Board of County Commissioners Work Sessions - Regular Meeting

Good morning, it's September 8th, 2026 at 1103 AM. We're gonna start this work session with overview and discussion regarding Lake County's exploration of alternative work week schedules. This will be led by Rachel Theler. Theler?

Theler, it's a title.

Assistant County Manager and Ashley Cole, that's an easy one, Human Resources Director.

Thank you. I've got my presentation here.

And it works.

I'm dried and luscious.

I'm gonna try the seat here.

I don't wanna get that leg busted.

the three dots up there and there are more you can hide that panel.

Control Alt Shift H. Control Alt Shift H. I got it?

Okay. Okay. So, Ashley and I are here to talk about different weekly schedules that we have researched. So first, we're going to talk about 4-10s, and then we found some very interesting information about 4-8 or the 32-week model as well.

So hopefully my non-PowerPoint works.

It's very pretty to look at. It was very annoying to put together because it did not want to format, which is why there are no bullets anymore because it would not add bullets.

Aesthetically, this is the most pleasing presentation I have seen in this. Thank you. He's got an award.

Transitions are phenomenal.

Yes, whatever you want. You can have it. OK. I love it.

I'll just do a present every time I do a presentation. All right. So what prompted this conversation was Lake County, like a lot of counties, were facing some challenges with competitiveness regarding how much we can pay especially and so finding non-monetary ways to help our recruiting process and encourage people to stay with the county longer without giving them a giant raise that we really can't afford within the budget and also attracting outside talent maybe to having those non-monetary advantages, like a shortened work week, whether that's 4-10 or 4-8. That's what prompted this conversation, especially since, as we are seeing and feeling personally, having a nice work-life balance is really important to people. And also, having that three-day work week or weekend really is helpful with that, and also improving retention and reducing burnout. So that is the lens that we looked at these options through. All right, so 410s. This one is definitely the most common of the condensed work weeks. I would assume everybody in this room knows what a 410 is. So that's working the same amount of hours, but you're smooshing it into four days. So you're doing 10 hour days over the course of four days instead of eight hour days five, eight hour days and five days. So everybody would get a three day weekend with this schedule. You would have longer service windows within the day. So even if you decided to have nobody, you know, you could cycle staff to have the consistent five days open for the public facing offices. But even if you didn't do that, you would have longer service windows so people could come in before they usually go to work or after they get off work. So I couldn't find a lot of hard and fast numbers or studies that were produced after counties switched to 410s or other organizations, just general information that it did increase productivity and decrease burnout and it seemed to be a driver So if we pursued this option and we kept it consistent to four days, which is what Chaffey and Fremont counties both do, so they've transitioned to four 10s and they don't have anything open on Fridays. we could have what's called a dark day, which would save us money in utilities. I'm really terrible at math, so don't take my numbers to heart, but based on what I could calculate from our utility bills, it would roughly be about $30,000 in savings if we had a dark day with the 410 schedule. So that was, those, yes, yeah, those were the, based on the utility bills that Will provided me, doing some math on that. Fremont County has hard numbers of saving $22,000 a year by having a dark day with its new 410 schedule. Rachel?

Yes. Is that just from this building or like how did you determine which?

It was for all of the buildings that we have within the county. So it was the courthouse and the annex and our public sports buildings and public health and DHS was all of them combined and then doing the math too.

Are Saturday and Sunday already dark days?

I mean, there's still some costs with those because you always have some sort of utility power. So I just averaged what we were spending a day and then eliminated one day from that. So it's definitely not an exact science.

So you're trading Friday like a Saturday?

Yeah. And then also...

I mean, not quite. She'd be taking out the whole day. Right. Which is not a Saturday and Sunday because you have to have residual utility.

And finance is working on... We wrote that on Friday, too. We couldn't do it on workday. Right.

Yeah, yeah. We're saying you can't take out a seventh.

Right.

Yeah. Finance is working on getting more exact numbers. They just didn't have them ready yet, so I just kind of did some rough math so we could get a general idea. And then, of course, I didn't account for... being open two more hours for those other days. So that could also contribute to that. But, I mean, Fremont has this hard and fast 22,000 that they've saved, and I don't know how many, over how many buildings that is.

They've got quite a bit more going on than we've got down there. Plus, they probably run an AC in the summertime because Canyon City is hot. It does, yeah. But they don't have to run heat in the wintertime.

Inefficient heat, nonetheless. Yes. Right out into the air.

Thank you. And I can share those more specific numbers once finance gets them to me, too. All right, so potential hurdles with the 410 schedule. Tower days are long days. Some people's brains don't work. officially for 10 hours and so even though you are squishing that into your four days instead of five days especially if it's a physical job are you getting as much productivity from a 10-hour day as you would be an eight-hour day some people do really well some people can struggle with that um the question also would be Would you want to do what Chafee and Fremont have done, which is just having the offices open Monday through Thursday? Or would you want to try to figure out a rotating 4-10 schedule so that the offices are also always open five days a week, and then the people within those departments just rotate through for their 4-10 schedules? Also, child care can be a little trickier. So Bright Start, I believe you can drop them off at 7. the school you can drop off children as early as 730 and then they have a project dream that goes till 6 so that does cover a 10-hour day assuming that people have access to that sort of if that's their childcare situation then there are workarounds for that also you just need to make sure as managers that people are still getting their work done and being productive through that whole 10 hour period. And especially if you're staggering days, how are you going to have managers making sure that those staggered days are still maintaining the same service levels? All right, so that was the 410. Now this is the little edgier option of the 4A work week. So Ashley and I just had a conversation with Kristen Meyer of the City of Golden, who is the HR director. And the City of Golden is completely on this 32-hour workweek schedule. And then I also found another case study that we'll talk about on a further slide. But the basis of this idea is people have proven to actually be more productive in less time because they know they have a limited time to do things. So they just get them done instead of saying, well, I need to sit in my seat for 40 hours. So I'm going to like twiddle my thumbs for a couple hours and like get eight cups of coffee and, you know, maybe work a little more efficiently and focus on deep work to really get the projects that they need done. Um, it's been very positive for recruitment. And it also has reduced burnout and people leaving. And so it's increased retention for the people that are already with the county or the city in this case, and the people that want to come and work for them. But it would require a big lift of how do we reorganize and reform to get such a schedule in place. Alright, so we'll talk about San Juan first because that was the information I had and then we can chat a little bit about the city of Golden. So San Juan County in Washington, they are a little bigger than us. They're about 18,000 people and they are, the entire county is islands off of the coast of Washington. So you can imagine that their cost of living is very high as well. This whole process for them started, they have a union within their county. And this whole process started when the union asked for some extremely large pay raises for all of their employees that they could not fit in the budget. And they wanted to work with the union and not lose the employees and have a long drawn out battle. And so their solution was to change to this 32 hour work week since they didn't have the budget for these large raises. And I think just the raises alone were going to equal a million dollars. that they just didn't have in their budget. And so they transitioned to this 32-hour work week. And this is at the end of their two-year report. For the whole calendar transitioning, they've saved $1.9 million in reduced turnover and raises that they didn't have to pay out, 18% less sick time. And actually, even though folks are technically working eight fewer hours a week, it was only 13% fewer hours because they didn't have as many vacancies that were going unfilled for a long time. And also the part-time people were still, if they were not full-time already, they were still working the same amount of hours. And so it didn't really, it didn't go down 20% even though it was a 32 hour work week. Their turnover reduced by 28% and they filled positions 27% faster. They also were very concerned about how the community was perceiving this transition, so they did a lot of surveys and things asking the community how they felt. And 87% of members said that they had not seen a decrease in services provided by the county. So we can talk a little bit about what we just talked with Kristen about. They started a pilot program with their police department going to 32-hour work weeks. And they actually found an increase in contacts with community members and a decrease in time to respond. And so their efficiency actually went up quite a bit as a result of this time. And how much did you say they saved in overtime ? $200,000 that first year.

