Personnel & Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay. Chair Erickson.

Here.

Supervisor Chawla.

Chappell here.

Supervisor Smith.

Did that not unmute? Smith here.

Yeah. Okay. Supervisor Brower. Brower here. Supervisor Kemp. Supervisor Rylander. Rylander here. And Supervisor Andre.

Andre here.

Great, we have a quorum. So, all right, with that, we have the minutes from May 11th. Is there a motion?

Move by Chavala.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? That passes. All right, Section C, fund transfers. Is there a motion?

And there is approval.

All right. Questions on that? Otherwise, all in favor? All opposed? That carries. Okay. So now we're to D. Which ones do we need to separate?

Eric, I'm not seeing this on the agenda. 439? Is it? D6?

D6.

Oh, got it.

Separate that one, please.

So we've got a speaker on that one.

Are we also, Chuck, are we also separating D1?

Please, if no one else is.

Because that had the, there's something that needed to be added into that.

Okay.

Language. So that would be D1. We separate 28 as well. Hold on just a second. So D1, D6. All right, and you said 21? 28. 28. As in res 28 or item 28? Item number 28.

You mean D-28, correct? D-28, yes. All right, are there any others?

D-31?

Any others?

Anyone?

Unlined folks? Anything?

No?

Okay. So then help me out here. We need a motion for D2 to D4, D5, D27, and then The 29. The 30. Talk does that sound right. It does and I'm assuming that a motion would incorporate any amendments or substitutes made by prior standing committee exactly yes, okay and was ever clear on that so the 2 to the 4 the 5 to the 27 the 29 to the 30 right now the 4 to the 5 would leave no cap and the 2 to the 5. D2 to D5, sorry. Yeah.

And D7. Right? Yep. 7 through 27 and 29 and 30.

Okay. Approval of the balance other than 1, 6, 28, and 31. Correct. It's easier to say it that way, including substitutes and...

All in favor of that?

Aye. All opposed? That carries. All right, so then we'll start with D1.

So who? Just FYI, I forwarded. So the clerk had indicated, after executive committee acted on this, the clerk, through discussions with the Corp Council, realized that there needs to be a modification. So David Galt drafted a substitute and... It's just the dollar amount? Should have been a... Looks like it.

Oh, and it says deleted declarations of domestic partnership.

Okay, so what isn't redlined here is you can see in the comment on the right there... That there's deletion?

I thought there was something about... Well, the dollar amounts are strange. Okay. The description on the bottom says $150, and the text says $100.50. But didn't you combine...

In addition to the statutory fee of $49.50. Oh, gosh.

version linked in the agenda has the blue words, declarations of domestic partnership struck through. Yep.

So that's what this, the sub notes just doesn't show the red line. It shows it as a comment.

Apparently that's the sub. And then do we have Corp Counsel's office available to make the changes?

The closing part there is, The clerk shall apply the standards to set forth in statutes to determine indigency. I think that part was in there for what came out of executive committee.

Then, Chuck, we had an email of language that wasn't included.

There was a public comment that I emailed that came in.

Oh, okay. But that's not what we're talking about here, then.

No, that was a member of the public. That was not a requirement. There's no... There's no statutory requirement that references that.

All right. So is everyone clear on what Patrick just said with this?

Yeah. I think we can make it reflect the... If my Microsoft Word skills are correct, I think we can make it reflect the actual line-throughing if we click those little red lines next to David Galt's name.

I could be wrong about that, though. Like that?

So it's showing... No, never mind. I'm wrong. What did you have that showed... The red line.

Yeah, I've got it. I've got it selecting all markup. That's strange. Yeah.

Accept all changes, maybe. There we go.

There we go. So that's the sum that the clerk was hoping could be moved.

So do you have a motion for the sub?

I'll move the sub.

Okay. Any discussion on this?

Yeah, my only question is why declarations of domestic partnerships get moved? What was the significance of that?

The clerk on?

Somebody, yeah, because I went through this once before. Oh, but I don't know that. I think this was related to since, I don't know, I could be wrong.

Do we still have the domestic partnership registry?

We still do. I think that that may have changed after marriage was legalized. Right. Okay. Because I had noticed this once before and asked, why was this removed? I think that that's the answer that I got. Does that sound right, Chuck?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that domestic partnership, that they stopped doing those certificates when marriage became legal.

Same-sex couples.

Sure.

Regardless of the fact that we don't give those out anymore, do they still exist out there?

And that's why the certificates of termination of domestic partnership is still in there because there are some that still exist.

Not to be topical or timely, but I talked about this today, given that it's Pride Day or it's Pride Month. So anyway, happy Pride Month.

I mean, my only suggestion to the clerk's office is if we're no longer doing those, it looks like you can still apply for them.

Suppose if it's struck in there, well, but the termination of domestic partnership, there's a fee for that. Chuck just mentioned. So that's why it's in the title of the section, 6.12. Otherwise, I think it's good.

Okay. Sounds good to me.

Right. So Chair Miles moved it. So any other discussion?

Could I? Yeah, go ahead. I guess, could I ask Comptroller Hicklin about this email we did receive today that was forwarded on? It says they point to Chapter 7 whenever an ordinance amendment creates a new fee or change an established fee. They're basically just talking about the fiscal estimate here, right? Yeah.

Well, so there is a statute from, I think, like 2004 that suggests that when local governments impose a fee, that the fee needs to be commensurate with the cost of providing the service. Otherwise, it can be declared a tax. So I believe that that person's referring to, is there a calculation of how much does it cost to issue a marriage license? such that you know it would be you know demonstrated that this is an appropriate fee and it does not exceed the cost of providing the service um it's the the statute says that the cost of the fee needs to be commensurate but it doesn't prescribe any way to to demonstrate that or require that one that any kind of worksheet or anything like that exists

But it does call for an analysis of the costs incurred. This is county regulation, right? Chapter 7.65, something like that. 7.56, parent one, parent V of county ordinance. Seven what? 7.56, parent 1, parent B. I had it pulled up on my computer before and I copy-pasted it. Whenever an ordinance amendment creates a new fee or changes an established fee, the ordinance amendment shall be accompanied by an analysis of the costs incurred in providing the service associated with the fee. All fee analysis shall be on a form approved by the Personnel and Finance Committee.

You could make a motion to postpone if you're not satisfied with what's attached.

And what's attached is just the fiscal estimate? Okay. I guess I do move that. I move to postpone because I'm just concerned that I don't see the documentation that is required in the county ordinance.

Okay. Are you postponing to a certain date? Our next meeting.

Okay.

So supervisors move to postpone to our next meeting. Any questions, discussion on that?

Yeah.

Sure. Go ahead, Supervisor Brower.

Yeah, so it says in there, right, that on a form approved by the Personnel and Finance Committee, do we have such a form? I'm just thinking about, like, if we postpone it, do we have a form to carry through on this to the utmost satisfaction?

I'm not aware of any form other than the fiscal note. All right, because I just wonder if we can process this through if there's some aspect of... Well, can I, if I don't, I mean to interrupt, but this does say it creates a new fee. This is not a new fee. This is a change in a fee that exists just to get technical.

It does say or changes an established fee.

Okay. Okay. So yeah, I don't recall that there's ever been a form developed or approved by this committee for this purpose.

My recollection is we've only relied on the fiscal note.

Right.

Maybe this is that form. Yeah. That's approved by the committee. Maybe the fiscal note is that form.

The fiscal note form has been approved by the committee. That I know for sure.

Go ahead. Sorry, Supervisor Chappell.

We did review this in executive committee and we did pass it in executive committee. In executive committee, the clerk did testify to the fact that this fee has not been changed in a number of years. The change here keeps it up with inflation. Also, Dane County offers virtual marriage licenses and offers a lot of these services virtually. And I believe they offer them bilingually. So they're handling a lot of this for people who don't live in Dane County as well. And to offer those services, this was part of... you know of what they needed to do so i mean i'm looking at this and we do have a policy and fiscal note we did have you know, testimony by the clerk and a presentation by the clerk to executive committee and executive committee. We did clean up some of the language. We did do an amendment to clarify folks who are indigent didn't have to pay the fee. We did come up with a way to quantify how to say people are indigent using a forms provided by statewide by the clerk of court. So I'm going to vote against postponement because I do feel like we've had a pretty detailed financial analysis on this. And I do also think the policy and fiscal note that's been provided, you know, suffices for some of that as well. So based on the testimony that we got an executive committee, I'm going to vote against re-referraling.

Any other discussion on re-referral? Postponement. Postponement. No? Okay. So the vote on postponement, all in favor? Aye. All opposed? No. That fails. So we still need a motion then to approve, or do we go back?

Okay, so we're back to the original motion so.

Supervisor Chavalo.

Okay. Chair Erickson, can we write to the clerk and then can we have the clerk also provide some of the details that he provided and testimony to the executive committee and also vote on this today? Would that be something that would be in order to do to have the clerk provide additional information just for our records?

Welcome. Not about this specifically, but about in general if this issue ever comes up again?

No, just about the testimony that was provided in Executive Committee to give a summary of that presentation and just give it to Personnel and Finance Committee members.

Okay, even if we move ahead with it today?

Yeah, would that be okay to do?

I think it would be fine. I'd be fine with being... Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, just... to address a lack of clarity or what are we?

Just, I feel like we got the details that we got an executive committee touched on a lot of the issues. And I feel like it would be of benefit for at least the committee members here to have it as well.

Even after we've, even though after we've.

Yeah, yeah. So just as additional information for our residents.

Was there a document or something provided to executive committee?

There was just a presentation. So there is the video. You can like watch the video, but like, I don't know, getting like some written summary of it would be nice as well.

Surely I am not opposed to more information. I also don't want to replicate everything that the, you know, standing committee has done for,

know items unless it's really important I'm just mindful of staff time yeah I don't know if we're replicating it but sometimes I see in other committees there's information that they had received and unless I somehow pick that up or talk to the whatever the director of that department I didn't necessarily get it my concern is just if we go ahead and if it's approved tonight but then he's coming back after that you know it's a little out of order so you know

To my needs, if people have questions, they can reach out to the clerk or review the meeting recording, or we can request that the clerk provide some written information via email. That would meet my needs and questions.

Yeah, and that's fine. That's fine. Maybe my idea wasn't a great one.

Well, I'm concerned about this if it comes up again. Maybe that's something we should clarify.

You know, I mean... Thank you. As Advisor Andrew said, request that he provide the board with the written information he provided the executive committee. Maybe it could be attached to the legislative record and that item on the board agenda.

Okay. Why don't we do that then?

Because I don't think, if I recall correctly, I don't think The clerk will be...

He may not be, yeah.

So otherwise you could just answer questions there.

Oh, right. That's what I was thinking initially. All right. For now, let's just move ahead with this. Go ahead, Supervisor.

This might just be because I'm new to finance. I don't usually see these things at this point in the baking process, but do we have a version of this that contains the indigency amendment to look at? Talk to you if we have that.

No, I don't have. I mean, it was just a motion, so it was never incorporated in a... It's not incorporated in the substitutes.

It's not my piece of legislation, I'm sorry.

