Remarks by Bob Nelson
492 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 20
“I'll go ahead and close public comment at this point.”
“Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the claps and the applause. It's appreciated. But because the rules of decorum in a hearing like this, what we do is the hand wave instead of clapping so that we can keep the movie moving along.”
“All right. Thank you all for speaking on this item. We appreciate you all being here. So we're back to the board here. And I'm going to take the chair's prerogative as this is a project that's in my district that I've been championing quite some time to kind of kick it off. And first of all, I just want to thank all of you guys for being here. Thank you, ORCA, for showing up. Thank you for advocating and sometimes wearing your heart on your sleeves. And I think that sometimes I see and I feel what you guys feel out there. And I know that a lot of you saw some things up there today and were a…”
“Thank you, guys. Just the hand waves. Thank you.”
“It's our turn now. Thank you. All right.”
“um what the options are in context to the other capital needs well let me and let me kind of maybe respond to that because i as just somebody that's advocating for this to move forward and some of that um prides himself in and trying to be on top of the budget this allows us to build it into that budget right if we move forward with this recommendation just like this last year you know for example this we built into the budget you know, the Texas HR1, right? So we had to put money away for, you know, $5.5 million this year, another $5.5 million ongoing next year to handle indigent care. And…”
“you know and that that will be a decision we'll have to make at that time we'll have to cut things out of that budget just like we're moving forward with the north or the north branch jail addition i think there's nine million dollars this year ongoing that we're doing financing there is that right channels and that's correct and so you know we're just trying to get this thing moved in and so we can budget for it so that it can be cake baked into the cake um and this is where we got the project to to this point um I will admit that I've been trying to get this item to the board for about a…”
“All right. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. Supervisor Lavagnino, do you have your lights still on? Your light's back on. Is that right? Supervisor Lee.”
“Thank you, guys. Just a wave. Just a wave is good.”
“Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and make a motion or sorry, Supervisor Capps, you guys went for the Supervisor Hartman, you have further comment or”
“LET ME ASK A QUESTION, THOUGH, THAT MIGHT HELP HERE. SO WHAT'S THE FIRST YEAR IN THE FIVE-YEAR FORECAST AS THIS SHOWS UP?”
“THIS EXPENDITURE. YOU'RE TALKING, IT'S PROBABLY, WHAT, YOU SAID 2029 OR 2930?”
“Similarly, we did the jail where we put $50 million aside so we could bring that number down as we move forward. And that's kind of what we're trying to get this one into the queue so that you can explore those options. It doesn't mean we're going to finance and do $3 million necessarily. That's kind of a worst-case scenario right now. Is that the way I understand it? That's the way I understood it as well. So, again... You can do other forecasts, but the math will be really simple. You look at 2029, you could reduce the deficit by 1.2 million changing the option at that time if the board…”
“So this would all be built into the five-year forecast, which is something that we're going to be budgeting for, right? That's what the five-year forecast is. It's a projected budget.”
“Right. I think that's how that's county finance in general is we move for these big projects. You know, we you know, we get to a place and we have to every year adopt an annual budget. You know, that's what we do. And we look at those things and we look at what those cuts can be. The question today is, do we advance the project forward? And I think we should. I think it's a good project. I think as Supervisor Labanino said, I think it's a need. And I so with that, I'm going to go ahead and make a motion that we adopt I'm going to go through the letters here and I'll go through which one those…”
“Let's make sure that under option B two, provide county executive officers develop a project financing strategy that can include ongoing costs in that strategy.”
“I'm saying option A is what I'm asking for.”
“The board, anytime we'll be able to reduce it, the project to option B by just reducing $1.2 million from a five-year forecast and choosing a lesser project. I don't wanna choose a lesser project. I wanna move forward with option A. But if the board's looking at future budget forecasts and you guys are saying, hey, we need to cut costs and you guys could identify that as a potential cost cutting measure and go down to option B instead of eliminating altogether, that would be something that the board would have that future decision before then.”
“So we could pursue both options, right? Is that... Was there a problem with that, Kirk?”
“yeah we can we can look at both i mean again like you said chair nelson it's a it's a number and it's just a formula and a line on thing and you change the so when we do our next side of your forecast it's going to have um probably i don't want to call it an asterisk but an asterisk on there essentially that says that if you don't when you're looking in out years if the board wants to make some additional cuts they can reduce the project the orchid library”
“And I don't disagree. And I mean, again, that's one of the reasons why I'm up at the state trying to lobby more money for us so that we have more money to do other things like this. I'm envisioning hopefully getting that $11 million of indigent care back to the state and that frees that money up. There's so many different levers in county budgeting. It's not a binary choice. I think we can do all these things. I think this is an important thing and I'm hoping that we can get there. But if we're in tough budget times, I'm somebody that's up there tightening my belt just with the rest of you…”
“Okay. Well, I can appreciate that, but two rows of 11, you know?”
“All right. So are we clear on the motion, though, right now?”
“So there isn't A and B is included on there? is part of the five-year forecast. Got that? Okay. So can we go ahead and get a roll call vote on this?”
“All right, thank you very much. Thank you all for attending here. We're going to go ahead and go to closed session with that.”