Board of County Commissioners - Special Meeting

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

with, I guess, the first of six budget sessions for this week and two next week. In the middle of that, we'll have a commission meeting, and so we're going to be kind of busy over the next couple of weeks. Today and in the coming few sessions, we'll hear from our departments, things that they've kind of accomplished this past year and kind of where they see themselves going in the coming year. It'll be good to hear from them. This is their opportunity to talk to us. We'll also hear from our constitutional officers much the same way. All obviously within the context of that thing that happened a couple of weeks ago as far as the budget issues go from Tallahassee and the direction that they're giving and the opportunity for our residents to study and then weigh in this election year. So there's an awful lot going on and I think for us to be productive, that conversation with our departments, but also the context within which we're working. And I know Barry will come later, probably July, but more likely August, to give us kind of final thoughts and recommendations for the budget. He needs a little bit more time than normal. Normally we'd be getting that probably in July. So hopefully we have a really constructive and productive six weeks, six, six weeks, that too, but six days ahead of us. So Barry, with that, I'll turn it over to you and get started.

And good morning commissioners. Today's like we say up here, day one, day one. And it's,

Mike. I appreciate them. That was Deputy McSweeney and Atkinson. Thank you for being here today. Thank you. Sorry, Barry.

If I didn't do it now, I'd forget for the rest of the day. Thank you. I understand. But I do want to put this in context. These are budget information sessions. These are not our budget public hearings. You'll have those here in September. Today's day one, and it's June 9th. We have to have a budget by October 1. So we have time. We have time and we set these days aside to where you can dig in and listen and ask questions regarding the issues that our departments, our constitutional officers and our appointing authorities are facing day to day as they try to bring you a balanced budget, try to minimize and make choices regarding request for funding. And that way you understand those as you ultimately make the final decision regarding how we're going to allocate the funds that we have and a final budget here in September. So we appreciate this time all these days and the hours that we spend because it's important for you to hear directly from them regarding all of those issues, and it'll help you make a better informed decision come August and September when you're having those hearings. and making a final determination on your budget. So today, I'm gonna provide a brief overview of kind of where we're at. We are not balanced, we will be. We have a lot of work to do between now and August. But this gives you a highlight. It'll also help you with framing the questions you wanna ask as we bring all of the different entities before you, and you can then hear directly from them regarding that. Pete will pull up the presentation. and get going. So as you can see on this first slide, our funds, our property tax, it grows, it's 4.2%. We'll have that on a future slide. All revenues though, as you see, are going down by 8%. And again, we'll dig into what all of those specific things mean. As you can also see, the County Administrative Departments, we've held the line on spending and we're actually 3% down on our budget request. You take, like, the sheriff's office, and he's going to go through that. It's all people-based. And his is up by 5%. Now, his does include a 3% budget request for salary increases. He's included that within his budget. We have not included that within the county administrators at this time. We always add that on at the end. So there's some differences between what you're looking at and what the budget is. If we had built that same thing in, ours wouldn't be down by 3%.

Barry, could we get Pete to put this up on all four screens? I can't read that one or that one. And you didn't provide this in our stuff, correct?

Correct. Was this in the slide? No. It wasn't in the slide?

We don't have this, and I can't see it.

Okay, Pete, can you pull that up on all four? Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm looking over. He'll send that right now.

Thank you.