It's noted in the legislative record what that is.

Okay. So it's not up to us to move that here and pass it here?

That would be a good idea, actually, because it's not incorporated in the substitute.

I don't know the exact language to make that legally good.

What's not included in the language about the motion and by exec committee about indigency is that not included in this?

That's not on our agenda.

Yeah, it is. So the motion and executive committee is noted. It says indigent people may apply for a fee waiver from the statutory fee. It's noted in the record.

It was in the last line of the way. Okay. So, it's in there.

Okay.

Okay. Anything else? So, if not. All right. So, back to the original motion. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? That carries. Okay. And the next one was D6.

Eric is here to speak on that one.

Okay. All right. Hello again.

Please go ahead. Hello. Thanks for the opportunity to speak tonight. I'm Derek Wallace. President of Local 720, but filling in here for Marissa, who is the president of Local 1871 or Dane County Professionals. So there was this resolution essentially authorizes the purchase of a call logger at 911. We, I wasn't at PPNJ, Marissa was there, but, you know, there was some discussion about there's an additional cost for, it's a Revy QAAI software component, which is another additional $123,000 in the contract. So we do have in-house QA at 911. Those are the positions in a professional classification that are represented by AFSCME Local 1871. So at that meeting, you know, there was some concerns raised from our end about, you know, making sure that we could have further discussions on this particular software. And so I think we all recognize that we do need to move forward with a call logger. I think that's in dispute at all. So We had a good conversation in between PPNJ and PNF with Director Bixler. I think we have a way forward here now in the sense of just making potentially an amendment here of striking or changing the amount of funding to just include the the call logging platform itself, the hardware, and then, you know, looking at the AI software at a later date. So, you know, I just want to thank, you know, It was actually, I'll just try and wrap up because I don't think it's close to five minutes. But, you know, there was, I'll just note this. What time am I at? Two minutes? We've got some more time. I've got more time. Okay, cool. I'll just highlight for you guys. Actually, our comm center was actually featured in Reveal, which is like this podcast. podcast syndicated NPR program. And so it really kind of highlighted how our staff and our department are doing really well with call center times. And I think part of that is, um, our, uh, employees and management coming together to, uh, to have really productive conversations. So I just wanted to say, thanks to director Bixler for, um, hearing us out, hearing our concerns and finding a way to move forward with us. Um, what, without sacrificing the, uh, the importance of, uh, you know, the, the, um, uh infrastructure needed to make sure that we're serving um community appropriately so um that's just really high overview certainly happy to answer questions if you have any and i think director bixler is online too so are there any questions for the speaker derek anyone

Okay, great. Thank you. It's time to spare. Supervisor Andre.

Yes.

We have no more speakers, right? No. Okay. Supervisor Andre.

Great. So I was in communication with Marissa, actually, so sorry, Derek left you off the last email thread on this, with Marissa and Director Bixler and Corp Council about this. Basically, my understanding is there's essentially an agreement and path forward to remove the AI components of this contract and to accomplish that. The way to do so, recommended by Corp Council, is that we act on the resolution and the contract as is tonight. but then make sure that the sub and the red line contract are available and let just start tomorrow and then move a floor amendment at the board on Thursday to both of those. That way the resolution comports with the contract. Cause if we move a resolution, but the contract isn't amended, then we have an issue. So as long as the contract is posted 24 hours in advance of the board meeting, which Director Bixler indicated is very likely to occur tomorrow, we can make floor amendments to resolve this issue. That is amenable to all parties, to my understanding.

We being PNF would need to move this out of committee.

Right now, yes. And then I had another question. Do you have any other questions or anything else? Okay. And are we removing language? No.

So Corp Council's recommendation is move approval as is and then I or someone else, but I would plan to do so after consulting with Supervisor Furman, he's good with this too, would move a floor amendment with the sub that will be posted in Legislature tomorrow with a redline contract so we would just act on something different. At the board meeting.

Okay. In other words, a sub will be moved on the board floor. Correct. So there will be a sub by tomorrow. Yep. It's ready to go.

It just needs to be posted.

Okay. So that's going to be posted.

Along with the red line contract.

Okay.

That reflects the changes in the sub. Right.

So the sub reflects these changes in the contract, which you were talking about.

Yeah.

And which, okay.

So that way both the resolution as well as the contract are the same, reflect the same things. It's just that the contract isn't available right now. The sub is, but we don't have the sub posted. Right. And we don't want to just have a resolution that doesn't actually reflect changes to a contract yet.

Okay. So we need a motion for... Sorry. We need a motion for Res 439 to recommend that for approval. Say that right? Yes. I did.

Andrea moves approval of Res 439 as is with the intention that a sub and amended contract will be available 24 hours prior to the board meeting.

Okay. All right. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay. All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed? That carries. Okay, thank you for that.

Yeah.

Okay. So now we have, it was D28, correct? Was the next one. Okay. Okay.

I'd be happy to answer questions or provide some background. I know someone had pulled it out, so if you want me to speak to it, I'm happy to.

I wish you would.

Great.

Okay. And I see the sheriff and other folks are on, too, from the sheriff's office. Okay, great. This is... similar in approach to another resolution related to having a more kind of proactive process that the board or committees are involved with related to somewhat contentious RFPs. And so what this resolution proposes is essentially there was $80,000 budget in the sheriff's office for this current fiscal year that the board essentially removed to end the FLOC contract earlier this year. This essentially reinstates that funding and requests that the sheriff engage proactively with PPNJ on how to move forward here related to a competitive RFP, which, to be fair, could still result in a contract the board doesn't approve. So, you know, that could still be an outcome here, but it would ideally set up the contract conditions such that there's input on the front end, that there's discussion about the RFP, that those processes are happening so that ideally we could get on the same page about that process and have that done transparently. It sets up particular provisions that would be included in the RFP related to transparency and accountability and considerations that came up in terms of kind of objections or concerns with the system that we are ending the contract with. So it's an attempt to basically say that a system that does this still provides very valid public safety value to the public, to public safety efforts, and essentially advances that by having the funding available, I find that that would be reasonable to do in the middle of a budget year because this was a part of the 2026 budget. I think that's the only rationale that would be reasonable to reinstate funding from the budget, not to do something new or that wasn't contemplated during the budget process. So I think that makes it reasonable. And then there would be subsequent processes here. I think having the budget authority is important because otherwise sheriff's office could go through this whole process and the board could say, oh no, no funding for this. And then we've all just wasted our time, again, going through the process. I'm happy to answer more questions.

Any questions for the supervisor? uh so that night first of all are we in order right now do we have to move approval of this before we start asking questions and discussing i'd ask for a motion to approve it and we'll just ask questions of the sheriff or anything too oh that's right yeah

So we're free to do that now? Yeah. I think this question is actually for Comptroller Hicklin. There was a lot of the night that we acted on this initially, there was a lot of motions from the floor to reinstate this $80,000 in discussions about how There's no real way to earmark it and say what it's for or not for and that we didn't have the authority to do that. I'm not remembering all the details. Basically, it was like these ideas to reinstate the $80,000 haven't fully cooked yet. What is our authority to say what this money is for once it is reinstated?

Well, I'm not there were motions that I think, created questions the night of that debate because of the language sort of people said, Oh, we want to keep it in there. But without actually saying restore this line in the sheriff's budget for $80,000. And so to just say to reestablish it or whatever, isn't the language we need in a resolution to move some money in the budget system. That's what I recall.

Okay. So giving it back without saying what it's for is a problem.

Well, no, it wasn't that. It was just that the actual, like, so the resolve clause needs to read a certain way in order to do it. That's what my recollection was.

One of your answers to a question was it has to be appropriated to a budget line.

Right. Yeah. And at that point, it wasn't that wasn't the motion. The motion was like, well, keep it there for it was a little too vague. I mean, the gist was there, but the gist wouldn't get it restored in the budget. This does because it actually mentions now one thing that's specific here that's different than the way it was before. Is that this is restoring 80,000 to a specific line item for automatic license plate reader.

Okay.

Before it was in with many other software maintenance contracts in the line for in this division of the sheriff's budget. So this is even more specific. and provides that extra direction, not to mention all of the text that is in this resolution, so. Okay, thank you. It's definitely clearer and more precise than what was discussed that night.

Okay, great. Any other, did you have a question? I have comments, but. Okay, questions, go ahead.

I guess I'll direct a question to the sheriff. so the the resolution that passed at the last board meeting that removed this 80 000 um as controller hicklin just mentioned it was on from a budget line that that didn't have as clear direction that now there's well this resolution establishes a new budget line that limits what the money can be spent on, in this case, automatic license plate reader. But I think the thing I'm wrestling with is the whole idea of pulling the funding is because the board doesn't have the authority to direct you to not contract with a particular other than denying a contract. uh well let me let me just get to it this way this resolution asks you to um present um let's see in states uh then county sheriff's office is requested to conduct a combined process um let's see and then the next one is that prior to the issuance of the rfp a draft of the rfp is requested to be presented to the um pp and j committee for public notice and input. So I think what the sponsor of the resolution was trying to get at there was, you know, working within our constraints of our authority, we can't basically require you to provide the draft RFP for input to PPNJ. And so to me, that opens up the risk that we could basically get to a contract situation where the board doesn't like it and we have to reject it. So I'm hoping we can prevent that. And my question to you is, are you amenable to presenting a draft of the RFP prior to issuance? Yes. Yes. So that's, yeah, sorry there's a long-winded way of getting to that question. But I'm just hoping we can avoid a situation where we're going through the exercise of issuing an RFP only to have it fail at the board. So thanks.

I think that last part was the best. Well, go through all this work and then it is, you know, voted down at the board. So we're trying to avoid. So anyway. Okay.

Yeah, we don't have a motion yet.

Correct. So do we have any other questions for the sheriff or anything? No? Okay. Do we have a motion then? So we're moving this as is?

No. So there was the PPNJ took action, made a small technical amendment because of a maybe like double drafted something in the resolution. So I would move approval of the resolution as amended by PP&J, which just eliminates lines 73 through 75 since they're already captured in a different resolve clause.

Okay. All right. Any questions about the motion? Okay. All right. If that's clear, then for discussion, Supervisor Chavala.

Yeah, so when I first saw this, I did have some hesitancy, but then when I read a lot deeper into it, I think the resolve clauses that we see, lines 60 to 72, a lot of these are very important. Independent third-party auditing, exclusive ownership control and management of all collected data. data retention limits, clearly defined deletion policies, user access controls, auditing of logging of who is using those, prohibition on unauthorized data sharing sale or external access. I think a lot of what we see here If these principles were adopted by the companies that provided this technology, there wouldn't be the big trust gap that we have with them. So I think putting forth the RFP with these constraints around it, it's a very smart thing to do. It's a very positive thing to do. And I think this kind of addresses a bigger problem. problem that we're having as a society where there is an inherent distrust of big tech because big tech doesn't want to listen to what the people want. They want to do what they think is best because they think it's in the best interest of the people, whereas the people can express what is in their own best interest. And I think with this resolve clause and with you know a lot of these a lot of this accountability not only to the public but to make sure that data is not being misused it gives us an opportunity for some of the use cases that are described on lines i don't know 14 to 28 and and so on and so forth so i think technology can be a tool that is valuable for the community as long as it's used correctly, and I think this RFP requests that it will be used in a responsible, accountable way, so I will be voting for this.

