Board of County Commissioners Work Sessions - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everybody. It's August 11th, 2026 at 11 a.m. This is a work session of the Lake County Board of County Commissioners. We have two items on the agenda today. The first one is quarter two financial updates led by Candace Bryans of the County Manager.

So typically we do this in July, but we to do disaster decoration in a fire instead. We have included quarter one here for you. So just to walk you through our dashboard, we've got quarter one revenues. And this blue line is if you divided revenues, we expected to receive evenly over four quarters. That's what you would expect. We know that the way property taxes come in, they don't all come in quarter one. Most of them come in in quarter two. So that's why this is above what we expected. And then when we look at our expense actuals versus our expense budgeted, we expect to see, if you broke it over four quarters, around $2.3 million a year in expenditures. The timing, well, I will say that quarter one, we do have a lot of big things we pay for up front. We pay our insurance. We pay our COP payment. We have a whole bunch of things that are kind of front-loaded in that first quarter. It's why we keep a reserve on hand. Our general fund reserve has to be at least three months of expenditures on average, so that way, just let's say we didn't get property taxes for some reason, we would still continue paying our bills and functioning. And that's a big part of why that reserve amount is part of your finance policies. So you can see overall, we're tracking seven and 16 slightly above what we expected for revenues. And then you can see our expenditures are about what we expected. It's kind of been interesting. When you compare prior budgets, our budgets often supplemented themselves to about where our budget started this year. And I think a lot of people didn't understand that the goal is to have what you budget for be what you actually do within Pearson. So other than a few unanticipated things like so you have have an expensive repair or, in our case, the boiler caught on fire. I had to fix the boiler. Outside of those things where a grant you didn't anticipate that you might be a match for, your budget should be where you kind of know what to expect every year. And because we haven't had closed books for prior years, we're really saying that having them closed last year Before we created the budget, it really has helped inform, hey, we know what we've typically spent, what to expect. And if people in their budgets for this next year, which we're starting to work on now, are asking for an increase, we're asking for information to back up and increase. Like a vendor is charging more than they have before. And not just a, hey, I would like this much more to spend. We're saying no to those kinds of things. But actually being able to track this every quarter with the books closed is is really, really helpful. And instead, I think in the past, we were looking back a full quarter out. So like at the beginning of the year, you were looking at the prior year. And quarter two, you were looking at quarter one. And so we're really being able to look at the quarter the very next month and see what's their close. So that's pretty helpful.

Candace, can you, under Q1, Q2, the bottom left quarter.

Yes, whatever, over here.

No, middle here. Middle project, yeah. Is that revenue actuals higher than revenue budgeted because of the expense flow?

I think it's a couple of different things. One, revenues are higher because I held our property taxes. Not our property taxes, sorry, our sales tax. Sales, okay. And I'm so glad I did that. Adam actually just sent me a report this morning and our sales tax has a lag for our reporting so we don't really get three months to a month or two out when we get those three months and our property taxes for this not in these two quarters up here but this one that's coming up have really dropped so even though our property tax is great for quarter one and quarter two we don't know what it's going to look like for quarter three and four and so i budgeted incredibly conservatively i would rather get to the end of the year and say wonderful we had tons of you know sales tax we can do some extra projects we can resurface the skate park whatever the heck it is because we had a little extra then get to the last quarter of the year until everybody cause on hiring a position that needs to be refilled, don't spend any money on X, Y, or Z to try to get us through the budget here. So I was really conservative on our sales tax. I'm glad I was because it's not looking great for the last quarter that we have reported on here. It looks pretty visible, actually. Adam just did a report for me this morning that compared I mean, we're down about 30% for the last quarter. And I haven't go ahead and compare all the communities around us. Most of them are down, I believe that's like 15 to 18%. Most of them close to that 15%. So the fire definitely impacted us. And I had to do it month by month so we could try to show that July was a pretty controversial month when the fire was happening. But revenues are down across the state.

That's wild. mean the fire was at the very end of them no i didn't oh you said july sorry remembering that was the end of q2 yeah so that's that's where we're going to see like a quarter three will kind of balance out because this just divides it equally between four pillars yeah okay thank you it's not like you know maybe we'll get there someday but to be able to anticipate when revenues come in versus, you know, whatever, dispersion is impossible.

So ideally, every quarter, when we present this to you, we add the next quarter. What will be wonderful is when we get to the point where we can say, okay, here's 2025 score quarters, here's 2026 score quarters, here's 2027, and based on these three years, we can project out the next five years, give or take. I mean, we can't plan on a fire. I mean, neither one of us would have known last year when we're budgeting that there's gonna be a fire for a month, the busiest month. But you can start to say, hey, we can build up trends for the next five years based on the historic information. And I think that was the goal, just to get to where we are, giving a five-year outlook, knowing we have to adjust for things like a fire we couldn't have projected. That'll be cool. So you can go through each of these and look at revenues, what they had, what they budgeted, expenditures, actuals, versus what we're budgeting. You can do this by department. Take a look at, you know, some departments, like blood, lead, It's a special fund that we have to draw down on. And prior to coming into this position, we had drawn down a large amount of that money. We can't draw down more until we're at a point where we need more. Yeah. So you can kind of see where revenues and expenditures are coming in. We've made .