Okay, while he's pulling that up, maybe he's pulling it up now. But what this really says, so the sheriff included 3% in. We always add that later for all the other departments so it's not baked in. It is something we're gonna address as part of the final budget. And then the tax collector included that in also because they have to submit theirs to the Department of Revenue for approval. What this says is that at this point, under these scenarios, we still have a deficit of a little over $18 million coming into the budget. And that, again, doesn't include the raises that we would include for all the non-sheriff and tax collector employees. So this is, you've seen this slide before, approximately 45% of our general fund budget goes to the sheriff, and the breakdown is typical. What I also will point out on this slide, our reserve levels are at 14%. That's below not only our policy, we will get reimbursement someday from the federal government from the storms, so that will improve, but until the check clears, it's at 14% right now. As you've also seen, you've reduced the property tax rate for the last five years. Our rate is lower than it was in FY1990. And the reductions that you've made through our property through the rate means that our budget's $100 million lower than it would have been had we maintained the millage rate from back in 2021. As we kind of highlighted there, our countywide property tax growth rate. Now that includes not that includes both new growth and also ad valorem value increases. Historically, you can see it was 3.7%, 26, 9.2 and 25, 11.7. 24 and 13.1. Again, that's a combination. That's not how much your property tax go up. Your homestead is capped at 3%. This is the total valuation, including new growth. So there's a lot of figures that go into that. So the countywide ad valorem increase is approximately $23 million. The MSTU for the unincorporated area is approximately $1.8 million. But you can also see that there's a lot of other things that are impacting the budget. For instance, our sales tax is down approximately 6.6 million, and that is directly a result of, or at least in large part, due to the repeal of this sales tax on commercial rentals. And we've talked about that before. Whether it's the right thing to do or not, it doesn't matter. This is the fiscal impact of that, right? And then, you know, while we're trying to balance our budgets and deal with all of these various things, the state decided to put a cost of living adjustment onto the public safety retirement systems. That one and a half percent cost of living that they added, assuming that the governor signs it, will increase the sheriff's budget by $4.6 million. We also were only supposed to pay a portion of the school board's costs that go to the tax collector. Again, another bill passed at the last second will change that, adding an additional $2.2 million in costs that we have to pay for the fees that go to the tax collector for the collection of their ad valorem values. As we look at the things that are not in the budget that I just mentioned, for each 1% of salary increase, if it goes to the base, is worth $1.3 million in the general fund. I mentioned the COLA for the sheriff employees, and that will also impact our firefighters at the airport, too. But that's not built into this. We'll put that on, obviously, the airport side. But we have several other things that we're trying to deal with. We're looking at electricity and fuel cost and whether or not we have sufficient funding in the budget to cover cost increases associated with those. Janitorial service is a big deal. We have a lot of issues with our current janitorial service and we're looking at options. THAT WILL BE FINALIZED AS PART OF THE FINAL BUDGET. BUT THAT COULD INCREASE OUR BUDGET BY A COUPLE MILLION DOLLARS. AND THEN DECISION PACKAGES. THERE'S A NUMBER OF DECISION PACKAGES. THOSE ARE CHOICES THAT YOU HAVE TO MAKE, BUT WE'VE KIND OF OUTLINED THOSE. AND THEN THOSE, AGAIN, WE'LL MAKE RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE BARE MINIMUM OF WHAT WE THINK WE NEED TO OPERATE, BUT THOSE, AGAIN, ARE OUTLINED WITHIN YOUR PACKET ONE BY ONE AND IT EXPLAINS EACH ONE IN GREATER DETAIL. So the way we got here is the departments were required to submit flat budgets. And you're going to see what that meant. What that meant is for you to submit a flat budget, you had to go back in and say, OK, I'm going to reduce positions by this amount in order to achieve that flat budget target. And so we do that, and we've done that for a number of years. That's how you've got to that $100 million savings, by challenging the departments to find different ways of doing business to reduce their costs. In essence, we've said, you're going to have inflationary increases, salary increases, health care increases, contractual increases, and we want you to find ways of being more efficient to absorb those increases to the maximum extent possible. So we've outlined those within your budget packets, and you'll see the decisions that departments had to make to achieve those targets. And you can also see where they submitted a decision package to say, we can do that, but here's what I have to do, and here's the reduction in level of service in order to achieve that. The appointing authorities were also asked to submit flat budgets, and so you'll see it outlined there. We have a number of preparation type studies that are underway. We've talked about several of those. For instance, the study that you asked us to complete regarding our health department funding and the way it's structured. And we have others. We're looking at fleet and the way we manage fleet operations. Those are ongoing. Those will be completed as part of this budget process, but they're not currently ready and we haven't had a chance to review the outcome or any possible changes as a result of those. We have efficiency and cost saving measures built within your BIS documents. So we, I always use the example because it's an easy one, but you know, if you choose to have a different level of service, if you want to cut the grass 10 times a year rather than 12 times a year, here's how much you save. And I don't think that's an efficiency measure Kelly put in. But my point being is we try to outline options for you that if you choose to reduce costs, here's the associated impact on service levels. Other possible funding sources, we're trying to look at other ways that we can move things off of the general fund into other funding sources where feasible. We're also looking at all the fees. You've asked us to increase fees for service as we go along rather than wait and get behind and have a large increase. So we, again, are looking at those, and those are outlined within your packets. At this stage, we've met with all the departments, the constitutional officers and judicial officers, and other entities funded by this budget. The dedicated millages at this point have been kept the same. Only the highest priority decision package will be recommended. But we're also really looking to make sure we look at a multi-year sustainable budget. We don't wanna use one time money for an ongoing cost, because then that just creates a future deficit that's even bigger. At this point, we'll continue to work with all of our departments and other entities to close the financial gap to where in August we present to you a balanced budget. Now, big change that just came our way. So property tax reform referendum, and I know Mike's got slides on this also, would do the following. If passed by the voters, it would increase the hometown exemption to 150,000 for the FY28 budget, not the FY27 budget. So it'd be next year's budget when we're talking about this.

Barry, that's the level that we increased to. That's not how much it's increasing by. That's correct. It's about $100,000 it's increasing by.

It's $25,000 right now, right? It's currently at $50,000-ish. So it's $100,000. Yeah, it's increasing by $100,000. That's what you said there, but I just want to make sure. And then it would go to $250,000 in FY29. It also establishes a pathway towards... There's a number of things that it does within here. It also restricts what you can spend money on to core services. That's very, very broad at this point. There would be an implementing bill that would probably further define that if it's passed by the voters. It also reduces non-Holmstead assessment caps reduced from 10% currently to 5%. And it also establishes new rules on how property tax rates may be raised. There's a number of things that would limit future growth in our revenues as a result of this. And so we're going to be looking at that and we'll be talking about that when we present our budget come August.