Okay.

Any other comments?

Anybody? Go ahead, Supervisor Andre.

Yeah, I'll just wrap it up. appreciating that, you know, there could be a path forward here and that we've heard a lot from the public about this issue and really want to be mindful of keeping this process as transparent and open as possible so that the sheriff has the tools they need. Because I think without being that transparent and open about what these processes are and having those insights, it creates this sense of not knowing or whether there's tools that aren't appropriate or the technology isn't safe. So I just appreciate everyone for being open to those processes and to the sheriff for engaging with us. And hopefully we can find a positive outcome here and appreciate thinking about these RFPs a little bit differently.

Thank you. Any other comments? Terry? Oh, sorry.

I just think I agree with everything that's been said by the previous two speakers as far as the improvements that this version have made, the things between lines 59 and 75 are positive. But as we debated this on the floor, while I was opposed to the company that was under discussion, I was more opposed to the concept itself. So I think I will be a no vote tonight. I might be the only one. I don't want the technology.

Okay. All right. Any other comments? Anybody? Okay. Otherwise, all in favor of the motion as amended by PP? All in favor? Aye. All opposed? No. No.

No, I'm not opposed. It felt like a double negative all of a sudden.

Sorry. So, all right. But those in favor, did I hear? So anybody online? You're in favor? Okay. I just want to make sure Chuck has a count then.

Well, we didn't do a roll call.

We just did a voice vote. Okay. Sorry. Okay. I think that carries. All right. Thank you for that. That was very interesting. Okay. So the next one we had them was D 31. So resolution 38 urgent Dane County Sheriff's Office to initiate a request for proposals for Dane County Jail resident communication services, privacy, affordability and transparency standards. So what were the comments on this one?

Someone asked for this to be separated.

I asked for it to be separated, and I could have sworn I was going to have a question by the time we got there, but I've been busy ever since. Because obviously this is a very important issue to me. But I have, well, I have, it was me, and I'm sorry. It's all right.

You want to discuss it all together? What was your?

I've got nothing.

Okay.

After we move it, I do have a comment.

Okay. Can we have a motion? I knew I was going to start. Did we have a... I'll move it. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. Okay. Discussion. Supervisor Chava.

Yeah. I think this is a good proactive process to take. You know, a lot of times we're getting contracts that come to us sort of... fully uh ready to be executed and signed and a lot of times we get a sense of urgency with those that if we don't uh execute those contracts by certain date that it will cause you know a disruption of service a gap in service it will cause other issues like that and i think that this um request uh but urging um you know initiating an rfp process that incorporates a lot of what we talked about you know in terms of technical standards partially subsidized tiers fully subsidized tiers tablet usage fees data privacy ownership and control similar to what we had in the last motion that we discussed i think clearly expressing what we'd like to see in a contract prior to that contract being put out in the community gives us the opportunity to have, um, much better outcomes with it. So I think explicitly proactively and, you know, uh, letting not only, you know, the sheriff's office, but the community know what we're looking for in a jail communications contract gives us a better opportunity for a successful one. So grateful for the committee and all the work they did on it. And I'll be voting in favor of this.

Okay. Supervisor Reitlander, did you think of anything else? No. Supervisor Chappell said it all. Great. Okay. Supervisor Andre.

Okay. My only note on this resolution and the one that we just acted on related to the other RFP is that I hope in no way it reflects any sense of encroachment on executive authority. And I'll speak for the last resolution. I won't speak for Supervisor Fuhrman, but I'm confident that... You know, both of these approaches are, you know, as indicated, just hoping to have a positive outcome for the departments and offices and divisions, and that hopefully we can just do that in a more proactive way, and it's not to... You know, it's in recognition that the executive has, you know, final authority and that constitutional officers have their own authority. So it's just that we all have to work together if we want to have positive outcomes and appreciating that there are different ways to do that and that also providing opportunities for the public to understand those processes is equally important.

Okay. Thanks. Any other comments? Otherwise, we have a motion to recommend approval. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? That carries. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. The next item on the agenda is E. So we have items one and two. Does someone want to move those together or we can go through them separately? We can have a motion.

I'll move approval of one and two.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Are there questions, comments on these? Otherwise, all in favor? Aye. Okay. All opposed? Those carry. Okay, so we are to item F, the part that we've all been waiting for, looking forward to. Maybe not. Anyway, I am. Oh, yeah. So based on the questions that you guys had, or supervisors have had. Chuck, do you want to?

I want to start with vacancies.

Okay, sure. We can go through what we have.

A couple of different inquiries that we're going to address.

You also want to just, I would suggest forecasting that this is a discussion at finance, but then there will also be a subsequent discussion Committee of the whole meeting where we'll have an opportunity to dive into these details much further. So today can inform those subsequent discussions, making sure that hopefully we're all operating on the same page going into budget processes. So this is not the only opportunity, but that is sort of laying the groundwork.

It's not the only opportunity, but I guess maybe I'm the only one, but I prefer to dive in in committee meetings.

Yeah, totally.

And so, yes, I mean, I don't know if that, of course, I mean, we can get this in the committee of the whole as well. But if the whole point of this was if we individual members of PNF had questions, now's the time to ask them. The other comment I'll make too, if you do have further questions, if it's not resolved here, or you don't want to bring it up, or some of us can get in the weeds, and so I've been on committees where the chair didn't like that, I will go talk to the department head. Okay, so feel free to do that as well. I talk to Chuck regularly, so too bad for him. Okay. Okay. So if we're going to stick to this, then vacancy savings, hiring freeze, and application of surpluses. So vacancy freeze, if you would go ahead with that. And do you want to go through your whole what you're going to say and then have questions at the end? Or do you mind having questions?

I don't mind questions as we go. This is also responsive to Supervisor Andre's email that asked for some specific data that I also emailed out. Chuck has it. It will be attached to the record. So I'll start with that vacancy savings, go into the actually hiring freeze portion of it, and then actual requisitions that led to hires. So I'm happy to take questions as they come, but maybe that's a helpful guide to know when to sprinkle them in there. So, with vacancy savings that we pulled, every annual budget, the county sets aside a certain amount of savings in the operating budget for vacancies. For 2026, that number was $7,606,779. And that was the budgeted savings for vacancies for 2026. Okay. At the close of pay period nine, which ended on April 19th, we've accrued $7,589,058 in vacancy savings. So we're about $17,000, almost $18,000 away from that budgeted savings on an annual basis. As far as percentages go, we were at a 5.8% vacancy rate at pay period 11 last year. As of this point, at the same point this year, we're at a 6.8% vacancy rate. So we've added about 1% workforce vacancy rate. Keep in mind, too, that we did take out 35 FTE in the last budget, so we are dealing with smaller numbers, too.

A clarified question. So is the denominator all funded positions, or does the denominator include frozen positions?

That's a great all FTE.

Funded FTE.

Thank you.

So if we were including all of the positions that were eliminated in the budget, the vacancy rate would be higher.

If they were not eliminated and they were held vacant, yeah.

So on an average basis, though, we're really right about average of taking the percentage of FTE. FTE grows each year, so we look at that percentage. And that's where...

In 2024, at this point, we were at 6.8% as well. 2023 vacant at the same point was a 7.9%. So we have seen higher vacancy rates than where we are currently.

We have had.

Yes. Yes, we're about a percentage point up from this time last year. But Chuck's correct that if you go back 2024, 2023, we are a little under where we've seen our highest vacancy rates.

So what you were just explaining to us is we have all these vacancies, so we're not paying these positions. And then so we'll have some money that's an actual budget line item as well?

Right. So departments have, it's called salary savings is in there and the city does this too. Lots of governments do it where you understand that not all positions will be filled throughout the whole year ever. And so that's budgeted at 2% of personnel costs, including salaries, wages, retirement, FICA and health and dental. So right now we're basically at about the breakeven point. where I guess in two things, one observation is even though there's hiring freeze, we are not running an extraordinary number of vacancies. And of the total 7.6 million of salary savings, which is the total for the whole year, we've got, we've accrued about half of that.

We budget for this. So in the budget, you could find salary savings. So it's potential. There's potential like you hire all these positions so you don't have any vacancies. So then, oh, that's going to contribute to a deficit or, you know, there's all these vacancies and they just remain open. And then that excess money could potentially go towards a surplus and maybe explain some of the reasons why there is the budget deficit is lower.

I would say, yeah, if we had every FTE filled, we would have a budget deficit. We would be running ahead with the amount that we have budgeted for personnel. That never happens. And likewise, at this point, we save enough through vacancies. If there's an extraordinary number of vacancies relative to what positions are budgeted, that would contribute to a surplus by the end of the year.

Okay. But you guys are saying we're right on the mark. Everything is just about what we thought it would be.

Yeah. So let me pick a hair on that, though, because $7.6 million is what was... budgeted for all of 2026 relative to salary savings.

We're about the break-even point for this year. Further vacancy savings will accrue past the salary savings.

That's the difference. At the end of pay period 11, we've almost broke even. So essentially if we're, you know, at what, April 11th? April 19th was that cutoff.

So we're a third of the way through the year, and we've currently... achieved the full year of salary savings at one third of the year relative to what was projected is that a am i understanding that correctly we're at pay period nine yeah we're about a third of the way through the year and we've got about half the savings

I'll also say that when we have vacancies, that also generates overtime, particularly in 24-7 operations. That is not part of, that savings has to be recouped as well. So just so we don't go running off too fast with that.

Because there's both, there's inputs and there's outputs of both of this, and there's sort of external, you know, additional factors that having all of these vacancies will have impacts on relative to overtime use. But I do want to track that that was the estimate for the whole year, and we've achieved that at this point of the year. Okay.

Thank you for clarifying. Yes. So is overtime linear, or does that all come in at the end of the year?

No, it's fairly linear, except the last pay period or so, particularly in the sheriff's office and in highway where people have, they've accrued comp time. A lot of that gets paid out over a certain amount of hours. It automatically gets cashed out. So that last pay period in the year has a bit, has a above average over time.

Okay. I think I'm clear. I'll follow up with you.

Okay.

I want everybody to have their questions. Sorry.

Just a point of fact, if I may, looking at the budget resolution, there is a line in the resolution that says for all departments of 15 or more people that the salaries, there's a line of 2% of salary, budgeted salary and wages that's budgeted for savings. And where are you seeing that again? It's in the budget resolution. From?

Always in the budget resolution.

Template. Okay. Thank you. Great.

Perfect. Any other vacancy questions?

Yeah, I'm just making sure I'm not leaving out somebody. Well, just a real quick question.

So, given the somewhat of an advanced pace of savings we're seeing to date, and is that, can we deduce that that's because of the hiring freeze.

