybody, you know, this is my chance, takes that in consideration when you walk by and you wonder why there's weeds growing up over there or this or that. And I'm not saying we're not getting to it, but there's a priority to this. And because we're shrunk in size, you know, parks are running right now. The head starts in the schools. They're out of school, so right now it starts your list where you can get into their building without kids, and you start doing that work. I was just using this as an example today. I parked out back in that back alleyway, and I'm like, boy, when we had three part-timers, they kept that weed whacked. pretty steadily, and I was like, the weeds are three feet high, and I don't want to say anything to my guys because I know what they're doing right now, and what they're doing is definitely priority over that. So I was glad yesterday they did it. I didn't even have to say anything, so I must have had some time. You know, but, you know, stuff like that, I have to, it bothers me, my OCD also, you know. We're a light bulb that's been out for a week, you know, or something to that effect, but we're getting to it all. It's not that we don't want to.

It's just... Good brought up. a point, the light for going does not come out of the bedroom. It's an automatic light. I guess there's mostly women over there, so you probably don't get told why. Some poor guy came out the other day and was like, yeah, I'll mention that.

So I think there's an on-off switch, and when you hit it on, it works automatically. But when you turn it off, it doesn't work on motion anymore.

Yeah.

So I think it probably operates. I've done that. The same thing at the, well, middle school.

For going, you better make sure that one's working, especially with people. They were voting there, so I'm like, yeah, that's kind of sad.

Somebody turned the light off, and when you turn it off manually, then the motion sensor doesn't work. I'll probably.

I want to just mute it.

You good? You all set? All right, here we go. Do you have anything more? No. Sorry. That's all I have. No, everybody understands the spot you're in. All right.

Yeah, I'm coming. I was just unplugging my computer here.

That's not me.

I know. I'm not today. I don't want you nothing. They see me when I grab this.

Go on, Melissa. It's not me.

It's not me.

I know.

So I was going to bring the update for the workplace and harassment in the workplace policy that I was told to bring to this committee. I wanted to give you, I think some of you needed more time to review it. So once you review it, if you'd like, I can put it on the agenda for next month. Do that? Okay.

Is it all right if anybody has any questions and give you a call on it? Yes. Sounds good. Is there anything else coming before the committee? No, sir. We stand adjourned.