Any further definition on core government?

We have them. We're going to get more determinations and definitions to that, I think. Right now it's an interpretation. It's pretty broad. They also have things that you've done in the past and whether you have debt for that. And so there's a lot of broad definitions. At this point, we haven't gone through to try to determine what exactly would fall under that and what things we would have to eliminate. We've had this, as you know, just less than a week. So we haven't even, we've been really trying to focus on today and getting ready for this year's budget. We'll turn our attention towards this as we get further along. You know, as you also know that so the BIS documents, these were prepared before the state passed their budget. So there's some changes that will have to be incorporated into our final budget based upon the final budget passed by the state. But what we do know is that the proposal as submitted to the voters will impact every city, every jurisdiction that's supported by property taxes. For the impact of the general fund, that's a countywide plus the unincorporated MSTU will be a reduction of approximately $124 million in 2028. And we're going to pass this out to you. So he's got a sheet on that. And then $184 million in 2029. But it doesn't just impact the general fund. And I've heard a lot about, well, you're gonna have to trim services and things like that. It goes far beyond that. And I'll show you that in future slides. But it's big, like the EMS fund. The EMS fund supports basically Sunstar and the seats out on the fire trucks. It is a self-supporting fund. So it will have, by FY 29, $28 million less to distribute out to those entities. It is a self-supporting fund.

As we look- Very real quick on that number. Could you give us a little perspective on that EMS fund? Do you have the total? I mean, reducing 19, reducing 28, what that-

Yeah, so over here, so we go down to the second to the bottom. So currently it's 102 million, okay? This is the 26 budget, not 27, but it's at 102 million. That's gonna go down by approximately 28. So it's 27% reduction. And so we'll simply have to divide out the funds based upon the number of seats that we have out. We're going to have to come up with a methodology. We haven't talked about that. I don't want to presuppose what that would be. But that fund that supports firefighters is going to have $28 million less. And that's a fact. You can see there, but there's a lot of entities that are gonna see significant reductions. As you look at the dependent special districts, that includes Palm Harbor Community Services, Eastlake Library, Eastlake Recreation, Seminole Special Recreation District you just formed, Now remember, that's what they get is through property taxes. And it really depends upon where you're at. If the heavier concentration of homesteaded properties, the higher that reduction will be. If you're an area that has a lot of commercial and non-homesteaded properties, it's gonna have a smaller percentage than an area that doesn't have a lot of commercial and non-homesteaded properties. So you'll see some pretty significant differences amongst different entities. But this is the impact on the dependent special districts. This is the impact on the unincorporated fire districts. And as you can see down in Seminole, that's a 48% reduction in that unincorporated fire district revenue. Clearwater, you can see all of them. And we're gonna, again, pass this out to you. As you look over to the independent special districts, Eastlake Fire, I mean, they live off of their property tax. That's a 44% reduction. Palm Harbor Fire, it's a 41% reduction. But you go down to Pinellas Suncoast, for instance, and that's a 20% reduction because, again, more non-homesteaded properties and businesses. So you can kind of see kind of a flavor of how this impacts the different areas. Municipalities, this is a list of the area municipalities and the impact on their property tax. And even SWFMA wasn't exempted. And so SWFMA, then you can see the associated reduction. So, you know, if we take just the property tax and we look at this and we say, all right, well, we're just going to fund the constitutional officers and the state mandated responsibilities. So if we take the 27 request, we look at a historical average increase in what we've seen out of the different offices and we apply that to 28. If we just align that with the property tax proposal, We're $50 million in the hole, and we haven't funded things like a $12 million subsidy that we provide to 911 services. We haven't funded anything for animal services. We haven't funded the $24 million we spend for parks. We haven't, and we have to maintain our buildings. That includes the courts, the sheriff, all those different things. We spent $33 million on maintenance within just to keep the lights on and to fund our facility maintenance operations. So we're $50 million in the hole before we even talk about these other things that I just listed. That increases to $121 million in a 29 budget. just if we fund our constitutional officers and the mandated services such as a medical examiner. We have to provide the state their Medicaid match, which is $14 million, and all the other unfunded mandates that we continue to receive from Tallahassee.

Are there cost of living increases in any of those numbers?

