Animal Control Program Advisory Board - Regular Meeting

Here, I'm calling to order this meeting of the board of supervisors for May 28. Let the record reflect that all members are present with supervisor Askew joining us shortly. At this point, I'm gonna ask Diego Celis to go see announcement of the interpreter. With Adam and Chief Supervisor Lejo doesn't mind leading us in the pledges this morning. I'll turn to the clerk to see if there's any additions or corrections.

There are none.

Thank you. Next up is public comments. This is an opportunity for the public to share comments regarding items not on today's agenda, so letting folks know this is not about the budget. If you're here for the budget, that time will be later on today. But just want the public to know this is your opportunity to make comment on items not on today's agenda. We'll allow two minutes per speaker. Invite folks to use a raise hand function or star nine to be recognized this time via Zoom or come forward in room. Mike.

Good morning, and thank you for your time and service. My name is Peter Barrage. I'm the vice president for MORCA, the Monterey Off Road Cycling Association. We are the mountain bike advocacy group for Monterey County, and we've been delivering positive impacts to our community since 2002. Members of our board joined the Monterey County delegation that traveled to Washington DC in 2012 to secure national monument status for Fort Ord, and we play an integral role in the Sea Otter Classic, which generates 85,000 visitors and 70,000,000 in economic impact.

I submitted a longer public comment via email, which I hope you will read. It lists more accomplishments and includes a fact sheet with links to data. I'm here because our community needs your support. In the past decade, cities, counties, and community leaders across the country have invested in mountain biking for two reasons. There is more research than ever demonstrating these investments pay back, and right now, there is historic funding available for mountain bike projects.

People for Bikes unlocked 755,000,000 in bike project funding since 2009. California Bike Coalition provided 1,100,000,000.0 for bike projects in 2020 alone, and Shimano's new Trailborne project makes 10,000,000 available. Right now, Friends of Laguna Seca is finalizing a facilities management plan for Laguna Seca that will balance racetrack needs with recreation area needs. If mountain biking isn't included, it will unlock significant funding, planning, development, and maintenance resources. Those funds could offset costs for planned infrastructure improvements to parking, restrooms, and campgrounds.

Mountain biking could save the money during development, return money through tourism, and celebrate the recreation side of Laguna Seca to the benefit of locals and visitors. Despite clear community input in favor of bike access in new places like Pala Corona and City Of Monterrey's old capital site, decision makers keep voting against bikes. Including bike amenities in Laguna Seca master plan would provide significant savings, generate proven return, address equitable access to trails. This is a win win win opportunity for Monterey County, and we can't afford to miss. Our community needs your help championing this vision to the Parks Commission. Thank you,

mister Birch.

Thank you

for your time.

Anybody else in the room? Hands up via Zoom? Seeing none, we'll close general public comment at this time, bring it back to the dais. As we jump into this morning's scheduled matters, I just wanna take a moment of personal privilege to congratulate all graduates out there. My son's graduating this morning from TK to Kinder, and so I'm just little emotional that I can't be there. But I know he knows that, I'm doing important work,

but I just wanna congratulate all graduates this morning. With that, we'll jump into, item one to receive a presentation from Barajas.

Were there additions and corrections, Val? I didn't think we had it. All three. Alright. Perfect. Thank you.

Good morning, chair Lopez and board of supervisors. I am Ciomara Barajas, chief deputy auditor controller. And on behalf of the auditor controller's office, I'm here today to ask your board to adopt the resolution for fiscal year twenty twenty five twenty six, GAN appropriation limit. This resolution is brought forward pursuant to article 13 b of the California constitution, which requires appropriation limits to be adopted at the regularly scheduled governance meetings. The appropriation limits have been calculated by the auditor controller's office for those, board governed jurisdictions determined to be subject to the provisions article 13 b and are shown in the attached schedule provided to you.

The documentation and calculations are available for public inspection at the auditor controller's office. The documentation and calculation, or the general and library funds computed appropriation limit for fiscal year is $968,065,139 This concludes my presentations, and we are available for any questions that you may have. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Sumada. Questions from the dais? Seeing none, we'll go to the public, see if there's any public input on item one this morning. Seeing nobody coming forward in room, no hands up via Zoom. I'll bring it back. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Motion from Alejo.

Second.

Second from Daniels. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. The motion carries. Thank you. With that, we're gonna jump into item two, resubmit a presentation from the HR department on Assembly Bill two five six one required local public employee vacant position, announcements, and we'll send that out to our staff here, Andreas, with a couple presentations to follow.

Okay. Good morning, Chair Lopez, members of the board. I will be presenting the status of vacancies and recruitment and retention efforts for the period 05/01/2024 to 04/30/2025 as required by Assembly Bowl two five six one. To my left, have Kim Wuer, my assistant HR director, who will be assisting with the presentation. Next slide.

I'm going to be talking a bit about the requirements of AB two five sixty one workforce information, recruitment information, recruitment challenges, vacancy information, and then ending off with bargaining unit specific information. Next slide. AB two five six one, which was adopted in January, has got two distinct requirements. The first is a disclosure of the status of vacancies and recruitment and retention efforts. It requires MMBA local agencies to present the status of vacancies, recruitment and retention efforts during a public hearing before the governing body at least once per fiscal year.

Presentation must be made before the adoption of the final budget and it also must entitle a recognized employee organization to make a presentation at the same meeting. The second requirement is if there is a bargaining unit, if the number of job vacancies in a single bargaining unit is 20% or greater of the authorized full time positions, the agency shall include the following information in the public hearing at the request at the request of that recognized employee organization. Total number of job vacancies, total number of applicants for the positions, average number of days to complete the hiring process, and opportunities to improve. As you can see later on, we did not receive a request from the specific bargaining unit that meets the threshold of 20% and above. The workforce information is currently for the fiscal year twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five.

We have 5,954 budgeted authorized positions. I'm gonna briefly walk the board through the recruitment process. It is basically a five step process. First step would be a request for referral from the hiring department. We'll then develop a job announcement, an examination will happen, final selection, and then the employment offer.

A little bit more detail about how vacancies are created and a few other in the steps. So vacancies are created in many ways through a voluntary separation, retirement, involuntary separation, internal movement, nearly budget positions. A request referral really means that the department is indicating to us that they would like to hire and then we will work with them to full determine ways to fill the vacancies. There are various ways to fill them. They can be through recruitments, transfers, promotions, flexible promotions, which I'll get into a little bit later.

Job posting is part of that. We'll either advertise on social media sites or various areas that we will target for recruitment. The exam phase can be several steps, supplemental questions, written exam, oral exam, performance exam. It can even be something like an application review. Once that has been completed, an eligibility list is basically put together with those people that are eligible for hire and that is then given to the departments.

HR and the hiring department collaborate to issue a referral which consists of candidates from that eligible list. Employment offers done by the hiring authority and then, of course, you have the final job placement. There are many ways to fill a vacancy. You just don't fill a vacancy through an existing eligibility list. You can do it through an open recruitment, promotions, flexible staffing, limited term appointments, trainees, reappointments, rehire.

And, yes, even through a voluntary demotion, you can also fill a vacancy. So there are many ways other than just a recruitment to fill a vacancy. The numbers I'm showing you right here is for the county in total for all departments. As you will need to note that they are both intern, they are both centralized HR department, which is us, and we provide services to about 17 or 18 departments. And they are decentralized HR departments that basically do their own recruitment.

So in these numbers, this includes both. So there were two thirty seven recruitments conducted. Some recruitments can have more than one vacancy attached to it. An example is sheriff's deputies. You do one recruitment but you might have 20 vacancies for trainee sheriff's deputies.

So there were six sixty two hires that happened, two thirty one flexible promotions. A flex promotion is if, for example, you're a unit flex series, you're a management analyst one and that's a flex series, you can be promoted to a two without actually a recruitment having to happen. And then, of course, there are comp promotions if we have a supervisory position and we are advertising it for a promotion. So briefly, our recruiting challenges. One challenge you would not see there is one of our challenges that we as a county are trying to do something about but is very difficult is, of course, the cost of living and housing within Monterey County and the lack of housing as well.

However, one of the key things that we did identify was that the base wages of various classifications were having an impact on recruitment and retention. Thanks to the board's approval, we have actually completed a base wage study project and that was about a 107 different classifications that we did. And we are in the process of implementing that over a four year period. Hopefully, we will be able to move the needle a bit on this. The other issue is or just one thing I need to mention is not just those base wage studies.

Currently, there are base wage study requests that have come in right now, so we are working on those as well. Then the county identified that there are some recruitments that are required to remain open for a minimum of thirty or sixty days due to the GARSA consent decree. The challenge with that is if you have a recruitment open for sixty days, by the time you get to interviewing people and it's a position that people can find work in the private sector, what they will do is just say, well, I've already you've taken so long. I've already found another job so I'm no longer interested in this position. Vacancy our current vacancy information, just to give an idea, in this year, we had 333 voluntary separations, 138 retirements, and 69 involuntary, which gives us the 540.

However, vacancies can be created in another way as well, not just by separations. You can have internal transfers. You can move somebody from department a to department b. Now what you've done is you've filled the vacancy in department b, now you've created a vacancy in department a. So that's also a way vacancy is. Vacancy is also created through comp promotions. If I promote a senior analyst to a supervisor, now the senior analyst position is is a vacancy. So that's how vacancies get created. Newly budgeted positions, those are vacancies and then, of course, voluntary demotions. I was a supervisor.

I volunteered to emote back down to an analyst. Now that is a vacancy. Now I'd like to get to the vacancy information. I do need to stress this is a snapshot in time. This is as of 04/30/2025. Like anything, we are a living, breathing, dynamic organization. So, therefore, every pay period, these numbers change. But the act requires us to just do a snapshot in time, and this is a snapshot in time. And as you can see, of all the bargaining units, it ranges from 0%. I'm not gonna get into each one of the details.

What you will actually see on this on the second page, if you go down to q, you'll see there's one bargaining unit where the vacancy rate was 33.33%. Now that looks like a very big percentage. However, they only have six authorized FTEs. So if you have two vacancies there, you will have a 33% vacancy rate. Now based on AB two five sixty one, that bargaining unit could have requested us to do a little bit more detailed presentation.

They did not. However, if those bargaining units reach out to us, we are more than willing to work with them and with labor to provide them whatever necessary information they do need. As you can see, there are really none of our vacancy rates at that date of 04/30. That was above the 20% threshold. We're looking at some of

our

competitor agencies. This is our vacancy rate as well within benchmark that we have. Does it mean that we can't do more efforts? And human resources is working closely with its decentralized human resources departments to try and address these efforts. Chair Lopez and members of the board, that concludes my presentation and it is open for questions. Thank you.

Right. At this point, we'll take questions, but then know that we've got two presentations requested as part of this and so we're gonna take those then there'll be another round of questions. At this point, is there any questions from the dais? Alright. Seeing none, we're gonna go out to the first, presenter I have here is SEIU five two one regional director Olivia Martinez. We'll give you the floor.

Good morning. My name is Olivia Martinez. I'm the region two director for SEIU. So although we don't meet the threshold, we are concerned that I think we're one of your largest bargaining unit with the number of vacancies. During negotiations in the summer, I think we had approximately 700 vacancies.

Today, we have five seventy five. Our concern today is that the county wants to cut the vacancies, right, instead of on funding them. When you cut a position, it's harder for a department to come to you to add positions. When you're cutting positions, you're also not looking at the workload of workers. So the work does not go.

Right? For social services right now, that group of workers are under immense stress. So I've been diving into the different departments to really understand what is going on. Right? Just as a reference, I'm a formal CPS social worker, so I understand the work very well.

So for CPS Family and Children's Services, when you have vacancies, that has a direct impact on the children in this community. So for example, you have emergency response unit. When you have a social worker that has 90 children in their caseload as a backlog because they're not able to close the case, because of workload issues, staffing, people on LLA, it means that they've done the investigation, but the children are still in that log waiting for the caseload to be closed, meaning they're still at risk, meaning that the county is still liable for these children's safety. We've been talking to the department about what Santa Clara has done around creating workload, caseload standards that work in order for the workers to be able to provide services to the family. Children are able to return to their homes.

And some of the research says that it has to do with the social worker, right? The social worker being able to manage the case, being able to provide the support to the parents that are trying to get the children back. If you look at Santa Clara versus Monterey County, right, or Santa Cruz, right, an ER social worker in comparison has perhaps seven cases, meaning they have seven children in ER. Your workers here, there's numbers. They've gone down through the work, but not sufficient.

So they're still in a rotation but have 90 kids in the backlog. 90 children. That's a lot. It's a lot of responsibility for you all. Right? You've had a couple of deaths already, and so I really want you to reconsider cutting positions in social services. Now going to community benefits. That's a disaster right now. You are the worst in the state in terms of, you know, your rating. You are the worst.

Monterey County is the worst. I don't know if you know that, but you are the worst per the state, not per me. Per the state. So right now, your workers are working under such a punitive environment. And I've gone to every single work site because I like to provide you facts.

Their caseload in some cases are 221%. That's a lot of cases, right? So this means that food stamps, Medi Cal, general services, right, are being impact to your most vulnerable in the community. If you're cutting those positions, then you you cannot have this punitive approach to your workers. Right?

But in my analysis and kind of figuring out what's going on is that the state is coming down on you guys because you guys have errors. Right? Errors and errors and errors. So then what management does is that then they're coming down to the workers. You mentioned your kid, Chair Lopez. My background is also child development. And so when you think of kids, right, and making errors in school, right, they don't learn by you hovering or being punitive to them. They learn by a different kind of environment of support, kindness,

right,

and looking at the areas of growth for them. Well, you're not doing this to your workers. You're not providing the training that they need. You're hovering, you're punishing, and you're being punitive. And so what we're seeing is that their errors are more and more and more.

Many of them are on LOA, you know, because they cannot withstand the anxiety and the stress because it's a cycle now. Right? And so it needs to stop because you're not gonna get out of this hole of where you're at. So the vacancies have a real issue, right, for the social services but all of the department other departments as well. We're asking you that you be considering not cutting vacancies, right, because for whatever reason, you cannot your budget does not meet, you know, you don't have the money.

Unfund them for a while because the work is not leading is there. I also think that you should really talk to your county officer, Della Rosa, to look at her own leadership and to see whether they need training in their own leadership. Because in these departments and where social services and human kindness is necessary to make a difference in the community, some of her leadership does not have the leadership to guide workers or their departments in a way that they should. And sometimes that's about training, but sometimes it's just not the right fit.

So just to time check, I know we allotted five minutes before we're sitting at seven minutes right now.

Alright. So that's all I wanted to say. So we appreciate your consideration, and thank you.

Alright. Thank you. We're gonna go to the DA Association's representative Steve Summers next. Steve, floor is yours.

Thank you, members of the board. We wanted to address you one of the things I wanted to share with you was the legislative findings of a b twenty five sixty one. They state that job vacancies in local government are a widespread and significant problem for the public effector public sector affecting occupations across wage levels. They say that high job vacancies impact public service delivery, and the workers who are forced to handle heavier case workloads with understaffing lead to burnout and increased turnover that further exasperate staffing challenges. May finally finish with there is a statewide interest in ensuring the public agency operations are appropriately staffed and high vacancy rates do not undermine public employee labor relations.

I don't always agree with the legislature, but I do agree with all that because we've lived that. Back in 2023, in early twenty twenty three, the county council's group, public offenders, and the district attorney's group saw what we knew to be understaffing. We were losing our best and brightest to the higher pay counties in the Bay Area, and we were short staffed, and we ran the numbers. We comp used our comparison counties. It took us about an hour, all public record.

We saw that we were over 20% underpaid per the county's own policy, listing the comparables counties. So we put in a request in March 2023 for a wage study. That request was completed in April 2024. The calculations that took us an hour took the human resources department thirteen months, and they had to go outside their agency to get those numbers. Now did we get those numbers in April 2024? We did not. They refused to share them with us. When we entered our bargaining sessions, we said, we need to know those numbers. We want that survey. They refused to give it to us.

We ultimately said we will stop negotiating until we get that survey. That's the important part of what we're dealing with. And in September 2024, almost a year and a half after we requested it, we got the survey. Now they didn't include Alameda County because they said they couldn't possibly figure out how to compare a public defender in Alameda County to a public defender or a district attorney in Monterey County, but it showed that we were 17% by their calculations below the the Bay Area, something we'd known for a year and a half. And their solution to that is, and I understand budget constraints, over the next two years, many of our other agencies, over the next four years, they'll try to catch up to the numbers in 2024.

So in two years later, we'll have a pay that will compete with salaries in 2024. That's a problem for us. We are the we were on that list. We're one of the highest groups. Our attorneys are leaving.

And the people who the our attorneys who leave are our best and brightest, our most experienced, our most qualified, go we had one one of our best attorneys leave for San Mateo County just a couple months ago. He got a $70,000 raise. We had another attorney a year and a half ago go to San Francisco County. He got a $60,000 raise. We're backfilling as best we can, although we are failing with new attorneys who they can't handle the heavy case loads.

They can't handle murders. We can't throw someone just out of law school into a child sex case or a murder case. And so those of us, I've been here over twenty years, are handling more and more cases. And the reality of that, this is what I want you all to understand, we are making choices not based upon what should be done, not based upon what we want, but what we have to do. There are cases we just don't file because the amount of resources that would go into making that case work would mean that three or four other cases would go short.

There are cases that we don't go to trial because we can settle them for less than they're worth, but at least that's one less case we can deal with, and we can deal with the other ones. It is delusional thinking that we can be down 17% of our staff and not have it affect public safety. It is affecting public safety. There's just as many defense attorneys. The public defender's fully staffed.