Which she did say it can be somewhat of a challenge because there are, as he can attest, there are some officers who want to come into a job and they're young, they don't have a family, they just want to work as much as they can and work as much overtime so they have all that earning potential. So it does cause some officers to leave because of that or not want to take the job, but that was the cost savings for that. did not struggle to fill those positions with people who maybe weren't interested in working as interpreters.

I'm trying to wrap my head around how transitioning to less hours for a law enforcement agency would translate into more contacts.

So how she described it is that because they knew they had, and I maybe would have to go back to her and get a better explanation, but essentially because they knew they had less time to do their job, kind of what they needed to do. They had 32 hours to complete all these different things. They were more willing to, you know, go out and have, you know, jump on a call and jump out to do these things to get their work done. That's essentially what she said. I did not ask follow-up questions.

Sure, yeah, no, that's, that would be a... Just for some context, Heath and I have discussed It's before, it's not like he's just learning about it right here. It is really helpful to retain and attract qualified people because the ability of officers to actually have some work-life balance is huge, and other communities don't do that, and it helps a lot with turnover. It helps people not just, you know, when you're burnt out in a band-aid or a rope, the way you interact with people

know it's a little more challenging to you know really show up as your best self when it's you're on a million hours of overtime yeah and that could back up how there'd be more contacts with this you know and they said they put guard rails when they did the pilot program with the police department they said you know we're going to try it out and if response times go up 10%, we'll stop because we don't want that drop in service from the police department. And then she said they were surprised to see that response time actually decreased.

I have more questions, but I'm going to wait until you guys are done in case if you... Did you have questions?

I've been really curious about like when you shift to this, how long does the quality stay before it becomes the norm? And I get that like That's not going to be quick. Like, we all have to work for a certain amount of money. It doesn't, I don't fear that, like, all of a sudden you get down to eight hours and you're picking somebody the same amount for eight hours. But I am really curious, especially with that two-year, the two-year survey that they saw from San Juan County, how, I mean, that survey actually was crap because it was only 16 respondents. And I was like, I wonder if, if you were to get a large enough survey response, how would people see quality of service changing over time? And is that because quality of service is changing, or because people just get used to the norm, and they're like, the government still sucks? You know, just really curious how you actually quantitatively or qualitatively track this.

And their project was called The Best for Golden? That's the informational website. The informational one. the six month pilot. So they had each department track. So they had each director or manager of their departments come up with metrics to measure productivity. And then they had within each department, it was tracked and then uploaded to the website, those metrics. So I don't know, I haven't dug into, but I think it's called the best for golden. So if We wanted to do some other research. I'm not sure if they uploaded all their metrics on there, but I think they uploaded them every month somewhere.

Yeah.

So it'd be interesting to dig into those numbers if that's what you're deciding to do. It was a wonderful presentation.

Thank you. They started with their law enforcement and got that figured out first.

Because you see every type of employee in law enforcement, they're only covered 24 hours. like admin staff who work a normal, like, typical office job, so they decided that was the best pilot area to do it.

I also mathematically don't understand how you can increase the amount of people that you need to cover shifts and see a savings.

I asked for that. I said, did, because one that came to mind for me was the airport. There's only three of them, and they're covering a lot of hours between those three, and I said, did you add anyone to try to cover so no services were reduced and she said that they didn't have to and that their goal was to be cost neutral at worse and then have a little bit of savings at best and that's what they did. They were completely cost neutral and did not add any to their headcount so we might have to dig in a little more to see how that would actually work too. They must be just spreading

fewer people over a certain time for some of those 24 hour services or even five day a week services yeah really i really don't know how the airport would even do it because i think there is so much like so many different types of leave that and lots of leave every time someone leaves you which we know our retention I don't know what it is now we actually have to sit and work at it but when I came on it was like no one made it longer than two years which means you're paying out all of this leave you know it's just a when you're constantly turning over you're losing a ton of productivity and you're also paying out a lot and I would imagine they probably were able to reduce how much leave they offer.

I asked that, and she said they didn't do that either. Did they not? Yeah, and I was kind of shocked by that.

Did they give as much leave?

Well, I asked that, and she didn't have the numbers off the top of her head, but she's going to send me that so I can compare maybe some apples to apples of how much leave they're giving and how much we're offering.

I'm really curious.

Yeah, me too.

What was interesting is they maintained five-day access to the office. They didn't have a dark day. And so to do that in a cost-neutral way without having to fill more full-time positions is pretty...

I'd be curious how they worked that. Yeah, they were very committed to no reduction in services anywhere across the city, especially to help with serving the public and public perception of, and they started calling it, instead of a four-day work week, just a compressed schedule because they didn't necessarily say you have to work four days. You just work a compressed schedule and you decide with your manager, your director, on what that looks like based on the flexibility of what works with your schedule and how you can get your work done. And I think that also helps with the coverage. So if you're not trying to fit people into a four, date box, then it's easier to flex people's schedules around to cover the full service hours of each department.

I feel like it would just be such a case-by-case scenario, like almost like a hybrid model of some departments can run four times, some of them are spread out across five days.

There are still departments that kind of struggle with either buy-in or figuring it out, and so they didn't

say okay the police department's pilot went well we're rolling it out county-wide they've worked count from department or city-wide they work department by department to see what it actually look like and be realistic for that department i feel like one of our biggest costs is insurance and i'm wondering how this translates into claims with people being on county property less time like does that you know what i mean like you guys

You're reducing the amount of hours, therefore you're reducing the amount of exposure to insurance claims?

Yeah, like how much time someone actually has to fall down the stairs.

I feel like that would be quite the data collection to try to get. If you expose somebody to less opportunity for risk, you literally expose them to less opportunity for risk.

I mean, if we look next door, that's probably one of the biggest departments where people need to get in there every single day. She's not going to be open on Fridays. People just adjust. That's all.

I have a question. How do you determine what the community's access needs are to five days a week versus 10 hours a day? Like specifically our community is a commuting community. So is it the 10 hour days that are more, that leads to more accessibility to the community? Or is it being able to be open on a Friday? Because a lot of people have that day off already that is the community's need. How do we find that information?

Really interesting question. And I don't think we would have a good answer for you since we're such internal facing departments. So it would be you as commissioners talking to the community, pulling the community, and then each elected office who's open to the public knowing what they need to do to serve the community per their office.

And department directors.

And I think in terms of child welfare and DHS, this could be a really great retention tool because that is an ever... So I'll be really honest. We've had so much turnover there. It's just wildly challenging. So the amount of turnover we've had, we've had to ask ourselves, do we need to pay more to attract somebody? And we're going to have to on some of these positions because we're just so far out of the market and the positions aren't so hard and we don't get to opt out of providing those services. It's not like a service we get to not do. That's where, you know, they might need one or two extra people. They probably do anyways, but that ability to rotate people to provide coverage, I think would help a lot in that type of a position because the number of times Laura and I are on the phone late at night, early in the morning, over the weekend is constant. And that's where, you know, because she needs help. She doesn't have any help. You constantly are turning people over there. That's where I think being a little more intelligent with the 410s or even, you know, she would never not have a Friday staffed. Right. And she and I are on call 24-7 for her response stuff. But I do think that ability to unplug for a day while you're not needed could be really beneficial in some of those areas that we know we're not gonna take a fifth day and be closed for DHS. It's too vital to have that access for our community, but where we could get in, be a little more creative with schedules in the same way, like he's department, create a place that people could stay and not just be sober and out, they are constantly gone.

And I know somewhere we've had stats on the cost of turnover. I think that would be a valuable metric to gauge a lot of this by.

It could be a period, going back to your point also, of fact-finding across departments of when do, you know, just counting, kind of head count, when do the most people come in and what time and when we're serving them. and that might be helpful. So it's going to be a whole process mod of data collection. I could see that.

Yeah.