It is, and you can see, like in the sheriff's, we've built in historical averages. Obviously, those could be debated about whether those budgets would go up by that amount for salary increases and things like that. But we're just kind of showing you a historical average, and we've overlaid that with the property tax of what it looks like in the future. Now, in full, you know, disclosure, we do have non-advalorem revenues, and you can see those listed at the bottom. But that's what we're going to be facing when we have to make these, you know, that's for the rest of all of county government, making up the whole and trying to fund all the other services that you provide. And that's before we get into, you know, anything else. So not to be doom and gloom, but we wanted to, you know, we've had this a whole week. And so we've kind of outlined this. We will go through this in greater detail. We'll talk both about what it takes to balance the budget for this year, but also we'll come up with options about how do we look at this in preparation for the actions of our voters if they choose to pass that here in November. Again, today through the 14th is our budget information sessions. We then have the maximum millage that you're required to set on July 21st. What I've asked, and I mentioned this at our last meeting, is based upon all of these changes, normally I'll present a balanced budget to you July 21st. We're going to ask that we postpone that to August 11th to give us a little more time. to deal with these things and also work with our constitutional and departments on options for you kind of in preparation for the budget. So we present our budget on August the 11th. We would then have, you know, we'll have workshops on the 20th, all of September and obviously passage at September 24th in preparation for the October one start date of the budget. We certainly can change or add to this, but these are what we have outlined at this point.

Barry, the idea really is that 28 and 29 budgets, where they'll be affected, we have to decide what we want to do to, assuming that it passes, what we want to start to do to bridge that thing. And then if it doesn't pass, what we can, I'm just talking out loud, so then we would make a strategy based on trying to make sure we can get to a certain point. in two years. That's right.

We need to start thinking about it now. And that's the reason I've also asked for a little bit more time to bring back options for you. We don't, you know, so let us work with our departments on that. Let us set some strategies up for you. And then at the August 11th, we can really dig in and look at what that means and then, you know, take your feedback and modify based upon, you know, all of that discussion and options that we present. That concludes my presentation.

Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Barry, on the level of service millage rates that we have to pave local roads, I think at one of our last meetings you said we started out with 1,200 lane miles that were failing, and now we're down to 200. I think that's what you said. So do we need both level of service millages going forward, or can we wind one of those down, do you think?

Well... We're doing really well on roads. We're not doing as well on bridges because we started four years ago. It takes four years to design a bridge, right? And so we still have more work to do, and I think you'll see more work over the next few years on bridges and culverts. We do. We probably, I mean, if this passes, then I think that has to be an option on the table. And, you know, that's something we could shift back to fund basic services. I would hate to unwind it all, But that, I think, is part of the discussion we can have. Right now, though, we still need those funds in order to kind of finish the job and get caught up for the deferred maintenance that had occurred for decades.

Again, we're in that cycle of continuing to invest in infrastructure that some of it's not due yet. So the monies that we would take away might not be there to help the next set of lane miles that are coming up on the schedule.

Those are going to be the tough choices we have to make. We went for decades without putting a lot of money into local roads. You didn't see big potholes on Belcher because the money that we got out of the penny we spent on a Belcher. Where we didn't have money is for local roads, drainage, bridges. So we had a number of bridges that are weight limited and they're inspection, they're safe and everything like that, but they were in need of either major repairs or replacement. and we're trying to get caught up on that. So the question is, at what point do we reach that threshold to where we can back some of that down? And I've asked that question, Kelly knows that, she's working on that, but we're not quite there yet. But it's a fair question we need a better answer for. If this passes, this needs to be on the table for a set of priorities for you to decide where we wanna put the funding we have available.

Just one other quick thing. I understand that you're doing this without programming any raises in for county staff, which I hate that, but it is what it is for the time being. Hopefully, we won't have to make that tough decision. I did notice doing some agenda review for next week that there's social action funding for $1.7 million for next year. I know we're going to do agenda review later in the week, but that one there just kind of just stuck in me that I don't think we should be giving money to other people if we can't take care of our own people first.

Well, these are the types of decisions as we set for the 28 budget or even the 27 budget. The question is, do you want to wind something down? before the voters make a decision, right? Or do you wanna wait and deal with it for the 28th budget? So it's a fair question. And even on raises, it's not that we haven't budgeted raises this year, we always do it this way. So we put the raises on at the end. So it's just a definite, it's not that we have said we're not providing raises, but it's part of the discussion we have that we've had a week to talk about that we're gonna have to consider when we get here to August.

Commissioner Saldala, and then come to you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To Commissioner Scott's point, I think I would definitely be supportive of preparing people for what's going to happen next year. I think this amendment will definitely get a majority, whether it gets 60% will remain to be seen. And so I think we need to prepare that the voters will approve it. And so to that point, are there funds that we have in our budget that, because we're gonna be in a situation of needs over wants. and we're going to have to prioritize our needs and not necessarily things that we want. Are there places in our budget and like the bed tax, for instance, is obvious one. that the definition of how that money can be spent can be changed by either us or the legislature and where we would have more flexibility on how to spend that money?