Private counsel's still we're coming up against this is an adversarial system. We're coming up against a fully staffed defense bar, and we are understaffed. The consequence is we take shortcuts. My boss probably can't say that publicly, that's why I'm here to say it. It what is happening is affecting the safety of the community in Monterey County. The police officers send us cases, and we ended up not filing them, and they get frustrated. I don't blame them. They worked hard on it, and we just don't have the time to deal with some of their cases, or we sell them out cheap. And that is happening every day, and it will continue to happen until we get back up to staff. And now we're told that, oh, one of the ways we can fix the vacancy problems is just eliminate the positions.

I guess the numbers work that way, but we'll still be understaffed. Thank you. Thank you, mister Summers.

And I know we had, some folks from the park rangers as well that were wishing to make comment. So I'm gonna go ahead and give them the floor at this time. I believe we have two representatives via Zoom. If we could give them the floor, I wanna say it's, John Anthony and Tyler.

Hello. Can you hear me? This is John Anthony.

We can hear you, John.

Alright. I just like to add, I've John Anthony, County Park Ranger supervisor and president of the Monterey County Park Rangers Association. I've been with the parks department for eighteen years and a total of twenty two years with Monterey County. And to kind of follow-up on what my predecessor spoke about, we waited four years to get the results of our compensation study with three attempts and refiling it to finally get it, and it came back to us a couple weeks ago. With the rate that we had been getting paid, our recruitments were dismal.

When I first started and first started as a supervisor, we were getting 200 applicants. And with what we were at, we ended up being at getting twenty, twenty four applicants for the job of county park ranger. And without these filled positions, it adds up to a lot of extra overtime and a lot of services that aren't provided like we used to. We don't have night patrol in our parks seven days a week. We don't have a dedicated boat patrol at Lake San Antonio.

As this weekend, I was the solo ranger at Lake San Antonio from eight in the morning till 02:00 in the morning when the night shift came on. So with not having these positions filled, it really cuts into the amount of workload. It adds to the workload that we as park rangers are conducting, but it also severely cuts the amount of public safety that is provided to our customers here in the park. So working to fill these positions, and I'll speak later in our budget as to the augment augmented positions that are coming up later, we really need to keep our staff as full as we can. And we actually have seven full time positions now until the end of the month when, if not approved in today's meeting, we'll be down to five.

That's really all I've got at this point. I believe, my partner, Tyler Decker, was gonna speak.

Tyler, I'll give you the floor.

Can

you hear me?

We can.

Good morning. How are you guys doing today?

We're good. Thank you, Tyler.

My name is Tyler Decker. I'm a park ranger three. I've been with the county for seventeen and a half years now, and I'm just advocating for the county ranger positions. These are very important positions. Currently, as it stands, we only have five full time positions, which makes patrolling our parks very difficult.

Three days of the week out of seven, we do not have any coverage in North County. So that means there's no customer service. There's no one to respond to calls for service. Search and rescue, yes, we rely a lot on the sheriff's department, but they are not park rangers. We So don't have anyone in our parks for three days a week up north.

South County, just as importantly, we don't have anyone we are only designated nights and boat shifts Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Midweek, we have one ranger patrolling, two if we're lucky. So it makes it very difficult to do our job. Midweek is important because with waters fluctuating, we work on both lakes, marking hazardous areas, placing buoys. And working on the water is inherently dangerous on any body of water, but you need the staff to make sure it's safe for working with heavy buoys, hundreds of

feet of line. And even though it's a lake, you're dealing with waves and wakes. And we need

the staff to make sure that the the patrols get done, but

also the maintenance gets done as well.

This weekend, it wasn't as busy as years past, but we did have a decent weekend, and I'd just like to go over a few of the stats that we had. From Friday to Monday, we had one hundred and thirty three quiet hours violation contacts. We had 94 ground fire contacts, nine traffic stops, 72 vessel stops, 11 vessel terminations for safety issues or incompetent operators. We had 21 contacts for quagga mussel violations. We, we responded to two crash detections, three medical aids.

We had 80 customer service contacts, four public assist, four vessel tows or vessels in distress. We responded to three physical altercations. We had four evictions out of the park. We contacted, multiple minor in possessions, and a subject for furnishing alcohol to minors. During our patrols, rangers also responded to a physical altercation where a male subject, was involved in a fight, and he brandished a knife in a threatening manner.

Rangers responded, immediately and handled the situation after investigating the call for service. The subject was later arrested. Later that night, rangers were flagged down by a female subject stating that a gentleman put his child in the car, a young child under the age of five years old in the backseat, and drove away from North Shore. She also reported that that driver was extremely intoxicated. Rangers were able to locate that vehicle driving on New Plato Road leaving North Shore Lake San Antonio and observed multiple moving violations.

They conducted a traffic stop, and the driver was later arrested for child endangerment and DUI. His blood alcohol content was over three times the legal limit. These are the things that rangers are dealing with on a daily basis. And even though these numbers seem like we did quite a bit on a Memorial Day weekend, this is more of the stats that we get on an everyday weekend for four months of the year. So these rangers' positions are very important, and I'm hoping you guys make the decision to fund these. And that is all I have to say.

Thank you, Tyler. Alright. With that, we'll go back to staff. Any final words or anybody I missed?

No. No final words from our side.

Alright. Back to the dais. Comments, questions on this report? Okay. Then by receiving the presentation, we have completed the requirements of two five six one. As you heard, most of these are requests for the budget, which we're about to undertake. So we'll proceed forward with our agenda this morning. So we're going to officially open the public hearing to consider our fiscal year twenty five-twenty six recommended budget. Actually need to go back on the last item too and see if there's any general public or any public comment on item two. Ara, did you have public comment on item two?

Yes, chair. I I just wanted to take a moment. Thank you to convey the water resources agency support for the request from the rangers for augmentation. The, you know, in addition to the the the vital and and significant public safety work that they do, know, reservoir owners up and down the state are now also having to contend with the spread of, golden, mussels. And so we are needing a a expanded enforcement, of the mussel, inspection program on the reservoirs, and the rangers work in that area is vital to helping avoid the the spread of golden mussels mussels into Nacamiento or San Antonio reservoirs.

So a slightly different aspect to their work, but an important aspect nonetheless. And so I just wanted to convey that, for you all. So thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you, Ara. Any other hands? Alright. Seeing nobody coming forward in the room. No other hands up via Zoom. We will proceed to open the public hearing to consider our 2526 recommended budget. I'm gonna send it to our CAO to give us some introductory comments.

Thank you so much. And joining me today is Debbie Palinelli. She'll be providing a presentation, and Raquel, who is in the office, will be, also listening in. She is our budget director, in an interim capacity, and Debbie has taken on the role of the budget preparation along with Raquel and our budget team. I do wanna begin by thanking our entire budget team, includes the CAO staff and also fiscal teams across the county.

We have a total of 26 combined office and department budgets that were put together for this budget. This is my third budget as part of, this county of Monterey. We started in 2324, and now we are discussing today '25 and '26. We have been very hands on when it comes to the budget. Both of us, Debbie and I, have were not here three years ago and are in the process of learning the structure of this county, but also understanding the needs of the community and also our department's ability to do their work.

The folks that are behind the scenes as well are administrative analysts, Tricia, Veronica, Trent, Isabella, and also Rocio, our executive staff person, are also listening in and have made this, preparation possible today. We also wanna recognize the 5,000 some the 5,000 plus employees, almost 6,000 employees of the county who have are executing the work that is included in this budget, but also all the work from many, many years of service with the county. Many of our team, I wanna say over 500, have been with the county for over twenty years. And in addition to the the dead people that are behind the scenes, also include some of our new department heads, and, of course, supervisors Church and Daniels also have joined us, as members of the board, supervisor Church joining when I first came into the office. And since '23, we have 12 new department heads.

Those include elected folks and also appointed folks by myself or the Board of Supervisors or the court, such as our our probation chief Jose Ramirez, and also the UC Cooperative has recently appointed a new department head as well. I wanna start by stating what the recommended budget is. It is balanced. It is $2,300,000,000 spending plan, and it is being presented today to the board of supervisors for the purpose of review, modification, and also adoption. In a nutshell, this is a very iterative process.

We presented a budget that safeguards every field position, at the request of the board of supervisors, but we will continue working through this budget until adoption and even thereafter. The budget itself is a 609 96 page document, and it does include the general financial policies that were adopted by the board of supervisors, and 455 of those pages are the departmental budgets. What it is not is set in stone. So I just wanna be clear that expectation is that we will update the budget, but we put it together solely focused on the field positions being, being saved, and then there'll be additional support that's needed and understandably by the departments. And those will be the request that come forward today.

So in terms of purpose and our motivation, we are governing by leadership and not by crisis. We understand that there are quite a few things going on at the state level and the federal level, but we are preparing for the strategic reduction of our workforce, but also at the same time looking at opportunities to address our current needs. We have been tasked with reviewing, improving, and demystifying the budget process to ensure that what is accurate and timely and that we share information frequently. We have heard from our elected department heads and also from our appointed department heads, and we understand that they have been tasked with a difficult challenge. We have updated our strategic plan.

It's not included in this budget, but it will be in future budgets, and that was also put together through our electeds and also our appointment appointed department heads. We have begun the use of AI. This has been, you know, our I'm sorry, artificial intelligence. We're using chatbots in some instances, but also looking to streamline processes. And in every instance, the employee is still gonna be needed.

It's not gonna be a replacement of employees. It's gonna be an addition to the work that we do to serve our community. We have prioritized capital projects to ensure that we're able to address the needs of our community and also the departments, and we're also looking to prioritize our housing and community development processes to try to stream streamline the permitting process, but also other services that are provided by that department. At the county level, we collaborate not just when there's a crisis, but throughout the year. So I do wanna commend the work of all our department heads and our electeds to try to work together to bring together a budget that safeguards as many positions as possible, but also reinvent reinvents ourselves.

I do wanna just add additional information that was provided by Leon Panetta, our secretary of defense from 2011 to 2013. He gave us key goals on 03/06/2025, and those goals were to focus on what needs to be done, to work as a team and ensure we're all going in the same direction, to be honest about ourselves and who we are because all of you know who we are, and you know what's going on. And, also, to ensure that we're honest with others, especially those working for us. Debbie Palinelli has worked on numerous budgets. This is her first budget for this county.

We have worked collaboratively. I have crashed course into a deep dive of all of your budgets and trying to understand the services that we need and understanding that we need so much more. Every decision that was made was decided collaboratively and informing all of the department heads and our elected officials. They were some decisions that we knew were difficult to make, but we understand that that's what's expected when you're in leadership. So today, I just wanna make sure when there will be a lot of questions that you follow-up with us as much as you can and continue to provide directions so that we can make our better our budget better and really our structure better better.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Debbie, and she will guide us through our budget process. Thank you.

Hi. Good morning, Debbie. Are you closer? Okay. Hi. Good morning. Debbie Paulinelli, assistant CAO. On the screen, I'm gonna start with the my presentation for the budget. In the middle of it, there'll be provoke workers will come in and do a presentation with the capital projects, and then we'll hear from the departments after that. So just a little bit in brief, just an overview of how the budget process works.

We start with the department forecast, and we develop an additional baseline budget. From that baseline budget, departments will conclude whatever they can in the baseline, and then they'll anything extra, they'll add as an augmentation request. Those augmentation requests are then, considered and by the by both during the budget workshop and by our office, and we bring forward a recommended requested budget that you're going to see today. So just starting with the fiscal environment, there's all sorts of stuff happening out there, obviously. And as Sonia mentioned just a little bit ago, a lot of those things are not in our budget.

They are also not in the state budget at this point. So there can be things that trickle down from federal to state, and then we see them fall to us, and there may be revisions that are needed later. Of course, there's the outstanding tariffs. Interest rates are still expected to remain high. We still seem to have some growth recession.

And like I said, the state economy is $12,000,000,000 deficit, and that's not including anything that may come down from the federal level down to the state and then on to us. Some of the state budget impacts right now for health. There was a reduction of Medi Cal related expenditure growth, including freezing the CPI adjustments for county administration, eliminating family planning and supplement payments, eliminating prospective payments to clients for state only services, eliminating long term care, implementing a drug rebate rebate, ag, and pharmacy utilization management in addition to pulling revenue from prop 35. And then on the state budget as well for social services, there's been some reductions in in home, support services, which referred is to as IHSS. A lot of times, nine products percent reduction there and some caps on overtime and travel for that, for that program.

Housing and homelessness, bringing families home and home safe continues to remain without ongoing funding, and there is no mention of the HAP seven per round or HAP for round seven. And then Medi Cal, there's a reduction of a little bit there to administration, a small little local reduction, and freeze on the CPI adjustments. And then a couple other things going on there with some enrollment freezes for young adults 29 to 49 and 50 and over, and then elimination of the long term care benefits for individuals with unsatisfactory invitations immigration status. Local risks. You know, this isn't something you haven't seen before.

The general fund discretionary revenue growth is not sufficient to keep up with rising costs. That's been kind of a consistent theme in the last couple of budgets from, what I've seen. And all the available discretionary revenue growth is recommended in this budget, as Sonia had mentioned, to maintain the current staffing and service levels at the amount that we can fund them at. We did use one time monies to fund this budget, which is never ideal, but all filled positions are funded and some additional services that were part of the augmentation process, and we'll go through all those in a little bit. Keep in mind the strategic reserve levels are at 58,600,000.0, which is 5.8% of the budget, and the target balance is 94.3 or 10% of the estimated actual revenue in this budget.

We are not recommending anything to go to that reserve at this point, but that'll be a different conversation come December, January when we get the or sorry. November, December when we get the fund balance numbers. So as Sonya mentioned, the the budget is balanced. Negotiations with all the bargaining groups, almost all the bargaining groups have been completed. There is a new measure, measure AA, as everybody knows, that was approved by the voter voters, which implements a new 1% transaction and use tax in the unincorporated county areas.

And as I had mentioned before, state and federal impacts are being analyzed, and it could be adversely impacted '25, '26, and beyond, but we'll see that as it comes down. And then as a reminder, the onetime funding sources of ARPA and unassigned fund balance have all been used, and they're not available this year as they were in the prior years. So the total budget is 2,270,000,000.00 in appropriations, and there's an increase of 255,200,000.0. What I really wanna explain here is a lot of this change is what's you'll see on this slide, which say talks about change in budgeting for cost plan. As we were implementing our new system, it was decided that instead of doing the cost plan as a contra account that we would put in a revenue and expense line, which instead of netting it, made both those numbers very large.

Since that change and this is what I kinda wanna talk about. Since that change, it has been decided that we're gonna go back to the contra account. So even though this budget shows these big numbers and these big swings here, of the 78,000,000, when it comes back in the adopted, we are going to adjust it so that it's back to the original contra account numbers. It's just an accounting change. So outside of that, the big change here is the change in salaries and benefits most, which is the 79,300,000.0, and then some intergovernmental transfers for Natividad and some higher operating transfers out.

So the big the big the big picture here is the salaries and benefits. And it's increased by the same down there, the 2.2 financed by the 2,200,000,000.0 in revenue. And there's about a 130,000,000 in general fund. That's not just discretionary, but all general fund growth in Natividad, some realignment growth in behavioral health. Here's a big picture of all the funds.

So you can see the big picture there. A general fund is your big blue, slice of the pie right there, followed by natividad. And what we're gonna concentrate, going forward mostly right now is gonna be that big blue slice, which is the general fund. Same slide as kinda before, just taking out the general fund piece. So 1,000,000,000 in appropriations this year, and like I said, a 131,000,000 over the prior year, 65,000,000 of that is that cost plan change, and there's the increase in salaries and benefits right there at 48.9.

Some increases in homelessness grants, entitlement programs, clinic services, and public health. Same funding and revenues on the bottom, the 59,000,000 for the program revenue, 60,600,000.0 in that cost plan change, and then 11.1 is the increase in discretionary revenue, which is what we really have the most say over. This budget also uses 19,200,000.0 of one time funds that are going to the following departments. There's a $10,500,000 true up for the health department after some reconciliations that they'll be using their restricted general fund money for, 2,200,000.0 in social services for community programs, 650 oh, 605,000, safety restricted, public safety programs. Then if you remember during the budget workshop, I talked about the 8,400,000.0 in the contingency assignment reserve.

Of that, we're using 5,400,000.0 of that to balance this budget. There's about 202,000 in the cannabis for the climate action plan that was actually budgeted last year and wasn't used and is just being rolled forward. 125,000 for some compensated absences versus the community request, and then a little bit of the 22,000 right there that was pulled from the capital assignment for some voting equipment needed in the elections department. Other inclusions in this budget is 6,500,000.0 from the TOT or to the road fund. That is a decrease in 3,100,000.0 from the current year adoption adopted budget, but that does cover their MOE payment.

2,200,000.0, contribution from the TOT is going to the DSAs. That's a reduction of 843,000 from the current year. And 4,100,000.0 and 2,200,000.0, from prop one seventy two to the fire agencies and nine one one dispatcher user agencies. This is a pie chart of the general fund and how it's split out by department. Social services and health there, the most of their funding is restricted, followed by sheriff, probation, and then the rest of the departments you can see listed around the pie chart.

So cost drivers. Our biggest cost driver, as I mentioned before, is salaries and benefits. They grew 45,900,000 in the current year, about an 8.2% increase. This is due to negotiations as well as some base wage studies that were included. They that wait. Just on the wages, it's about 352,000,000, an increase of 28,000,000. That is not the benefits that are included with the just, wages. And these these numbers do include some salary savings by departments of 33,700,000.0. This is a slide that, you know, we've seen before. This is our pension, contribution trend.