And so obviously this 32-hour option poses a lot of unique challenges. My personal opinion is that public perception would be the biggest obstacle to something like this because you're paying people the same for less hours is how you want to break it down to how that looks. That's how it works out. However, if you're maintaining that five-day public access, then that can help soften that blow. And also, if you're saving money because you're not having to rehire or pay people big raises to get them to stay, things like that, that can actually offset those costs.

I was thinking about that this weekend, like that was part of the story in my head about like, you hear about how these companies become wildly successful by treating their staff really good versus the companies that are like the opposite. And, um, you know, the CEOs who are like, I just always tried to do as best as I could for the people who make this company, what it is. And from a business perspective, I felt like there was some similarities between this concept and that notion. And that I know, like the reality, everybody in this community has to know that we can't pay nearly as much as what the neighboring communities pay. And when you balance that versus the cost of turnover, this could end up being something that actually saves us money in the long run by just owning up the fact that, hey, we don't pay you guys, we aren't going to pay quite as much, but you're going to have a better lifestyle here. And if that reduces the turnover, then that saves the hard dollars and cents. But also people are generally... happier, you know.

We could also try just getting a ping pong table. I've heard that increases productivity. Thank you all for it. Any other ping pong players in the room?

In Elsa's line of thinking, what happens when the honeymoon phase for the ping pong table wears off?

It's very trendy. We'd have to get some data.

Yeah.

I'm all for it. Some people would have to take Monday off, right? It seems like it's... It's going to be really complicated, but I'm all for it.

If you have Friday coverage, yeah, you probably have someone that's staggered.

Or someone who comes in for the morning shift and then for the afternoon. They may still work five days a week, but they work 32 hours and cover the morning slot. And then another person who prefers to come in a little later, work afternoon slot, something like that.

I think this would look like the budget meeting. So we'd have to sit down with each department one by one and look at what model works right for that department.

Yeah, I think really what it would be is the department director, you giving them the directive, hey, get to this point. And then they come to you and make a presentation of, hey, this is what will work for our department. Sound good? Yeah. OK. Great.

And that's where knowing your budget numbers is really important. Because then you just say, this is what you have for staffing. You actually can't go beyond what you're allotted for staffing for a department. And the director has to work within that. I think we utilize a lot of part-time staff that I think we could get away from. Like, five part-timers is know two and a half full-time positions so it's like is it that hard to add one more fte maybe not if you're being more conscientious to not do so much part-time because now the work is flexible enough like that part-time person you know maybe doesn't need to sit in that part-time seat so i think that's where you just really have to know and why it's good that we do know you know what have we been spending what have we been budgeting for those are really hard time filling positions

Is everybody, or are most people that work for the county salaried, or is there hourly as well?

They're the vast majority salaried, but we do have hourly, and most of those are part-time and seasonal staff.

If somebody's hourly, does the, does overtime turn into anything above 32 hours, if we go to 32?

Nope. That's another, that's kind of one of the biggest cost savings is overtime costs, because you are pretty much across the board, avoiding overtime costs. Because you're trying to stick to 32 if you go a little over, I mean, you're still not getting close to 40.

Okay. That was a question that I had, and I think I've asked it before, but I couldn't remember. Like, if we go to a 32-hour week, if someone works 35 hours, they're not getting paid.

What is the benefit, then, for hourly folks that we're going to 32 hours?

There's really not much of a change or benefit for hourly folks. It's pretty much the same. I mean, I think we're already having a separate conversation of how we reduce those costs. It doesn't make sense to reduce it across the board and say, you should work a certain percentage less hours because we're trying to do cost savings for this because you need them for that many hours one way or another. So there's not much of a change for those folks.

Is that an area that we need to figure out a different retention model for?

I don't think we really struggle with hourly because again, it's like part-time and seasonal. So it's usually people, um, looking for just some extra work to pick up our younger folks who are helping out with the rec department. Um, you know, we just hired someone to help out the custodian team and he's just looking for a little extra work since he's been retired, things like that. So I don't, we don't really struggle in that area.

I also think we have some really intelligent, really qualified people that already live here that are driving away from here to work other places.

And there is some cost savings too. If you have that extra day, you're not taking your child into daycare that day or to childcare in that day that you're not working. And I think we could potentially have some of those people quit driving over the hill to have a little bit better schedule. Or you could do something extra on a Friday or whatever it is. But right now it's really hard because it's expensive to be here. And we're competing with people who can just pay so much more than we can. We also want really qualified people. What I love is really qualified people who have a great work ethic. They get a lot done. And that's really what you want to see. Especially for people who are salaried, that they don't get overtime, they're exempt from overtime, the amount of work that they're expected to get done doesn't change because the number of hours they're in the office changes. They're still expected to get their work done. My time would be mine to manage or Ashley's or Rachel's or anyone else that's in that kind of a position, but you still have to get the same stuff done.

And Kristen also confirmed that, because that's how it works for their kind of director levels. leadership levels that unlike her she she's like I don't track the hours I work I just make sure to get my work done it does allow me to have a little more flexibility of you know I have to take my kids to daycare so I arrive at around maybe nine and sometimes leave at three if I need to and I don't feel bad because I know that I'm expected not expected to work 40 hours but I make sure I still get all my work done so maybe I work on Friday a few extra hours or something

Yeah, it almost boils down to department directors compiling a task list as opposed to how many specific hours are you here this day with certain departments. Like the assessors in the treasurer's office are a little less forward. Well, maybe not the treasurer, but I know the assessor is a little less forward-facing than some of the other departments.

Things like that. Well, I can relate to the people who have physical jobs.

Definitely, it wears you down. And then your productivity, especially week after week after week, you can really start to, your body can start to deteriorate.

Yeah, Saturday and Sunday isn't enough to recover from manual labor. Especially when you have driving back and forth to Eagle County or something like that. The salary, you know, when we

post a job, or there's an opening, there's a salary. Range. Range, thank you. Would those go down, or would they try and keep them the same?

The same.

And then what about raises? Would they still be, all that structure would still be the same, or would we start, and what if future leaders say, hey man, these people are only working 32 hours, let's start to ratchet down their pay. Or not, at least not increase it all the time.

That's where we've invested in the pay banding study, or will be this next year, because we do want people to be able to grow with us, right? But right now, you're either entry level or you're director, or we made everyone deputies at some point, because that was the only way to create growth. And some of our pay is just, I don't know, it doesn't follow any logical progression and it's hard to come and well not legal to just come in and like reduce somebody's pay it's not really how it works but when we do the pay banding study we'll be working alongside Matt to put people into the correct bands so that we don't just have you're either entry level or director level there's like growth and bands of pay for that gross like an accountant one could be an accountant too once they've done training and shown know progressive growth so that person doesn't just go from being an accountant one to the director overnight they actually have some growth but we can do it in a way that we can absorb into our budget and i don't know that the number of hours really changes that that much once you get that kind of structure in place we've just never had that structure and what i've inherited is sometimes really unclear how we just decided whatever the amount that someone came on at. But it is challenging.

Well, it's so challenging because, I mean, you think about a corporation doing one or two things. How many types of positions do they realistically have? 10, 20 maybe? The number of job titles we have is 130-something because we are such a pancake organization with so many departments. So it's a struggle, but that's why this comp study is so important. And I think, yeah, sure, people who sit, different people sit in these seats and they say, well, because they're only working this in the hours, we're gonna not focus on these raises or this compensation philosophy that we put into place. But I hope whoever's sitting in this seat or in Candace's seat recommends against that and says, no, this is a separate way of retention, but people should still have their pay go up for experience and training and better at their jobs and cost of living.

Retention has hidden cost benefits, too, because you think of how efficient you are at your job in year three versus year one.

Yeah. Oh, even me in six months. There was a good period where it just took me so long to learn.