For that one, that would have to be a change in state law. We hear that all the time, especially from communities that want us to help fund their operations or whatever. we would need a change in state law. And so those funds are restricted. And I actually had a point up there about us looking hard at anything we can shift cost out of the general fund onto other funding sources. We've taken a hard look at that in the past. We're going to take a harder look at that now that we're facing this question. But to your point, we do need to look and be... for what could happen here in November as we prepare this budget. And we haven't had time to do that. I will tell you though, if we eliminate all the wants, we still have a deficit, okay? I mean, we still have a deficit. You can talk about social action funding and things like that. But for instance, the $2.5 million to the health department, are you gonna eliminate school nurses? I mean, those are the types of choices that we're going to have to make, because it's going to have to come out of that fund somewhere. So it's either going to come out over in the health department services that they provide, which means more people end up in the ER over at other places. So those are things that are going to take time to put together recommendations. And we do have time. I don't want to scare anybody. And that's the reason I've tried to stay away from that. Let us go through and evaluate all of those different services. But those are the types of things that we're going to have to deal with. We have time after November all the way until next October, but it's going to go beyond once how much remains to be seen.

But you do think there are items other than just the bed tax that could be changed by...

The legislature. I can't answer that. I mean, it'd be a big help if we just got rid of unfunded mandates that we continue to get, okay? But that doesn't seem to be working, and I'm sure I'll hear about that for saying it, but it's a reality. The fact that we're getting ready to eliminate or reduce property tax revenue, and then they add $4.6 million for an additional benefit. That recurs. That comes from the very fund that we're trying to use to provide public safety. It absolutely makes no sense, but that is exactly what happened.

The bed tax that you were talking about, that story is we have a million residents here, but when you add on all of our visitors for a period of time, there's an average that's much higher than that. So the impact on infrastructure is real. It's not make believe. And that's the argument for getting some of that money for infrastructure. Whether they buy it or not, it's true. It's a fact. So those are the kinds of things we're gonna have to be looking at.

address in the upcoming session and even if you did that for infrastructure it'd be different than operations because that that would go to infrastructure you know and you know i mentioned you know because we'd always talk about and i put up the constitutionals and those kind of mandated what everybody thinks about in terms of mandated services but you know we subsidize our 911 by 12 million dollars animal services we want to i mean come on You know, what would be the community impact, you know, for reductions there? Just maintaining our buildings. But that doesn't even go to emergency management. Look at how much we spend on emergency management and being prepared and the response that we were able to provide as a result of that preparation. There's so many different pieces that are basic levels of service that are needs, not wants. And so...

Mr. Peters. I'm sorry.

Real quick.

To that point, Joel, are we allowed to adjust what the penny does? and add things, like could we add some of the needs to the penny list when it goes before the voters, since that is something that's been popular to our residents?

The penny is a restricted revenue, just like the TDT and others, but within the restricted uses, you certainly could. One of the, I would say probably one of the major drawbacks, to the extent there is one with the penny revenue, is that it doesn't provide a maintenance for all the lands you might buy or streets or roads or bridges that you may build. So you can certainly rebalance the types of priorities that you might have with the penny. It would have to be confined by the uses prescribed by the statute. Again, with the major drawback being lack of use of those funds, generally speaking, for maintenance.

So I wanna go back to what Commissioner Scott brought up. So what I would not wanna do is just eliminate one of those funds because the roads and sidewalks, and we did that specifically to reduce the number of lawsuits. So the more than 1,200 miles of roads and sidewalks we've done, we've seen the lawsuits cut in half. So there's other ways that you're saving money. So it's really an investment. So the only thing I would worry about cutting that is then we... You save the money there, but then you spend more in lawsuits, right? So we have to find a balance on everything that we look at cutting on what the unintended consequences are. And so we very specifically put that money in transportation on roads and sidewalks for the very purpose of reducing trip and fall lawsuits. And we, in fact, did cut that. I got the data just recently, and we cut it by more than half. So we've just been really good stewards and we're just gonna have to find ways, but we have to use more of a scalpel than a machete and make sure that we aren't, or at least we're very thoughtful in what the repercussions can be and what the unintended consequences could be. Because we don't fly our flag on all the great things that we do sometimes. And that's a big deal. The money we saved in lawsuits is a really big deal. That was a great investment that we've done with a great return. And so I just don't wanna lose sight of stuff like that as we go through with this scalpel.

Thank you. And to that point, fixing a normally planned road improvement is X dollars. But if you're behind and those roads become a lot more expensive, it's not just paving, you're now talking about infrastructure rebuild. And I'm not, this is real. This is part of the reason we did that extra millage was to try to get, caught up on some of those really bad roads that were just eating us up on the lane. Mile cost was so much higher to your point on on lawsuits, which is a big deal on the sidewalks. We having we were getting hammered.

on that too so we're caught up on sidewalks it is seven to eight times more expensive to reconstruct a road than it is to repave it at the right time but once the base is compromised through water infiltration okay then it's compromised so maintaining that is very important i agree these are the tough choices that we're going to face mr flowers