So these are based on CalPERS actuarial reports, and you can see the blue is the normal cost of the plan right there, and then the unfunded liability as the yellow part, which, increases up and down, right, with with the market. Costs are projected to grow throughout to, twenty thirty, thirty one. Here's that unfunded liability, a little bit different picture. Estimated liability for the 2023, which is the most current actuarial report, $1,000,000,000. It's 63,000,000 more than the prior year.

It's due to investment losses. CalPERS uses a 6.8 investment return assumption. And so if they don't make 6.8 that year, then those numbers go down. If they do make over 6.8, it goes up. You could just look at this chart right here, and you can see that 2021 was a good year for our fund, and other years are not.

But that number can go back and forth depending on the market. We are planning on using this year $6,300,000 from the 01/2015 plan to pay for the increase in unfunded accrued liability. The idea here is to keep that level and to keep it steady for everybody. And then if if there's a year that's really good, so let's say it's a twenty one year and it goes the other way in our favor, 6,300,000.0, we've put $63,300,000.0 back into the one fifteen plan. The general fund, health insurance premiums, those have been a big part of the increase in the budget.

Historically, we've covered a large portion of the annual increases. As you can tell in 2425, there was a larger chunk in, covered as well as increases in health insurance from CalPERS. Had a lot to do with that raise, and so there's a big spike there from '23, '24 to 2425. And that was all part of the negotiation process. So the general fund reserve, this is the total revenues right here, or sorry.

The general fund revenue trend. Total, general fund revenues are your purple line, and your little blue dotted line right there are your, nonprogram revenues. The general fund, it it is projected to go a 130 a 130,700,000.0 in twenty five-twenty six. Remember, the cost plan charges are a big chunk of that once again. So 60,000,000 of that is cost plan charges, leaving an increase of 70,100,000.0.

59,000,000, we saw that number earlier on the slide, is program revenue from federal and state aids, is growth, and up in 15,000,000 more in realignment funds. So the discretionary revenue right there is like it was a different slide earlier, had the 11.1 on it. The largest increase in that discretionary revenue is property taxes at 10,800,000.0. So here are your general fund discretionary revenue drivers. Your 10,800,000.0 up there, property tax being our biggest change from last year to this year.

Everything else, semi stable. That transaction and use tax there for 1,800,000.0 is measure AA funds that we brought into this budget to balance the budget. And then the one, that would stand out as well as the federal aid on the bottom is ARPA funds that are no longer available. So those have been, have been all used at this point. So as I mentioned in the beginning, we started with baseline and then departments put in augmentations.

In this budget, the departments put in a $121,000,000 in requests, an augmentation request. And on this sheet, you can see the categories that they put in. One of the things on here are capital improvements. Just as a note, capital improvements, that number is not included in our requested budget and will be considered today separately. And I will have public works help with that those slides later.

Here is the same 121,000,000 summarized by fund, general fund up there at the top, and then also the capital projects are still in this one, but general fund being the biggest with some small numbers in the other, health and, the animal services. Here's the requested augmentation summaries by departments. Largest request coming in from the sheriff at 30,800,000.0, followed by public works, facilities and parks at 7,200,000.0, the district attorney at 4.6, and public defender at 2.9, Social Services and Department of Emergency Management. On this slide, can see the $64,000,000 is down there at the bottom, and that's for the capital projects that I had mentioned earlier. So we took all those, and we came up with some recommendations.

And these are our recommendations that we did, and this is starting with how we funded them. So you can go to the left. We used 1.873 of the AA funds. Funds. We used that little bit of the cannabis assignment that I had mentioned for the climate action plan earlier. The compensated absences assignment is the one for the community projects. The 5.4 is the contingency reserve from the original 8.4 that I had said during the budget workshop. There is, 1,000,000 there in discretionary revenue. I had mentioned during the budget workshop that that was some, revenues that came in higher than expected. That capital projects, is the 22, for the equipment in elections.

And then we, reallocated some GFC. There was just extra GFC that was in people's budgets that they had left that we could still use. And then that redirected TOT is from the DSAs and the road fund that I mentioned earlier, and then some restricted funds that came in for some projects. These are recommended augmentations by departments. You can see the totals right here.

So 3,200,000.0 in the sheriff's office, 2.9 for the public defender, 2.8 for the district attorney, 1.5 for social services. It's funding 75.1 FTEs. There the positions were all funded with general fund money. If there was positions out there that needed no general fund money, they were considered funded, and we included those as well. So those are the 13 positions on the bottom and other funds that that we funded.

General fund augmentations, total of 62.1 FTEs are recommended, 50.1 positions in the sheriff's office, district attorney, and public defender, and DM. Three are left un funded and vacant or unfunded in the assessor's office, and then nine new, nine new positions funded by program revenue down there with health and public awareness planning and the district attorney, bringing us to a total of 13.1 in general fund augmentations. This list is long. It's kind of up there for, reference, but these are all the positions that were funded. I don't plan on, everybody memorizing those, but they're there for your reference.

The other recommend the other recommended augmentations were these that were mentioned during the budget workshop. And what we did is we did a 25% reduction in all of them with the exception of the general plan, and we funded them at 75%. These are funding sources. These slides you're gonna see the slide two different ways right now. So this is funding sources by department.

So if you look, you can go down this list and you can see each department and what type of those original revenues that I that I said were used, and you can see which department got what of what of what revenue. These are the positions by department. We're recommending a 116 for deletions with 79 in social services. These are all vacant positions. Let me start with that.

All of the filled positions, like I said earlier, have been funded. 28 in the sheriff, 10 in the district attorney, nine in child support, and the list is right there on on the right. So these are the unfunded augmentations. These are the ones that did not get funded there from the original request and did not receive funding. These are 42,000,000 of them, as you can see, were not funded.

You can see by what department on this chart we did not, who requested and did not receive funding in the recommended. These are the unfunded by category. As you can see, all the filled positions on this list are gone as they have all been filled with during the requested or recommended budget. This is a long list. This is another one of those that I said is probably just kind of for your reference at this minute because you're not gonna memorize this whole list, but it is four pages of everything that was not funded that was requested by the departments.

So now we're on unfunded capital projects, and I'm gonna share these slides. They're actually John's slides. I don't think John's in here, but he's online. Okay. So I'm gonna turn these slides over to John and let him explain these to you.

Thank you, Debbie. John Snively, administrative operations manager at Public Works Facilities and Parks. I can speak to these slides, and I will just note that these projects, as with everything else in the county, is part of a, you know, a living work plan and living document. So I have a spreadsheet version of this, which thank you, Debbie. I'll pull this up quickly.

Just some minor updates since those versions were shared and staff continues to update this worksheet based on the most current available information to provide the board with information needed to make informed decisions. The CIP these are this is an expert excerpts from our capital improvement plan, which we will be presenting in further detail in June at the adoption. What I have here is a snapshot of the facilities work plan just to give the board a sense of some of the other projects that have funding and are going into the fiscal year. Really, the focus today is is those unfunded projects that have been raised through budget workshop highlights and other other requests. And the the purpose of these of this table is to provide the board with the worksheet so they can make determinations of which capital projects they would like to allocate fund for $78 to.

So there's a there's a lot of other pieces to the CIP, but that's really the focus. So what you see here in this first section is simply the funded facilities work plan for next fiscal year. I will note that some of those projects do have rather large estimated unfunded needs in the future. Some of those are still preliminary estimates we are working through. Others are pending further discussion about scope, but that just gives an idea of what staff is planning to work on in the coming fiscal year.

The discussion today focuses more on these sections here below. I'll start with the projects here, budget workshop highlights. These are capital projects that are unfunded for fiscal year twenty four twenty five, twenty six, and that at least three supervisors recommended be returned to the budget hearing for the board's consideration. We've had them sorted by the dollar amount of their funding request, and I have a column here showing the fund $478 when the board is prepared to make decisions and what they would like to to allocate there. I also have a running balance of what we believe the the estimate the placeholder estimate from CAO's office for fund April so we can track how much money there is to spend down as we go through these projects.

Briefly, these projects include the COVID memorial, some scoping and estimating money to further assess the maintenance and repair needs down at the King City Courthouse. There was a project to do some repairs at the juvenile division building restrooms. Staff is recommending that the board consider a smaller amount for better scoping there. This this dollar amount of $2.37 is based on a 2015 assessment. It's been escalated, but we'd like to get in there and make sure we have a true sense of the scope and need for funding there.

And then we have the Pajaro Mansion and a certain smaller dollar amount to finish the emergency repair work due to the floods, an unscheduled maintenance line item, as well as the larger Pajaro rehabilitation project for the 2nd And 3rd Floor access and re remodel. And then finally, funding to complete construction of the new Bradley library. So those budget workshop highlights are about $10.510600000.0 dollars. In addition, PWFP staff have a number of projects that they are providing a supplemental recommendations to that list, and so those are found below. Those include the a project for JLADA work in in those facilities.

This is a placeholder amount of 2,500,000.0 to initiate some of the remediation work that is needed there. We also have HVAC repairs and replacement at the Schilling Campus. It is a $4,400,000 ask, but staff notes that there are six subtasks within that project. And if the top three priorities were to be funded, that would be about 2,500,000.0 of that 4.46. In addition, some solar projects that are planned at the 168, West Allisau campus have increased the urgency of repair and replacement needs there, and those include a parking lot replacement and a roof replacement project.

And staff is available to go into further detail on those projects if the board desires. I'll keep it high level at this point. Finally, there are two other projects that since the budget workshop, have had significant changes to their needs, and so we wanted to highlight those here. One is some laboratory HVAC work that was originally part of funded this coming fiscal year through a federal grant. However, that funding is no longer available, and so the engineer's estimate and and project cost is listed there.

And speaking of solar projects at one sixty eight with Salisau, there was some soil conditions identified which would increase the cost of that project. The sustainability office is looking to cover that within the project budget with some scope revisions, but we do list it here as it's it's recently become aware that that may be an unfunded need. Finally, we have a line item as a 10% contingency based on that fund $4.78 starting balance. And so at the at the time that the board desires and wishes to discuss these capital projects, I can pull this worksheet up and track the the projects that the board approves. So I'll stop there and turn it back over to Debbie. Thank you.

Okay. So back to me. Okay. So, like I these are some known administrative and technical corrections that are gonna come between the recommended budget and the adopted budget, and the biggest one number on number one there is the cost plan change. That is gonna be, like I said, a $78,000,000 change when it comes back.

So when people look at the recommended and then look at the adopted, I don't want it to look like a huge surprise. Also, there's about six positions there. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first year of a brand new system for us, and we were working through some of the bugs of the system. All of the money for these positions are in the recommended budget. It's just the words of their titles didn't make it over, because of the way we were moving titles.

And so those will be corrected. We found those, and those will be corrected in the in the adopted budget. So a couple questions that always come up are the TOT allocations. And just to kinda give everybody a chart here to look at at the beginning, there is a history here back to twenty seventeen, eighteen. The top part are the DSA allocations, and the bottom are the road fund allocations.

And what was recommended in this budget for the DSA allocations is to bring them back to the 2223 actual year. And then also for the road fund, it's not bringing them back to any year, but that 6,400,000.0 is covering their MOE. These slides, I just have them on here. They are basically just what is in the recommendation of the actual budget item, have the budget hearings, making some changes for some, for some DSAs, the road fund, the kind of everything I went through on the budget. Number five is in here.

It is, moved as rec as as recommended or as suggested by the board during the budget workshop to not be part of the TOT anymore and just moved into regular critical needs. And you can see the four the four items that are getting funded there. And then the rest of these are just oh, that's interesting. The rest of these are just basically letting us make changes and all the things I went over in my slides. So the next steps.

So this is the what is actually available for the board to do today. Of course, there are redirections that the board can do at any time. If there's programs that are not mandated and the board chooses to discontinue them, they can do that and to redirect that money to other requests. The contingency appropriation is funded at the 1% per our general policy, general fund or financial policies. That total is 8,700,000.0 for 2526 this year.

The cannabis tax assignment still has about 1,300,000.0 available in it. And then the balance of the contingency reserve fund is that 8.4 that I said we used 5.4 of. There's 3,000,000 left in there. And then finally, of course, there is the Measure AA funds, but I would recommend being very conservative with these because we don't have a track record of what this is gonna look like yet, and we haven't even collected our first dollar. And I I just don't.

The estimates that we originally had had already been decreased by the consultants by a little bit, so I just I'm not a 100% sure on how that's gonna come in. Looking ahead, just something I kinda wanna put out there now just because of how tough this year was and how to just kinda struggling to find some money. At the end of the year, the budget year end, there's always a fund balance left over, and we tend to, you know, say, oh, we have extra money. Let's put it to all these things. Our office is gonna really recommend saving a portion of that.

I mean, up I mean, up to at least $10,000,000 so that when we're doing this next year, that we at least have that because the 8,400,000.0 that I had this year will be I already used 5.4 of it, so that we'll have some more money next year and make this process a little easier, hopefully. This is a question that comes up a lot. This is an updated slide. We talk about FEMA reimbursement status. They have DEM has been working really closely with Cal OES they and public works, and they've come up with a revised schedule on what they think we may be getting back from FEMA.

That number on the bottom right is the number 17,700,000.0, but it is not all general funds. So keep that in mind. There's some will return to other funds such as the road fund. It'll go back to the funds in which the original cost came from. And that is the end of my presentation, and I will let the department speak now.

So housekeeping. Just want wanna talk about process here. I know we have folks from the public wanna share. We're gonna take public comment after the departmental presentations. Those will likely take us through lunch based on the time frame that we're looking at today. I'm gonna let departments know as well. We I know I sent out a strong recommendation request ahead of time that we stayed at ten minutes. I will give you a visual cue when we hit ten minutes and ask you to wrap up. So I'm just asking folks to honor that ten minute request this year. And then in terms of process, we're gonna work through the board of supervisors I'm sorry, the county budget first.

And then after we conclude that and take public comment and make decisions there, we'll come back and take up the other budgets that are before us as well. You'll note that there's quite a few of those. Those tend to go a little faster, so I'd like to get through the county's budget overall first. So that's how we're gonna take this on. So at this time, I'm gonna invite foe invite forward social services director Rod Franks to make their presentation.

I think Becky is gonna be joining, Becky Kromer. At the end of each presentation, I'll invite the board to ask any questions that they may have and just ask that we refrain on any of the sausage making till all departments have completed their presentations.

Take notes.

Good morning. While we're pulling up our presentation, I'd like to thank you, chair Lopez, the board, administrative officer, county staff, and the public for the invitation to speak to you today on the Department of Social Services budget. With me, I have Becky Cromer, finance manager three, our department finance director extraordinaire, as well as Adam Erhabi, who is serving as the acting military and veterans affairs officer. I see that our presentation is up, so we'll move through. This presentation, we should be able to get through within the time limit.

It's pretty similar to what was presented to the board at the budget workshop. We'll be going over what you see here, baseline budgets, some of our impacts, the augmentation requests, and we'll wrap up with Adam presenting on the military and veterans affairs. For fiscal year 2526, we are looking at a recommended budget for the department of 369,200,000.0. That would also include a staff complement of 852 positions. You can see that budget is broken down into three general areas.

Our program administration, close to 200,000,000. Our community programs, about 13,000,000. And then a large entitlement program, 160,000,000. Our budget is broken down into, a few funding categories. You can see that about 92% of the revenue that we receive comes from federal and state funds and the sales tax realignment.

Only about 7% of our budget is from county general fund dollars. And the next slide shows how that number is broken down. The largest portion, a little over 15,000,000, really goes to our entitlement programs. The next largest is to administration of our programs, and then you can see military veterans affairs in our community programs as well. So one of the largest cost drivers as we were building this year's budget, very similar to what was presented earlier, was the increase in employee costs.

So if we were to take all of, the employees that are currently on the books and add in all of the increase in salaries, benefits, overtime pay, temporary costs for temporary employees, you can see that we would have seen an increase of about $29,000,000 from our current budget. The graph there shows the red line as our staff complement, which is maintaining pretty level, and then you could see the projected increase in all of our employee costs. Next slide. So how do we deal with that? To maintain the integrity of the current fiscal year twenty four twenty five budget, we've had to sustain a vacancy rate of a little over 14%.

That has equated generally to about a 125 to a 100 and positions that we're maintaining vacant at any one point in time. I'm very proud of our staff. They show up to work every day. They work really hard serving the residents of this community through all the various programs and services that we provide, and we really wanted to find a way to bring as many staff online to assist in that process as we possibly could. We had, opted for the 14% vacancy rate in the current budget in the hopes that the fiscal situation would improve over time, that there would be increased funding from our state and federal partners for the programs that we administer, as well as additional local funds to assist us in funding our programming.

As we've seen from the earlier presentation, that's just not the case. That's not how things have played out, and it looks like we will be experiencing that for some years to come before we would see significant improvement. So to address those realities, we took a look at our current vacancies, and we are, putting forward a budget where we are reducing 79 of those vacant positions and then leveraging that to keep 44 positions that are currently vacant and to fill those positions going into the next fiscal year. We've already started working very assertively to fill and those positions and bring them online as quickly as possible. So two of the augmentations that we requested during the, budget workshop were for out of home care assistance and we're very grateful that the recommended budget includes funding in these two areas.

So thank you very much. Funded at 75%, but we believe that we can handle the unfunded balance moving forward. We do have three augmentations that were not included in the county's recommended budget. It's for a few positions, two positions in social services aids to really assist us in our outreach efforts for our community benefits program, and then, one employment and training worker to assist us with the increase in case loads. At any time in economic down downturn, we do see a significant increase in those that would be requesting assistance and looking for employment, and so we would be looking for some assistance there.

I'd like to point out that you wanna slip back? I'd like to point out that we are able to leverage dollars from our state and federal, partners, and so the total cost of these three positions is about $375,000 but to actually fund them would only require about $185,000 So we're going to flip through just a few of our program areas and highlight Our Community Benefits program serves about 262,000 individuals in our county, administering about $200,000,000 in just CalFresh and CalWorks benefits each year. You can see a picture of our new outreach van. We have delivery of it. We've been bringing that around to various events throughout the community and plan to, assertively use this new tool to outreach to all corners of the county.