You're in the general fund.

You're where all the money comes into. Just not your specific.

Not us, but us. Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about conservation trust funds. Yes. So conservation trust funds, we get, is it quarterly payments? It is quarterly payments that we get. Conservation trust funds, those dollars, and I'm addressing this because I've seen just a few things where people are real confused about money that the county gets for recreation. Conservation trust funds, one of the actual uses, can be for recreation. It is not for recreation programming. It is for the maintenance of recreation facilities. So typically, counties provide the upkeep of parks, parks equipment, maintenance of parks, maintenance of trails. That is the sort of recreation and parks programming that counties typically provide. And so those conservation trust funds, that is in use for them. We haven't touched any of them. We recognize that the turf field costs us about $800,000 to replace. And by the time it needs to be replaced again, it's going to be around a million. So this could be used for that. It could be used for other items. But right now, it just has carried a fund balance for the last few years without a dedicated use. Um, but we get quarterly payments. We have to report on it, um, to, uh, DOLA. We do a budget report on the conservation trust fund by itself. Uh, it's due every year and we get the account for every penny of that money received. And we have to make sure that when it is extended, it is on Sundays acceptable. And we have to file that in a report with them. So I did want to flag for you what those dollars are for. That the, can you remember the exact fund balance, Will? $660,000.

Thank you.

So there's $660,000. Oh, but this is, you know, rolling balance. Yeah. So I do want to make sure, you know, it's there. Do you know how long you have to carry a fund balance?

I didn't check that.

You just went back the last three years. Yeah. 2024 yeah and it increases by like by like 60 000 a year every year it's a different amount so it is actually based on on revenues collected i think it's for gaming and mining revenues and so those get passed on you know to counties and you get a certain allocation every year usually we get an email the state they tell us how much is coming each quarter and then we pull those reports and report on it back to DOLA because we have to report if we've used it if it's an interest-bearing account we have to count for any interest that's accrued all kinds of stuff we have to report on but it does have a balance and we did not in our budget opt to touch that balance but do want you to know that those dollars are there $660,000. So that's one of the statutory funds? It's just one that we have to keep and we have to report on. So that is something we can have discussions about this year. I do think it's important to keep in mind how much it costs us to replace that turf if you think you would be doing that again. and you touched part of this to do other projects, you'd want to be mindful that we can't put money into this specific fund. This is money that comes to us. We can expend it, but we don't get to put our money back into this pot.

But maybe once we do the camp, this is a place where we could be looking for some of that. Yes. Cool. Okay.

Capital asset management plan. I'm calling it the camp. So just making sure you all know what that money is for. And I think the other thing I'll just clarify, is we have a recreation capital asset, sorry, capital acquisition fund. We budgeted no money in that fund this year. It's in our budget book. And underneath that in our budget book, we have our capital acquisition fund, and that's where our fleet is budgeted. So recreation capital acquisition capital acquisition, two separate funds, two separate uses for money in those funds. And when those funds have money, it's because we've taken general fund revenues and we've budgeted to move them there for specific projects. We don't get any sort of state funding or federal funding that specifically goes into those two categories. So I think I should clarify that because I've had some questions about We just have money for recreation. Other than these conservation trust funds, which is typically what counties invest towards REC, in addition to raising funds through fees or getting grants, there's no money that we get other than these dollars that has a specific tag for REC uses. And I think that's important for people to understand. OK. Clarification. The RCAF. versus the CAF, are those actually funds, not just line items? They are funds in our budget. They don't have to be funds. They could just be in the general fund. That could be a line item in the general fund. We've created a lot of funds. I do think it's good to keep your capital acquisition in a place where it's easy to track. So there's no problem with it being a fund, but that's where we would be tracking any capital investment we make. And I'm pretty certain that there REC Capital Acquisition Fund got created when community partners and the school were working alongside the county to help raise funds to replace the field. So what we can see happened is money had been dedicated to that account and it got spent in its entirety to replace this turf. And we have not budgeted money into that again because we have not had extra money to put towards big projects, but it is a big reason why these conservation trust funds are important to know because you could actually release those funds to do projects or you can save them if you have a bigger project you want to tackle, but I think it is important for you all to know what those are and to just be clear that we didn't budget any rec funds this last year. Our budget was pretty darn tight. We were actually cutting things.

No rec asset funds. Obviously, we budgeted for the department.

Yes, but we didn't budget for any asset replacements at all last year. In fact, we said no to every capital request because we were on the receiving end of a pretty tight budget and losing DHS funding.

Which gets another round of that in like October.

Medicaid. So when we talk about our next topic, I'm going to give a few updates on DHS, which are going to be kind of challenging.

Thank you.