And also, one thing that struck me in that San Juan study, that even though people were working 20% less technically, Because they didn't have those vacancies, it was actually 13%. Like the work that you're losing, not just what it costs to get somebody up to speed, but the work you're losing by having that position vacant can be really substantial.

What do you think? Do you want to chime in real quick if you have time?

Yeah, I appreciate that. doing the work and I can relate to that as all my statutory responsibility is deducted by my employees and so valuing them as number one has always been my motivation. From a law enforcement standpoint we're wearing a bulletproof vest our entire time so the stress levels of those hours are extremely high and so that's why it's always been important for me to try to find ways to reduce additional cost then what does the bottom line look like and I think that's maybe to Elsa's point like trying to calculate how less hours equals the cost savings and so if you pull out some of these cost savings in here they're not really speaking to bottom line they're speaking to individual columns of overtime or this or that and so what I'm curious about with Goldman that I don't have the answer on is potentially maybe they were already paying their officers well enough to live to have the staffing to handle additional call load per person to handle for a reduced hour a week, where I would say we don't. So from Lake County Sheriff's Office standpoint, I don't have the staffing to say we're gonna work less and be able to manage all those calls because we still have vacancies.

So there's some deeper comparisons that we're gonna have to do to really see what that is. So Golden's rules of saying we're gonna follow

and incurred extra costs associated with this they may have already been built well enough to say we can handle that transition to a lower amount of hours but if i look at it from my office standpoint to be able to provide services to the community especially from a response standpoint for law enforcement is having more staff and so with the cost savings of less overtime maybe there's there's costs of there's absolutely law enforcement there's absolutely huge cost savings in turnover the cost of sensitivity academy employee

we have to consider that over time.

Also, as was mentioned, there's a cost savings there, so we really have to analyze, okay, we offer this amount of days off versus what we're currently paying, but is that total cost plus the retention value increase and overtime, but not the free monthly say it's a cost savings, I don't think it's a reality. I think at the end of the day, it's going to, well, the goal should be to wash. That was golden.

Well, and Heath, you've got, you budget for positions that never get filled year after year. So maybe, actually, it might be neutral in that by doing this, you could fill those positions that allow you to have your patrols, you know,

So, and we're 24-7, so if you think about it from that standpoint, we would need how many more for a 32-hour, 36-hour, we made it on, we would probably fall more than that 36-hour range since we're on call the entire time.

It would require an extra position, so for 24-7 coverage. And that's probably something to analyze

then we probably get away with a four or eight hour shift for 32 hours a week by the offset. And that's really not too challenging to accomplish. I just leave that to that director of the department to say, manage it. So they often talk to the employees, would you rather have Friday off, would you rather have mornings later, early later, Mondays off, whatever the options are, but we're not reducing our service hours to the community.

And then they get creative too with

appointments versus just having the doors open and people can walk in at any time, any of this, this, and this.

Because appointments help adjust to that. So it's not that hard to manage. I don't think it would necessarily take a commission. I mean, with every single department, we're helping the best possible. There's a torque ball for us to offer that. But we're still following the 40-hour option.

And I think there is, you know, fully staffed office with what we're currently budgeting for an in-administrative meeting, probably get away with that covers their 40 mile with our administrative staff. Which is what I think, not completely across the county, obviously the county does have other departments that are needed 24-7.

So that would look more like where our patrol, how we manage patrol with less hours per week. But with all that said, I'm a big fan. I really think this is something that could, especially in our community, a lot of our community is now a tourist community. We're up here to enjoy being outside, enjoy doing those activities. And that offers more time to do so, more time to rest from the stresses of the work and all that stuff. There's a lot of good points to consider.

At school, they had session only four days a week.

I remember having a job at one point that was Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and Friday. And having that Wednesday in the middle of the week was so awesome. It felt like you never really had a work week. It was pretty sweet.

hybrid option where it's 36 hours a week, where there's like two nines and two eights.

We can explore any type of compression.

I think that's why I had asked for this work session is so we can't, probably won't be much data that we can borrow from other people about the 36, but just want to understand from you all what you want us to explore so we don't spend time Exploring something, if you're like, let's leave it like it is, because that's also on the table. I do think we've seen, it's really tough, the retention piece, but also we, you know, with Tracy asking to move to the 410s, I know you maybe wanted to explore that through your department. I've had other departments, but wanted to get really a consensus from you all about what do you want us to explore if we did anything at all. like the 432 or 436, I would want to start with Heath first. He's the most complex, indeed the most challenging, and I think that's what you see with Golden, is you've got to get that piece figured out, and then slowly figure out other departments.

And Golden said, one, I was like, what would you think would make this the most successful in how we get started? And she said, number one recommendation is buy-in, someone who's really passionate about this. So we have that in a share. So now would be the time to actually think about it since we have someone who is really supportive and passionate about exploring this. One more comment I want to make. I really caution the 410s. I don't think that is going to help with retention. I think it's going to do the opposite and it would cause so much frustration with people who just can't make that schedule work, whether it be for child care or for their brain

Well, I'm all for exploring it. I think it makes a lot of sense. The bottom line is we're going to need our communications person for this. We're going to take the heat. We can handle the heat. Just put it on us. And the quality of life, all those positives, I can't really think of any negatives except for the community feedback.

I think it's an easy call for me because it feels my gut feeling is that this is a positive thing for our staff and the right decisions aren't always popular the popular decisions aren't always right and I get a little tired of like catering to that yeah the disgruntled dozen especially when it comes to things that would affect our staff's well-being. So that, to me, feels like the super easy call on, yeah, let's take a deeper dive into this and really seriously consider it. I want our staff to be happy.

Another couple of pieces of information from Golden is they have community listening sessions. I think it was one month, six months, and then a year? 18 months.

I think they had one, six, 12, and 18.

and then the second one, only like 10 people showed up, and then pretty soon none was showing up. And no one even, they said they just kind of quit talking about it, and people were just like, okay, if people, she said most people could not care less, and there was only those few people who seemed to really are very passionate about everything that still kind of talk about it, but she said they were very surprised to find that it wasn't that big of a splash. Yeah.

realistically see that happening here it's like the flavor of the month problem that you know like it'll be a it'll be a big deal for a little bit of time but you know if it's something that can improve quality of life for the people who work here that's worth all the in retention cost so much money i mean if you could put a number on training

trying to hire, staff time interviewing people. I know that's kind of a gray area, but there is a number there and it's big time. Plus everybody taking in a new person, that's where you keep the paper. Don't tell anybody.

What do you think about Candace? Wearing seven hats at the beginning of her job? That was nuts.

Can I ask a clarifying question for the pay portion? I think you might have answered it earlier, but you talked about the pay range. Does it come from an hourly standpoint? Because you can look at it two different ways. Are we maintaining their hourly pay, or are we maintaining their annual pay?

Maintaining annual would be my perspective.

So that's an increase in hourly rate. Just to be clear on that. It's also a good appetizer as well. What's the timeline?

Is there a goal timeline or would it be this year or next year?

I would probably, I think if we're up for exploring it, have a year to plan and then get it really rolled out for your department and see how that goes. And then everything else is quite honestly easy. than that. And it doesn't mean that we couldn't be planning for other departments simultaneously coming up with KPIs to track productivity, have some discussions about what does that look like. KPI. Key performance indicators. It's like just how are you doing, how are you performing before and after. But I think we could be doing that work simultaneously. We have a history of like growing things out there before they're fully baked and I would want to have like a real plan, like a real plan to roll it out, have had conversations, have more data about cost savings.

Collect data, plan to continue to collect data.

Something like Matt's office though, I mean that's pretty easy. That would almost be a contractual thing, wouldn't it? There would not be a policy.

I mean, I don't see a world that I've never worked in four days a week.

But yeah, with my staff, certainly I think it would be huge for morale and attention.

Yeah, I think that's an understated value that it's really hard to put a dollar figure on. you know, having people feel good about their work and, you know, you can't pay them. That's certainly one way of doing it.