Our CalWORKS employment services, which I've indicated before, is probably one of our our most beneficial in assisting people, out of poverty and into self sufficiency. And then we've also mentioned our in home supportive services program. You can see that almost 7,000 individuals receive in home supportive services in Monterey County and of the 8087% of the providers are family members who are caring for their loved ones. So at this point, I

do

we have one

more slide, Becky?

Nope. We're good. Okay. Thanks. At this point, I'd like to call Adam Erhabi up to the podium to, talk to us about the military and veterans affairs.

Good morning, chair Lopez, CAO Della Rosa, members of the board. Excuse me. So what does your veteran service office do? We support, assist, and advocate, provide services for veterans, their families, and the military community. Our core services include benefits counseling, claims development, and submission.

We are the only accredited agency, both nationally and state, in the Monterey County, and we serve about 23 and a half, thousand veterans, active duty service members, National Guard and Reservists, and their families in in Monterey County. In fiscal year 2324, we served just shy of, 3,000 unique veterans, filed 5,700 claims, and were awarded about 1,900 disability compensation claims totaling in $19,800,000. So today, I'm standing before you on behalf of Jack Murphy and to offer our thanks for your support, CAO DelaRosa's support, and the community's support. Your continued support allows us to accomplish our mission for serving the veterans and their families of the county. Thank you very much.

So now we're getting to the questions. Actually, the slide I was looking for is after the questions. So you'll be able to see it in your presentation if you have any need for information regarding our homeless programs. Before we move into questions, I'd just like to talk a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing in the Department of Social Services, in the last year or so. It has been brought up that there's some concern about vacancies.

Very true. The workload tends to increase for us in times of economic downturn, and we need to be braced and ready for that. In our family and children services department about, oh, I'd say less than two years ago, we had vacancies of over 25. We currently have just six vacancies, That is due to the cooperative work that we have been doing in the department. We meet regularly with our union partners, our creative leadership from the department leadership, and hard work has really led to some very innovative solutions to bring that vacancy rate down.

And in addition, in that same time, our, case backlog has almost been cut in half. And so it really speaks to the diligence, skill, and hard work of our workforce and what can be done when we actually work together with all of our partners. At that, I would, be willing to stand for any questions.

Nine minutes and fifty five seconds. Well done, director Franks. I did right? Alright. Way to set a trend. I'm gonna go down. I I know, supervisor Daniels had a question, so we'll go there first.

Thank you. You talked about removing the 49 vacant positions. I'm sorry. The 79 vacant positions, but then you're filling 49. Does that mean there's a going to be, in this year's budget, an increase of 49 new staff members filled?

So we are cutting 79 vacancies of the 123 that existed, and then we are filling 44 of the vacancies.

44.

And so, yes, the end result is not new positions because these were positions that were part of this current year's budget but unfilled. We actually will be filling 44 more positions than what have been filled in the current fiscal year next year.

That was my that was my question. So 44 new 44 filled formerly vacant positions.

That's correct.

Thank you.

Any other questions from the dais? Alright. Seeing none, thank you, director Franks. I appreciate you and Becky and Adam. Great presentation. Great trendsetters. Gonna jump over to the district attorney next. Is the DA with us?

Yes. I am here, and I have my chief assistant, Berkley Brannan, in chambers who I think is walking up right now to set up the presentation.

I don't see Berk in the room. Do you want me to come back to you?

Yeah. If you just if you could, I'd appreciate it. Thank you. I thought I was standing there.

We'll go to elections and then come right back to you. So at this point, we'll bring forward Gina Martinez from the elections department.

Good morning, chair Lopez, members of the board of supervisors, CAO Della Rosa, members of the community. I am Gina Martinez, registrar of voters. I'll be presenting the elections department augmentation request. I will begin by providing some context re regarding changes in the election revenue cycle. The department generates revenue by charging billable jurisdictions for their prorated share of election costs.

By law, these jurisdictions include city schools and special districts. Now in 2017, billable jurisdictions moved from the odd year city school and special district election cycle to consolidate with the even year general election cycle. At that time, the department reported to the board of supervisors on the fiscal impact of billable districts consolidating with the even year general election cycle. Now this is a point in which the department moved from a relatively stable revenue stream each fiscal year to alternating years of deficit and surplus with overall budget neutrality. The 2526 fiscal year is a deficit year in the cycle that includes the June primary election.

This is a major countywide election, and costs now average $2,500,000 for this election. Revenue now averages $175,000. The augmentation requests are necessary to conduct the election and meet our mandates as they are the same regardless of the number of billable jurisdictions participating in the election. This graph represents the major cost categories related to the administration of any election. The largest cost categories are staffing, which includes both seasonal and permanent staff, and voter guides and ballots, which includes production printing and mailing.

These two cost categories account for over 80% of total expenditures. Without additional funding, we will face challenges such as not being able to meet our core mandates, including the production and distribution of critical election supplies and providing services to candidates, voters, and observers. This chart represents department's augmentation request prioritized in tiers, taking into consideration mandates, guidelines, and specific needs of the department. Tier one lays out our top priority requests. These needs represent costs associated with meeting our minimum legal requirements to conduct any county wide election.

The county is obligated to absorb these expenditures. The county will recoup a minimal amount through reimbursements and claims. Those numbers have been taken into consideration and accounted for in this request. Tier two requests include an estimated increase in translation costs. Our election material must be translated by certified translators.

This request accounts for the use of an additional translation agency due to the retirement of a lower cost independent contractor. This request also includes training towards state certification for three election program managers who will be onboarded in the new fiscal year. Tier three request represents expenses incurred throughout the election related to activities that are encouraged but not mandated, including additional outreach, mailings, and advertising. If there are changes to election administration via executive order or a change in federal law, the department will return for an augmentation request to include voter outreach and education. Tier four requests reflect a request to release funds from the capital assignment fund for election technology.

That request has been approved for fiscal year twenty six. Now given the budget year, we are focused on funding tier one or top priority requests to meet minimum required services to the administration of the election and will reluctantly defer tier two and tier three requests. This concludes the presentation for elections. I'm happy to take any questions or comments.

I'll take note. Four minutes.

Four minute. There you go. Alright.

Questions from the dais. Supervisor Eskiew.

Maybe this is a question more for our budget team and council. This sounds like something that we're required to provide funding for. Am I clearly understanding that? That is correct. We would either fund it today or we would have

to fund it with contingency since we do need to have the twenty twenty six elections. Keep in mind, the recommended budget, we only cover the filled positions and certain items. There's other items that the departments will bring up that we were not able to cover given the access to the dollars that we had. So your board can certainly identify resource, or identify items you'd like covered.

So the so just to to part to to tangent from the elections department. So there's a and I've got a list of items. So so there's an entire list of items that we're we're sort of walking into this, CAO recommended budget with an expectation that we have a number of items that are legally required for, this county to fund, to meet our mandated responsibilities, that will require us to tap into additional contingency, dollars, in order to meet our obligations. Or if we were to be, you know, prudently fiscally responsible in a in a different way, not tap into contingencies, it would otherwise require us to identify reductions elsewhere in the recommended budget in order to fulfill the legally required obligations that are in front of us today? Correct.

Okay. Just wanna make sure we're we're all clear on those points. So this is one of those legally required obligations that we must find a way to fund before we walk out the door today.

Supervisor Church.

Let me provide a correction. We can revisit the budget later in the year. However, given the upcoming twenty six election, we would likely have to fund it potentially with contingencies. So it's not a decision that absolutely needs to be made today, but we will have to address it.

Supervisor Church.

Yeah. I

I'm not sure I understand how this is an unfunded augmentation when this and a few other things are legally mandated. It just seems like this you know, elections are the the leg upon which the entire government stands and why this is even happening to be considered as an augmentation. It I I'm not understanding. I mean, this should be this should be just in their basic one of these things knowing that it's coming up next year that it's gotta be done. Mhmm.

And so I'm kinda confused at how you know, a little confused, I guess. You know, not the word, but surprise, I guess, is the better word of of why it's even an unfunded augmentation into here. And I I just now kinda agrees with question on just where what are what what is the the basis upon which we chose our priorities to fund and then why we chose not to include this. And I think I think I saw some in the civil rights as well, and there might be somewhere else that seem to be legally mandated, and we don't have the funds for them.

Supervisor, to address that, to be clear, when we had the beat the budget workshop, the county administrative office was tasked with, keeping all filled positions. We have access to certain resources. One of the things that we cannot use is the contingencies. Or for example, we tried to not use very much of AA or and also try to keep a reserve. So the recommended budget does have certain items that will need to be covered.

The reason we did not cover them as part of the recommended budget was because the CAO's focus was to preserve all filled positions. So at this point, yes, there will be certain items that you will wanna cover, and that's why departments are presenting. In addition, the other item that you'll see that I know will affect you directly and myself is the animal services component of it. But, again, our specific task was to preserve every field position.

Other questions from the dais?

Yes. Thank you. I just want to see if you could just reiterate why we don't have the budget neutrality that used to exist. And more importantly, now that the election cycle has changed, how you're, perhaps unable to get the benefit of multiple jurisdictions or school districts or whomever to cost share and why we now no longer have this alignment, and our costs now exceed, the revenues that come in.

I'd be happy to. And this is a relatively new, condition for Monterey County and many other counties in the state. We, go into every budget year projecting the cost of any election that would come up and, the prorated cost that the county would pay versus the cost that any of our city schools or special districts would pay. In 2017, all of our jurisdictions that we would be able to bill left the odd year cycle. That meant that we completely had no, districts to bill during that year to offset the cost of any other election that the county would be responsible for.

And, they did that according to law based on a reduction in turnout. So anytime you have a turnout that is lower than the general year election, these schools, cities, and special districts would have to analyze their voting area, determine a certain percentage that would then cause them to legally have to transition to an even year cycle, in support

of voter

turnout. So we lost the funding during that year from all of these jurisdictions. Now in the even year, we do see an increase in in these jurisdictions, obviously, that are sharing the cost of the election, so it reduces the county costs overall. But in that odd year cycle, when we have a primary election, there really are no jurisdictions that we can bill out. So the county is left to pay the cost of that election. The election cost is going to be whatever the cost is, 2,000,000, 2,500,000.0 at this point per countywide election, regardless of the number of jurisdictions that we're able to share that cost with.

So, just to the CAO, my question would be, it seems like this is a new cost that we're having to figure out because we don't have the neutrality anymore because we can't two for one in some cases. And so, it it sounds like there's a larger conversation we need to have in the future of what revenues covering a state mandate I mean, a a mandated service that the elections department pays. You have to have an election. We can't choose not to. So I think that's a a future conversation, but I do understand how we got where we are today, and you definitely need to fulfill your duty, and we're all grateful for it. Thank you.

Thank you.

I think the theme of my time in office will be unfunded mandates. That's what I preach. So thank you for drumming on that without me having to. Any other questions from the dais? Alright. Thank you, Gina. With that, we'll go back to the DA. There's Burke, so we'll give you the floor.

Apologize. I think I was working off a draft agenda, I assume.

Good morning, everybody. Janine Pachiani, Monterey County district attorney. I'm glad to see my team is in chambers. Thank you to chair Lopez for allowing, our office to present earlier in the schedule, and I appreciate that to a to a personal scheduling conflict. You're gonna be hearing directly from chief assistant Berkeley Brannan, and he's gonna briefly be identifying the specific service cuts that are going to be necessitated by the cutting of nine attorney positions.

Although we are here asking for five attorney positions, please know that there is a real impact right now as a result of the unfilled positions we currently have. For example, we have two legal secretaries that are unfilled, and we two victim advocates that are unfilled as well. We have a backlog, and it's a combination of things. First of all, it's because we don't have enough filing attorneys. We don't have enough staff to input the cases.

And what that does is it creates a backlog of 1,700 cases right now, which is really an astounding number of cases in a backlog status. And we are addressing that with overtime and really getting on it, but it's not sustainable. And, that's as a result of not having the support staff to input the cases and then the attorneys to file them. But Burke's gonna go ahead and talk to you about the the reasons why we're requesting the five, attorneys right now, and we are reluctantly giving up on our advocacy for the victim advocates and the support staff. So Burke?

Thank you. Thank you, Janine. So we're looking at some real severe personnel costs. These are just due to the base wage salary survey, and what we're looking at is nine vacant deputy DA positions. That's 21% of our general staff.

We also are, as Janine pointed just pointed out, and we're not asking for this funding, but at this point, but we're gonna lose 20% of our victim advocate staff. We're gonna lose 10% of our legal secretary staff. We're asking that you you freeze all these un unfilled positions rather than just eliminate them at this point. But we are asking for funding for five deputy DAs, that would that would represent a 10% cut to our staff, our our our general fund attorney staff. And we're and apparently, slideshow is not working at the moment, so I'll just forge ahead.

You could just ask of Totavans. Yeah.

Next. So, why why do we have all these open positions? Well, you know, there are there are a number of reasons for it, but, one of the ironies of this is now that we have the base wage salary survey in, know, one of its purposes was to allow us to recruit. I mean, we really aren't competitive in this market. That's been evident.

We it's certainly for not lack of trying that that we can't fill these positions. We have a continuous recruitment. We're constantly interviewing. We're constantly doing our best to get applications in the door. And now that we've got a remedy for it, the kind of catch 22 solution is that we can't hire.

So next slide. What this slide is designed to do is just let you know that, you know, we're pretty good stewards with your general fund money. Only 53% of our budget is general fund and that is really quite unusual for a DA's office. Numbers are usually much higher than that. You can see what they are for the contiguous counties.

The thing is when you're relying a lot on grants, we do, the problem with that is the grants go to things that really aren't what you would think of as core responsibilities of a DA's office. They go to other things, welfare, health care, insurance, and workers' comp fraud, consumer and environmental protection. These things are all very important, the crimes that occur in our two prisons, but your general fund dollars that you invest in the DA's office, that goes to our core functions, the things that the crimes that you would naturally assume that DA's offices are prosecuting. Next. The we wanted to make the point that the money that you spend, general fund money that you invest in our office, it is money that it has ripple effects.

It's leveraged. It's it is money that is used to effectuate dollars spent at the municipal level, in law enforcement, in police departments, at the sheriff's office for investigating cases. So all that money that goes into working up a case, sending it to the DA's office, if we're not able to file it because we don't have enough general fund investment, then that money is is wasted. It's it's for naught. Next.

So we're gonna get into some service cuts, that that we're looking at here. Life for hearings are hearings in front of the parole board, and the parole board is deciding whether to let a murderer usually out of prison. They're they're there on an indeterminate term, which means they're there on a certain number of years to life, and the parole board is is deciding whether this person is a current danger if released. And so what occurs at these hearings, the inmates represented by counsel, victims appear these these hearings appear occur at all of the prisons across the state of California. And we did 128 of them last year.

We have eight thirteen lifers in prison right now in Monterey County. The way we do this is we use one of our open positions that is ready to be cut to hire an annuitant who handles this work. And if we're if we lose that position, we won't be able to afford the annuitant and we will not be able to attend these hearings. So that is a grave consequence in terms of what we're looking at here. Next slide.

We, as Janine pointed out, we are already behind on our filing. We use an annuitant. We need three full time filing deputies. That's what we need to file cases. Because of recruitment issues, we are using two and an annuitant, And if we lose this position, we're gonna lose the annuitant.

We need to fill it. And what will happen is we will file felonies, obviously. We're not we're not we're gonna get those filed. But we file about 10,000 misdemeanors a year and what I anticipate happening and I by the way, I was just meeting with a chief of a police department yesterday who was complaining about us not reviewing cases that they had sent in an ongoing neighbor dispute because we're behind. And what is gonna happen is these cases are gonna get older and older, and at a year, the statute of limitations for misdemeanors runs, and we aren't gonna be able to file them.

So they're gonna end up being triaged not by choice particularly, but just by an inability to do our job and long delays. I mean, even talking about a year, it it it's it you know, the these delays aren't fair to defendants who are waiting around to see if their case is gonna be filed. They're not they're not fair to victims who are wondering about their case. And we're already in a bad situation now, and obviously, that situation would get much more exacerbated if the cut goes into effect. Next slide.

Some of these other points that we want to make our current patchwork that we're doing to deal with our 20% shortage in attorneys, in general fund attorneys, and one of them is early resolution court. Early resolution court's a very important court to the operation of the criminal justice justice system here in Monterey County. It is a misdemeanor court, so about 10,000 misdemeanors come in, and they all go into early resolution court. And what happens there is we try to make an offer on these cases that will incentivize a resolution of the case. So it is a low offer not to be repeated.

And, the staffing of this court requires two experienced attorneys, to handle it. We we have a a vacancy. So how are we doing it? Well, we take misdemeanor attorneys, new attorneys who are assigned to a trial court, we yank them out of the trial court, leave their partner alone there, and throw them into this court for a month. And, you know, making the right offer, the finesse in settlements, it requires an experienced DA, and this department is not going to work at optimal effectiveness doing it this way. It's just a patchwork and it's untenable over time, as the slide says. Next.

So just to know, we're at ten minutes, Merck.

Oh boy.

Okay. I apologize for that. I am getting close to the end and I'll speed up. So our elder abuse, our boss, the district attorney, had to eliminate our dedicated elder abuse prosecutor. Counties of this size have elder abuse units and what's happened, instead of having a unit, as you should, this work is just being spread out through the office. And I think you heard Mr. Summers earlier today express his concerns and frustration with that. That's what's happening here. Next slide. Civil commitments and sexually violent predators, another area where we're requires specialization.