I think it's helpful to that savings. There is still hiring going on at a lesser rate than we saw at this time last year. I also think that with budget instructions coming out, department heads are a little more aware of where they can save and what they can fill. So I think we'll see more strategic filling as well with a little more awareness. So I would not expect a huge surge coming after this because we know what is coming after this. But are they all front loaded? I don't think so.

I think one of the interesting observations that we found as we dug into this was that we are, even though there's a freeze, we are basically running average on the number of vacancies. Now that average does include years like 2022, 23, where we had one added a lot of new positions. So think about You know, those years when we were adding positions and those positions always started the year as vacant. So by now, by, you know, it takes a couple of few months for a department to recruit for to fill even a new position. And that was a period where the labor market was such that there was a lot more churn. I mean, right now, you know, I get an email twice a week or every Friday about what new positions are posted by Employee Relations. It goes to everyone. It's like one position, you know, in 2022, that'd be four or five. that were there. So people aren't. But what's also interesting about this that I observed is even though we did have a retirement incentive and we are above average on retirements by maybe about 10 or 12, that those at this point to pay period nine, all those people who separated through that incentive are in that vacancy number. So actually, if we didn't have the retirement incentive, we wouldn't be at average probably for our vacancies. I think the labor market is such that people are staying put more than they were a few years ago when there was a lot more churn in the economy.

I'll address my next question.

Okay.

Why don't you continue? I think we've covered that.

Perfect. So I'll move into the hiring freeze specifically, and I thought it'd be helpful to do a high-level overview of the hiring freeze because I think it's been a little while since we put it through and it's happening. It includes all FTE and LTE other than some exempt positions, namely in sheriff's office, 911, Badger Prairie nursing position, some of those 24-7 operations that we really can't afford to have vacancies in for the safety of people. The appeal is sent by the department head. They can hold a vacancy as long as they want to on the front end. They don't have to submit it when it is vacant. But as soon as DOA gets it, it can sit for up to 16 weeks as of the date we get it or as of the date of the vacancy, whichever is later. So there's some tinkering around with that too. Okay. All of the non-exempt positions that have been approved, both LTE and FTE, were individually reviewed. And some of that required follow-up conversations with department heads, with their staff about their total vacancies, how many vacancies they're holding back and not putting forward, how savings are being realized or would have to be realized. And some of those conversations happened under a $32 million deficit, right? How do you make up savings if you put this position forward? And then specifically, I want to talk about LTE hiring because I know it is a hot topic and it is... It's just something we should talk about. Every single LTE that was filled had a conversation about its usage. Are these LTEs you've always used and in the same capacity and scope you've always used them to make sure that none of that was being used to backfill into an FTE? So that was done with a lot of diligence as well. So that's kind of the policy as a whole and how we've been processing them. So as of Friday, which is a snapshot in chat time of, that was May 29th, we had 216 positions request to be exempted from the hiring freeze. I put out that document that has all of those freezes and their status, and I did them by exempt, FTE, and then LTE as separate categories. So on that first page, you have 60 exempt positions. We still got in- Is that this one? Yes. Okay. We still took in forms requesting that appeal just so we had a better picture overall of how hiring was happening around the county. But these were approved almost immediately because they are exempt under the hiring freeze. The only ones that are still pending approval are lieutenants and sergeants that are required to sit for 12 weeks before they can be filled. The second page moves on to FTE requests. We have 60 FTE requests. 31 of those have been approved. Two were denied. And then 27 are still pending, which means they're still sitting out that 16 weeks. And then we'll continue to evaluate and review those and if they want to still put them forward after they have their budget guidelines or they want to run out the clock on those. The ones with asterisks on that chart were approved after that 16 weeks. So they sat for the full 16 weeks and they could move forward with them if they wanted to. And then the last, I think it's on page four. Thanks, Chuck. I know it's not a fun PDF to scroll through.

This one?

Yes, our LTE requests. There were 96 total LTE requests. 90 of those have been approved. That number is high. And so I think it's important that we talk about it and give additional context. Like I said, those are all done through conversations with the department head to make sure that they could speak to how they've utilized them before. These were all budgeted in the 2026 balanced budget. So they could only use them as they were budgeted. And on those forms, they were required to say what their LTE budget line was and how much this position would cost them. Filling them doesn't hurt 2027's budget, right? Because they're done as a part of the balanced 2026 budget. That's not in the same way. Their hours are only 1200. They are capped. They cannot continue into 2027. So any savings from LTEs would come from that 2027 budget if LTE lines were gone after.

Okay.

Some of the biggest utilizations of LTEs are in land and water, which is 41% of those LTEs we see. And they always utilize those LTEs for seasonal labor. And then others are the zoo, which is for summer operations like camps or carousels or what makes us money at the zoo. So not filling them actually does cost us money to do that. And then some things like interns in county board office or with the highway who trains underrepresented populations to learn how to drive our equipment to hopefully become FTE or utilize those skills elsewhere. So those are kind of the big LTE uses we see and count for 60 to 70 percent of that that make up. Those are the hiring freeze numbers, and I sent this to you electronically, too, so you can dig into them a little more if you have any other questions. But are there any initial questions on the hiring freeze appeals?

Questions? Okay.

So that brings us into positions actually hired. I think that was the last question I was asked by Supervisor Andre and I think Supervisor Brower. Anything that went through a requisition for a new hire would have had to have been approved through the hiring freeze. So it should be a one-to-one, but not all of them have been hired. So since beginning of the year, we've had 175 requisitions be submitted, which is basically the starting point of a posting, right? That's after department has their approval, they go to employee relations and they submit through our system to start a hiring or recruitment process. At this time last year, we had 317 total requisitions. Though the 175 requisitions can include things like transfers or reassignments that still happen under the hiring freeze or promotions. So those are not new hires, but we've still seen a pretty significant decrease in our requisitions from where we were this time last year again. And then in those 175 requisitions, there were 126 total new hires. Of those 126, 54 were our FTEs. So we see the same kind of ratio that we did through the hiring pre-use freeze approvals of a larger LTEs, but we've only hired 72 of the 90 approved LTEs and they've hired 54 FTE hires. On the chart that Chuck has up on that most right column, it's employee group eligible. 95% of the classifications that have been hired in FTEs are within the employee groups. I know it's a lot of numbers all at once.

Checking up Jay online.

Oh, sorry. Supervisor Brower. Go ahead.

Yeah, if I can ask. So I just I haven't had a chance to really do like an in-depth comparison, Shelby, between this list that we have up on the screen now and the other list that was the title freeze appeals. And it has the exempt departments. Those hires from the exempt list are not represented here, right? Well, it seems like some of them are.

Yes, they would be in card at any, this is all new hires.

Oh, okay. So, well, so, and just forgive me as I try and make sense of this. So like when I look at the- It has, you know, there are, I don't know, 11 total FTE positions there. Those at the airport, those were hired because that's an exempt department, right?

Yes.

And then when I flip over to the chart that Chuck has up there, I only see like a terminal, like two positions. And I'm just trying to see how these two things, these two sheets integrate, if at all.

The sheet that Chuck has up right now, the FTE and LTE hires are actual hires. They've been in our system as a new hire. Whereas these could be, all of our approvals could be in a myriad of states of requisition. So a department could have an approval, but they haven't yet put forward a requisition or they are in the process of creating the class spec or the PD. So the sheet you're seeing now are just specifically new hires that have been hired, but there could be a gap between what's been approved and what's actually gone all the way through having a person in that spot.

Got it. Thank you.

Yeah.

Other questions? Okay. Anything else?

Not right now. I'll have more numbers later today, I'm sure.

We'll probably be asking for them.

I'll just thank you for doing the data poll. Is this the sort of thing that would be just capacity-wise possible to do again? What was the lift to pull this right now?

It is possible, again, as much runway as possible is helpful. It's going to take a few days and a few people to pull the data, look at the data, check the data. So it does take a little bit of time to get this all configured and ready. If you know that you'll want these at regular intervals, I think we're also doing quarterly reports on vacancy savings, retirement savings, voluntarily without pay. If there's some interval date that we can be ready for, that's helpful, too.

Okay. Did you have any other, like, learnings when you looked at the data? Anything that was surprising or interesting to you?

There are more of them than I thought, right? So I reviewed every single one of them, and still when I pulled the numbers and saw 217, I thought, oh, no. But I think that just speaks to how large our workforce is and that we still have about an average vacancy rate. These are what the departments are putting forward as necessities. So I think that it speaks to, we can absorb a little bit here. We have grown substantially.

Okie doke. I don't know. Just let me know if you have any. I think maybe getting this regularly could help because I'm thinking that we'll want to have these numbers again. I mean, what, in the fall, early fall into summer, maybe. But let me know.

Yeah, certainly going into September in the budget. We'd want to hear this at least once more.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Maybe honestly as late as possible, just so, because the April numbers are interesting. The September numbers will be more interesting.

The only other thinking about LTE use, I know it's a very hot topic, making sure that either understanding or... grappling with the sense of using LTEs when it is full-time work would be for me to understand for example, from 2025 LTEs, which I'm not requesting this right now, I'm just thinking about it and I'd be interested in your response to it, but basically how many of the LTEs that were used last year that are not seasonal employees, like doing land and water work, reached their 1,200 hours and now we've just hired them again and there might be a conclusion that we're using that individual in work that should be full-time work. So I'm trying to think through if we had a list of the non-seasonal employees from 2025 that were LTEs that all reached 1,200 hours, that we've hired that exact same person again this year and they're starting their hours, that would be an indicator to me that maybe we are improperly leveraging that person's talents as an LTE. But I'm just curious if any sort of thinking like that happens to track these people over time or to track how many LTEs are using up 1,200 hours that we might draw a conclusion should be full-time staff.

We can look into it. I can find that.

And how many hours does an FTE work?

An FTE, we budget on 2080. 2080, okay. And then LTEs are capped at that 1,200.

Well, just noodle on it. Don't take it like as a, you know, we need this information, but I'd be curious how to think about that issue.

Yeah.

Using data.

Absolutely. I think Supervisor Andre worded that very well. That question comes up a lot. So that would be great. Okay, no other questions for Shelby?

Okay.

So thank you again for doing this. So I guess the final one is application of surpluses.