So I don't know if we want to just flip through all of these and let me ask questions. We're going to put this on the website. If someone's in the general fund, like Department of Human Services, they get allocations from the state. Their revenues are anything that their state and federal allocations do not cover in their budget, we cover. So I think that's helpful in thinking about some of the conversations we're gonna be having about budgets. If we're required to provide the same services and we get less money to provide them, the only way to continue to provide those is that your general fund dollars now start providing those services. And just for some context, we could have, individual here who you know becomes a ward of the state and we have a certain amount we have to pay for the care of that ward through the time they're 18 we often get handed those and they're not budgeted for I mean we can't plan for every single person that we're going to get assigned and then we'd be covering yeah we've had a couple of those that are pretty expensive come up this year And that's where getting less funding from the state and fed means we're having to fund more of those. And we don't get to say, well, we're a small county, tight budget, we won't do that. But it's not an option we get. We get told, this is what it costs, here's your bill, and we have to figure it out. So I think those are important to recognize as we see that the revenues we're gonna get on that end are gonna be less these next years. We should anticipate maybe an increase through Q3. We're still working with the DA, but it sounds like they might have some different requests for this year. We haven't really worked through that just yet. E911, I think I should clarify because I've had some questions. Also think it's important to note E911 falls under our budget. They're a parent-child entity. That's not our money. We are a partner in E911. But that's an authority that has its own board. And that board is not appointed by us. And the members of that board, their organizations contribute a specific amount of money to that fund. Someone was mentioning the new Leadville job description, and it makes it sound like one of the key goals is to work with the county on running the E911. And so I think it's probably helpful to clarify. They're just under audit as a parent child. They're their own entity. They set their own budget. I don't get to tell them what their budget is. They collect a specific tax on cell phones that helps fund their operations. And so I do think we house them. but I do think it's important to note they have their own funding stream and it's not us fully we do contribute a small portion of our our phone call revenues that come in but that that's it fire control make monthly payment or excuse me monthly payments to them based on the budget we approve This GASB, these are journal entries at the end of the year that our auditor gives us for accounting adjustments based on their reporting needs. So this doesn't mean we grabbed extra revenues that we didn't plan on. This means that between last year and this year, at the end of the year when we're closing the books, they've asked us to make some adjusting entries, and those are given to us by the auditor. And in fact, this is one of those funds that they've said, do you guys really need a Gatsby fund? You probably could, that could just be your general fund. But I think they've got created before we were both here. Health insurance, we paid the bulk of that up front. Let's see, Mineral Belt Trail. We have just the smallest amount of revenues that come in. And usually those are brought in by one of the Mineral Belt Trail Committee members. I had Nikki look. Do you remember what the deposits were for? It was two deposits. $240. Yeah, they were real small. Yeah, they were tiny.

Appreciate it.

But I think this is an important time to say We don't collect large amounts of money for the mineral trail fund the mineral trail committee also has monies that are with the lake county community fund and are held there. So I do think that's important to note that we aren't taking all of the money from the mineral committee and honestly. We don't always budget money for them to know about trail, and if we do it as a very small amount based on we know something needs to be repaid if we're you know we're okay. Operations, this is IT. So we expected that to be fairly expensive as we moved all of our IT expenses, which used to be spread across departments, into one place. Next year, IT will have its own bucket. So you can actually look at and start to say, hey, here's what we're spending on technology. Here's how much we think it would cost to replace computers in the next five years instead of doing one-off replacements, which cost us way more than if we got a bulk discount. And so a big part of ops was split between operations, comms, those sorts of things. And facilities is in here with Stewart. But we're going to get facilities to have its own tab. We're going to get IT to have its own tab. But that's been a big part of our budget work is splitting those things up so you can really start to understand how much do things cost. Parks and Recreation. And we'll see revenues, expenditures, public health. Public health has a lot of grants and at this point we do have a grants fund. I do want to flag for you that there is no need for a separate grants fund. It makes it very hard to account for grants because you're trying to make adjustments across funds instead of just putting the grant in the department that the grant belongs to. And so we are working with our auditor to close out the grants fund and start to account for revenues and expenditures for a grant, both in the same place instead of across multiple funds. So that'll be a change that you see this year. There's no requirement for a grants fund and it makes for some really challenging accounting. Road and bridge. We know that Q3 will probably be down a bit just because we had to take a pause from paving in July. So you should expect to see a bump up, but they'll be doing paving now in August. Our senior center got a really great grant to help cover the transit, which we're pretty excited about this year. He's department, I know he had a lot of overtime in July for so I would expect to see that K-3 probably looks a lot higher just because of overtime staffing costs. But we are getting, we have put in to get those reimbursed. We will likely not see any of those reimbursements until next year. Keith and I have chatted about it a bit. He doesn't care that it gets coded back to his budget line if he has room for it. If he needed a supplemental later in the year, it would be because We spent money on overtime and outside resources that were not budgeted, but we would get it back next year if we found ourselves in that position. And then when we got the reimbursement, it would just go back into the general fund to replace the overage. But we don't anticipate that he's going to have an over-expenditure. It's just having a plan if we do, just because a full month of overtime for everybody is expensive. tourism and economic development. I think it's really important to share that the tourism panel, also an outside group, they collect a specific revenue, and the revenue that they collect, they create their own budget. It does fall under us, but I can no more tell the tourism panel what to do with the money it's collected from the man on the moon. And so I think sometimes we have expenditures come out of tourism. They get posted in the paper, and we get a lot of questions about them. And that is a separate tax that is collected specifically for that piece. The economic development, we have a separate bucket for them, or a separate division. But that tourism piece, not our money. I don't get to tell them what they spend their money on. So generally, if I get inquiries, I try to direct them to that panel because I do think sometimes people get upset not recognizing the whole point of that tax that is collected is to grow tourism to help businesses here. Transit, largely made for with the grants. You see at the grant revenue, it is a reimbursement grant, so we spend and then recoup. You can see we got property taxes coming in into Patrick here. He gets a lot of the money that we receive and then it gets coded to the appropriate department on our end. Veterans services, we actually submit for reimbursement for all of our veterans expenditures. And then water projects, we should see in the next few years budgeting actual revenues for selling the water. I do think it's also important to note that water is now water and natural resources. So this will look a bit different in the future. Our natural resources is technically our open space management as well. And they have a lot of grants that come into there. So when we're talking about open space grants, we work alongside RWIC to do fire mitigation. They also helped us to create an entire mitigation plan, which we were required to have. So we have grant revenues for some of those things. We provide the grant match for some of those things in exchange for work that they provide for us. So just to make sure you guys have some idea of what all you'll see in here, because we'll have all of those natural resources .