Yeah, you love the cost, you know, to pay per hour, essentially. There's so many intangibles that you just said you can't put a dollar value on. It's like the daily happiness index factor, you know. A little more free time to get some pow turns across the wintertime that can, like, save your whole year, you know.

Yeah.

Okay, explore.

Can I add a couple things though? I can see how this fits within our strategic plan. Easy. And I really, in terms of the data we collect, I really want to know from each department like who, when are people coming? And I think that in DHS that would be one of the most important things to track because of the population that we're working with and that's a service we don't want to interrupt. So who is coming in for what service and when? So if we're spending the year kind of creating a plan for the sheriff's office, that's great, but let's use that end time.

And do they do track that because of all of their reporting requirements for all of their caseloads?

That's great. So I want to be able to look at that to be able to right-size off of whatever plan we're coming up with. Say, yeah, OK, we're not going to interrupt service. And then I am really curious. I think the biggest question for me is the departments who provide 24-7 coverage, what is the actual difference in dollars? Because my inclination is that it will be an increase in cost for us, but I really want to know dollars and cents. What would that change be? And then my last question I think I have for the health of the whole that we're looking at in the strategic priorities is, are all of the culture shifting that's been happening in terms of supervising folks, setting clear expectations that match with the job descriptions, creating the annual plans for the annual reviews that create performance guidelines. I don't want to move to 32 hours if that supervisory piece isn't strong enough to handle it. Because I don't want to move to this like, yes, let's make this a better environment for you to be able to be more efficient if we haven't figured out how to appropriately supervise people for their efficiencies and we haven't proved that we can hold people accountable to that. So if we don't have the clear cultural leadership to be able to do that, I would be reticent to move into the 32 hours. But obviously, I can see how this is healthy for everybody. I love it. But those are the three things that I would want to see in place before I would sincerely say, yes, green light. This is going to check off that priority role.

That's a great point. Krista did say that I kind of mentioned the management piece and how sometimes maybe there's not strong managers in place to facilitate this. And she said, yes, this does exacerbate any problems that are already existing. Right. And we need to be ready. We do need to be ready. I don't know how we solve that. I think it's just a work in progress.

Totally. And I think that I can see that we're moving in that direction. But I'm just saying, I think from my position, that gives everybody a year to prove that we can do it to get the green light from me.

In some regards, wouldn't this maybe give us an opening to

of like okay like you're gonna get more free time you're gonna have a better work-life balance but here's what needs to be done I think those things exist already and there has to be the will to follow through and some of those things don't exist perfectly yet yeah but you can see that leadership is creating that framework whether we go to a 32 hours or not and so I want to see some of the follow-through on the framework that has been created right now and As opposed to like, oh, once we get this, then we can do it. It's like, no, we should be able to do it no matter how many hours a week people are working, is my opinion.

What happens if an entire department just completely drops the ball and the quality of their work or their services provided just go right down the toilet?

I would be honestly shocked if that happened because I can't think of a single team where you have high performers, you have poor performers, and Kristen's then moving to something like this just kind of highlights a little bit extra the poor performers who are not necessarily pulling their weight, because they have even less time to not pull their weight. But I would be shocked if a whole team would have failed completely. So kind of to Elsa's point, it almost will shine a spotlight on the... Yeah, so it's good to have this foundation and framework that we're still working towards and ensure that we continue to commit to working towards that while we explore this option.

I think that's where it's great to be able to, as attrition happens, when you hold people accountable, attrition happens. You just have turnover because you don't allow people to just not do their job. But that's where being able to really bring on board someone really qualified who maybe could consider making less because of the flexibility of the schedule becomes important.

I really think we should consider the ping pong table as well.

DHS does have one. It does not save child welfare this year. Ping pong table or not. Well, thank you.

Thanks for all the

work and thought you guys put into this. I'm really excited to see what's next.

Moving on. Item number two in this work session is overview and discussion regarding options.

See you, Ashley.

Thank you. For an offsite E911 dispatch office, this will be led by Heek Speckman, our sheriff, and Stuart Clark, our facilities and fleet director.

Just want to come up and I don't know if you have.

We also have Sarah, our dispatch director, who is on too.

She's not feeling very well today, but she might chime in.

So I can kick it off with where we're at right now. It's just a discussion of this. thought earlier driving in, a little flashback of my military time. I was in this school where we had to do pictures. It was a field sketch. And so we had to go outside and look at this field. And then we had to come back into the classroom and draw it. And we had to pinpoint all the different things that we saw and whatnot. And the instructors, they were super nice. And they told us, hey, we really want you guys to do a good job on this.

Okay, got it.

And then they walk out of the room. And then a second later, they walk back in the room and start screaming at us, turn the lights off, and start throwing flashbangs and say, run or attack, get under the table. And they're like, hurry up and finish this project. And so it provided a little extra stress, but it was also because that's what we're preparing for. It was also to develop us so we can handle stressful environments calmly. But that's where we were going. We were going to areas that would provide that type of atmosphere and environment and I was relating that to dispatch, and dispatch also has to handle stress, so don't worry, we don't do that type of training. But that's the environment that they have been experiencing, and that is the unnecessary component. They already have to handle enough stress as it is, picking up the 911 call and hearing somebody in distress, especially in a small community where you've experienced dispatchers know the person on the other line, and that causes a lot of extra stress. And then we have that extra component that we've just dealt with, is of being across the hallway from the jail. The jail, I'm sure you guys have probably heard, there's people in there screaming, yelling, saying inappropriate things. We've had situations where they've wiped vomit and other stuff all over the wall. The smell comes through. And it's just that extra ed, extra component that is truly necessary. I'm grateful to have Sarah on board now. She's been with us for a year or so now. And it's just, what are we doing here? So I think it's kind of to the point where we're saying, really enough is enough of this, where dispatch is at. I would move on, Sarah, to other dispatch centers, just to see smaller communities comparable to ours. And it's not this gold-plated facility. It's small. It's a small community. And still, to compare it to ours, we're so far behind on where we should be. I would describe our dispatch center as a closet. monitors and is here to answer this radio. Nobody's kind of been okay with that for so long. So we're really hoping to move away from that. And so that's where we started to push this discussion with the E-MEMO 1 authority board a little more pressing. And what this also presented was the question of, well, if we are looking at building a future facility for law enforcement in this now and then the reply to that was really we should also have a backup dispatch so we should have a backup 9-1-1 call-taking center we don't have one in Lake Yonge our dispatch our 9-1-1 calls go to Chafee County if we have to shut down here or lose power here whatever the situation is we don't have that backup center so this also like a good opportunity to explore this it's not just a solution for our problems that we're experiencing now but also as a backup for the future so it isn't a waste of time and money to build something like this and so those are the two main reasons why we're looking at doing this to catch you guys up on some of the discussions we've had with the 9-1-1 authority board is related to the budget we're looking actually tomorrow to approve finalize our budget so we can give our ita payments out to all the different entities involved And the big question is how we want to manage our excess in our fund balance. As you can imagine, it's not just a building that we're struggling with. Our software is not working so we're working on fixing that. We also have GIS issues, which is the mapping function, which is one of the most important elements. delaying our response time so this is huge for us to say okay we need to immediately fix this what does that cost we don't have the equipment for it we don't have the personnel to do that so we have to put this out to bid to try to get somebody who can do that we've tried to we've worked and Shelby's amazing she does great work in the county she just doesn't have that person as one person in the capacity to also take on the needs to fix our GIS function for emergency dispatch We also don't have software for recording purposes, which is huge when it comes to prosecution or just evaluating situations. So those have turned into our main focus for how we want to utilize our excess in fund balance with the dispatch budget. And then this component is the most expensive one. So those other ones provide solutions within that $100,000, $250,000 range or below. so we feel comfortable doing that. And then one of the discussion points is how far along this process that Stuart has been helping us with just to get some rough cost estimate of what it would cost, how far can we go with that project. And so today is really just hoping to have that discussion with you guys on what we're thinking from the dispatch center standpoint, so it's really what we're representing today. And also just what this looks like for both the city and the county since the proposed lot is with the city lot where the cash is currently located and that works as a good location because that's where the radio tower's at. There's already some utilities there so that should present a good location and it's a good location too for a future back out so it just checks a lot of boxes is why we're looking at that location but we're also So that's a city lot, but in the county, we're using county resources now to help us develop this plan. So I want to make sure you guys were informed of this decision. I'm not presenting any sort of requests or apps today. And it's just to talk through all this, brainstorm a little bit, and then have Stuart kind of walk through the work he's doing here.