Yeah, so I... Chuck. There were some questions posed. I think some questions were generated by the Cap Times article. Speaking with the board chair, it seemed to be, I think, a good time to maybe define some terms so that there's a common understanding of some of these numbers that get thrown around, and there are synonyms to them. And if we all understand it, I think we'll have better... communication and people have a better understanding of this particular element of our of our budget process so um So I thought about this in terms of kind of where we start. And I think it's important to start with a definition of the county's reserve fund. What is the reserve fund? Because that is a term that has been used for decades. And some people call it the rainy day fund. Some people call it reserve fund. Some people call it the general fund only. And many of those terms can apply, but let's call it the reserve fund. And what is that? And technically, it's a number that's reflected in our annual comprehensive financial report, and it's called the unassigned fund balance in the county's general fund. So the county's Financial operations are divided into groups called funds. That's government accounting, sort of one-on-one. The general fund and the human services fund account for almost all of our GDPR operations, those two. Then there are other funds like the Airport Fund and the Solid Waste Fund and Badger Prairie Fund, which are funded usually from user fees and things like that. So those are kind of enterprise funds. You'll hear that. But the general fund is the metric, and the unassigned fund balance particular metric is a key measure of our equity at the end of the year. in our fiscal health. It's one that our bond rating agencies look at. It's like the number that they zero in on. Because if you look at that over time, it tells a story about how strong our financial position is and what kind of fiscal discipline we have. So We have a policy now, and the policy is incorporated into the operating budget resolution starting in 2023. And our policy right now is that at the end of the fiscal year, our targeted unassigned fund balance in the general fund should equal 10% of the combined budgeted expenditures in the general fund, including the Align Energy Center, because now the Align Energy Center does have GPR in it, The human services fund and the Badger Prairie fund. So we try to have our year end that metric in our. Financial statements equal 10% of that those total expenditures. Now that's a common. uh, type of metric that rating agencies use is terms of a percentage of your expenditures, because it's kind of like when you say a little bit, I don't like to use personal, uh, financial examples, but when some, you know, when Dave Ramsey says you should have a six months, you know, rainy day fund in case you get laid off or whatever. That's kind of what they look at here. And these 10% is a moderate number. I mean, there are many counties in Wisconsin where that's 25, 30%. And they still don't have the credit rating that we have.

And that should be at least 10%? No, no, no. I'm just...

So this is an example of walking you through that calculation. So for 2026, the general fund expenditures were $273 million. Human services was $277 million. Badger Prairie, about $32.6 million. Total, $582.9 million. 10% of that is just a little over $58 million. That's our target to end this year or to end 2025. But back to your question, what is the right number? Our credit rating is partially based on our financial performance and our financial management. We also, though, get a lot of credit for the strength of our economy and the growth in our sales tax base, the growth in our tax base upon which we can levy taxes and things like that. So if you're a slower growing county, like Marathon County, you know, it's strong, but it's not Dane, right? They don't have 2% unemployment all the time. Their rating agencies are going to look at that and they're going to say, well, you need to counterbalance a little slower economy by having more reserves. And we're lucky to be able to do this. Our policy when I joined the county in 01, it was 3% was the target. And it was sort of an unknown. recorded target, it was some people tried to do, it was hard to meet. The board at that time, finance committee got together as part of the budget and said, yeah, we want it to be an explicit 3%. So that was, during many years, that was our target to hit. Now, we, when you take, you know, 3% of this, I mean, that's not a lot of money. We go through that money in one pay period. And we are constantly commented in our rating reports about our slim reserves. But when we had a 3% reserve target, we also didn't have a levy limit most of that time. We had the ability to go and raise taxes, and the board did. And right after their assignment, they did it almost at 9%.

Right.

Clerk McDonald remembers that very well. And it was because we had flexibility, we had access to revenue that we just weren't tapping into at that time. And right now, we don't have that same access anymore. So it makes sense to have a larger percentage reserve. Since this policy was implemented, I believe that our rating agencies are pretty satisfied with it. The long story is we had that 3% target. We actually in oh nine are, are, uh, that metric went negative, uh, as a result of the recession. Cause we didn't, we had a quick downturn in sales tax came really quickly. And even though the, um, uh, uh, bargaining units and the administration got together, we did a wage reduction and, and a lot of, um, savings initiatives within departments. We couldn't mitigate it fast enough. And, and, um, It went slightly positive again in 2010 and went negative again in 2011. And we had, from their point, gulped it up again. When we went negative, when... where Zala was treasurer, there were times where we had to communicate how many checks we were writing in my office because the bank account was getting pretty slim. Looking at the balancing, the state aid payments coming in to support human services and the sales tax payment, which comes fairly predictably in the last couple days of the month, you know, there's times where it was a little leaner than was at all comfortable. So, you know, it is important to and that's the purpose of this is to kind of be able to mitigate some situation like that. It would be a detrimental probably in the long run for the county to explicitly change that target to a lower number. to support spending in a budget. Like, let's say we just went in and said, wait, we don't want to make these cuts that the county executive has just asked departments to look into. Oh, we want to make this 8% instead, which would get us about that amount of money. If we explicitly did that, that would be kind of detrimental to that portion of our rating criteria that relies on strong fiscal management. So that's, so when they, after the long history of the general fund and the, or the reserve fund as we went negative, and many of the years between 2011, In 2023, really the goal was, and our policy was, was to just raise that balance to the point where we could get our AAA rating back, which we did. And it was at that point in 2023 where the 10% policy became reasonable. I mean, at that point, you know, we don't need a general fund of 45%, you know, and we, because at that point we would have, we'd be denying the community services. We would be denying our employees compensation and things like that. to accumulate money that was beyond what was necessary to maintain our rating. So that takes us sort of to the next. Here's a history of the general fund since 2017. You know, you can see the other thing that's important is try to keep this steady. That's also a good thing to not have it, you know, bouncing around a whole lot. But the asterisk there in 23 indicates the first year. of that current 10% policy. And you can see that we were at 62 million for a couple of years, and that policy brought us down to 55. And now the increases really are just as that percentage grows, as the base for that we're applying that percentage goes to calculate that target. As that grows, the general fund has to grow a little bit. Later in the budget process, when we talk about amendments, we always have to account for the fact that each dollar we spend and add to the county executive's budget requires 10 cents needs to go into that reserve fund. So we keep track of that. So the question then becomes, well, what's surplus? Can I ask a question?

Yeah. Would you rather wait until the end?

No, if we want to talk about this part of it because we want to change topics.

Let's go back to the general fund. So when I get a question from a constituent after they've read this article, but maybe the amount was there or whatever, maybe they just ask. But if they say how large or what is the amount in our, not general fund, but our reserves, I'm going to call it, Should I say it's projected by the end of 2026 to be that amount you had before?

Yes, it's about $58-59 million.

So that would be the appropriate way of answering that. It was projected for the year. If the flat-out question is just how much is it right now, that's what you could say. Right. Number two, then you made the comment about reducing it. Say right now it's at 10%, and if we were to reduce it to 8%, along those lines are, if we're looking at the situation we're in now, and I'm seeing 50, whatever, 8 million, whatever, and to make up that gap, I mean, that's something that we could do. But, you know, it doesn't sound like something that would be helpful.

Yeah, I mean, it's an internal policy. It's not externally imposed upon the county or the board. So the board could, you know, I would project or, you know, believe that the 2027 operating budget resolution will have that 10% language in it, like it has been. And if the board said, hey, you know what, we want to – add money for some service, we want to change that from 10% to 9%. Now we've got some money to spend. I think that would be, you know, that's that's sort of like rating that that reserve, not for the purpose of sustaining ourselves during a mid year downturn, but to just sort of keep on spending with and that that is what might be looked at as a lack of discipline, right?

And so then when we have, I'll just wrap it up, but when we have the bond rating is very important and that impacts what exactly and how much.

The interest rates that we pay and how attractive our debt is. So when we go to market, we put our debt out there and we take the bank that will offer the lowest interest cost.

Right.

We attract a lot of bidders, and the margins between the lowest and the next lowest is just fractions of a percentage. And that demonstrates that our debt is attractive because it carries that rating. I mean, I don't want to exaggerate the difference here. I mean, a AAA and a AA+, which is the next notch down, it's not like you're going into junk territory. But it is a good standard to have. We are one of the few in the state that have a AAA. We are actually rated higher than the U.S. Treasury right now. So that's a good thing because we do borrow kind of a lot of money every year. I mean, we're out there for probably $140 million this fall. So, you know, even a little bit of interest makes a difference. Now rates are climbing, so that makes it even more important when... You know, for a while their rates were so low, you know, and we're paying like 0.8% on five-year debt. And we're out of that territory now.

So it's a significant thing. That's just I wanted to hear from you. I've always considered it significant. But, okay, I didn't want to ask too many questions. I already am. Sorry. Supervisor Chavala, go ahead.

Yeah, thanks, Chair Erickson. Chuck, a question here. It says 2023 was the first year of this current policy. Can we see how close we were to that 10% number? For each of those years, do you have what that actual number on the screen is, what that percent was?

Were we at 12% or 13% in those prior years? It looks like from 2022 to 2023, we...

That fund dropped like $7 million. So it's increasing, it's increasing, it's increasing.

Yeah, we were probably at 15% when it was $62 million, something like that maybe.

Okay. I mean, I could calculate. I don't have it. And then was there a big expense or something? Was there a big expense in 2022 that basically that we spent that $7 million on? Was there some driver of that?

Well, yeah, that was right when we were looking at 9% wage increases.

Okay, so a lot of that, so we were at maybe a 15% number, and then with the wage increase, that 15% number brought us into 10%, which was the policy we wanted in 2023. Right. Okay.

Yeah.

Would you be able to get us what those percentages are if it's not too difficult?

No, I just go look up because it's the same set of documents.

And then let's say we have a really, really bad year. Would our requirement to stay at this 10%, could it drop like a whole bunch? Because it's kind of one of these things. When I thought of the Rainy Day Fund, or what do we call it? We call it the Budgeted Reserve Fund. That's what it's saying in here. I always I was kind of naive. I just thought that number would always just like be growing in that it was a static number and we'd never touch it. But it seems like it's a dynamic number based off of like budget factors. So.

I don't know, it seems to me like... Well, for the last few years, it is. Before that, it was just... Our policy was let's grow it till we can get our AAA and get comfortable with that. So now it's based on a formula. But prior to 2023, in the years that you have on the screen, it was not based on a formula. It was based on... Because there were years where it just went up a couple million bucks and we were, you know... trying to trying to get that to a sustainable number yeah so now now you know like we weren't doing a percentage calculation back here in 2017 or 18 or 19. i can calculate that now and it will be more than the 10 now you could have a situation where this is a year-end target You know, there's a lot of clouds and stuff that happened during the year. And if you get a really big storm coming in terms of some fiscal, you know, picture, like the recession of 08 or something even a little more moderate than that. We could close the year out and not have hit our target. That's a possibility. It hasn't happened. I hope it doesn't happen. We try to not have that happen. But, you know, I mean, it's let's say sales tax in the last four months of the year, like we were $3 million short per month or something like that, which would be a reduction of 40% in our sales tax. But, you know, you could have something like that happen. And in that case, you know, we might not hit our target. Now, there is a little difference between not hitting your target and explicitly saying we're changing our target to spend money. That's what I was trying to illustrate a minute ago.

And then do you track this like Shelby was tracking like the layoff or not the layoff, the vacancy sort of number just to see if we're on track? Do you track that the same way?

No, it's not. Someday with AI, if we could take all of our budget system and if we had access to AI, maybe there could be some kind of module that would do that almost in real time, but we don't do that. Many of our things work on a fairly steady basis. I mean, you know... you know, payroll is one of our biggest expenses. But if there are some big shift in some kind of state aid or something like that, or federal aid that came in, then we would be looking at that saying, what is going to be the impact of that? But it's not something that we, you know, when we look at a number of requisitions, there's individual transactions that Shelby is relating to you in that analysis. I mean, there are thousands of transactions every single month.

Yeah.