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to share with my colleagues that in the Senate committee hearing regarding the utilization of bed tax dollars. That question was asked by Senator Whiting from South Florida and several others. And sadly, it was an immediate no, because the question was, especially for rural communities, could they utilize these funds to make up for some of the shortfalls in other areas for necessary funding? And immediately, Senator Avala, who was doing the presentation of the property tax thing, said no. I think it's still worth us exploring and maybe making that as one of our priorities because I'm sure we probably won't be the only ones, should this pass, I'm sure we won't be the only ones looking for other financial resources. So I think it's good, Commissioner LaValla, that you brought that up. But I wanted to share that was, you know, as could we divert that. And I apologize for being a few minutes late, but, Bear, I'm not sure if you also covered the component piece that the state was initially talking about having this grant fund set up where people would apply to the state. That also has gone away. So now you don't even have that opportunity to make application should, you know, you find a shortfall in a certain area and desire to make that application. And just as an FYI, if anyone has not seen it, Florida Association of Counties has invited state individuals to come and there will be a panel discussion on Thursday in Orlando only about property tax. So instead of having a speaker that we would have had for the lunch hour that we normally do, it's gonna be about property tax. So if you are going, I think it'll be worth coming in there and hopefully being able to maybe get some. We got the largest room that they have. But I think it'll be worth coming in there. And I don't know if there will be more answers or not, but it'll certainly be worth being in the room for the discussion. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Appreciate it.

Anybody else? Okay.

Next up, we have the property appraiser. Welcome, Mr. Twitty. Good to have you here. And a lot of his slides are going to be a little bit more in depth of mine, but kind of hitting on some of the same topics. Morning, Mr.

Chair, Mr. Vice Chair and Commissioners.

Barry, Chris, thank you for your help through the budget this year, too.

All right.

So I have no, I can't drive, right? Can I drive? I need the wheel. All right, so yeah, there may be a little bit of repetition in here, but I'm gonna dig into the constitutional amendment a little bit more and pull back the shades on it a little bit more, because there's some things that people may not realize. But we're gonna start off with how we always do with our value trend. This goes back to 2007, so that was before we went into the Great Recession. You can see that with the blue bars there, that's just market value. Countywide, as determined by our office, the gold bars are taxable value. The delta between the two is your exemptions and your assessment caps. Create that difference there. And you can see that that gap is still pretty big between the blue and the gold all the way out there in 2026. You can also, from this one, you can see that, well, Barry mentioned taxable value did go up 4.2% over 2025. That was predominantly because of recapture, which we'll go over that slide here in a minute, but that's basically those assessment caps riding up to CPI or 3%, whichever is lower for a homesteader, and then up to market or 10%, whichever is lower for a non-homestead property owner. so new construction you can see that that red line there big dip following the hurricanes big spike afterwards because that includes the repair costs as well it's the way department of revenue requires us to report it so we had to do all the demo had to be factored in for last year, and then this year we had a lot of restoration, we had a lot of removal of excess depreciation on parcels as people repaired, and that restored a lot of that value back to the roll. But if you look at those blue bars carefully, you'll note that over the last two years, you see it going down slightly. So it went down 1% in 2025, and it's gone down 2% for this year. So that's an aggregate, that's largely due to condominiums. Single family has dipped some, commercial has been flat or down, but condos, because of the milestone inspection rules, the increased reserve and maintenance fees that we've all seen happening throughout condo communities, that has had an impact, and they've suffered the biggest blow on the market value side. This breaks down the taxable value of that new construction, which is that 3.15 billion. So you can see there over on the predominantly in the residential realm is where most of those dollars are coming from in Pinellas. That includes your high rise condos down to your single family homes and your town homes and things like that. Commercial, not a whole lot of pure commercial. Most of the commercial new construction has been in multifamily rental. And then this year was different when we sent out the letter that I know went to the chair and probably get distributed to you all. We broke down between existing and new builds so you could see kind of the repairs as they came back on. This is a recapture. A lot of people don't understand quite how, I know this is Chris's favorite slide. So try to follow along here. So again, the blue bar is just market value rising and falling over time. The gold bar is assessed value, which is a capped value. So let's just assume Homestead in this scenario. So in this scenario here, the gold bar can only rise at 3% or CPI, whichever is less. So you can see in a large, upswing in the market that gap can grow pretty sizable that is also that amount that people can take forward to another homestead for port that's their portability amount or their save our homes benefit but then if the market turns and your just just value starts to drop your assessed value can continue to rise this is where a lot of property owners get confused hey my market value is going down how did how did my tax bill possibly go up And that's because assessed value is still kind of creeping up until it closes that gap. So until those two meet, so assessed value can never exceed just market value, but once they meet and if just is still falling, then it will push that capped value downward. You can see in this example, it pushes it back down and establishes a new base, and then the market starts to increase again and you start to build that differential. But as that's happening, two people's amount of portability benefit is getting squeezed. So this happened during the Great Recession. A lot of people, any port amount was essentially wiped away, but then it pushed them down to a new base, which was lower than where they were before, and then they started over again.

So, Mike, in that little gap area there, that gray line also just follows along there too, right? I mean, that's what we're saying. In that one area where you just had the gold line? Yes.

So that's where... assessed as caught up to just market, so that's them riding down together.