These are people that the prison says are too dangerous to release. You need to civilly commit them, get them into treatment. We're just spreading it out over our, giving it to our district attorney staff, it isn't viable over time. Next slide. And then our collaborative court, Prop 36, which are drug treatment felonies, mentally ill, veterans court. That is what occurs in here. We have a manager who's handling this court three days a week, and during those three days, the manager isn't supervising his misdemeanor deputies. Next. And our cold case unit. We have a we had a person assigned to this unit.

I think most board members are familiar with how successful the unit is, and what's happened is that person promoted. He's now an assistant DA. He's keeping this assignment in addition to his supervisorial duties. Next slide. So what's the cost?

You know, at a four step seven, it would be $1,700,000 We won't be able to hire, and we don't hire at that level. We generally hire at a one step two. It would be nice if we, you know, got a three or a four applying for one of these five positions, but the fact of the matter is that, you know, the it wouldn't even cost $6.60 $666,000 over the course of the year if everyone came in at that level because that's that's the amount if we hired five the first day of the fiscal year. So the cost is is is less and we're asking for the the $6.66 for these five positions. Next slide.

And this is our conclusion. You know, we we don't have surplusage right now. You know, we have enough to basically get along with, you know, bailing wire and duct tape at this point. But without these five positions, we just don't see a path forward. So we're requesting funding for them, and we're requesting you freeze the remaining, and and Janine and I can take any questions that you you have at this time.

Questions from the dais. Supervisor Church?

Yep. Thank you, Berkeley. Looking at the positions here, there's a couple of legal secretary positions, for example, which you're talking about the attorneys and, you know, what we need out of that. So are these legal secretary positions, when the when you don't have enough for that, who does the work?

Well, they just do the work. They? Yeah. Who's they? The legal secretaries. And so what we would what we've been doing, as an example, and I I realize this isn't sustainable, you know, we with our filing backlog, we offered either comp time or overtime for them to come in on their own time and work on that backlog. And so we have a bunch of volunteers that came in this last weekend and and worked. And, obviously, if we have enough money in our budget to pay them overtime, we can do that. Or if we didn't, we'd go with comp time.

I I was just, one, just trying to make sure that we weren't using attorneys for backfilling

some of We we don't do that. Good. They don't know how. Okay.

Well, that's comforting, I guess.

Supervisor Alejo. Thank you very much. Thank you for

the presentation. It's certainly very concerned about the drastic decreases in staffing at a time where voters overwhelmingly approved prop 36 to better address crime, retail crime, other crimes that were covered under the proposition. Do just going to the state budget, I know the state's not taking up their budget until next year, but prop 36 was appointed discussion whether the governor and the legislature were gonna provide local law enforcement more resources to fulfill the will and the intent of the voters of California. Any idea whether low local DA offices will receive more funding at this point in time, and I know we're on the we're only a few weeks away. I think they vote on the state budget by June 15, but there's budget trailer bills that might be deliberated into the end of session, at the August.

So but I just wanna know what may be coming to help offset the increase in workload that's coming as you're telling us, we're gonna have less staffing to do the critical work in keeping our community safe.

Well, it's a great point, supervisor Alejo. So I am on the California Days Association Ledge Committee, and my understanding, and this is really from yesterday, is that the money that's being asked to fund Prop 36 is for social services. That is, it's for treatment related to the drug treatment felony. So there's no money, there's no ask for DA's offices. We're just gonna, and I don't know what the story is for public defenders, but as far as I know, other than the treatment component of that, we're just gonna have to absorb this work.

If I could add to that. I I testified up in the senate budget hearing on this issue a week and a half ago, and the money is not, being directed toward, traditional law enforcement or DAs. It was being directed specifically at behavioral health services and probation services since that's gonna be the brunt of the work that is gonna need to be done to address the prop 36 population. So there's no funding in line for, prosecutors. I do know that the Public Defenders Association is requesting, I think, a $120,000,000, but, there's no funding in the works for the prosecutor's offices.

And, miss mister Brannon, is the DA's association making that request? If if

We you know, we thought the, I I think at a political level, our concern was, in order to make this work, we we needed the treatment money. I mean, we don't we don't want to send people to prison for for drugs, for drug possession. And, you know, our feeling is that, I know, in a lot of counties it actually works fairly well here. Behavioral health is doing a great job on this in Monterey County. But, and using Medicare, Medicaid, Medi Cal, I should say.

Sorry. But a lot of counties, there's no treatment component. They don't have it. And so the law says you get treatment. And so I think our feeling was that's where the money needs

to

go. You know, we can you know, we'll just deal with the the the rest of it. We didn't we didn't wanna advocate for the proposition and then try to cash in on it.

Well, that is one then I just expressed I'm just more concerned about your decline in staffing at a time where we expect, things to be much more busier this coming fiscal year. Thank you.

Supervisor Daniels.

Thank you. This is a question for the CAO's office, and I'm new, obviously, at this and curious the difference between what's the budgetary impact difference of freezing positions versus eliminating them? And does freezing mean keeping them unfunded?

That's exactly it. It would be the position itself would remain, but they would be kept unfunded. So the only issue there is just the oversight then from our office. We still have a hiring freeze, so they do have to submit a request to fill the positions, but that would be the only we would have to manage and ensure those positions were not billed because we don't have the revenue attached to them. Thank you.

Supervisor Hoskey.

Thank

you. I think this is a actually, one of the examples and one of the broader concerns that I have as we move through this budget cycle and into the coming year and future budget cycles is that we talk about strategic reduction of workforce. I think that was one of the things that our CIO had mentioned. But yet the direction that we gave to just keep filled positions and eliminate all vacancies was more of a it was not a strategic direction that that we as a board gave to our our CIO in how to move forward. It was it was more of a not not a scalpel decision.

It was a, you know, broad, I don't know, a hammer kind of decision. And and and this department, as a result of having a larger number of vacancies and and we're not having to, you know, I think be more strategic in how we move forward. So I think that the broader conversation, I just wanna make the point is we as we move forward, we need to be more thoughtful in the direction that we're providing to our our staff so that we are strategic in what we're asking them to do, whether it be in develop a budget that does provide us with the mandated services that are fully funded or in how we're moving forward with strategic reduction. We will have less resources. Our revenues are not increasing sufficient to meet the increasing costs.

We have provided increase again as we heard this morning, we've made a commitment to paying our workforce what they fair wages, which is appropriate, but the reality is there are limited resources and so we do need to our our our the number of employees that we have will be will be less. The the amount of work is not less, and that's clear. So in this case for this department, I think there is some balancing of what we need to do to make right the position allocation. And I guess the question is, is the five positions the right? Is the six positions the right?

And so I would look to our, I guess our staff. Have we had any ability to assess or look into that or in collaboration with the district attorney? I know they've worked really hard to determine what is maybe the right size. Do we have comparables? Is there any additional information that our CEO's team can share? I'm gonna

have Debbie come up and respond to that question, so she'll be joining you there.

Maybe I could just filibuster for a second for her. You know, we did we did realize that we we shouldn't come out of this feeling comfortable or whole. So we tried to, you know, if you count up the number of slides there, there's actually seven attorney positions on the slides. We we, you know, we can sustain I mean, you you can sustain going light for some period of time. I mean, you can do it.

You you can do it for a year. You can do it for two years. I mean, you heard from mister Summers this morning. I I think there's a a real level of frustration and concern in our office. We we tried to give you a number that certainly that we could live with.

But, you know, we we felt like, you know, at the $6.66, you know, filling it at that level, that that might be palatable. Going you know, filling likely filling these positions at that that attorney one, step two level would work. I I just wanna say, I didn't have a slide up there, but when you when you're when you're 20% down, you know, you know, that that I can't make a slide for that and kind of tell you how that feels. It's it's it's problematic.

No. I appreciate that. And I think thank you.

Debbie?

So just kinda going back to the overall picture of the budget. Right? And I think there might be a little confusion here. There are a lot of vacant positions in our budget. So going back to we gave everybody a baseline. The departments chose with that baseline what they can fund and what they couldn't fund. So if there's a vacant position that is scheduled to be deleted or recommended for deletion, it's because the department couldn't fund it with this funding. So back to your question, supervisor Daniels. It's it's the departments chose what to put in the augmentations and what to put in their budget for operation expenses. So if there if somebody's coming now and saying we need these vacant positions filled, they need the related funding for it as well.

So there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of vacant positions. There's a lot of departments. We have them in our office that are vacant right now. We funded them within our baseline and cut other things. So just kind of the overall clarity of the the departments trying to make their budgets work within the parameters that they had within their budget, and they need a little extra to fill vacant or whatever else may it may be. That makes sense.

Supervisor Daniels?

So for clarification, though, at that point in time, each department was given a baseline. Correct. It may have been different from what they had the year prior?

The baseline, it's kind of a complicated process, but the baseline does change with what we have. So what we do for the baseline process is you start with last year's number, you back out any onetime, cost. We make all the departments whole for the cost plan, general liability insurance and workers' comp. So that's an adjustment within their budgets. Then it comes to a new baseline.

We do what we call off the top, which are our debt services and commitments that we've already made that we have to pay no matter what. And then whatever's left, the departments either get a positive or negative funding based on their total amount of the budget. So the baseline the baseline budget that changes a little bit each year be and it changes it looks bigger for some departments and and smaller for others because of the swings in the cost plans and their liability and their experience rate in workers' comp or general liability insurance.

So my my last question would be if a department had a large number of vacancies, though, would they find themselves at a disadvantage in this process?

No. So they they can fund their vac vacancies with their baseline, or they could not fund them. So everybody's kind of in the same advantage. You're all in the same boat. Where you would find, the disadvantage from and in the DA's case is that, you know, the base wage studies were very favorable for them, and that's kind of where a lot of their, lot of their costs differences are coming from.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Right. Any questions for the DA? Seeing none, we'll continue. Thank you. So next up, we have the HR department. We're gonna send that to Andres Piper. Looks like he's got Kim Moore coming up with him.

Good morning, Jay Lopez, members of the board. I will be presenting the the fiscal year twenty five twenty six augmentation request for the human resources department this morning. The human resources department oversees and provides all county wide human resources functions, including but not limited to policy procedure implementations and compliance, labor relations negotiations, oversight of the most complex employee relations items, benefits administrations, HRIS, classification compensation, recruitment services for centralized departments. As you can see, there are about 17 centralized departments and there are 10 decentralized departments. Next slide, please.

So the decentralized HR departments do what we call department departmental day to day human resources. That includes they do their own recruitments, their own selections, and and transactions. They do departmental personnel transactions. They do benefit coordination, enrollment, adding dependence, and frontline employee relations support, but HR does the more complex stuff in terms of that. Given that, I would like to just present what my augmentation requests are.

This is down from our original request that we had of about 783,000. I will be discussing so we are asking for 30,000 in the classification of compensation study line for legal services for labor negotiations, 40,000. And then the quantum engagement survey, we are asking for 61,000 for a total of a 131,000. So briefly, I want to talk about the consultation service of classification and compensation study. Earlier this morning, you heard about the fact that so many of the compensation and wage and classification studies were taking so long. One of the reasons they were taking so long is that we did not have the necessary

One second, Andres. I just lost quorum, so I've gotta stop you for now. Give me one second.

As long as we stop the clock as well.

Yeah. Your clock is stopped. Alright. Proceed.

Thank you, supervisor. Consultation services classification and compensation studies. As you heard this morning, you know, there was quite some delay in some of the compensation studies. When I came on board in December 2023, I made sure that we caught up on that delay. One of the challenges we have there is is that we do not have enough staff in the classification and compensation division to do a timely and to do class and comp and base wage studies in a timely manner.

We heard this morning the remark that classification and compensation study could be done in twenty minutes. That's akin to taking your, basically, your symptoms, putting them in WebMD and diagnosing yourself. It's much more complex than that. The effects of nonfunding is delayed county responses to classification compensation proposals, continue working out of class of employees, impacts to services as appropriate duties cannot be assigned, and appropriate job classes cannot be developed. What we want to use this money for is where we have critical class comp and wage studies that we need to do that we can use an outside consulting firm so that we don't get the same backlog that we had prior to me coming on board, which was over seven years.

The legal services for labor negotiations, that's very, very important. Currently, we are still busy with our foundational agreement negotiations with the union of American Physicians and Dentists. And in January 2026, we are gonna start with the California Nurses Association, which is gonna be a very complex and involved negotiations. The legal support is really important for us with it comes to laying down this memorandum of understanding with UAPD because that sets the tone for future labor negotiations. And therefore, we have that request of for outside consult the funding that we need to do outside negotiation consulting.

The effects of nonfunding would, of course, be delayed county responses to county to union proposals. It could lead to some labor unrest and impacts the services to the public if appropriate contingency planning and legal measures are not appropriately completed in the event of labor actions. The last one is the quantum agreement. Now this is a very important part. Research indicates that when employees feel their voices are heard, they're more likely to not they are more than likely to remain with the organization.

We have just complete a big quantum survey, and we are basically now working with the various departments to implement the top three areas that have come up from that quantum survey. To continue these efforts, you know, we need to make sure that once we've implemented that we do the survey again. And therefore, we are asking for a just so we can continue with the contract for one year. Through the survey, departments can conduct surveys such as quarterly pulse surveys, job applicant surveys regarding recruiting experience, new hire and onboarding surveys, and exit surveys. The lack of effects of non fundings, the lack of employee engagement software program requires extensive manual analysis of the survey data collected and it doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurate.

And the cost is significantly lower than adding staff to assist the employee engagement manager. And I have to mention, for a county our size, we have one employee engagement manager for a county of almost 6,000 employees. That is so this software really has a huge multiplier effect. So in summary, my requests are going to be the class of comp studies, the 30,000 that I'm looking for there, legal service for labor negotiations, 40,000, the quantum employee engagement survey, 61,000. These are all one time funding requests.

I'm fully aware that coming to the board and asking you for, you know, ongoing funding requests is just not in this fiscal time viable. I appreciate the board's time. Thank you.

Thank you, Andreas. Questions from the dais. Supervisor Church.

Sure. Just looking at the presentation we had earlier and what you're requesting and and understanding for a budget office to keep up with, you know, as we go through this this last days of your preparation for the budget office to keep up with every department's all, you know, presentation. It can be really difficult. But I noticed under Homan, you know, a few things that under under this under the funded augmentations on the presentation, it lists three positions, which you don't seem to be emphasizing as much. And also, the legal services was a 100,000, which you've looks like you've trimmed down to, what is it, 40,000.

Yes. So I just wanna make absolute confirmation that because a couple of things are up in your augmentation request are not on this Mhmm. Presentation list. You would you consider these

This is what I'm This what we are asking for. Okay. Rather than relating to ongoing funding and at this point in time, you know, I don't think it's opportunity to be asking for something that would require ongoing funding. Thank

you very much. Other questions from the dice? Alright. Seeing none. Thank you both. We're gonna proceed to the Assessor County Clerk Recorder. Give you the floor. Marina Camacho. 19.

Marina Camacho, assessor, clerk recorder. Good morning, chair, CAO Della Rosa, and members of the board and members of the public. I'm here to present for my budget augmentation of three positions for the assessor clerk recorder's office. It's it's the same augmentation request that I requested earlier at the budget workshop back in April 28. Total of the amount that we are requesting go ahead.

Change it. Is 403,114. Three positions, an office assistant position of $103,004.76 to help make the assess the clerk recorder's office fully staffed. Right now that that department consists of three positions, two office assistants and a supervising office assistant too. Currently, we have two positions there And due to one of the positions was used to offset the wage study increases from 2024 and, again, used for to meet the GFC for 2025, 2026.

In order to offset some of the challenges that we face in that department is we used a position from the assessor's office side to cross train and currently assist in that department. But that's still even a challenge that the impact there is a reduction in staffing levels for the assessor side to help with the support the appraisal staff and the cost meet the customer service demands. One of the things that actually impacted the on a positive side, the clerk recorder side is that last year in February 2024, we started offering a service of civil marriages. That's become a quite a positive impact on the department and has been able to generate some good revenue positive to the department. This year alone, effective July 1 to the actually last week, we've generated 82,500.

That's about eight twenty five ceremonies. We're averaging about 18 ceremonies per week. Again, we could be doing more if we had the additional staffing, staff member. Right now, we have, doing those ceremonies, it does impact, the lines that we are able to service as quickly as possible. We are projecting that by the end of this fiscal year, we should have performed roughly around 900 plus ceremonies bringing it to about nine 90,000.

And we are also projecting that for next fiscal year with with the added services that we included for this particular service that we offer to the county and to the community. And actually, there's a lot of people that come from different counties that use Monterey County as the destination to come and get their civil marriages performed here. We are anticipating that we will generate sufficient revenue to fund this position for the next fiscal year, which brings us to my next two positions as the appraisers two. We have two vacancies that we, again, we use to offset the wage studies that happened in '24 and then also in '25, which were favorable to the staff. But, you know, as you can see, we don't get any new real dollars.

So, therefore, when we, as a department, have to choose what positions we use to offset the cost, is not a choice that we want to get rid of those positions or we don't want to fill them. It's just we have to make the sacrifice to ensure that we meet the general fund contribution that we are provided to meet on that baseline. I just wanted to put that out there. The appraiser positions are total is $299.06 38. So if if we are able our projection is that we will be able to fund this office assistant too. So, really, from the general fund would be, like, $2.99 38 as opposed to the

$4.00

3. These positions, as the board is very, very aware and CAO just talked about how important the property tax revenue is to the county in general. And looking at the current budget book, it is estimated that 312,000,000 of the non program revenue comes from the property tax revenue. Of that, 229,000,600,000.0 or 74% is of discretionary funding to this board. And I wanted to just point out that these two positions are a contributing factor to generating that revenue that gives it to the county and the departments to fund salaries, benefits across the board, those that rely on the general fund, including my department.