That, you know, even every paycheck, you know, we're running out probably 3,000 paychecks and, you know, thousands of accounts payable checks and all sorts of checks to agencies and everything like that. So it... There's a bit of an art to it to try to have an understanding of kind of where those big polls are. I mean, I'd say, well, I'll get to it. And let me get to that in a minute because it kind of goes into my next point about surplus. Okay.

Okay.

I'll hold my question.

I think, yeah, Supervisor Rylander maybe had a question on.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, you covered a lot of it, but it's so rainy day fund is really kind of a, you want to put money in a swear jar for saying it because there's no rainy day. It's a misnomer. It's a misleading term.

Oh, I'm sorry, but it's not misleading. That's a term. We're not misleading anyone here.

No, I know. Rainy day fund, that's the nickname people give it. They shouldn't. The reserve fund is the...

The reserve fund, yeah, I mean, I don't use the term rainy day fund.

There's no amount of disaster that would cause you to want to tap into that money.

It would be it's for a rainy day that we didn't see coming that happens in the middle of the year. It's not for, oh, it's a tough budget coming up. Let's dip into here because we don't want to realign our finances to the resources that are available. That's not exactly a rainy day. A rainy day is Trump passed something and they, you know, took it. $10 million out of our, you know, out of some service area that we really need to support or sales tax drops off precipitously or something like that. I mean, it's sort of like a rainy day fiscal crisis in the middle of the year type of thing to sustain. And then we would need to be like addressing how we're going to remediate that in our next budget. I guess what I mean is, so it, it, It depends on what your perception of a rainy day is. If a rainy day is, I don't want to face the fact that we have less resources than we have committed expenditures as we approach a budget, and I want to reduce this from 10% to 8%.

That's not what I call a rainy day.

That's not what the bond agencies would call it, or rating agencies would call it.

10% is the number you shoot for, so that if mid-year there's a COVID, then you can hit 8% instead of negative 3%.

Right, yeah, and in a situation like that, I mean, you could have... That's like COVID would be a good example, right? I mean, you don't want to run to the point where you're not making payroll because revenues just shriveled up all of a sudden. Like we had that happen when the city did their wheel tax right before COVID. And they're looking at that and they're like, man, this isn't meeting what we thought we were going to get. And so they called the DOT and the DOT said, you know, we're in the same situation, right? People are not renewing their registrations on their vehicles because they're not driving. And you pay a penalty, $10 or something, if you pay late. But if you're not driving the vehicle and you're sitting there and you might have lost your job and you realize that, oh, I got two vehicles sitting here, I can defer the renewal on one of them. until I figure out what's going on, or maybe I'm going to sell it. I don't know. Right. And something that would normally be as stable as your vehicle registration was off by 5%. And we had the same problem too. So, you know, when you're looking at those sorts of external forces that a rating agency would look at that and go, yeah, we know what you're talking about. You know, everybody that we talk to, everybody that we rate is going through this. That's a rainy day.

Sorry, one question for me on the reserve. Essentially, I mean, I might speak with a constituent and $59 million sounds like a lot of money. It's 10% of those other funds. But really, at least when I think about this in terms of cash on hand that you might in the business, it's really... a payroll or two it's not even a month is it right so the math on it is i i think very important in relative terms to expenditures is that yeah correct okay that's kind of why a percentage is a good metric to apply and kind of continue with because then as your expenditure base grows

you're naturally increasing this metric to go along with that versus, say, our reserve fund should be $50 million. After 10 years, $50 million doesn't look like what $50 million was 10 years prior because your base has gone up.

Would another reasonable use of reserves kind of under, like, GAAP or, you know, regular accounting principles be, like, a cash flow problem where, like, let's say opioid settlement funds, you know, we were expecting $10 million, we've got a plan for it, and, oh, my gosh, for whatever reason, that big chunk of money didn't hit our books when we thought it would? Like, what are the other exceptions?

So, yeah, I mean, the county has... you know, a pretty large treasury, that this doesn't really represent our treasury balance. So one of the things that the county, you know, so we have a cash flow, you know, some things are real steady. Sales tax is pretty steady. It varies somewhat like post-holiday, you know, or whatever. But we also get big property tax payments at the beginning of the year and at the middle of the year. so if you're a school district like all you have it really is mostly your property tax so you're heavily dependent on that like you got to make that la that first installment last till you get the one in july and yet july your expenses are real low because the kids are gone right um the county has more predictable cash flow than that now if there was something um Like there was an aid payment, you know, like let's say the state didn't pay us our CARS payment at the end of the year. Like the one that we're supposed to get the 28th of December came on the 15th of January. And that drew our reserve down and our financial statements down. But we identified that we would then point to that with a rating agency and say, Hey, it wasn't really our fault here. And, you know, there's a way to track that on the various statements and point to them and say, really, it was just, it was received 15 days late. And so therefore this had an impact. And then the next year it's corrected that, you know, things like that can happen, but it's, In a general sense, you know, having a sufficient balance in the reserve fund helps our cash flow because it's a measure of – partial measure of our equity, and equity does have an influence on the amount of cash balances available. And those cash balances are invested, so we do get money off of that. And it does help with those, like I said, when we went negative in 2009. I mean, cash flow, it wasn't like we needed to start looking around how to borrow for it, but we were more conscious of it than we ever had been prior or ever have been since.

Thank you. Any other questions? Quick question. So... table on the prior page of the 25 budgeted reserves 58.2 million is the calculation and that's what was budgeted in the for the start of the 26 budget year um so the difference between that and then the next page $59 million? Is that just the books closed? Yeah, it's a target.

Yeah, a little bit different between the actual and the target.

A little over a million, about a million dollars.

Which will help in terms of, you know, when we do that table dice and see you have on your screen, when we do that, we'll be starting with a balance that's probably going to be what we need, but we would otherwise have to increase it to get to Are we good with the reserve fund? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So the other term that is used related to the budget at this stage and related to the reserve that was also mentioned and was a lot of the discussion in the Cap Times article is surplus. So what is surplus? So in the county budgeting, a surplus amount or an estimated amount is an estimated or an actual or estimated amount of resources available at the end of the fiscal year that are above that 10% calculated reserve. So we talked about how that could go negative if you had all negative news going forward. If you have good positive news, you come up with a little more than the $59 million or $58 million. So that goes back into the budget. as a resource to fund operations in the next, in the budget that we're preparing for. What does, and surplus, where does it come from? I mean, technically it results from receipt of revenues in excess of what was budgeted or expenditures being lower than what was budgeted. And usually it's a combination of the two. For sure, it's almost always a combination. And it's going to be like, well, how does that happen? Well, our expenditure base across county operating departments is $820 million. So a 1% variance on that is $8 million. And our revenue base is $431 million, the difference being GPR. And so if you had 1% variance on budget of revenue and 1% on expenditures, that's $12 million right there. As much as we try to do, we do the best we can. But, I mean, it's impossible to... project with a level of precision anything lower than one percent so um when we're talking about these kinds of like large numbers so it doesn't take much in terms of a percentage to result in what you all would call real money um and you hopefully and usually we uh We have been in a position where it's been a positive. I mean, we don't want to be in one where I'm coming in here telling you, well, we didn't meet our general fund. No, no, we got to cut to make up for that, which is kind of the opposite of applying surplus is you're cutting to build the reserve back up. We haven't been in that situation a long time. So, um, the question about well how what's our history of applying surplus in our budgets and i went back you know 10 years back to 2017 and you can see it's um it's been growing uh 2021 in particular is that one was boosted by COVID. And we had the CARES Act money that was the first big COVID relief system that was passed when Trump was in his first term. And it was set to... And they gave us all this money. It was like $195 million. And we had plans to spend it, but there was a... There were some... unknown factors until the very end of that year. That said that we had to spend it all in 2020 or 2021. So So what we did was we accrued expenditures and we put that in reserve and we did plan to spend it on services that next year. And at the last minute, I mean, literally the last couple days of the year, the Congress extended the spending period for that CARES Act money. So our strategy was proved to be moot at that point, but we had to exercise it because we had a budget way before we knew the result of that legislative change. So that kind of inflated the 2021 number because we booked that all as revenue. So that went into the general fund and inflated it. And then we planned to spend it on most of it for hotels to housing type of programs that we had running. So we could kind of bridge the legislation and show it was spent, but we could spend it later. our peak at this point, it was 2025 where we had 59 million in, um, the $30 million, uh, budget challenge that we met in for 2026 really represents that going from, um, from 59 million down to, um, 27. And, um, I'm not, I don't know quite what it will be, what we'll have in for 2027 at this point. There was a lot of discussion in the article about what do you do with surplus? I mean, if I added all of this up, it's $245 million, okay? Like if we didn't spend that, what would we have done with $245 million if we would have a general fund or reserve fund of $300 million, basically. So our method of processing, estimating surplus, taking known and estimated surplus at the end of the year, incorporating that budget has been a practice since I've been here, other than years where we had a negative general fund or reserve fund. See, I get my terms mixed up there. We had, you know, when we had that 3% target and we had a lot of gaps in our budget, sort of, you know, under budgeting on expenditures, over budgeting on revenues, a little rosy picture, and we would be closing the year and it would be too low. So then we would literally be asking departments to cut just to get to that 3% number. We're... One of the, I mean, one of the challenges that the county is going to face if current trends on expenses continue is we have, like, for 2027, we're probably going to have, say, like, seven-some million dollars of health insurance expense increase. We have the ability to increase our tax levy by a little over $3 million, and maybe we can increase our sales tax. 3% would be about $2.7 to $3 million, close to $6 million. We don't have enough growth in our base revenue to cover just our health insurance increase. I mean, that's kind of the challenge that we are faced with. So it's difficult with the limitations on our – On our levy growth, because it's really, we don't control our sales tax. We can't increase the rate and we can't change the consumer spending pattern. So we are kind of relying on an external behavior that drives one of our key revenues. Investment income is the same kind of thing. And we can try to keep our balances where they are, but we don't control interest rates. And we are limited by the state in terms of what we can raise on property taxes. So the key thing, I guess, to understand is, you know, we do, we have used surplus. And if we weren't going to, I would open to suggestions on some other way to budget than the way we've been doing it for decades. 25 years but if the surplus is there. It's a little hard to say no to or to reduce services. Currently in these budgets. 26 and 27. I mean we're using it to maintain services not to grow the base. I don't think we're you know the budget instructions are such that don't add new positions that are GPR funded. Because once we add new, you know, I mean, we need them. I'm not denying that, you know, demand for services is there. But right now, it's probably important to look at not expanding that gap that exists between our growth and revenue and our growth and expenditures, hopefully. By the time we roll around for a renewal with Dean, maybe we'll get a little bit of a break on our health insurance increase rates. But now the base is so high that even, you know, we're at, by then we'll be at about $100 million. So a 6% rate increase, which is about less than half of what we're getting now, is still $6 million in real terms, right?

Sure. I missed a step while you were talking about the difference between 2025 and 2026 being the problem that created a $32 million budget shortfall. Sure enough, I see it there. I see the difference, $32 million. But both of those numbers are positive and good. This is 10 years of surpluses. Yeah. That's just a less good surplus. Right. But still, we overshot our projections by $27 million, right? Yeah. So how does that turn into a $32 million crisis?