So the water enterprise fund, that'll be coming for us .

It'll probably have its own division. They'll be in the same fund. So like operations has a division. It's got IT as a division. It's got ops as a division. It's got facilities. We will probably change it up a little bit, but they're all in the general fund. Water Enterprise will still have the other natural resources. They'll just have their own. sub-accounting codes. Do you guys have any questions? It's on the website.

So we don't control Adam's salary either. We do.

The tourism, the TED department is the tourism piece, is multiple things. There's not just the tourism job. It's not just the

revenue from whatever accommodations. Yeah, so he has his tourism budget, and that's the accommodation tax, and then there's the economic development piece. And I'm pretty sure his salary falls under the economic development piece, or is it a split? I can't remember. Adam's in the general fund, so yeah.

Separate of the lodging and tax fund.

So that has its own fund, then?

The tourism has always been, it has to be because of that tax that comes in. That's great. But when we look at all these, like the assessor, the clerk and reporter, you all, coroner, attorney, myself, finance, fire, All of those things are not separate funds. We're just showing you each department's budget. Those all live in the general fund. And honestly, you only want to be creating a separate fund if there's a real reason to do so. Like, there's tourism dollars and they can't be spent on any non-dedicated purpose. I just think fund accounting is challenging. And when we set up our fund accounting, I think there was... a misunderstanding of exactly what to do with funds and when one was really needed. And so if it helped people keep things separate, they were like, it gets a fund. But the best number of funds for any organization is the least number of funds. And so we are working pretty hard to get, if there's a fund that's not needed, to really talk with the auditor about, OK, can we clean this up? Can we close this fund and just move this into the general fund? We're trying to do that where we can, unless there's a real reason. You don't have separate funds.

Yeah, I keep asking because it's helping me understand where we have a separate fund. Yeah. So I can see what you've been talking about for a while now.

We'll try to explain when we do the budget overuse and where things are at. So when you get those questions, what money do you guys have set aside for rec? Other than conservation trust funds we don't collect a separate tax for that, and I think it's helpful when we do these these people are going to ask you those things yeah make sure that you have a clear picture, so you can answer them yeah Thank you. All right, that's all I have on this. And every quarter will add it can add on will have the next close quarter. and then repost so that we've got all four quarters by the end of the year. Thank you.

Would it be helpful to have some descriptors on the website as well?

We do. It's in our budget book. Our budget book defines every fund that we have. It is a long document. really so I don't know that everyone reads every bit of it but we we actually in the budget book so if you look at our audit our auditor has statutory funds that means like a statute requires them they have enterprise funds so that's any fund that like brings in its own revenues to offset its expenses that's like the airport they report on our audit budget versus what actually happened on the books They report beginning and ending fund balances in their audit. They report a change in any debt. And I think it's really important to note that counties up until a couple years ago did not have to report like a lease payment as debt. But now we do because you owe that lease until the lease terms are up. So that makes our debt look higher than it was because we never had to account for it that way before. But we take our budget book and we organize our budget book and the funds and the descriptions to align with that audit. So if somebody wanted to look at the audit and say, I see public health fund, they can go and look and see that that's a statutory fund and it's listed under statutory funds with a descriptor of what the fund is for and where the revenues come from, where the expenditures go to. how it's funded, and then you can see their actual budget snapshot underneath for that department. So this and all of our other documents all align with one another. So you could use them side by side, but I think that's, I don't think a lot of people do that.

Not yet. But if you were on a deep dive and say making accusations, The rebut to that is you read the budget book before you make accusations. Or if you're just interested.

Yeah, just interested. Like, you can compare this to our adopted budget, to our budget book, to actually help you understand, you know, what does it find for? Why did we create it?

This is a huge step up, and so we appreciate that. I appreciate it.

It's a cool tool. I'm really glad you all got it.

Do we push any, like, public engagement or advertising of this page much anymore? Like, do we let people know? Kind of, you know, outreach about, hey, here's this cool tool you can use.

We can do a Facebook post about go check out our financial dashboard. It's with our, so we have some statutory postings annually. And all of those go on, like our finance has a couple of different sections. We have monthly reports on expenditures. We have two different reports on salaries that have to go in the paper at two different times of year. We do these quarterly updates kind of in that budget section. And the quarterly updates aren't a requirement. We just think they're nice to see how you're doing throughout the year before you get to the end of the year and you're like, oh no, we didn't look at it till now. So we kind of put these with that budget book in our adopted budget. But we can do a post on social media, say, hey, we just posted, we just did a work session on quarterly updates. Check out our link here.