So we'll start off with that.

Sure.

Wait, sorry, before we move on. What is the actual software investment that would be needed for all the changes that you're hoping?

So that's with our... our CAD so the dispatch system that software program RMS which is the reports management system and JMS which is our jail management system and so that's where all our reports are done through the CAD portion side of it is where all the dispatching function goes into it and this is we've had

on everything.

And so while we felt a little under gunned in that ability, we talked about like problem solving that, this is what that is at this time. So while we're starting that process now, that's under the OSP system is to switch our CAT system. And so that's that component.

And is that going to be able to be covered currently by the 8911 budget or is that going to be an extra request?

No.

It's okay if you don't have the cost number. I'm wondering if it can fit within your current budget or if that that you just proposed is going to be also another budget request.

So as we're sitting now, so no, this isn't an additional budget request. This is being consumed by the E-911 authority completely through the access in our fund balance. Okay, cool. That's what I thought. This doesn't increase our annual payment either. And that's just, that was the, as the number one priority by the 91 authority board as we need to do this now and so that was yeah so that's not part of this in a roundabout way we can say that has reduced our available funds for something like this but at this time we're not making a specific request from lake county government to assist in this building process that's not part of the request we're just looking at this globally at this point

Okay, and does potentially moving locations change any of that software cost?

Very little with that specific component because we're switching to more of a cloud-based setup versus hardlining everything in. But there would be additional costs beyond this that we're just kind of guessing right now. We would have to have some hard lines in there for 911, for emergency phones. So there would be that. We don't have those costs quite yet, but not to the software though.

Cool, so it's not like we would be purchasing, you know, we would be purchasing it for a location and then in the move there would be an additional cost. All of that software upgrades would be able to move with? Yes.

Okay, thank you. I'm sure there's some cost associated with physical labor and moving some of the hardware and having IT come up with that, but that would be it.

Okay, thank you.

One quick one before Stuart gets going. What's the current dimension? You said a closet. What is about the current dimensions of the space they're working within?

You haven't seen it? It's like 5 by 10.

I poked my head in there, but I feel like I can't remember clearly.

Yeah, I would say it's from the desk back, that area, that's where we fit two dispatchers with all the equipment.

It's got to be about 6 by 12 somewhere. Oh, yeah. Perfect. It's a walk-in closet. Yeah, it's a walk-in closet.

way would that free up some extra for your department too yes correct so we are also playing that game of office space and that does free up some space for the sheriff's office which is more appropriate to have our our jail staff have office space right across from the dual which i'm sure was part of the original design i don't know what the history is on how long that dispatcher's dispatch center's been

Would this reduce some of the bird's nests, wiring harness catastrophe that's going on in some of those rooms?

It has to. Yes and no. It's not going to remove the problems that we have down in the basement. The last item here on this spreadsheet is a $25,000 move of the equipment by the authorized company that can do that. So he would fix all the area upstairs. And the area upstairs needs work too. There's a little closet there and it doesn't look much better than our basement. So that's a good question. All right, you guys ready for a little bit of this information? So originally, and it requested kind of a 24, you know, a double wide. two different units, it'd be something like that with a couple of bathrooms. And this isn't necessarily manufacturer specific, and this number's maybe padded a little higher. But what makes most sense is if we used a Colorado manufacturer, because then we would save on the permit shipping costs. So this number's padded just a little, and then our delivery and setup's padded just a little too. Just so you know. And then some of the things we have to have that are associated with setting up a new building. And then if you scroll down, I don't know, is this a touchscreen? It is not. You can touch it.

It won't do anything.

We'll have to clean it. So basically, to do everything needed, this is, I think the number coming in a little lower, but about $350,000. And one of the reasons why it's a little high is this is a super fast setup.

Yeah.

Helical screws instead of a concrete foundation. I know that some of you are very familiar with this, but you know, we can do this in a couple of days when we get a company here. If we wanted to do that, it would look something like this. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. And I kind of checked that soil there was adequate for this type of thing. So we could, about as fast as they could get it here, we could have our foundation and everything ready. So we could do this fast. If we did a traditional concrete, we could reduce this $40,000 for the foundation down to 20 if we did it, because the helical screws are kind of expensive. They bring a big track hole up with a big hydraulic drive on it to do that. Anyway, it's kind of the latest technology, but it's super fast. Let's just say, for whatever reason, we went with half the size, a single bathroom, a single wide unit, we could save about $150,000 off of that.

Half the size is only a quarter of the cost?

Well, there's still a lot of associated costs with setting up any building.

What size do we need?

Well, according to... Sheriff's Department. They really need the double size. I just thought I would throw, without their permission, I thought I would throw that out there. I looked at the one that we have in Garfield County and they have it remote too. It's in a kind of a retirement area and it's not, Garfield County is much larger than we are, but their unit's a little smaller than what we originally quoted here.

Why do we need such a big one?

I think we could go down in space. Sarah's on now. She can talk a little bit to the space needs aspect. That's why I don't have a lot of experience. I just know it's really small. Yeah, yeah. We want to give her big.

We want to give her bigger.

But I do think that there is room to look at smaller options to reduce that overall cost. Big questions are how long. depending on what our building plans are and a lot of that's up in the air right now so that's a big question and also you know are there other needs that we would use in there like an emergency operations center if we wanted to utilize it for that then we're back to that bigger bigger picture portion and then that's probably where I would in turn Emergency Operations Center and then that cost difference then I'd probably come to you guys with a request for additional for funding towards this project for county specific purposes. So I do think it's worth exploring smaller ones that we can get away with just as a temporary location serves as a long-term good backup location and what that treaty size can get narrowed down to.

There are some advantages of going there. First of all, the land's owned by the city of Edmond. We have a contract with them to have our OEM building. We own the building. We don't own that particular land. We have other examples where we work with the CLN like our dog shelter. It's the building. The land's owned by us, but it's their building. I don't think that would be a problem. There's an oversized generator already here on that property. And it runs off a separate fuel. It runs off of propane. And so we could use the same generator. And if we put the building in this area, the utilities come in right here. So it's all really good for cost effectiveness.

Looking ahead and down the options we'd be exploring, A little can you elaborate a little bit on on the benefits of having an alternate or a backup emergency Center like what. What what i'm thinking is like getting a new. law enforcement facility feels like a really. important thing in my eyes, like figuring that component out. And I know it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be fast, but if we were able to set up a modular dispatch with a helicoil foundation, is this something that could be moved at a later date to complement and be a part of a new law enforcement facility? It feels like you view it primarily as it would stay there, it would always be a backup, but would there be any value in considering like, hey, we get the bigger one and we have it as used for the E911 for now, and then when we look ahead into the future, this could be moved to a potential new facility spot and be a part of that project?

I would say the desire would be to keep it separate from some length of distance. Because it could be, if we have a bomb threat at this facility and we put a backup center, there are fires threatening it, so it's important to have some separation from a backup center.

But still, we need it within our county. So when you say backup, it's not like a second dispatch center? Or E911 dispatch, it's just separate from? Yeah. Okay, cool.

Yeah, always being remote. Also, I heard your conversation that I had with you, you said that they need their privacy. Like my team constantly bothers them because we have to get access to get into the jail to do work, and that's adding additional They're here 24-7. I mean, they need their isolation from other people even wanting to just visit and things.