So if you had a little gray line that kind of went alongside of that gold line, it would be descriptive of where our market values are, too? Yes, no? I mean, be the same, one and the same?

They're one and the same in that example. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We could have made a blue and a gold line traveling together?

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Okay, thanks.

So here's a little update on what's going on with the residential market. Our sales pace is still slow. We're still slower than obviously pre-COVID certainly during the COVID years and even slower than pre-COVID. In 2025, we had about 11,000 single-family sales, and that's down a couple thousand sales from even back in 2016. So we're still a little sluggish there on transactions, and you can see overall single-family as a whole went down 6.7%. on a median price per square foot basis. That's countywide. Still, when you get down to different locales, different neighborhoods, you might've seen a rise, you might've seen static, or you might've seen a decrease. It varied. And then for the first quarter of 26 so far, we're relatively flat. These are realtor numbers. You can see the median sale price is a little bit higher than what we show in our numbers, at the aggregate of an entire year's worth of sales, as opposed to they're doing a one month capture here. So their number's a little bit higher. Median days to contract and close continue to creep up. The month's supply there on single family, I think is a little bit misleading because it only shows 3.7 months, however, which would normally still indicate a seller's market. But I think we all know that that's not really the case anymore in most areas. Like I said, there's some neighborhoods that have very low supply and other areas that have a lot of supply. So that's really the driving factor. And you're gonna see that here. So I've shown this slide before. The dip there, so green is your active listings of all residential in Pinellas County, and blue is your demand. So that's your sales activity. You can see over the years, sales activity really hasn't fluctuated all that much compared to listing, active listings. And you can see it's up there pretty good right now. The gap there where it closed, that was during COVID. So that's when we had all the bidding wars, everybody paying above ask, and that's why, because demand was overshadowing supply. So we've got some correction there. A lot of that is part of the condo issue. A lot of those condos are out there on the market. A lot of people are still trying to ask COVID type pricing. So, you know, there's still a lot of recalibration that needs to happen with people's buying and selling expectations.

Commissioner Scott. Hey Mike, what's your kind of longer term outlook on that condo market? When do you see that? starting to moderate or turn the corner the other way?

Most of them are through their milestone, their first initial milestone reporting now. So I think over the next year or so, you'll see at least some more certainty in knowing what you gotta pay going forward. But a lot of those maintenance fees have jumped Dramatically, a lot of those reserve requirements have spiked up. And it's really association to association, depending on how healthy they were to begin with going into it and how well they were reserved. Those were tough boards to sit on, obviously, because nobody wants to be the one to, and you guys get this. I mean, you have to do it here, but at a county level, but decide if people are gonna pay more or not. And when they're your, your friends and neighbors in the same condo building, they often don't want to, you know, they've kind of shrugged off some of those reserve requirements and now they need to put those back in place. This is just trend wise on transactional activity so that's just number of transactions like we said so you can see 2021 that was during during covet that was the highest level and you've seen it's it's kind of gradually dropped down since then so we're still kind of in the in the pocket of where we've been the last couple years on single family pretty close condos have continued to drop and largely because of what we just talked about still too much uncertainty seeing a lot of people going to contract and then what's presented as the maintenance fees they find out are actually gonna be higher than what they anticipated or there might be a special assessment or some other things and then they might be pushing away from the table. Our perspective here, where we stand right now with our residential property owners, 66% of our residential properties are homesteaded and 33% are not. So that's, and of course that's countywide. And once you get down to each jurisdiction, that can vary. Just a reminder, because we're gonna get into the property tax talk here in a minute, that we have had two years of, you know, we talked about the current homestead is broken into two bands of 25,000. One covers assessed value from zero to 25, hits all millages, including schools. The new property tax amendment is the same way. Schools are held harmless. going forward, but then the second band of 25 is 50 to 75,000, but it has been increasing at CPI for the last two years. So it is now up to 26,411. So you're at $51,411 is this year's homestead exemption. So you're gonna see that number again later, so I just wanted to point that out. Yes, only the second band.

Commissioner Flowers.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm not sure if you have already looked at or calculated, but based on the 33% of homesteaded properties that would receive the additional exemption, have you also calculated the number of properties that actually would not be paying any tax at all because the property value is far less than the $150,000 or right at the $150,000 or less than $150,000?