Item number two, which is overview and direction regarding budget priorities, also led by Candace Bynes, County Manager.

All right. So we've had a couple of different sessions. Next week, we're supposed to adopt our five priorities. And I just wanted to have a little bit of time to talk about and confirm what our priorities are. So just to give an idea of the budget process and where we're at, we started doing department meetings in July. Unfortunately, we had a fire, so that kind of threw our schedule off just a little bit. But our goal is to have a pretty solid preliminary budget, even though it doesn't have to be accepted. It didn't turn in until October 15. We try to go ahead and get a pretty good budget built out so we can fine tune the last few decisions. How much do you guys want to contribute to local nonprofits? If we think we're going to have additional revenues over expenditures, what projects would we put them towards? Are there any capital requests that make any sense? One that we held off on is the de-icer, you know, that could potentially create more revenues. And we said, hey, we want to do more digging before we say yes to that sort of thing. But at this point, we've kind of identified, you know, your five top priorities. One is public... safety and well-being one is financial stability and a part of that is getting the capitalism management plan done getting our audits done on time creating paying for the correct systems do the work that we need to do a second one is staff training and engagement we know that turnover is very expensive and that's one of the priorities so we've got a list of things that you guys identified and just wanting to really reaffirm that that's what we're focused on as we build the budget. So what happens is we have budgets submitted to us and we have to come back and make cuts if our budget is lower than we anticipate, it's higher than we anticipate, we get to do some other things. So I've pulled together a document that I think is interesting information. I did not compare all 63 counties, but I compared quite a few of them. Andy Lee, can you see that?

Yep, there it is.

OK, great. I'm trying to hide this guy. There we go. So I think it's really important. We've got a couple of things coming, guys. DHS has some cuts coming. The Fed is no longer paying for SNAP. They're passing it on to states. Our state is in a budget crisis. The state is passing it on to counties. The level at which it's going to pass that on to the county is unknown at this point. We've gotten some estimates from them ranging from, and this is wild, from around $100,000 to over $500,000 that we could have to come up with. in addition to what we're already paying for public health. And we probably won't know until we start next year, which means we're going to have to do one heck of a subliminal if they determine it's the higher amount.

That's just SNAP. That's just SNAP. It's not even our Medicaid 60-40. No, this is just SNAP.

This is SNAP by itself. And that's just because the Fed can't afford it, and they're saying, hey, somebody's going to pay for it, and it's not us. Um, so I think that is important to know that that is coming at us. I've talked with Mark. He's supposed to have some prelim numbers put together for me by the end of this month. So just for your awareness, I am building our, um, our budget off of the same revenues as last year, holding in a set that 39 and was it 39 and a half that we needed 39 and a half mil projecting. Very conservative sales tax numbers. I don't feel comfortable changing those until we get a little closer to the end of the third quarter to know what we did this year. So we're keeping things pretty tight. We've asked people to stay at 2024 budgets unless there's something that's absolutely necessary. We know that insurance is going to cost more. We don't get those estimates until October. Insurance is probably going to go up. So we've got a lot of big things coming at us. And so I think this is important to understand. County services provided.

We love to go big.