So we have we work very diligently. We are very lean in terms of what we do, and I wanted to just go over some of the impacts of not funding this. As this board is very well aware, the annual assessment roll becomes the base upon which the local property taxes are levied, collected, subsequently distributed to the cities, counties, and special districts to fund government services. While we do our very best to and we I have wonderful, great, committed staff that does the work that we do daily. I'm very proud of what they do.

I would be remiss in saying that it is not a challenge each year and every year that we have to consider what positions we are going to use to offset any new increases or costs or wage studies in this case, are favorable to our employees, which is very well deserved. Nevertheless, it is an impact and it is something that we have to as a department. As a department head, I have to make the tough decisions as to, okay, what vacancies do I not fill this year? How does this impact the workload? Well, how does it impact?

It's it's a delayed and reassessment and value enrollment, which is a delay to the general fund, less properties levied, less collected and apportioned to the counties, the cities, the schools in the special districts. As I stated, 74% of that revenue comes from the work that my staff does. Less dollars for the GSE used to fund all these salaries and benefits in the core services of the department, including mine. Customer service impact, angry taxpayers, property owners, untimely valuation, which equals reduced valuation for them or under assess, if you will, until we get to their their assessment change. Currently, we have the department, the impact to the department and the county as a whole.

We currently have approximately 4,800 remaining workload supplemental assessments. Tentatively could be drum up about $1,700,000,000 and this is based on a $355,000 per supplemental assessment. Having these two positions would help increase the basically reduce the workload to the staff that we currently have because they have an increased workload. In addition to having an increased workload, we have a couple of appraisers that aren't currently an LOA, which makes it even more strenuous on my current staff. Lower enrolled dollars to all the agencies that depend on the property taxes levied and collected.

So, consequently, if we don't have a fully staffed, we can't enroll the reappraisal events timelies and the county doesn't get the revenue from these events to fund the core services. Thank you for your time, and I'm happy to take any questions or comments from this.

Thank you. Questions from the dais? I'm gonna go down on this. I'm gonna start with supervisor Daniels. Sorry, supervisor Church. I know you used to go on first, but supervisor Daniels.

Thank you, and thank you for your presentation. I just am trying to understand the 60 to 70% discretionary funding that could be lower. And so I just have some basic questions about when is a property reassessed?

The property is reassessed anytime there's a change in owner, whether it's a purchase, a partial interest, a partial sale. When there's a report from the State Board of Equalization that they receive, information that an entity has caused a threshold of over 51% has changed ownership, so it results in a change of ownership. So anytime there's a change of ownership or new construction.

So a new construction, I would understand, requires some back and forth with a with a property owner. But doesn't all of those other things just trigger the reassessment, Or do you, in some cases, just rely on a previous assessment if you don't have the staff in place? I'm trying to understand the No.

We have to reassess them regardless.

Right. So I'm just trying to understand the relationship between the two positions that are needed this year and the potential loss in revenues that you're citing in

It's it's it won't be a loss. It's just a delayed a delayed revenue to the general fund. Delayed. It will take a little bit longer to work the events. And I will I will state this is that my staff works really hard to ensure that we capture everything as timely, but having a greater workload and distributed among less staffing makes it that much more challenging.

A 100% understood. That part I understand. So if there is a reassessment that's delayed, do you collect on past years that

Correct. Were underpaid? As opposed to the new valuation value. Correct.

Okay. Thank you so much.

I'm being just a little pedantic today because I want to make sure I understand everything and not make any wrong assumptions. But you did say that the office assistant position, can fund yourself, correct?

We are projecting that we should generate sufficient revenue from the civil ceremonies given with the additional services that we recently got approved on the free schedule, thanks to this board. We are projecting because as for this year, we're projecting about 90,000 or so for the revenue. So, leaves just a tiny bit less. So we are projecting that for next year we should be able to fund it.

Okay. So then we just started really looking at these two positions. So I just want to make sure I was absolutely clear on that. Thank you.

We're relying on love to balance the budget. Alright. That's right. No. Alright. Seeing no others, thank you so much.

Alright.

With that, let me take us to the CRO, and I think we've got Juan and Nadia coming forward.

I could start. Nadia's working on the slides, which should be coming up shortly. Good morning, members of the public, supervisors, and county colleagues. My name is Juan Rodriguez. I'm the civil rights officer, and I'm joined here today by with by Nadia Vilarde, senior analyst with the civil rights office.

I'm trying to rush, and this is making me nervous, so I'm gonna take a breath. But I promise it's under ten. We have a short presentation for you regarding our requested augment ations. Our first slide, as you can see from this slide, 90% of our budget is allocated to salaries and benefits, leaving little room to implement programs which are mandated by either the state or the federal government or by this board of supervisors. We are requesting augmentations for $118,702 which we group by program and priorities. As we discuss the augmentations, please keep in mind that these augmentation requests are considerably less than the average cost of a full time analyst position in our office, which is 200.

So to help you in the public visualize our requests, we organize them here by priority. We have the red signifying a vital a vital function, blue the mandatory compliance function and black signifying a maintenance of minimal level of service for the civil rights office, all totaling a $118,702. The couple that have an asterisk are denoting a function that is either mandated by the state or the federal government or both. So we are here focusing first on our first set of augmentations, the red highlighted augmentations, which are vital for a functioning civil rights office. We have the administration request here first.

This request is representing the minimum amount of funding necessary to run our office. This includes our copier machine, document translation, and our small office software. Second, we have our internal investigation request. One of our state and fender federally mandated functions of the civil rights office is to conduct workplace investigations of unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. This augmentation request allows us to continue to perform this function well.

This is essentially functioning to fund our case management system that currently stores our office's investigations for the last seven years. This is the software that analysts are primarily documenting and maintaining records of all investigations that we conduct. This is where we keep our files when county council requests them to defend lawsuits and where we store the information that departments need to respond to the state civil rights department or the federal equal employment equal employment opportunity commission. While the board while the board directed the CIO to full fund the full 24,000 for this, they had to make the tough decision to reduce it by 25%, which isn't sufficient to cover the cost. And then lastly, we have our mandatory training augmentation.

Our office provides two mandatory trainings to the county. One is the board of supervisors mandated civil rights training. The other is the California mandated prevention of sexual harassment training. We developed the civil rights training in house, but we need a software license to do this. As for the state mandated training, we contract with the vendor to provide an online version of the training that is updated frequently and works seamlessly with our learning management system, and we have a legal obligation to provide this training.

This is a good summary of the of these vital augmentations for our functioning civil rights office, but I want to reiterate that to have a functioning investigatory and preventive framework, these augmentations are really necessary. If not granted today, we anticipate that by September year, we will probably be making again the request to the budget committee and this board of supervisors for these augmentations.

Next, discussing that next level of augmentations, those that are necessary to maintain a minimal compliance with federal law. These two functions are developing an equal opportunity plan, which is simultaneously compliance and discrimination prevention. The other is implementing title six of the civil rights act plan, especially within it, the language access plan, which lives within title six, recently approved by the board of supervisors in February and required by federal law. The title six plan is not only a compliance issue, but a vehicle to serve our residents better and can prevent complaints of unlawful discrimination by members of the public against the County Of Monterey. To fully implement these functions, we'll need 11,000 for the federal workforce reporting requirements and 38,000 for title six, equaling 49,000 for both.

This 38,000 includes funding title six implementation, for full programming, including a community interpretation certificate for county employees with miss and a paid intern, among other things. However, acknowledging the constraints of the budget this year, we can make these two functions work with a reduced amount of 16,000. And this last set of augmentations are designed to maintain a minimum level of service for the civil rights office, including functioning funding for the community impact action plan, also known as CAAP, that this board also approved February 2025 this year. And the 10,000 for CAAP will allow materials for leads from several county departments for training materials, professional development, and the last item is for mileage for the community volunteers that serve on the two Brown Act commissions that our office staffs. So here's again our request of our augmentations.

We've told them hereby priority and what's most essential to our primary functions. In summary, our total request is a $118,702 minus the 18,000 in the recommended budget broken down as you can see here as follows for vital CRO functioning represented in red. We're requesting 57,000 to meet minimum compliance and discrimination prevention. In blue, we're requesting the full amount of 49,000 or the minimum 16,000 to maintain minimum compliance. Then this last set identified in black to help the county better serve our residents and meet minimal levels of current service, we are requesting 12,400.

Thank you very much for your attention. We recognize the really hard job you have balancing our residents' needs and are happy to answer any questions.

Questions from the dais. Supervisor Church.

Yeah. I just wanna get one little clarification on on your numbers here be oh, could we have that screen back?

I didn't stop there.

That's not me.

There we go. Thanks. Just pointing out. So I know and the investigations are 18,000 is already funded.

Yes. The board recommended '24, but, yeah, the the CEO's office recommended the 18. Yeah.

So you need another six?

Another six for investigations. Yes.

And and I know you down at the bottom, you say it's $39,003.00 2 is what you need, but up here, kinda gives the idea that you're asking for 57, but you're really only asking for 39, if I understand it correct. Am I incorrect on that?

Okay. Yes. Technically, yes. I don't know if the recommended budget has not adopted it, so it's just summing it up. Okay. I I just she gave for clarification.

We're really looking at 39 from

In addition. The recommended addition. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you.

We have questions from the dice. Supervisor Askew.

Yeah. I think this is another one of those, like, I guess it didn't occur to me that we needed to give direction to fund to to include all of our mandated legally required programs and services in the recommended budget. But the the is it the just to be clear, the 118 is what you would require in order to perform your legally mandated?

So the full one eighteen would do the minimal level of compliance that we're doing now. But like Nadia mentioned, we recognize how tough a year is. I think the reduced amount, instead of the 49,000, can do it with 16,000. So the total would be 87.

5,702. That would the one eighteen is for total programming, but minus if we do 16 instead of the 49, that would do that would give us about 85,702.

And to supervisor Church's point, minus 18 that was already recommended, by the budget office.

Oh, sorry. So 85 minus 18 or 85 total?

So 85 total including the 18 already recommended by the budget office.

85 includes. So what's the total amount additional dollars that you need?

67? Right. $67.07 $0.02.

Thank you, Sonia.

67. Okay. Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Brenda Brenda's numbers. We're looking at this we're I'm trying to get where we get to 60 7, and maybe I'm just looking at this wrong.

It's 39.

It's the 39 plus the 60 and the 12. Plus the 12.

Yeah. Missed that.

Thanks. Alright. Other questions from the dice? Thank you very much. Thank you all. Alright. We're gonna proceed. Going to DEM.

You guys are gonna pull it up. It is open. Alright. Good morning. My name is Kelsey Scanlon, director of emergency management.

Thank you so much for having me. I wanted to take a moment to thank our staff at the Department of Emergency Management. Since my first day here, not but seven years ago, they have been moving quite literal mountains and then sometimes putting them back, but have done a tremendous job in boring the weight of the county response to all kinds of natural disasters in Monterey County. So, throughout the iterative process of the Monterey County, fiscal year twenty five, twenty six budget, process, we had identified approximately four total positions that would likely be cut as a result of our, GFC limitations. Through the CAO's recommended budget, the administrative secretary position, which is a, full time permanent position and currently filled, is recommended, which leaves us with three positions that are anticipated to be cut.

One of which is a part time temporary retired annuitant, serving as an emergency services planner. One is a full time limited term management analyst two, which is currently filled, and one is a management analyst two position, which is currently vacant though full time and permanent. As you're aware, we have significant impacts in Monterey County as a result of natural disasters. But most importantly, it's extremely difficult for us to anticipate what kind of disasters might occur in the coming fiscal years. So we're constantly anticipating how we can be more nimble and more effective in how we leverage our resources, ensuring that we're meeting the ongoing and ever changing needs of the community, including but not limited to emerging new threats, rising disaster costs, increasing community expectations, and cascading impacts.

This is significantly less than what was presented at the budget workshop. We have taken a hard look and triaged our request, which is not to say that the original requests during the workshop were not necessary, but we understand the predicament of the current budget situation and have attempted to really be surgical about what it is that we're requesting. So this augmentation request is assuming the approval of our admin secretary position as part of the CAO's recommended budget. We had initially asked for a new allocation of a permanent management analyst three position, which we are now asking that instead of a new position, reallocate a current MA2 to an MA3, which would cost about $15,911 We are also asking for the allocation of or the excuse me. We're asking to retain one of our current vacant positions, which is a management analyst two to assist us in, financial administration, which I'll talk a little bit about.

If we're unable to do that, we would appreciate that the position be frozen and unfunded, but retain the allocation. We have also requested one time funds for an emergency operations plan to be updated, which is a mandate. And, though not included in this request, something for consideration is the emergency operation center budget as well as funding for grant administration for the Pajaro recovery program. So we have asked for the reallocation of a management analyst two to management analyst three to assist with local, state, and federal grant program administration and pre and post disaster contracts. This position was originally requested of the board in the fiscal year twenty three twenty three-twenty four augmentations, which Supervisor Alejo brought up during the budget workshops to assist with contracts, pre and post event MOUs, grants, and FEMA public assistance.

We had intended on this position focusing predominantly on FEMA public assistance. However, at the time, had to, repurpose the position to focus on the administration of the Homeland Security Grant Program, which is managed through our office. This position was staffed full time for a year after it was allocated, and the person filling the position worked approximately 98% of their time on the Homeland Security Grant Program to address the significant backlog as a result of grant monitoring and also served a total of five sixty eight hours above their annual time trying to make headway on that backlog. And that program funds things like the Monterey County Sheriff's Office SWAT program, the bomb squad, the Environmental Health Bureau hazmat team, the Salinas Spire hazmat team, the Monterey Peninsula Special Response Unit, the Monterey Urban Search and Rescue team, the search and rescue team, the Monterey Fireboat, the Monterey County Sheriff's Office dive team. So not an insignificant program by any means.

And so we greatly appreciate that augmentation in fiscal year twenty three and would like to, considering the significant amount of work and the complexity of the work, reallocate this position from an MA two to an MA three. We are also requesting, continuing funding for a management analyst two that is currently vacant. This position did have a conditional offer out when the freeze went into effect. That person, later denied the conditional offer and took a position with a competing, agency within the Monterey Peninsula region. This position was originally allocated to be a training and exercise coordinator, which is, essential for our ability to meet training requirements.

Those duties have been reassigned to an emergency services planner, reducing our ability to, update emergency services plans. We are requesting that this position be funded, and if not, that we retain the allocation but keep it unfunded. We require somewhat of a significant amount of flexibility in our ability to respond to whatever disasters are occurring and the subsequent recovery operations to meet the needs of our community and reduce human suffering and protect human life. And so having an allocated position allows us to be nimble and flexible as disasters occur, and we can hire quickly, or should additional grants become available, use management and administration costs affiliated with that grant to manage those programs which have direct impact in the community. We have not included it in this augmentation request.

Excuse me. We have included it in the augmentation request for a total of a 140,000. This position or this project was originally funded by ARPA due to the complexities of competitive procurement in Monterey County. It took about a year to find a vendor, and upon about the time we were ready to enter into a contract, we were coming to the end of the fiscal year. We are requesting funds to update the emergency operations plan, which is a mandate under, Monterey County government code as well as state and federal code.

This document serves as the county's policies and procedures for responding to various disasters in the county and outlines those duties, responsibilities, and authorities. I will mention that this plan is, a one time expense. We do it about every five to six years, and it is a critical service that enhances public safety, emergency services, and disaster response prevention and recovery, and serves the unincorporated area. The municipal jurisdictions are required to have their own emergency operations plan, and as such, this project does qualify for Measure A funds should you choose to fund it with that source. The Emergency Operations Center budget, this is a one time appropriation.

I believe this is the third year that we have requested this fund. It is essentially the buffer between us and the strategic reserve. Obviously, you can't fund a full disaster with $600,000, but it does allow us some flexibility in initial startup costs. For context, 600,000 can buy us forty five or thirty days for 45 families in non congregate sheltering. It can buy us community dumpsters for debris removal at no cost directly to our residents.

It can provide us free public transportation for evacuees for two weeks. It can provide us a emergency flood berm at Dom Pierre Park. So there is a a lot we can do with 600,000 that has a direct impact on our communities, that allow us to move quickly while without impacting the strategic reserve right away. And last but not least, we are requesting funds for a, to continue funding for a full time limited term management analyst two to administer the Assembly Bill one zero two grant funds in the unincorporated township of Pajaro. We have about six to eight months left on that grant, and then close out of that grant.

And so if unable to fund with general fund dollars, could be funded through Measure AA as it does meet the, below categories and specifically serves the unincorporated township of Pajaro. If that is unfeasible, an alternative funding source is utilizing assembly bill one zero two, which the board had not wanted to do when this program was, first established, but is a potential eligible activity under this grant.

We are at ten minutes.

And that is actually my last slide, and I will open it up to questions.

Questions from the dice. Thank you, Kelsey.

Thank you so much.

We go to the sheriff's department next. Just a heads up to the public, we are gonna break after this for a lunch break. I don't depending on how long this takes, I'll announce when we complete this, what time we will come back, and we will continue.

Stretch as we break. I'm being serious. You guys have been here through a long time, so it's a little tense too.

Usually say that at 05:00.

Not giving up early,

but is easy. We're only halfway through then.

Yeah. There's no easy answer, and we understand that. So thank you. Good morning. I'm, sheriff Tina Nieto. Presenting our budget stuff is my undersheriff Keith Boyd. To my left, your right. So, Keith, ten minutes.

Recognizing we only have ten minutes, our augmentation request is 645,000 per minute. So, we'll keep it brief. So thank you for your time, chair, and members of the board. Where's my just a little background on the sheriff's office budget looking at prior fiscal years. In fiscal year twenty four, our growth over fiscal year twenty three was $4,800,000.