Yeah. I can't imagine calling with some like really sensitive or really upsetting situation and then hearing on the other line someone's trying to like talk you through it and then in the background you hear some unruly detainee screaming at the top of it like that's gotta be not awesome.

Yeah, you can speak up just a little bit.

Yep. Okay. Is that better?

Yes.

Awesome. Um, so to go back on a couple things, um, that original size that we quoted was after what we requested. And so that included a break room because our dispatchers can't leave their area. We have to provide them with some sort of kitchen type situation as well as a bathroom. It also included a mini conference room for trainings, and or like the sheriff mentioned, if we were to merge with the EOC and combine it, we would be able to have an EOC center in the back. So that was their, when I started reaching out to companies, that was their recommendation for size, but we can always scale that down. That's just what they did based off of the request we provided. The need for a secondary backup location, like the sheriff mentioned, when we had the bomb threat at the courthouse, that's just one. But if there is a fire, perfect example, Colorado Springs Police Department, where their dispatch center sat during the George Floyd riots, they actually, somebody broke in and set fire in their lobby and the dispatchers had to all evacuate to the backup center for El Paso, Teller County. So it could be a slew of things. It could be as simple as when we lost complete internet service and our entire center went down back in May for the entire day. It could be something as simple as that. If we have an outage that lasts more than an hour where it's impacting our services, we could always then go to the backup center and be fully functional within a very short amount of time.

Thank you, Sarah. I think I was just misunderstanding the backup as a duplicate instead of just a, it was just my bad.

Yeah, really, to understand that it needs to be separate. Yeah. Important piece of information. At the bottom of this section, there are some options. I didn't think they were necessary for the initial building, but a paid parking lot and then a security fence because of what they do.

That's all I have. Is there anything else you need to add? No, thank you for all the help so far. It's been very helpful with the E911 Authority Board and so we're at the point now where we're really exploring our options and trying to make decisions and how they go into the future just like it's going on everywhere else.

But back to the request portion, again not asking for towards this but obviously we need county resources above and beyond at this point and even more so in the future to help us save money so future considerations would be associated with that is what can Stuart and his team do to help reduce this cost to that help make this a reality and we haven't had this conversation with the city yet but that would be

Wouldn't any new construction need that optional, wouldn't be an option to have the handicap ramp access for ADA compliancy? Wouldn't that be something we would have to do regardless?

An ADA ramp for this particular building?

Yeah.

I don't know the answer to that. We'd have to get with CDD and ask that specific question.

Man, permits would be 3,000 bucks. Can't they do us a solid on that one and waive the fee?

Some of the permits are not related to the county. Some of them are power and gas. Oh, right.

Fair enough. I was looking for angles there. Sorry.

That's a good one. Looking at their website here, they've got a bunch of used buildings for sale.

Yeah.

Interesting. I'm not suggesting it, I just find it interesting.

It is great to look at those things. I think the lifespan of one of the modulars is about 20 years, so we want to back that in. Got it.

Because they've got flat roofs, they're flattish roofs.

Do you think realistically this would be definitely within the five to ten year use, if not more? Just to be honest. That's my perception. of how quickly this entity can move on capital projects, given where we're at. I mean, we've watched the Justice Center conversation like this for 20 years, right? And we're getting an elevator into what we're getting, right? And I think that a bigger, you know, we have to look at the infrastructure for actually being, we just have a lot to do. before we could look at what we're gonna build next. So do not expect it in the next two years.

No, and I appreciate you saying that, and that is in the back of my mind, which is another reason why I think we need to move on this also, is to continue to have this hope of a year or two, a year or two, a year or two, we're gonna have this new facility, and we better have this conversation now. And if it is in that five to 10-year range, we still have another 10 years of life out of this investment for a back-up center. But we need to start moving on. They're one of the higher priorities right now when it comes to space and the space that they're operating in.

Okay. So can you be more explicit about the ask? Is this entire, would this whole request get dispersed to all of the people who contribute, all the entities who contribute to the E911? Or would this be only a county request?

No, the way the ITA is set up now currently, if it was an additional cost, right now we're just looking at our fund balance. We have an excess in our fund balance that we know we need to spend down a little bit. This is one of the projects that we're looking at unionizing that fund balance for. If it went beyond that, then one of the conversations we would have is, is each entity comfortable paying into the percentage that's listed in our current agreement? So then yes, the answer would be yes if it's beyond that. And just these are rough numbers because it's a rolling three-year average of use is what we use. But it roughly, the total cost beyond any grants, other revenues like grants or the emergency telephone charge fee that we collect, it's normally the remaining of that split by my office by about 40%.

By the police department, it's roughly 40%. And the remaining 20% is 10% for fire, 10% for EMS.

And that's what historic numbers have shown us when it comes to the use of dispatch.

So then, what is the current E911 fund balance?

The total? Yeah. Currently it's about 1.1 million.

Yeah.

Okay, so this would- But we have- The software- Our fund balance and also the comfort level of what we want to spend that down to. If you follow county policy, so it's the same three months of operating expenses. which is roughly around $400,000. That would be their minimum, which I really don't think everybody's comfortable with spending it all the way down to that. And then the additional other projects that we're talking about. And we're also looking at the future of the United Women's Center and the affordability of it. What we've done historically, which is not a lifelong good plan to do, spent down on the fund balance a little bit to keep our ITA payments in an affordable range. If we have to pay full ITA payment amount, which is only about 75% to 80% of the total cost of the dispatch center, that's not something that we can do for the next forever. So we're really having to look at other options on how we fund the dispatch center. So we do have a pretty good cushion right now, and that is offsetting the cost of our dispatch center, which is another cost consideration of how we utilize that fund balance. But it's not looking, our current process isn't going to keep us going forever.

So how much are you spending down the fund balance year over year then?

Roughly, if we use all our expenses that we plan for, it's about $250,000 per year is the rate that we've used in the past.

How did the fund balance get so big then?

what are they bringing in average per year about that about 250 000 and um we're currently going to request an additional um emergency telephone charge beyond what the the state limit is which in 2020 I think it's $2.27 or $2.96, and we're going to request more than that to help offset the cost, but it doesn't have as big of an impact as we were hoping it would be.

Would partnering with someone like OEM offset the cost?

For the construction portion?

For the construction and the ongoing maintenance?

In a way they're OEMs on the e-911 authority board, so they're representing the county in that fashion, but because they don't utilize the dispatch center as often as the daily users, they don't have a cost split portion into it. It's just, it's essentially me and however you want to look at the fire department portion, because the fire department, we contribute to the fire department and we charge the fire department for their e-911s in a roundabout way. The county also pays into it through the fire department.

county asked from the office of emergency management.

Yeah, I don't know if it's prudent to put timelines on this right away. There's too many variables that happen month to month, if not year to year, to say for certain. My gut feels like if that would change drastically depending on which of these options you know if you went with a smaller building and poured a concrete slab i don't see why this couldn't happen a lot faster than than was mentioned um i think she was talking about yeah that's like a different oh the law enforcement facility oh i thought you were talking about this specifically i was like i can't it's too far out five to ten years I think this could happen. This could happen pretty quick, I feel like. Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry, I apologize. I misunderstood that part of it. Just want to be realistic.

Yeah. I can, you know, from the authority board recent conversations, we're not going to pull the trigger on this until we're confident in that decision. And really considering the future, the next, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now on what it looks like for the Lake County, you know, one dispatch center. and that's why today this is perfect for a work session just really want to get that information out to you guys who are looking at here are some of the numbers that we've explored potential ask what they would look like so no specific requests when are you going to make the call on it we are approving our budget tomorrow which we earmarked funds for this potential in 27 on how we

So Will would need to know what the expense is so we can capture that expense and then it just naturally reduces because you need to do your reading fund balance, revenues, expenditures, ending fund balance. So if he doesn't have those or didn't include them, we need to make sure they're included in Tyler if you think you want to plan for it. Otherwise, we'd have to do a supplemental and do it next year.