Well, because if the surplus, this is the amount applied, so $59 million of our expenditure base for the 2025 budget was supported with surplus.

Okay.

Okay. And so when we went into the 2026 budget, it was clear there was not going to be $59 million of surplus to spend to support operations for this year. Okay. And that's the issue. So if the surplus, you know, if it's known to go down, then we have to make that up somehow. And really the only option we have to make that up is to reduce expenditures because we don't, we, well, I mean, our ability to close a substantial gap is limited. You know, and for 2026, there was an increase in the wheel tax that generated additional revenue. That was a lever that we could pull. We don't have that lever again, and we can't keep, have an $80 wheel tax or something like that, probably. I mean, there's a political limit to some of those things. So in the construction of the budget, an amount of surplus basically acts like a source of revenue.

And if that drops substantially, we have to adjust to that. So the difference is we balanced the 2025 budget based on $60 million we had laying around, and then next year we had half that.

Yeah. Okay. I like that summary.

Okay. Supervisor Andre, were you done? I'm done. Okay. Supervisor Andre, I saw, and then Supervisor Chappell.

Okay. Chuck, are you going to discuss the basically the difference between the forecasted deficit and the- Yeah, this is a good time to do that.

I think now that we've got our terms all down and we've got this history here. So as part of that, the fiscal trends that were in that February memo are still pretty much hold in terms of our main sources of revenues and things like that and the projection of growth there. The good news that reduced our estimated operating deficit for 2027 between February and now is closing the books and getting a known surplus number that resulted from 2025 operations that's higher than what we anticipated. So part of that, it's not like we got new revenue coming in. We got more surplus. So it's going to be part of this calculation here. And that's going to make it so that we don't have to cut as much to balance the 2027 budget as we might have thought in February. We're not out of step. in terms of the timing of the process. So, you know, there's a certain amount of time it takes after the end of the actual fiscal year of 1231 till we can, you know, process year end transactions or to like sales tax that comes in after the year gets booked back. There's a lot of gap adjustments that happen in those first couple months of the year. And then by the end of March is usually when we're, you know, getting all those adjustments in so that we can get a preliminary read on what the reserve fund is, how close we came to the target. And that's the result. That's where this follow-up memo is related to that. There are lots of different places that did better than what we had hoped. And, you know, Lion Energy Center was probably about a million dollars less in GPR than we had thought as we constructed the 2026 budget. Badger Prairie had more revenue. I think that... the county executive's leadership and communication with departments about the fiscal situation. I do think had many departments look more closely at kind of how they were operating and where they were spending money and sort of organically contract there when they could. I mean, I've just noticed there are some that were, I'm pretty close to the edge, you know, in 23 and 24. And it's like, oh, they kind of did a surplus. You know, I think people were just sort of, you know, evaluating their personnel, looking at wants and needs differently, perhaps. So. So there were a lot of different ingredients that go into that revision, and most of them were pretty good. So that's positive news. I hope that this background and in-depth discussion about these two factors, which are really the ones that relate to the difference between February and March, this zeroes right in on it.

So I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth here on the good news, but I do think what I hear a lot of questions about is demystifying those inputs you noted. So AEC and Badger Prairie and really I would appreciate that breakdown of it was – and especially understanding as we discussed tonight, there's already – 7.6 million built into the 2026 assumptions relative to vacancies. So we know that's already something accounted for. So when we look at the 15, $16 million difference, I would, to help explain to the public, really appreciate a table that says, here's what was projected into that $32 million, and then here was the difference. It was AEC, it was staffing, it was contracts.

Yeah, I think that. I can give you the highlights, but I mean, I did not, we don't have a reconciliation of to this number, to that number, exactly what it was. Okay. But I can give you, I mean, you've got to look at what the material is. Movers are on something like that because there are also some bad news that came in.

OK.

I mean, you know, we are getting a million six in housing of residents, for instance. So now that's a new contributor and negative.

Right. Right. And I think, yes, I understand that it's impossible to get, you know, all of the details, but in the broad strokes, it was staffing and it was, you know, some of those figures help demystify just where we landed at the close of the books.

Well, there's, you mentioned the AEC did better. That's great news to me.

I mean, most of it's good news. I mean, I'd have to look and see if the sheriff's office did worse or better than what we had projected earlier.

Something for Badger Prairie did better, Medicaid or something.

Yeah, Medicaid revenue.

Another one that, I mean, someone is kind of obvious, our interest income, you mentioned that.

Yeah, right.

That's, you know, and you've got a lot, but then also department heads were... you know, trying to type.

And there's some other human services, you know, contracts, not expenditures and WIMCAR revenue. I mean, there's just a lot of inputs into it, but you can come up with a sort of a sketch of the movers.

That sounds like, generally speaking, what it was, where the savings, where they came from the savings, et cetera, so. Supervisor Chablon, do you have a question?

Yes, I do. First of all, thanks, Supervisor Andre, for asking that question. Because, I mean, the memo we got, it just said, through careful fiscal management and the work departments have done across county government. And I've gotten a lot of questions of, like, how did the deficit go from $31.8 million to $15 million? I just kind of said, well... I have no idea. And it could be politics and messaging. I don't know. And if we can't answer that question, we could say it's complicated. And there's a lot of different factors that go into it. But if you could write us a memo that says like, here is, you know, like we have told her, I'll give you a list of what some items are.

I think that will satisfy you.

Yeah.

And we won't put out a memo in February again.

You won't put a memo in February.

Well, you might not. I thought that that would be of service to the elected officials to have some forewarning on what didn't look very good. So I put out a memo. I think it's good to get that. I've never done a February memo before, and I won't do it again because now it's all second-guessing. When actually, if I would have just waited, you would have never heard about a $32 million deficit because we would have had the information we had in March. So I apologize.

Well, hang on. A lot of us are new on the committee. The more information you give us, the better. Like all this information you're giving us. is great i mean you could bring it as a report to committee instead of as a press release i think like there's a difference between how information is disseminated and like the purpose of it but please continue to give us the information we're not asking we're asking at the time whatever information you have if you give it to us it helps us because we're going to start going into those those budget meetings but i did have a different question that i wanted to to go ahead with well i Okay, finish up. Let me know when you're ready for a new question.

So I appreciate that we got it. I think any of us in that position, here's what our deficit is, but hey, it's going to be lower. Now, there's questions. I think the questions are valid, like where did it come from and whatnot, but something I learned long ago. was when I was laid off from my position, I was very upset. Someone said to me, you know, they can't predict what it's going to be. You know, they couldn't, we got into a situation. I worked in the private sector. They're $850,000 short, so whatever, lay off. But I was just like, why can't they project? Why can't they project? And it just sounds like we can't, we won't know what 26 is until 26 is done, right? In effect, that's what it sounds like, that a lot of information had to come in in 2025. And otherwise, it's projecting. So, I mean, that's projections. That's part of it, I think. So, there's just that. Okay. Sorry. But what was your next question?

So, my question is, how do these surplus expenditures... affect our cost to continue budget? And should we have like a longer view on surplus expenditures so we don't put ourselves in a position where if we look at the cost to continue budget, it's something that's not sustainable because a lot of that was built on a surplus, which is not something we can regularly expect. Because I mean, I look at like some of these expenditures here from from the surplus. I'm like, I'm sure they've probably made our budget what it is now. And when you look at the cost to continue, it's just not sustainable. So can you kind of let us know how these surplus expenditures have affected our cost to continue budget?

Well, yeah. I mean, what's, you know, what's important to understand is, I mean, the, when we, you know, when you put an expenditure in the budget, it's rarely ever goes away. So, you know, if we increase services or contract for homeless shelter or we add deputies or, you know, whatever, you know, it's rare that that base is retracted. And it's pretty uncommon for a budget amendment or for the county executive to put something in and say, yeah, this is just going to be a one-year program. One year is a $5 million worth of expenses that are operating, not capital, right? So... So it's difficult to, you know, adjust when those surpluses are lower. The challenge in the county is that if there's money to be spent, I mean, I feel like we have a strong support in consensus with the administration and the board on the 10% reserve that we just talked about. But if there's another, you know, when you get down to remember at the budget amendment time and everybody's looking for 50,000 here or hundreds of thousands there to do some critical needs. And there's 30 people in the room testifying about that. And it's $150,000 we'll make or break these people's need. And we have money sitting in a surplus that we say, well, we're just not sure if that's going to be there or not. That usually isn't the response it sustains, right? So... You know, there are units of government like counties and other ones that run a little more on the like Dave Ramsey model. And they're, oh, we have a surplus, we will spend it on roads or trucks or something that is one time because we're saying it's one time money. And In Dane County, if you said, well, we're going to fund the conservation fund out of $10 million worth of surplus and not borrow for it, I can guarantee that there will be a supervisor with a budget amendment for $500,000 that will move $500,000 of that expenditure onto capital and take that $500,000 and put it on an operating expense. I don't know how to change. You're right. I didn't mean to. You know, I mean, everybody knows that. Ever since the levy limit and the capital thing went off, we have pulled all the capital out. You know, back years, we used to have a million dollars worth of road funding on the levy. And when the levy limit went in place and capital was exempt, it all went out. Now we spend $17 million or so whatever on road construction now, not a million, but hey. So, you know, I don't know what it would take to... instill that kind of discipline that would change kind of how this picture works because you would be because like i said we don't have enough in ongoing sustained revenue to meet our what we call cost to continue in the budget office which is increases in wages salaries and health insurance and retirement we don't even have enough to cover that and if we had money that was there somebody said well We have a $30 million surplus and we just need $3 million so we can keep the health insurance. I can guarantee you, you're going to get a lot of pressure to spend that $3 million on that. So I don't know what to do about that.

And I think that's what, you know, it's like the curtain is being revealed a little bit, like now that we're on finance and we're looking at it. But it seems like the hard decisions that we're going to be making in the years, you know, ahead, we're partially, you know, informed by excess surplus expenditures in the years past. And it's always it's hard for us as supervisors because the budget comes to us. There's not a lot of meat left on the bone. When the exec presents the budget, most of these surpluses are already accounted for, right? And I think it would be helpful when we're going forward and we're budgeting and we're getting the budget presented to us to see how much of what the executive has presented to us in the budget is based off those surpluses. Off those surpluses. And I think if there's a way as us as a finance committee can try to work with you to maybe take our best guess to see what that surplus will be over the next three to five years. And if we could kind of exercise some of that restraint, whereas if we have a year, that's a really great year, we're not expending all of that surplus, but we're saving a little bit of it for when we have a bad year. And just the thing that makes like thinking about that a little bit more complicated is, you know, just through like, since our budget is so big through these little changes, we had a budget deficit go from 31 million to 15 million. And it just, if there's some way, and I know, I think you just said right now, it's hard to do, but if there's some way we could try to look at our crystal ball and see, try to project what our surpluses are and look at them, not as like, one-year surpluses, but like what we think we'll be getting over like three to five years and use that to inform our budgeting, I think that would be helpful.