That that dealt with $525,000 added to the sheriff's budget for creation of the jail compliance unit, $950,000 in restored funding of unfunded deputy sheriffs for the jail, and at that time, 3,300,000.0 in augmentation for increases in jail health care cost. In fiscal year twenty five, our growth over '24 was approximately $7,500,000 We received $4,000,000 in augmented funding to maintain '29 positions at that time. We received $2,000,000 in new funds for the implementation of our Axon technology program, body worn cameras, tasers, drone, the interview system. We received an additional $290,000 in new funding to expand our jail compliance unit. And non we GFC impact, but we added $1,200,000 in new revenue funds through CalAIM grants to help with the expansion of the mandated CalAIM program.

The reason I show this year over year is is when we talk about baseline, our baselines has grown, but it's never grown in satisfactory nature to offset true impacts to the to the need to maintain status quo. This year, in fiscal year twenty six coming in, our baseline is at a 168,500,000.0. It's recommended in the CEO's recommended budget to fund 21 positions that are currently occupied with 3,300,000.0 in augmented funds, bringing our recommended at this time to 171,800,000.0. So note, our our status quo to maintain for the upcoming fiscal year would be a 188,500,000.0. Now a lot of people or departments have put different things into augmentation.

We focused on incur ensuring our mandates were within our baseline, and then we looked at what are we not mandated to do. And so that's where the 16.7, it's gonna include personnel costs because we ran out of other non mandated things we could we could ask for. So to try to cut that request and to support the rest of the county to bring our augmentation down, if we look at our 188,500,000.0 requested budget, we've eliminated some augmentations from consideration. We eliminated an additional $22,000,000 in overtime we were seeking. We eliminated 750,000 in the partial Axon we were requesting.

The big one we've eliminated, because we don't have a new contract in place at this time, is we eliminated a request for increased jail health care funding of $7,200,000, which was a projection based on market. We recognize there's not enough money to go around, but we're trying to to sort this out. We're also working with our municipal partners across the county to enter into an MOU to fund three of our record specialists for services that we provide for the rest of the county to offset, which will bring in approximately 336,000 in revenue. That's bringing our requested budget down to about $178,200,000. Our recommended CEO budget this time is $1.71.8, which puts us at a still in a need for 6,400,000.0 that we're seeking and asking for your support.

That $6,400,000 is 1.45 is our Axon Technology program. That was originally funded with ARPA funding in year one. We have it still shifted to augmentation. But to meet the other 5,000,000 in augmentation needs, there's there's not services that we could necessarily cut. So it leaves us to 28 vacant positions.

What is noted in the CAO's recommended budget position is different than what we have noted in this slide coming up, and it's partially because of the continual movement of positions within the organization. So our vacancies when that budget was book was built is different than what it is today. Looking at that $5,000,000 augmentation request for personnel, 16 it's 28 total positions. 3,800,000.0 is tied to 16 sworn deputies, eight of those in the operations side of the house, which is out in field services serving the community, responding to to day to day calls for service, and eight of those are in the jail. We wanna note that all we've been under a hiring freeze countywide since October 2024, but at this time, we have approximately 26 deputy sheriffs ready to hire if funding is authorized.

We have people that wanna work and do the job of serving the public and serving in public safety. We also are short 12 professional staff in this vacant for 1,200,000.0 that we're seeking funding, and we have eight of those positions ready to hire as well. This is our prioritization list for our augmentation for the vacant positions. As you'll note, we have the deputy sheriffs in corrections listed number one and the deputy sheriffs in enforcement listed number two. And then we we run down our list of professional staff based on our prioritization of need within the organization.

This list is different than what is listed in the the recommended CEO budget book. So it's noted that the board would have to give direction on this to be the vacant cuts if they're to occur because the board controls the funding. The sheriff under government code controls the allocation of the funding, and so we've shifted we've moved to these positions to spread the impacts across the organization instead of being staggered in the CIO recommended, which heavily hit enforcement. Just to note, settlement impacts for our jail, for the federal settlement, if we if we aren't able to achieve maintaining the vacant positions, we could see a reduced ability to provide services to our incarcerated population and their their families that come to visit them. We could see a reduced ability to implement mandates from the state and federal government and federal settlement.

We could see increased hazards due to reduced staffing. We could see impacts to employee the employee wellness due to increased overtime or shortness shortage of staff to support them. We could see increases in overtime due to cut positions because the jail is a mandated requirement. We could see increased costs long term to our federal monitors in the settlement. We could see increased costs long term to the plaintiff's attorneys.

We could see an increased potential for judicial sanctions against the county and the sheriff for failure to implement the mandates of the settlement agreement. In field services, the impacts to the community could be with the loss of funding, for those vacant positions. To the Monterey and King City substations, we could see a closure of those stations or modifications of services from those stations. We could see the reassignment of sworn and professional staff from those stations to the headquarters in Salinas. We could see a reduction of the actual amount of patrol cars patrolling the streets countywide.

We could see extended patrol response times due to the, countywide due to the longer distance that they're traveling. We could see extreme delay or nonresponse to low priority calls such as food vendors, such as noise complaints, such as things of that nature. We could see a significant reduction in our ability to serve as the operational area mutual aid coordinator and support our municipal partners. Again, circling back our augmentation request, and and we know there's no money. There is a limited amount of funding to go around.

And and to fund this, you're really looking at contingencies and such. But we're we're focusing on the 1,450,000.00 to maintain the Axon body worn camera. If it's not funded, then we're gonna have to find a way to absorb that cost into our budget of what we're allocated and make it happen, or consider eliminating that contract with Axon and eliminating the body worn cameras. Because that's our one way to get out of that contract legitimately is a lack of funding. And as noted, funding of approximately $5,000,000 for the 28 vacant positions, 16 sworn, 12 professional staff, and we're in a position to hire 24 today.

Before I take questions, star sheriff, one more thing. I just, you know, wanna thank all of you for your time. I know you understand the value of public safety. I wanna thank the men and women of the organization who serve this count county day in and day out, give their heart, give their soul, give their blood to to take care of the residents. And, we appreciate your consideration for them, for this community in evaluating our request.

Alright. Questions from the dais? Supervisor Askew.

Yeah. So just an acknowledgement. I mean, you cut called it out in the initial portion, but the a jail health care RFP that's out. And can you speak to the timeline of that?

I'll ask counsel before I answer.

I I I think Broadly.

Yeah. Broadly.

Yeah. I think you can speak to when you would expect award to go out in negotiations to be completed with the bidder that that was awarded.

So we, supervisor, we are we are expecting that in the first two weeks of June that we will be able to begin negotiating with whichever vendor was selected for that future process to develop a contract. The current agreement in place that we that we have funding in our budget, baseline budget to cover, goes through 12/31/2025, and we would project this new contract to begin thereafter.

So middle of this budget year, we would expect a new contract to be executed. So there's a cost potential change associated with that that's unexpected at this point or unknown at this point that if the sheriff's whatever we allocate to the sheriff's office isn't sufficient to cover that, it ultimately would be something that we'd have to come back. And I just want to acknowledge that the board, the county, with the amount of resources that we've expended, we've spent most of our almost all of our one time pots of money, our savings. And as we go through this process here, it's looking like we're going to be asked to spend into our contingency today in order to meet, like, basic legally mandated services and requirements which will effectively leave us without many options, for resources available to pull from to, to respond to unexpected costs that come up over the course of the year. So I just I wanna be really clear about how tight things are.

I'm not putting you guys I've well, more to like to so that everyone's on the same page about the realities that we're facing. We've we've we've had one time money that our predecessors have put aside over the years. We've now spent all of that. We're gonna be spending the one time money that we have available for this budget year, and we're expecting that there are some unknown costs that are gonna hit us come come December, come January, come whenever this new contract gets gets put into place. We don't know what those costs are gonna be. I just wanna acknowledge that reality, and so thank you for the the presentation.

Supervisor Church. Thank you for

that question or the comment there, supervisor Ascot. It was one of my points I was gonna make there too. Could you go in and explain how you cut the 750,000 out of the Axon? Because it was 2.2, and you went to 1.45.

So the Axon contract cost for the upcoming fiscal year to maintain what we entered into an agreement with them last year is approximately 1,450,000.00. We had added approximately $750,000 into that funding for the next year to fund the replacement of drones that we lost in May 2023 during a critical incident, drones that have just service life or at end of serviceable life. Also, were looking to expand services with Axon to add what's called fleet cameras into our corrections vehicles. So when we're transporting incarcerated persons, we would be able to have in car cameras and and have for litigation and risk management. So that money is what was reduced from our augmentation request, and we're just staying with the the contract need at this point.

So to and to fund this, when for this 1,500,000.0, what's the the deadline for us to come to the phone with that? Do you need you have to have that one on this budget right now, can it come later, for example?

The bill will come due in fiscal year '26, and I as I recall, it's June September 1 with a forty five day payment terms. So we'll get the bill for $1550000.00.1.45 approximately September 1 and have to pay it no later than October.

Of October, something like around then. Okay. Thanks.

Other questions from the dais? Alright. So for my and my only question is looking at the list, it was a little we moved a little quickly through the numbers. But in terms of patrol, right, I I heard potential closure of Monterey, potential closure of King City, but big picture in terms of getting folks out on the street and visible. That's what I've always prioritized. I'm just curious given what you're laying out here, where does that fall in your final request?

So working diligently in the past to to impact the private like, the sheriff took office, we had 20 plus vacancies. And as of last June 30 at the end of the fiscal year, we were full sworn staff. That put us in a position recognizing all those deputies would go through training, start hitting individual solo this spring, March, April. So we have increased the transfer of deputies from the jail to the streets as part of our patrol training program. We have approximately eight to 10 deputies right now in patrol training, and those deputies will be on the street solo if they successfully complete the training end of summer.

And that this allows us to continue that path. If we lose these eight sworn vacancies in patrol, we won't have any vacancies to transfer anybody from the jail into to increase staffing until somebody retires, separates for some form, or gets promoted.

You need those funded or or are they unfunded? What is your retirement rate looking like right now to be able to backfill some of those folks in if we leave them unfunded?

Unfunded? If they're unable to be funded, unfunded is always better than eliminated. We believe we have retirements coming this summer, but we never know, because employees can seek to to reap the benefits of the pension system with the increased salary that we've given.

That's helpful. Yeah. Any other questions from the dais? Supervisor Daniels.

So just looking at this list to follow-up with the previous question. So we're talking about number one, that first eight. Those are the patrols you're talking about, deputy well, no. Deputy sheriff corrections and deputy sheriff enforcement. Which are the eight you're talking about?

The eight that the supervisor Lopez just referenced were number two. Okay. The eight and number one are in the jail.

Alright. Thank you, sheriff.

Thank you. I just wanna remind everybody, don't open any emails from me.

Or Keith. I got some from

Keith too.

I was entertaining. Pushing scams. Okay. So we're sitting at 12:11. I'm gonna reconvene us here at one.

So we'll take a fifty minute break here for lunch. We'll see you all back here at 01:00 to continue. In memory of Odie and supervisor Alejo will take lead on that. Go ahead and fire up. Just a reminder, we are in the middle of our budget hearing.

If you're just joining us, we just concluded the sheriff's item, broke for lunch, and we'll now be picking up the health and human services tab of our agenda. At this time, I'm gonna turn the floor over to Elsa Jimenez, our director of health, for her five minute present oh, I'm sorry. Ten minute presentation.

Good afternoon.

Chair Lopez, members of the board, CAO de la Rosa, County Council Blich, County colleagues, and members of the public, thank you for allowing me to present the health department's fiscal year twenty five-twenty six recommended budget. I want to express my appreciation for the health department directors and finance team members for preparing a balanced budget. A warm thank you to our team members that have direct contact with our clients, patients, consumers, and the general public for making them feel valued, welcome, and wanting to continue to receive health department services. And to the public for continuing to put your trust in your local health department, helping us bring additional resources to our county. The health department continues to expand its services and programming through receipt of new grant dollars and expansion of billable services.

We continue to rely on the general fund for those services that are not reimbursable through other means. The department's recommended budget for fiscal year twenty six is 17% greater than our current year adopted budget, funded with outside revenues and departmental revenues. The county's general fund contributions continues to be only about 3.89% of our total appropriations. At your board of supervisors workshop earlier in March, I presented the department's requested budget highlighting the general fund augmentation request for a total of $327,000 Your board provided support for the two investments highlighted on this slide. While we appreciate having received preliminary approval for 75% of our request for the spay and neuter clinics, we urge the board to reconsider and approve the remaining county share of almost $27,000.

A special note, the City Of Salinas' preliminary budget does include a 100% of their share for spay and neuter services at a value of about 98,000. Approval of the spay and neuter clinic ask in full will result in the successful coordination of about 45 to 50 clinics in the areas of greatest need based on data, serving up to 1,500 cats and dogs, supporting continued efforts to reduce unwanted animals, many of which end up in our shelter. By offering low cost spay and neuter services, we will achieve a decrease in the number of feral cat colonies and population over time and ensure our residents have access to low cost services for their dogs and cats in their own neighborhood and community. So this slide highlights the pending augmentations for your consideration. I'd like to note that there are four new positions that we've asked for for the Hitchcock Road Animal Services, JPA.

With the formation of the JPA or the joint powers agreement in January 2023, the costs are shared between the county and the city of Salinas at about 5149%, respectively. The dollars noted under the reimbursement column is the anticipated City of Salinas contribution towards requested augmentations approved by the JPA board of directors in February. The approval of these four positions will help us meet existing needs for services in the field, in the shelter, and expand capacity to pursue grant funds and programming services. Of note, these new functions could be funded with measure AA funds once those revenues are realized. So just highlighting.

So 27,000, balance of our request for spay and neuter clinics, full time animal control officer, full time management analyst, a full time office assistant too, and an animal care technician, all totaling about $253,000. So these are the two recommendations before you today. The first is to approve our pending augmentation request of about 253,000 in full, and the second is to approve establishment of fund balance for the joint powers agreement fund. Currently, the practice has been for both agencies to contribute proportionally towards the actual costs, and excess contributions are returned to the city and the county. Approval to establish a fund balance for the JPA will provide an opportunity to accumulate funds for future operational and facility needs.

The fund balance will be created over time by retention of unspent contributions from both the city of Salinas and the county of Monterey. And that concludes my presentation.

Right on. Five minutes. Alright. Questions from the dais? Alright. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate the presentation. With that, we're gonna jump into HCD's presentation. Mister Spencer, you do not get to keep the balance of Elsa's time. Just for the record.

Thank you, mister chair. Good afternoon, supervisors. Craig Spencer with Housing and Community Development. I, first wanna thank the CAO's office, Sonya and Debbie, for all their work on this, and appreciate the board support for some of our or at least portions of our augmentation requests. We can and will make do with the recommended budget as is proposed.

I this is my second year in the budget process, so I am still learning. But what I'm what what I'm want to do is just share briefly my experience with how this works. Essentially, we have increased costs, mostly salaries salaries and benefits, but all kinds of other costs as well. We get a a portion of the increased revenues, and then we're asked, in our case, in HCD, to balance the budget with essentially a million dollar gap. And that is, okay, how do we maintain the service levels we have with a million dollars less?

And we did have to eliminate vacant positions. Fortunately for us, they were fairly long standing vacancies that we believe we can continue to operate without. We did have to eliminate things for supplies and services, and we start looking at training budgets and all of the things that we have to pay for every year. And then we come up with what we can we we think we can live with, then we ask for what we need in addition to maintain levels of service. What I think is missing, and, again, I'm still learning, is the future vision.

And I think in future fiscal years, we keep hearing that it gets more difficult. And so what what we're trying to do is is think about, you know, not adding positions that we may have to eliminate in the future, but we do struggle with doing more with less continuously. In the world of housing and building, there's so many unfunded state mandates that continue to add to our workload. And what we need eventually is one time funding to help simplify some of the processes so that we can do more with less, not not it have people continue to do what they're doing above and beyond all of the hours they put in. And I do, on that note, wanna end by thanking my staff who are incredible and work extremely hard, including Laurie who helped us balance this budget, and I am available for questions if you have any.

Thank you, mister Spencer. Questions from the dais? Record at two and a half minutes. Thank you. Alright. Next up, we have Randy Ishi, director of public works facilities and parks.

Thank you, and good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. As introduced, I'm Randy Ishi, Director of Public Works Facilities and Parks. And with me today is Assistant Director Lindsay Larrabell, as well as various members of the Public Works Facilities and Parks executive and management teams. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to be able to present to you today at the budget hearings. As we have presented back at the budget workshop, we presented many needs, and as a result of that, we are very grateful to the board and to the CAO's office and budget office for granting some of our requests.

However, we are here today to parlay with the board about remaining requests that we went back and looked at it with a fine tooth comb and to meet public safety needs and bare minimum levels of service inclusive of mandated and sometimes state mandated activities, we still need those needs fulfilled, and we're coming to you to present those today. We'll go to the next slide for an overview of the conversation for today. And we'll start off with a brief department overview. We'll then talk about the general fund budget needs. We'll then talk about a new need, which is the road fund's budget needs.

Then we'll go into more detail about the budget augmentations. And to assist the board, staff with the extra effort to try to create some options to address one of the ongoing needs of custodial and security options for the board's consideration. We've we are stewards, and we feel we're good store stewards of the county's funds, and so we wanna present a full range of options for the board to consider. Then lastly, we want to conclude with a request for your support. We'll go to the next slide to briefly go over the department overview.