Yeah, I could talk to Will. And you too, offline, see what, with that plan, what is the best way to earmark those funds? So we just want to make sure that as the authority board that we are recognizing that potential, what is the best way with the county?

It's easier to budget for it. And if it doesn't happen, you don't adjust anything until the end of the year. You just adjust that one expenditure versus it takes two or three changes if you're going to touch fund balance and you have to do it by resolution. It's easier to budget for it, and then if it doesn't happen, it's a little easier to fix.

And that's what our plan is, is to budget for it. How that exactly works, we need to work with the case on.

Yeah.

That's the budget for it, and then we're not committed to it.

We're not signing contracts on it. And the camera and security is not part of this?

Because I know that we're... about the 88 ramp.

So it's not a public building, not a public access building. So there's some things there. Like, for instance, if we interviewed a person who needed a handicapped ramp, then we'd be obligated to put one in at that time. But I haven't studied the latest 2018 or whatever that we just adopted.

2024. 2024, OK.

So this could potentially come to us as one of the IGA members as an additional request, right? So next year we have budgeted out all these funds for our camp, capital asset management plan.

Isn't it just the asset management plan? It's all assets? This is only capital assets?

Well, capital just means anything that would be recognized as a capital asset on our books, which is anything over $5,000. Oh, that's low. Ours is real low, yeah.

Okay, camp it is. I was wondering if it might be the amp.

It's not.

Okay.

But it's fun.

It is?

Yeah. So through that process, we'll be determining kind of like a, the hope is at the end of that, the outcomes are what needs the most work, what would cost the most to fix versus replace. And then from there, making some more informed efficiencies and bundling of what we build next versus what we renovate next. And so I think my request would be if you could keep it small, if you could keep this asset small so that we have more flexibility to build something that will last longer, as opposed to having this temporary building that, say, another department would be part of, that then we've spent all of this money on something that's temporary that will need to be built in somewhere else. That would be my request. And then that also saves us as an ITU member those dollars to be able to put towards an actual investment building that will last longer. But I understand the request, and I can see the thought process. I think that would just be my hope.

That's a really good point.

And I agree with that, that I think we should.

I want to keep looking at this as county-wide. I don't want to be separate of the Sheriff's Office or the United Mormon Authority, but with this grand picture that we're trying to build here, I think it's important that we're members and partners in that process. and then also answering all these needs that we need to at the same time, so it's tricky.

We all need two players. Would the entire project just kind of hinge on, the lifespan of the entire project, to me personally, doesn't feel like it solely hinges on the modular structure itself, though. Once it's moved and all the systems are in place and everything like that, 25 years from now, it's like, okay, unpack the shell, replace the shell, foundation's already there, plug everything back in, And that's, you know, that's not the full scope of the cost. So, you know, even though that the shell itself has got a time, the ticking time on it, it doesn't mean that can't be replaced at some point down the road. Should we need 40 years out of this facility?

I guess when we've talked about it as a group, as a group, all of us, it's been like, well, an option is moving public works and or sheriff law enforcement up on the hill, right? Our airport industrial park zone, which means that we have a lot of infrastructure to put in the ground. So any money we could put towards making that a more efficient facility, maybe U91 goes over there, but even $50,000 will help us move towards a longer term facility.

I guess I was just of having it be separate from...

It can still be separate, but in the same complex, right? Where you can't hear somebody screaming in the jail, but you do have your officers nearby, you do have OEM nearby or whatever. Right. Whereas keeping it fully separate, eventually that place becomes kind of lonely because you need new facilities for everything else that's over there.

Yeah.

I'm not saying that's the plan and that's what's up in stone. I'm just saying that it locks us in to a temporary facility where we're actually hoping to invest in and make a plan for long-term facilities.

And that's why as a backup center in the future became attractive. Because if this was purely a temporary option, I wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

It wouldn't be heavy enough to do this.

But the fact that it could lock the doors, close it down, and if we have to evacuate for whatever reason, we can go over there and unlock it, turn on the lights, and then we continue our emergency dispatch functions in our county. And that's why this is a, okay, this might be a pretty good move, but we want to keep it to size appropriate, cost appropriate, and that's what we're pursuing.

Yeah. I don't understand why the lifespan is so small. You can replace the roof.

There's other options, too, like with those new two-liter steel buildings, they have a four-year life item. Yeah. So if we buy a 20-year building, we're probably keeping it 40. Yeah, for real. I think we considered that road and bridge building a brand new building, but it's been there at least 10 years, right?

Was there a lifespan attached to that building?

It would be the same, about a 20-year building. I mean, HVAC equipment working within a year or so. Yeah. Anyway, there's other options. This is just a process.

Yeah, yeah. It's unfortunate that you have to put that into the equation. You're going to spend all this money and the building's going to fall over in 20 years. With zero maintenance, with some maintenance, it should last 80 years. New roof, new siding, new windows. It's not going to collapse. I don't know. I guess I don't understand my part, but I don't need to. Because it would take a lot longer.

This is just a cost estimate, but... Most of the tubular steel buildings, they're not very pretty, but that's the future. A tubular steel? Yeah. They use the tubular steel frames instead of red iron. Oh, okay. Those go up in a couple weeks. You have a 40-year life. You have to pour a pad. Actually, it costs a few less to buy these buildings.

I like this.

Me too. You too. I'm out of there. I appreciate your time. I guess the last thing is I just don't like the temporary aspect of it, is what I'm trying to say. That's an asset that we could have for a long time and put another department or Matt needs an office or something like that. We're concerned about money, but I hate to see all that work and effort and all that power going into something that's not meant to last. It doesn't make sense to it.

First we throw a VersaTube or a two building up instead of a modular. And a modular, you know it's going to last 30 years at least.

All of our public schools do that. They build a $10 million building, then they start bringing modules.

And the time frame that I'm sure is put on this building is by the company that wants to sell you the next one. Right. So let's be realistic about that.

Well, and I think that our hope is to build something that is not temporary, right? But timing-wise, this sounds more urgent about the health and safety of that entity and their ability to do their job. in a work environment that makes sense with the software upgrades they need. They need something soon, and it doesn't seem appropriate to wait on our timeline, which is honestly five to 10 years, and honestly, probably a little bit.

I think we can also, there's a little bit of parallels between the conversation we just had about the eight, four 10s,

be freaked out by working in an uncomfortable situation and you know it's better for your staff but also that's a little bit of urgency as well like how soon could we put these people in a better situation yeah have you had a lot of turnover in that department yes yeah yeah we are um four full-time dispatchers not including myself um so that's four staff members to do 24 7 operations we did just hire somebody, which is very exciting for us. But I will tell you, really talking with our staff that have been here, I mean, our longest employee dispatcher, three years solid, one of them just over five years on and off, but morale is really low. We don't even have enough stations to fully staff our department, even if we were fully staffed.

Yeah, I can only imagine sitting in that little room.

Yeah, we also have some heat issues. Right. Even the warmth of the winter.

Man, no end to the stresses and that stuff. Being cold at work sucks.

We'll just avoid the HVAC system that went into Road and Bridge. Because I think they're still using space heaters, aren't they?

They are using space heaters, yeah. That's great, yeah. This area, it's really hard to get an HVAC contractor.

Yeah. The only guy I know who does it is so, he's so busy, he can't keep up. Chris Carey. Matt Duncan.

Well, that's all we have.

Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Thank you both.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate you guys. Cool. Let us know what we can do to help.

Candace, we're going to dedicate the last week of this month to making changes in the annex. Okay. Everyone's comfortable.

Thank you.

This concludes Lake County Board of County Commissioners work session. 124 ish thanks for coming it's 12 49. sorry let me put my glasses on