So when you look at Adams County, their budget, $876 million, and mind you, I would have done all 63 counties, but every single county, you have to scroll their budget book to figure out what they adopted. And so I pulled together a lot of these, but I didn't do all 63 because that's a whole lot of my time. But I did try to pull together people who are similar in size of our budget and just talk about, you know, county services. Could I have missed a service in a county? I could have. I just had to stalk their websites to figure out what all they do. I think this really starts to help inform not just only this budget year, but how we need to be having conversations about funding things in the future. We don't have an $876 million budget, but we sure like to provide services like we do. And I don't think that's a wrong thing. I think it really opens us up to have some conversations about If our roads really need repair, if our buildings really have all of this deferred maintenance, we have to commit to having some real conversations about how to fund all of the many things we fund that aren't a requirement. As we get less money to cover the things we have to do, it means we have less money to do the things we want to be doing. And so I think we get an awful lot of criticism for all of the things that we don't provide. But when you really look at budgets and the services that counties do provide and what they're required to provide, we're going really big with a really tiny budget. And I think a lot of the deferred maintenance on buildings, a lot of the road shut up by turquoise, that is a direct result of trying to cover everything with money that wasn't intended to cover everything. And so as we work on our budget, we really wanna prioritize understanding, okay, how are other counties and towns and districts able to provide These services that we know are important to our Community, but we recognize like our general fund can't continue to have word everything it hasn't for a long time and that's really all the deferred maintenance, you see is rather than fix things. they've been held off on to find so many things, and so I think it's we're starting to build these budgets, I really need to confirm with you all that these are the priorities you want me to focus on. are the things we're supposed to do, and then look for creative ways to fund other things. Or if your priorities aren't that, we need to know that. Because when I go to a department, I'm like, you've got to cut your budget by 15%. I'm going to say, this is what commissioners said their priorities are. If it doesn't align with these five things, that's where you make the cut. And I think we're going to have to make hard cuts these next few years. And you're seeing that in Summit. You're seeing that everywhere around us. Revenues are down, people are spending less, homes are sitting on the market for a lot longer than they were. And so I wanted to have this conversation with you all to really get direction about what is it we should be focusing on. Just really reaffirm, you know, I know that recreation is important to us all. And so I also included some information, I think, When we say that recreation is a statutory requirement, it's not saying don't do it. It's saying we have to figure out a better way to fund it. And so I went to a lot of different, and you can see I didn't pull every single budget. I have a lot of time, but I don't have time to read 63 budget books. I tried to pick the ones that are close in size to us or some that really go big on programming and just say, okay, who funds it? And you can see a lot of them, it's a combination, city, town, rec district. It's city, town, the county owns the asset and maintains the asset, but the programming gets provided somewhere else. A lot of these people have grants, which is great, but there are fewer and fewer of those. And then I highlighted us so you can pull us out. But I thought it was really important to point out, and you can take time to look over this, This will help inform decisions later on, I think. But we get a lot of people asking, well, why isn't this that or the other being done? And I think the big thing is the county's not caring at all. A lot of it, they've got cities and counties working together. And a lot of the programming piece is provided by specific taxes that are recreation district taxes or The city is handling the programming piece, and the county's maintaining the asset. And I think we have to, and this isn't even just about recreation, this is just the one I get the most questions about, and especially lately, the one I've gotten the most questions about. I think you could do this same table with fire. You could do this same table with animal shelters. You could do this same table with libraries. You could do this same table with senior centers. You could do this same table with transits. And the thing is we're doing all of those things under one budget. And so as we come into this budget season, I just need to know what, what we really want to focus on. And if the direction is. Make sure we cover X, Y, and Z. We need to know that because that's what we do when we are in these budget meetings is we're like, Hey, we don't have as much money where we do. And here's the priority from our commissioners. And so before. We spend months coming in here to bring you a budget that then we're going to scramble to change in a month. I think I want to share this information because I think we do have to have some different conversations about how do we still provide everything when we're getting less additional money to provide the required things. And what kind of conversations should we be having this next year? And what do you want your priorities? to be for us? I know this is a huge question, so it doesn't even have to be answered now. I just, if we want to have a conversation now, lovely. If you want time to ruminate, we could have budget meetings for a whole month. But I do think there is a need for us to have a commitment from you all about, hey, this is what we want you to focus on. Otherwise, we're spending a lot of time to come back and then reverse direction. And I think the next few years are going to be harder to cover everything. So the direction you give and what you care about matters.

Something that jumps out at me right away is that I know this. Matt Bullock knows this. Elsa knows this. Everyone in the room knows this situation. But yet here we are still saying, oh, we get so many questions about this. We get so many questions about that. And I think we've really fallen short on developing a strategic communication plan emphasizing this exact point you know something that has some charts that shows what your average county handles what are we statutorily required something that kind of you know i mean dumbs it down a little bit so that anyone who looks at it is going to be like oh wow look at that list of stuff lake county has to do no wonder we're stretched thin. No wonder we're short. No wonder we can't provide top notch recreation services. We can't build eight baseball fields. We can't build a pool. We can't, you know, all these things that people just don't seem to understand. I am a little bit inclined to say is not, not a failing, but something that we could probably do a better job at. So in short, just like a strategized, communication piece that all of us are on the same page with that all of us can use you know our talking points in safe way our talking points with our community partners when we have to say no because it sounds like we'll kind of be in this going on a diet phase so you know like some kind of a collaborative effort between all of us about how do we how do we frame this what are our key talking points that all of us are going to use so it's coming the same way from all of us when we all talk about it so that there's less confusion and less questions it's something that just kind of jumps out at me that i don't i would like to try to do a better job of i mean we are working phil the comms physician which will

help us come up with a plan. I think until we have that person, I really want to do a budget town hall and take some time to really highlight these things. Because it's not saying that rec shouldn't be funded. And I point this one out because it is so important to our community. It is a huge part of our community. And I think saying, hey, something's not statutorily required is being misconstrued as, They're saying they don't have to do it. It's not important. And that's not the message here. The message is we can't fund everything. So how are other people funding it? And why don't we try to figure that out as a community? And I think that it comes up a lot because it is so integral to who we are. And it does impact the quality of life for ourselves, for residents. But I think some of the things i've noticed are that it's a partnership between the city the county and creating a funding source that is specific to what you want to see and whether that's record whether it's fire or whether it's. A collaboration like some groups don't have a recreation district, they have like a coalition of. people who get together and raise funds and go for grants. I think there's a lot of cool ways to fund the things you want to see that aren't just taking money for one purpose and putting it to 18 others. And so I think we can work maybe on some comms as we come into budget season, even before that person arrives. Probably just spot check it with you all before we put anything out there. But I do think I also wanna know that what we have left before we're working on budget with is to focus on statutory items, getting our internal ducks in a row, and then work on other ways to intelligently fund items. And I just wanna make sure that really aligns with the priorities that you guys have. And if you feel something differently, it's okay to feel differently. We don't answer how people feel about us publicly. We just show up and nothing bolts dollars and cents, facts, you know? So if there are other things that you want us to focus on, I would just really want to know that before I go to putting budgets together. So if something's important, we don't want to come back and have made cuts to something and then find out we should have been prioritizing it. So I guess I'm just asking for a, Can we just have a gut check before we start doing budgets?