In brief, this slide represents the outside funds of which the department manages and oversees and provides to the public. In brief, and this has been presented to the public in the past, oversees the road fund, which is the funding source primarily for maintaining the twelve sixty plus miles of county maintained roads. If you were to take all the county's roads and stretch them end on end with one another, that would get you one third of the way across The United States in the East West direction. Other services under outside funds include the enterprise funds such as Lake Nacimiento and Laguna Seca Recreation Area, as well as capital projects and various financing authorities and county service areas. We'll go to the next slide in the interest of time.

There's a wealth of various general fund funded services that the department provides for county customers, whether they be internal customers or external customers. The department manages and oversees over 2,740,000 square feet of county owned building space and an additional approximately 400,000 in leased building space. They do the architectural services. They oversee the long term maintenance, which is the rehabilitation of these various county buildings and grounds. And it oversees over 30,000 acres of parks and open space for the county for the our public to be able to recreate and enjoy.

Additionally, there's almost 3,000 acres of former Fort Ord lands that came to the county after the dissolution of the Fort Ord Reuse Authority. There's county disposal site areas, and the slide shows the various other lists of activities we perform. In interest of time, we'll go to the next slide. And so with that, we go to our general fund budget needs. Pausing here for just a moment on our general fund recommended budget, and as presented by other departments to you today, there were increased costs that need to be accounted for.

And this department's philosophy, due to the increased labor costs, material costs, fuel costs, and just the ever increasing price increases that we're experiencing, the department first chose to cut anything that was not necessary. And so we cut our nonmandatory trainings, we cut all of our conferences, we cut contractors, we reduced consultants, We even reduced our vehicle replacement fund known as the vehicle asset management program, aka the the monthly financing tool that we pay into. So that way, when a vehicle needs to be replaced, we have funding built up to be able to replace that vehicle. For all of our units, we are suspending those payments for at least this entire fiscal year to be revisited at a later time. All of this was then done so that we did not have to offer positions.

The last thing this department wants to do as its philosophy is offer any positions. And so the very last ones we would offer up are the existing filled positions. Layoffs are the last things the department will do as the county employees are the greatest asset for the department and the spokes of the county will to keep it going. So ultimately, we did need to cut to the point where you need to offer up our vacant positions. It was not that the positions were not needed.

It is that the positions were vacant, and that was the last funding source we were able to draw from. All those, cumulatively summed together, represent on the right hand side of the slide where it says the baseline reductions to meet general fund contributions. That's where the $5,000,000 comes from, inclusive of nine full time equivalent positions. So here again, we cut everything possible in order to make a $5,000,000 cut possible in order to make a balanced budget. And all of this was here again, those efforts to preserve positions, to keep the day use parks free, and also keep other existing services going to a very bare minimum baseline level of service.

We'll go on to the next slide to briefly talk about the new need, is the road fund budget needs. Similarly, on the road fund side, we are significantly delaying recruitment suppositions. We cut non mandatory trainings. We cut contractors. We cut materials, supplies, our consultants.

We here again, we've suspended those vehicle asset management program payments, aka the vehicle replacement fund payments, to be revisited at a future date. And with the most recent newer emerging thing that we learned in the recommended budget is that there's a reduction in the TOT contribution, a. K. A. Transient occupancy tax contribution, of general fund dollars to the road fund.

That reduction is approximately $3,200,000 And with this difference of having only the bare minimum maintenance effort payment made as opposed to the 25% of the county's transient occupancy tax, what that effectively does is it suspends the local road rehabilitation program. And what that further means is that it would put into risk the completion of the road resurfacing in CSA 17 Tierra Grande, a community that is in progress. It would put in at risk the next set of work we planned on doing, which is the streets in San Ardo. To be clear, there's a state funded grant for sidewalks in the community of San Ardo. That is still progressing, but it's the next phase of work, which was the planned road resurfacing in the community of San Ardo, would then be suspended.

And a last set of planned activity was the design work for the community of Spreckels. Additionally, it suspends the community road maintenance program to the tune of approximately $780,000. So the next slide, takes us into a little bit more detail about it. This is just a reminder that the Board passed a policy known as a local road rehabilitation program policy this past year. And as we discussed and agreed to at that time, the difference between the 25% of the county's transient occupancy tax and the maintenance of effort requirement through various funding requirements, such as the Transportation Agency for Monterey County Measure X Ordinance requirement, as well as the state's requirement.

There's a minimum that they require for general fund contribution to the road fund, and so that difference between those two numbers represents the funding source for those local roads and the program of local roads to be rehabilitated, as well as some other needs such as the annual sealcoat program and other programs that are performed. So we'll go to the next slide. And here we'll talk about our general fund unit augmentations in further detail, starting with the highest priority and going to the lower priorities. So priority number one is to restore four vacant positions in our parks division. The total of these four positions is approximately $580,000 and two of these positions are county park ranger positions.

As the board and public had heard earlier today in the AB two five six one presentation, these positions are vacant, and they are in exceedance of the threshold of that vacancy number that's requiring that report out, among other things. And there were also cases being made by the county park rangers for having these additional vacant positions filled. If these positions were not to be filled, then as stated by our parks rangers, the department would be extremely challenged if not not able to staff our various parks with a park ranger. Or in other words, there would be days that would go by and there's not a park ranger who is available. Many of them are working overtime hours, particularly during the summertime season when we have the greatest visitorship, enjoying our lakes as well as some of our parks.

So we're asking for those positions to be restored. We're also asking for the senior parks utility water system specialist. That's been a very difficult position to fill similar to the county park rangers with the senior park utility and water system specialist. That's a state requirement in that there's licenses that are held by that position that are needed for the water treatment plants and the wastewater treatment plants at the parks and lakes. What we've currently been doing is we have been using that set of salaries and benefits to fund a consultant to perform that duty and thus keep the county in compliance with the state requirement.

If we do not receive the funding for the position, whether it be through the consultant or for this full time position, we are at risk with the water and wastewater treatment systems.

Just to note, we're at ten minutes, mister Rishi.

Okay. Very good. I'll I'll quickly wrap it up then. And the the senior secretary's last position. We'll go brief very briefly through the last set of slides. So priority number two is restoring the funding for the Como River Lagoon sandbar management. Number three and four are the custodial services for the multi use facilities. And we'll talk about those at the end of the presentation in a little bit more detail. But we have a range of options for the board to consider. The request is to fund those to the preexisting amounts.

Next slide, please. Priority number five, as we have discussed before, is the Fort Ord open space unscheduled maintenance. We're asking for an allowance to do the veg management at the former Fort Ord. Next slide, please. Prior number six is the encampment cleanup for an allowance to do homeless encampment cleanup should that need arise.

And then lastly, we're asking for a small amount of general fund dollars for the Lake San Antonio Landfill's Post Closure Monitoring Report. So in summary, in terms of augmentation priorities, we brought together a scaled back version of what we feel needs baseline services. The total fund need is $2,260,000 But when you add in the new road fund need, then that comes to a total request of $5.45 ish million. And just as a reminder, these are the other augmentations that we had brought forward at the budget workshop. And so the original request of the budget workshop was over $7,200,000 We had pared back that request to being a little north of $2,000,000 But with the need for the road fund that emerged, we're asking for the $5,450,000 approximately.

And as we had discussed at the beginning of the presentation, we want to talk further about the custodial and security services. Recognizing the financial challenges the county is going into this next fiscal year, we did the best we could to try to find how could we fund both custodial services and security with the amount that was allotted to us post budget workshop. In terms of current levels of service, this slide, which is available in your packets, shows the existing current levels of service for the different county buildings. And so as we go to the next slide, what that shows is a range. Option number one we have for the board, with the existing amount that is in the recommended budget of $500,000 plus, we are able to do two days a week of cleaning of the county buildings, including the restrooms, and only on board meeting days would we have one security guard available.

If we were to select that option, that would represent no further requests needed for the security and janitorial services. On the other end of the spectrum, to keep things status quo the way that they have been for the for years, that would be the request to fulfill those budget augmentations to their fully requested amounts of $1,200,000 Looking for that range in the middle to find something in the middle of which might serve both the financial needs as well as the basic needs for people who pay for in the county buildings, Staff's recommendation of those options is a three day a week cleaning and having one security guard provide weekday service for twelve hours per day during the weekdays here at the government center. And then a different security guard, again, one security guard for weeknights and weekends at Schilling Place in the Ballora Yard, and that represents a request of $672,000 The next slide just shows the other range of mid tier options for consideration, again, all depending on how much could be available to fund the custodial services and janitorial services. That'll take us to our final slide where, as a reminder, these reduced levels of service to the public and county customers are a result if lose these augmentations, and these one time decisions could yield long term repercussions.

I take this to our final slide, and we thank the board for their consideration, and we open up for questions and comments. And that concludes today's presentation. Thank you.

Thank you, director Ishi. I'll bring it to the board here. I'm gonna start with supervisor Daniels.

Thank you, and thank you, mister Ishi, for your presentation. I have a couple questions about the local re road rehab program. But before I do ask that question, can you just articulate briefly the relationship between road regular road maintenance and rehabilitation and costlier long term projects over time, in terms of, you know, avoiding road reconstruction by maintaining?

Some questions, Supervisor Daniels. So there is a prioritization that staff uses for the annual plans every year for road rehabilitation, reconstruction, and maintenance treatments. And as pointed out, it is certainly less expensive with the treatment methods to maintain roads and prolong their life than it is to fully reconstruct a road once it has hit that pavement condition index range of the zero to 20, sometimes 40 range, where it requires a very expensive road reconstruction treatment. So in general figures, doing seal coats, which are pavement preservations that improve rideability, are approximately $500,000 per mile, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little less depending on the circumstances. And then for a full road reconstruction, such as what we would do on a road like Harkins Road a couple years ago, that level of activity requires $2,000,000 plus per mile.

Some roads do need it, and as we go through our priorities, we try to find that balance with Measure X priorities, aka the promises that were made in the specific sales tax measure, and fulfilling those campaign promises while also prioritizing other roads using that matrix that is in the spirit and consistent with the Monarch County general plan where we focus on roads that are ag routes or high volume or tourism routes. And so what what we try to do is we try to find that blend of fulfilling those measure x promises while also doing the long term payment preservation, like the seal coat programs. And one of those we did this past year was on Carmel Valley Road. And in the prior year, we did parts of Reservation Road and Blanca Road on the West Side of City Of Salinas and others. So we try to maximize that blend while also meeting these obligations of road reconstructions.

We do look at traffic volumes, look at how we can benefit the most people with the limited funds that we have. So that's all separate and a part of the local road rehab program.

So the local road rehab program, though, you're you're you're predicting will be impacted by the reduction in the road fund. Is that is that am I understanding that correctly? That it's the reduction in the road fund that is going to impact the ability to maintain the same level of of service from the local road rehab program?

You are correct, supervisor Daniels.

Okay. And then so I'm just wondering if you can walk me through one of them that you you mentioned, which was the CSA 17 project, which is Tierra Grande. That project has been approved, and it would be in progress in this fiscal year. And so are you saying that with this type of reduction, that project may sort of stop halfway through the progress in the next fiscal year?

If some questions to president Daniels, you would be correct in that there there was funding this year to do the first half of the roads, and this is a unique project in that it's straddling two fiscal years. It's straddling the end of fiscal year 'twenty five and going into fiscal year 'twenty six. So in approximate numbers, the first half of the roads were fully funded and were able to accomplish. Then when they go into the beginning of the new fiscal year, the remaining half of the roads could be accomplished. If we don't receive the funding for this next fiscal year, that does cause concerns for how to finish the project. It might even cause a suspension, and so we're looking for support on having that fully funded.

K. And is the seal coat program part of the local rehab real local road rehab program?

It's part of that entire general fund mix. So, yes, that's

correct. Thank you.

Supervisor Church.

Sealcoat program, is that the chip and seal?

That is correct.

And you're saying it's 500,000 a mile? I thought it was cheaper for but maybe it's, you know, reevaluation the last couple years has sent it up.

You're correct, supervisor Church. Historically, it has been $250,000 to $300,000 per mile. This last iteration, we found it had gone up. Could be attributable to fuel prices or labor at the point in time, but you are correct and to correct Steph's earlier statement, it is generally around the $250,000 to $300,000 per mile. These past years have just been somewhat anomalous.

And let me see if I have any other questions. Oh, The other question is on your priorities here. You have a one, two, three, four, five. Is that how the department views as one and then two, then three in that order of priorities? Or is it just the listing generically and we were to pick out which one's from that?

Excellent questions, Director Church. It is in priority order, in descending order. So priority number one is the department's recommended highest priority and then descends down from

there. Okay. And since you were supervisor Daniels was asking about the the road maintenance program and and everything. If I recall a couple months ago, board did have a just a little discussion about perhaps maybe bringing back what our current policy is for priorities. And hope sometime you might be able to do that in near future just so that we can kind of determine how we're gonna balance out between, you know, ag and commercial and residential use. So it's like, I know you're doing the best job right now. You can't work within that, but we do have a a policy that, is rather old. I don't know if the board is fully in alignment with it this time.

Thank you, supervisor Church. And, yes, staff is working on it as rapidly as we can.

Supervisor Alejo. Thank you,

mister Ishi, for your hard work and trying to under very tough budget circumstances, you really tightened up your departmental fiscal belt and really came up with these these minimal needs to just keep operations going. And and I get the full ranger positions and certainly the sandbar, which we see covered in the news every winter when when your crew is out there, when it's raining, when it and when it's windy and it's cold. Those are those prevent flooding and and it's preventative work that really goes a long way. But I wanted to just speak with on the custodial and the security. Obviously, the numbers you're presenting is just their proposed increases.

Cost of increased additional 178 is for custodial and almost just over 1,000,000 for security. What what is is that because the the people we contract with are saying this is what the increased cost is from last year to the next fiscal year?

Excellent question, Supervisor Alejo. What these numbers represent is not only the accumulation of increases in costs such as salaries and benefits on county employee side, but it also represents the augmentations that were brought through the budget process to the Board of the Budget workshop, and the numbers are changed now because we did get approved for a little north of $500,000 for custodial services. So that does reduce the ask at this juncture of staff to the board by that amount. So that remaining 100 ish thousand dollars is what we're asking for to get custodial services back to their existing baseline level of service. And then since there was not support for the security services at the time, the million dollar plus figure that the board and public sees is asking for the existing, here again, level of security services that are provided at the various county buildings, such as the Government Center and Shealing Place and at the Lowryard.

And so as presented through these several options, there's several options of a mid range for the board to consider if those numbers are too great.

Alright. Well, I hope to flesh those out a little bit more because I I'm certainly concerned on the on the custodial side, you know, because you you cut some of these days down to three. It's really disruptive to those employees, you know, to try to now find another 40% more hours during the week is hard to do. And I'm just I'm just concerned about that disruption in in their lives. The security, there's some ways that some proposals here to adjust the hours, but I would just caution, right, that that here we have these government buildings.

Certainly, security overnight at at them, whether it be the Laurel Yard, this facility, a shilling place. When nobody's looking, then then the bad elements start vandalizing. It'll cost us more to clean up any damage or any vandalism that is as Curtis, I just wanted just to be cautious of that, to not put ourselves in that position where we're later regretting having to spend money anyways to clean up vandalism or other damage caused. So, anyways, I I just wanna perhaps later as we make the decision just to look at what those are more closely what those options are to find maybe a middle ground there. Thank you.

Mister Kozlowski, any comments on this one? Alright. And I think mine are all, sausage making, so we're gonna go ahead and leave this here. Thank you very much, director Ishi. And at this time, I see that we've concluded those departments who requested to speak. But I know we have a few folks who wanted to make additional comments, so I'm gonna give an opportunity. I see our IT director here and give you the floor first.

Thank you, chair, members of the board, county staff, and members of the public. I'm Eric Chatham, chief information officer for the County Of Monterey. It, I'm here representing the ERP augmentation request, for FY 2526. During the budget workshop, we requested a $2,500,000 augmentation that was supported by the board at the time. This augmentation is required to complete the implementation of the planned ERP go live date of July 2026.

The primary reason for the additional funding requirement was the extension of this project by one year, which it created additional system integrator costs with our system integrator Graviton, as well as county resource costs for the year and additional licensing for carrying both Oracle and CGI for an extra year. We successfully have deployed the EPM, which is a budget module, which this year's budget was built on top of. So thank you, Debbie and team, for leveraging this the new system, the new Oracle system. Our budget book was produced by that system. We currently are targeting the HCM HR module to go live January 2026, followed by the ERP system in July 2026.

And with that, we we we respectfully request the funding to complete this project, and I'm here to answer any questions. 2.5.

Questions from the dice? Supervisor Askey.

Yeah. Sorry. This was included in the recommended budget?

It was not included.

Not included.

We have funding available with our current funding that is, available that will take us through January 2026. So there is the thought we can come back midyear as we see is the are we consuming the amount that's currently projected for county resources? That's the one controllable item that we have.

Okay. And I think that that's helpful. And and also coming back midyear is great, but if we've spent all of our contingency, then coming back midyear doesn't leave us with anything unless we've saved money for midyear requests. We already know that there are handful of midyear requests that are coming at us that could be fairly large, in nature. So thank you for making that clear.

Anyone else from the dice?

Alright. Thank you very much.

Adam, I'm gonna go to county council.

Thank you, chair Lopez. I can make it real quick. We have three vacant positions that are set to be cut. One attorney and two legal secretaries. We realize that there's not funding for them even though we could desperately use those positions. We're asking that they, that we retain the allocation and that they stay as an unfunded vacancies versus being cut.

Thank you. Those are the two departments that let me know they wanted to speak. Any others? Supervisor Lejo.

This is a question that mister supervisor Church and I had because we're both on the economic development committee. We had a hearing a few days ago where two I presentations were made. The the committee recommended unanimous approval for them. What we had a presentation from the reservoir. This is Danny Bernstein who's been working to try to get state money but actually has more detail now.