Yeah, that would be quite, that would be pretty difficult to do. I mean, to get that far, very far in advance at all, really. I mean, it's, there's a lot of changes that happen. I think you could comfortably say, well, you know, there's, you know, if you try to balance a budget on with $12 million of recurring surplus, but then, you know, you might do that because I just did it. And now you're all saying, right, I just did it in February. Now it's like, oh, you know, so I don't, I don't, I don't see how you do it. We can certainly, when the budget comes from the county executive, we can go over this. Now that we've had this session, you'll be able to clearly understand kind of where that surplus is, how much is in there, the table upon which you can see it calculated and applied. That will take some mystery out of it for some of the new members or even some of the old members who maybe weren't looking at it that closely. But longer-term forecasting is quite tricky. because there's so many different revenues and things like that that behave different, you know, change in their behavior and you really don't even know.

Thank you.

Yeah, I know.

I'm sorry. Longer term might be difficult, but... short term i mean now we're looking at we're projecting uh basically a 23 million dollar surplus for 2027 that can be applied what can we project can we roughly project 2028 that's not long term that's one year out maybe later this year i couldn't do it now because you know to Supervisor Chabla's point, you know, when we get a budget proposal, we being the board, and the committees go to work, primarily what we're looking at is the decision items and the amount of room we have to maneuver within the levy limit. And When we get the budget proposal, the application surplus is already baked into the proposal. And I guess that's where it's been, you know, and it's to some degree because, again, we're focusing on that, you know, like you have a table that's running and shows the impact to GPR. And the surplus part of it is already out of sight, out of mind. And it's not a problem when you have years that's increasing each year, but then you get that fall off, like 25 to 26 years. now i'm wondering if we apply where we thought it was going to be 7 million for 2027 and now 23 million if we apply that well what do we do when 28 comes along and now we're looking at 7 million perhaps for that and that's where i'm thinking what supervisor chavla is I think trying to get at is if we looked at it from maybe a, a rolling year average of surplus to try to get some predictability, um, to what we could, um, to some safe degree, um, anticipate being able to apply from surplus and then if whatever is in excess of that um if we're going to maintain the 10 reserves then yeah maybe we're looking at it that in excess of that is as uh one-time money one-time needs well i mean it you you know i mean the strategy could be and that

This table shows how much was applied. Now, there were years where not all surplus available was applied in some of these years. So this is just what was in the budget.

And that's usually been in the human services.

Right, right. So, I mean, you could look at that and go, well, okay, yeah. Let's say by the end of the year, there's more surplus. You get into there and you go, well, yeah, we want to. We'll take part of it and use half of it. And then so that you know that the next time that you know that you've got that much in surplus for the next year. That's been done, you know, where it said half the human services reserve fund was applied. The other half was there. So you knew at least you had one year that that money you had it on hand at the end of the prior year. So you need pretty good chance you're going to have that. when it comes to the following fiscal year besides the one that you're budgeting for. That's easier to do when you already have it on hand and you are allocating it and saying, yeah, we're making a choice to put this in for two-year. But right now, that was when there was still money to grow In addition, and in most of those years when they were surplus applied, there was also money left under the levy limit for the board to work with. You know, when the exec's budget came out. And last year there wasn't. And I don't know if there would be this year or not. Maybe not.

So...

So those are, yeah, I mean, those are, you know, those are some, those are good points. I mean, you know, if you can get it, it would be a matter of when you're, when we're in this environment right now where there's reductions, the temptation is to put those, at least put those back in, but we'll see what happens. We haven't done a budget. We haven't done the 27 budget yet.

Yeah.

So, Chuck, can you explain that a little bit about the Human Services Fund? Because we have a budget line item here, 2026 available for levy reduction. How does the budgeted reserve and the human services available for levy reduction, how do those two things work together?

Well, if it's available for levy reduction, it's being applied as surplus.

That's what that is. Okay. Yeah. So that table you're looking at, if you go all the way to the end of the last column.

Yeah, go all the way to the right.

You'll see that $27 million total of all the funds.

Okay. We don't explicitly add it up. You just have to add it up yourself. It adds across the table. Yes. Okay. Okay.

What other questions?

Can we discuss the budget directive to clarify spending reductions and rationale?

I think that would be, you know, the amounts that we had talked about, the $5 million and the $10 million.

Yeah, I mean, the guidelines, the guidelines are out. There's reductions, get targets given to all the departments. County executive.

Yeah. Yeah. Could you indicate how those direct those targets were established?

Well, there was part of the 10 million was distributed based on percentages. So just like kind of traditional distribution. flat across the board only. What's often been applied in the county in the past is smaller departments get half the reduction, the percentage of the larger departments get. The other portion of that was distributed based on the relative growth in FTE that departments experienced over the last five years.

And is that So departments added positions, subtracted positions, LTEs, FTEs, et cetera, you know, a lot of moving pieces every budget year. Were those net new positions or you just like added up the added positions every year? Like how might I think about that?

Well, we know the total FTE by department. So if you went from 50 to 55, that's a 10%. Okay. You know, that's five more FTE. Okay. If you went down, well, you don't get, you don't get a, a negative budget target for losing FTE. So the total FTE growth by, you know, then proportionally, some departments didn't have any. So they didn't get a piece of that reduction. Some of them had a lot of growth. So they got a bigger piece of that.

So each target for each department was based off of those multiple factors into one number.

And then, Chair, are we going to get all of these different things that we discussed, like the slides here, like the LTE, is all going to be on the notes?

Well, I'll email them to you. Okay.

We put them in Legistar too?

Well, that, I don't know. I guess I'm not, I'm not, I'm never clear quite on what the, what the conformance is on.

My understanding is anything that was displayed during the meeting should be a part of the public record in the Legistar file. Part of the minutes. Right.

Part of the minutes.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I mean, these definitions right here, I think we're going to refer back to these definitions probably all the time. Like, I think they're going to be this is going to be what is it canonical, like everyone's going to be referencing it all the time.

Yeah. And since we don't have a legislature item for this, you know, it's not a resolution or anything, they would all be reflected just in the minutes from the meeting, right?

Can we also enter the GPR reduction by department in the minutes?

No, because that, I mean, we talked about the concept, but we didn't, the guidelines were not part of the agenda.

Okay.

Exactly. Y'all have them. I know you do.

We have them, but how did we get them?

What do you need to link?

Well, I mean, I could give them to somebody, but I give them a Legistar link. It's a lot better than like, hey, here's a PDF for me. I don't know how official people think things I say are. I've had a lot of commentary about what I've been posting on social media lately. So if I present some numbers, I'll be like, that's that crazy guy.

keep us together stay on task what I think you're saying is that this is all very beneficial that we will refer back to this when you know we get questions because well I didn't want to say too much but I've gotten questions as well and about the changes the reduction and everything else so I go to Chuck, I talk to Chuck a lot and what, you know, I use those definitions and what he tells me to explain, you know, but I know people question it and I, you know, what point, you know, so.

Like I might request under future meeting item agenda items to include GPR reduction by department, like a more formal presentation on that. Then we could present it and have it in the notes.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, we're going to have the community of the whole on the 25th. I mean, I'll put it on. Okay. Okay.

Great. That would be good.

So that way it'll be not. Yeah. People have to dig into the PNF minutes.

Yeah. Yeah. We know people like to do that. Surprise her, Andre.

Yes, sure do. Chuck, just for the Committee of the Whole, too, I think there's always discussion about what is a structural deficit and what is a one-time deficit. So clarifying how we can think about those as different concepts, I think, would be a very helpful level set.

Sure.

Which is all part of the decision. Do you think this was helpful? Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Like this definition stuff. I mean, cause there's some of the stuff I had that I did last in 2024 is kind of already covered in like the numbers, like I said, in the financial trends and the February memoir, pretty much the same. And I can review those again, but I also feel like this is getting the definitions and the sort of baseline conversation on the same level for everybody would be It might be a good service as people approach that, right?

I think it's very helpful. I couldn't stand to hear it more than once.

Maybe one of the last notes on kind of understanding inputs for the budget or surplus and how it's applied is just to follow up, Shelby, again, just thinking about future conversations. But, you know, we had early retirement issues. plan and there were retirements. And I would be interested in understanding how those projections and the actuals fit. And again, I don't know if that's a reconcilable data point, but to understand how those data are feeding into the whole budget or just as an update as it goes.

I think that's a Chuck and I conversation that we'll have about, I don't know if we can project those into that budget.

Yeah, that's tricky. I mean, I think you know, it would be nice to be at the end of the budget process. Yeah. No, we're not. Right. And so some of the, some of the, I mean, I think that the retirement incentive was really designed to create opportunities and how departments will, you know, but we don't control what those opportunities are. So you look around and go, Oh, But that person left and they were great or that person left and maybe their position could be changed or whatever. So we're going to have some discussions, I'm sure, with departments, with the executive and those meetings in July where we'll see what opportunities actually departments, what they turn those into because we can't tell other than Shelby finding that somebody pulls back on a requisition request or a freeze appeal for a position that opened because of the retirement incentive that now they're not going to fill because they're going to put in their budget. But, you know, even that, it's just a little too early to know. But that's because ultimately those kind of incentives don't generally save us a lot of money. People leave. There's a little difference in salary if their position doesn't get eliminated or reclassed or whatever, but they're getting paid on their vacation, and then they're paying their health insurance sick leave conversion, which takes up a lot of the difference between what their new entry salary was and maybe the new person coming in. So there's not a lot of savings unless the position can be restructured or eliminated. Okay.

Maybe what I'm coming to a conclusion about is, you know, where sometimes in my mind, it would be helpful to have like a very linear, you know, if this, then that, you know, the picture is much more. And, you know, a lot of these are moving pieces anyway. Okay. Thank you. Just seed, but I don't have any follow-ups on that exactly then.

Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for doing that. So I think it was helpful. Yes. Still have folks online. All right. So we have some good suggestions, though, for moving forward. All right. So... That was under discussion items. Then future meetings, future meeting items and dates. Our next meeting is June 15th, same time. Public comment on items not on the agenda. We don't have any other businesses allowed by law. Anyone? No.

Is this an appropriate time to discuss getting that form, which seems to be required by our regulations passed by this committee? What does that take? Is that a resolution?

I feel like the fiscal note is indeed the thing.

Is the form. We've approved that for that purpose.

Well, I've never seen it otherwise. No, I mean, we haven't really.

Or whatever the thing is, what it costs and stuff.

Because it sounds like in cases such as that, we're supposed to be using it to say, well, this is why marriage licenses cost $150. Yeah.

It's not a resolution that I can answer. Maybe the county board staff could work on a, you know, we could work with them on some kind of a fee justification form or something like that that would go along with it.

I don't know.

I mean, it depends on what the committee is in charge, not the board. It's not a resolution because the ordinance is already there.

We can talk about that further. Yep.

Maybe it's just like a discussion item at the next PNF meeting. Like, are we getting the needs met to the letter of the ordinance, or does the ordinance need revision? Like, one of those two things, perhaps, is not on.

Okay. Anything else? Okay. Motion to adjourn. So moved. All in favor? Aye.