I think my only worry about the priorities that we set, our five priorities, is specifically around. And Candace, I'd love to hear from you of where you think it does fall. Because I know it's totally on your radar. And I know it's on your radar. So I just want to see how you would interpret of our five priorities. the continued restrictions and capacity needed for our Department of Human Services. What does that look like for you as we see the budgetary cuts from the state and the feds, the extra workload on that department, the exhaustion for that direct service? How would you interpret our priorities in shoring up that department?

Honestly, DHS is the last place I'm making a cut. They're not doing anything discretionary. They're taking care of humans. Also, their budget has no fluff. There's not a fun thing to cut. It's a department of a lot of care. It is not a department of a lot of fun things happening for the most part. other than taking care of people, you know? And so I just think as we have cuts, my priority is to cover those things first. I think you guys were really committed. I think we had a fun saying people over potholes and I do agree, like taking care of human beings with human services is a priority and it's something we don't get to opt out of, even if we didn't want to do it. But then I do, I would love to say that our next priority is you know public safety roads facilities and then we take other funds across everything else that's not required and do the best that we can and then if we have to take make cuts to recreation if we have to make cuts to you know other libraries we have to make cuts to you know the sled hill or any of those things Um, that's where I would ask, Hey, as we start to have work sessions with the city, can we start to have these conversations about if we can't fund it all and we don't want to see it go away as a community, what is the best way to fund the things you care about the most? And I think it would be great to help for you guys when you're interacting with the community to help explain, yes. maybe we would have to make some cuts to things that were really fun to make it through a budget here. But it doesn't mean that we are saying we're never doing this again. It says it means we're figuring out a better way to fund it. I think a lot of people do not recognize that this is what we're trying to do with this. And they just assume because the county always has that it's their duty to do that with tax dollars. And I think that is helpful for people to understand that we're not saying these aren't important, we're saying we only have so many dollars to go around, and when we take money from things we're required to do and spread them out across everything, then everything is not done well. There's just no way we have this much money, and actually I think our budget was closer to 39 at the end of the day. But I think If the commitment is to cover things that we're supposed to do first, I would just ask that we honor that when we make decisions about budgets and have to get pushed back, you know?

Is there any easy ones up there? Like, is the golf course covering their own expenses? Is Ski Cooper covering all their expenses? Are those two easy ones to address and say, hey, we can't do it anymore?

I think that's where we need to review some IGAs and get steered in here to kind of look at what is our insurance costing us for those items, which piece of the insurance should rest on the county, which piece shouldn't. I think we charge such a low amount for some of our facilities, it's not even enough to keep them from falling apart. And I think those are some big conversations is just working with Matt to say, hey, let's take a look at these IGAs, let's actually break out what is the real cost of providing this fun thing, and just try to make sure that we are covering our, at least the expense of maintaining it. We had that discussion about the rodeo grounds, they've had complaints about, you know, The condition of the bleachers and the everything that gets brought out there and we had so many complaints about that, but we've never actually charged enough to make it to even maintain it. Sixth Street gym, we barely raised the rate on using that facility and people lost their minds. If you don't invest in maintaining them and you're trying to cover 100 things, then something has to give and at this point, we're in a position where we can start to fix those things or we're gonna be two more boards down the road and they're gonna really fall apart. And our amount of revenue we bring in isn't going up that drastically. It's not increasing at the same level, our cost to fix the things is. Yeah.

Well, I would say everything is on the chopping block, whether it gets chopped or not, it's non-statutory. I don't know how else to say it, except that you guys, and maybe in our joint work session, we ask for some help. And then maybe in the fire management board meeting, we say, hey, man, there's probably not going to be an increase next year. Just prepare yourselves that everything is sliding down, Probably property taxes at the next valuation. So we're in a really tough situation.

I'd like to get a concrete number on what we're actually spending on insurance for ski Cooper. That'd be nice to know. So, and then collaborate with the team about what the shape of that conversation would look like when it's time to talk about that IGA.

I think we need to do it for all of our facilities. And I think maybe that can be something that we work with Stuart on, is trying to break those out. And I know he's done a little bit of lead work. I think we budget for what we have done in the past for this year. But I think we have to really get into the nitty gritty of what is it really costing us to pay for some of these things, and even just charging enough to break even so that it's not a loss. when someone else is able to then operate it for a profit. I think it's got to be enough to at least maintain the asset. And I don't know that we can pull that all together before we adopt budgets, but I would just like a commitment to, as we are coming back in for work sessions this next year, really digging into those things and trying to right-size some things so we don't find out that everything It was broken eight, 10 years down the road to the point that it can't actually be fixed.

I hear you. I hear you about the priorities too. My understanding is that you want to make sure that when we adopt our five priorities next week that they are accurate so that you can use that as a tool as you go to staff As you build budgets and you use that as like our voice in those rooms. Yeah. Saying this is what we're building off of. And you're doing a gut check right now before it comes to adoption next week that those are accurate.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And I feel that is correct.

It is. It's going to hurt. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's going to hurt all our little pet projects. I'm not going to say the word.

The pool?

No, the grooming.

The grooming. Everybody's got to say the word.

We all have our little things. As long as we don't touch that, we're good. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Well, and I think the bigger discussion is, can we find out a better way to fund it?

There's a better way to do it. There's funds there that have not been used. It just sucks because, you know, even the ice rink is an example. It's very cheap and affordable, but that's where a lot of the kids go and the teenagers. And so raising that on some of those families that there's not much else to do. So that's pretty tough, pretty tough for folks to swallow.

And that's where I wonder, can we start to have the conversations of, okay, what if, you know, what if the programming piece was, you know, provided by a district, or maybe the city would contribute towards the programming cost, or maybe we do have the discussion over the next few years if recreation is really important. Do people want to fund it through a dedicated funding stream that is for recreation? I think that's what you're seeing right now, The money we take as a county isn't dedicated to recreation other than those conservation trust funds. So then when push comes to shove and I have to do the things that are required and I don't get to opt out of them, it leaves less and less and less to put towards the extra. And I think that this one is really important. I think fire is really important to our community. And so I think that it's a great opportunity to have conversations with the community and with other you know, municipalities, districts in our community about, hey, if these are the most important things, let's figure out how to fund them and not just keep slowly giving them less and less and less when they are the only thing that kids have to do here. And families, you know, have to do.

You know, it's really smart of you all to be thinking about this stuff because I don't think it's been thought of in the past. Like I said, it's our facilities that really suffer and our roads.

It's pretty interesting to do just a deep dive into how are other people doing it. And I'm not going to say that this spreadsheet is like a thousand percent perfect. I'm one human and I literally just had to go take on people's website. that's where this information lives did someone provide a service that isn't spelled out in their departments i'm sure you know like public or cpd they include like gis and some people list gis we don't list gs separately you know but i tried to account for those things where i could um you know but i do think it is important to recognize like gosh we're doing a whole lot yeah with a lot less than a lot of people and

And we're totally reliant on the Mayan.

Yeah, and that's my other big thing is like any economic changes to the Mayan and what they can pull in really change what we're operating off of. Yeah.

Yeah, we go down to like Larimer or whatever that, I think it was Larimer on your spreadsheet.

When I, you know, like I think other communities that are similar in size, are having to ask themselves the tough questions. You know, Chafee's really struggled to not dip into their reserve every year, which has gotten harder and harder for them. I know that their city carries the fire department, and they are having to ask themselves questions about, do you need a district if we can't continue to provide this? I know Clear Creek has been deficit spending. So I think that's the big thing for people to understand. During COVID, everybody had a lot of additional money, and you were able to really get your general fund reserve, which is like your piggy bank, for a rainy day built up in a lot of cases. But what we're seeing is everybody is having to, especially small counties with small budgets, to continue to provide services at the same level they were, is having to dip into that piggy bank. And for most of us small counties, our piggy bank is just really quite small. So I think those are important to keep in mind as we share with people.

That's all I had.

I think I just wanted to share this information, be thoughtful as we start moving toward budgets.

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's the least fun part of this job, making cuts.

Yeah.

But like you said, Andy, we need the communication piece, so if people don't think we're doing it out of meanness or something, there's a lot of pieces to this part. The city conversation, the mining conversation, the statutory obligations. But one thing that keeps coming up is rec. I mean, everything's on the chopping block.

Is our communications position open at the moment? We are wrapping up the description. We've been at this week.

We had to wait until you approved the supplemental to post. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Shucks. Great. Is the rec department director position posted or thinking?

It is not yet, but we are going to be getting it out there. I'm going to spell finance. Look at me go.

Oh, my goodness.

Look at that right there. Finance.

That's the French spelling.

Finance.

The Canadians don't. No.

No. We met with them yesterday to start discussions about what they came out of reorganization with. I will say change is hard. Change is hard for people who've been here a long time and haven't experienced change. And the reality of our budgets means we're going to have to have tough conversations. And we're trying to do some of that pre-work. believe our last recreation director. I don't know that it would have mattered who it was. They were not set up for success to come into two completely different groups of people who had not had a director and were used to making decisions internally to then have someone and then have this budget reality looking you in the face. Not an easy task for anybody and we want to be intentional to fill the role. Well, and also to set that person up for success. So do some of that groundwork of getting that team to be growing in the same direction and on the same team and organize before we throw someone into it. Because if we do the same thing we did last time we filled it, I think we're just setting that position up for failure. And that seems like a waste of our time and money. So we are going to work on that job description. We actually have a meeting after this to kind of have some discussions before we meet with that group again.

Andy, you got anything you want to say before we wrap this thing up? Besides when are you coming home, getting off that dock and the boat and whatever else you're doing out there?

I have no additional questions and I am packing up the truck as soon as we're done this meeting.

I'm just jealous, that's all. Sorry.

I'll be home on the evening of the 13th.

Alright, well thank you guys for the hard work. I feel like our job is pretty easy. We'll take the heat, you guys do the work. Should we wrap it up? this concludes the lake county commissioner's work session it is 12 24. thank you chair thank you chair thank you commissioners thank you staff thanks andy