Yes, so I have, so the percentage of homesteaders that have an assessed value, because remember, it's an extra 100 or an extra 200, right, in the two years, because the 50 is already pretty much covered. So the percentage of homesteaders that already have an assessed value of 200,000 or less is 51.5%. And then if you look at those under 150,000, it's 37.3%. Thank you. So those would be completely, those people in those buckets, once they hit that year two, they would all get swept up in, they would have a zero tax bill, assuming no other changes, no new non-ads or things of that nature. But yes, but of course schools are still the same. So everybody's gonna still have a tax bill. Wanted to touch on a couple of law changes that occurred in 2025. This one's really important because of our hurricane impacts and we have a lot of people still recovering. and taking advantage of what we call the calamity provision in state law. There was a change that was signed into law on June 26th of last year, so it was after we met last year. So I wanted to make you aware, before the law change, both homestead and non-homestead, if they had a calamity event, they were able to repair or rebuild their home and not be treated as new construction, so they aren't getting They get to keep their save our homes cap or their 10% cap in place and repair and rebuild. It was up to 1500 square feet or 110% of what they originally had in square footage, whichever was greater. The new law change impacts homesteaders and now allows them to go to 2000 square feet or 130% of their original square footage, whichever is greater. So that's helping, especially the people that need to elevate and get up off the ground, that 130% is a big help. And now homesteaders have a five-year window to pull a permit to start that process to be able to be eligible for calamity. They have to keep their homestead in place on the property. If they pull it off or port it somewhere else to live in another house temporarily, then they will not be able to take advantage of calamity on that parcel. So they need to leave it intact. Doesn't matter if they've demoed it and it's a vacant lot, we can still hold the homestead there. and ensure the cap stays there. So they have a five-year window after the January 1 following the damage event. A non-homesteader has a three-year window after the January 1 of the event. Make sense? This slide is really more on the calamity. The biggie is to remind people not to pull their homestead off a property if they plan to rebuild or repair that and they wanna take advantage of calamity. I was talking to a fellow that I hadn't seen in 10 or 15 years, ran into him at the barbershop last night and we started talking and he said, oh, we really got hit by Milton, it was wind-driven rain, we faced north, we got blasted, we had water come in around all of our windows, ripped, came up under our soffits, got all, we had to redo our roof, our windows. He was worried about the tax implications. I said, no, you're fine. That's under calamity provision. He's replacing his windows, fixing his roof, all that type of thing. So important for people to know that. And another tool we've added, you know, we like building tools in the property appraiser's office. And so we built a new calculator for calamity. So our calamity calculator is to help people that are in that decision-making process, knowing what that potential increase in their tax bill might be. If they're under that, whether they're a non-homesteader or a homesteader, so it does the 110 and the 130% calculation, they just plug in their square footage, the area of their porches, there's a couple of things they have to provide the information for, and then we show them if there's any increase or not. In many cases, they stay under that percentage, they're good to go, and it'll show a zero, and there won't be any increase. But we know that that gets to be a complicated calculation for some. It does a lot of more complex things in the background, so we tried to make it simple for them. And a reminder of another constitutional amendment that is on the ballot that actually passed the legislature in 2025, just to make everybody aware, is related to the 100% elimination of tangible personal property. So anything with a TPP exemption related to ag equipment would be would be wiped off the roll here in pinellas we have the fewest amount of ag parcels in the entire state i think we're down to about 80. so our impact is is is nothing on on this amendment in fact they probably shouldn't even let voters in pinellas vote because of that but i mean we can't do that so uh So that will be statewide. But just to give you a perspective, when you get into some of our more rural counties, they can have as much as 40% of their tax roll from tangible personal property. Wouldn't necessarily all be in ag equipment, but a lot of it may be. All right, moving on to 2026. So when the budget passed the week before the property property tax special session. There was the budget special. And in the tax package, there were several ad valorem items. These are the ones that I just wanted to make you aware of. There's a few others that kind of get in the weeds. but one would put a 3% assessed value cap on lot rental parks, so mobile home communities that essentially are owned by a landlord, but as long as 75% of those lots are rented with annual leases that pass through the real estate taxes, then that property owner would be eligible to apply to be treated with a 3% assessment cap as opposed to the current 10% cap, which could potentially become a 5% cap down the line. Space Florida, we don't have any Space Florida exemption properties in our county right now, but we know we do have a lot of aircraft manufacturing that goes on here, and I have met with Space Florida on several projects in the past that they were kicking the tires on, looking at coming into Pinellas County. Their new exemption is going to broaden what they can work on so it won't just be space related, it will also pull in aviation. So just wanted to put that on your radar. Those are more of an economic development type thing and it really applies to the tangible personal property related to the ad valorem taxes. There was a change related to homesteaded properties if they're rented by officers of the US government. Now, if they are deployed, they would be allowed to rent out their homestead and keep their homestead and save our homes cap in place. There was a change to portability. So, no change in the timeframe. Several years ago, I championed getting Portability moved from two to three years, so that still is there and in place. However, now you get to pick the, if you own multiple homesteads within a three-year window, you essentially get to choose the highest amount of port of those three years and use that going forward, which is a little bit of an administrative nightmare for us, but we'll figure it out. And then lastly, the disclosure of estimated ad valorem taxes. That's the one I've told you all about, I think, for the last four years. And thankfully, that finally passed. So that is putting that property tax transparency on the online listing platforms. So it's been a little overshadowed by all the other constitutional amendment talk, but I'm proud that our association supported that, and we worked that really hard to finally get that across the goal line. do want to give Senator DeSigley and Representative Anderson credit for being sponsors on that and helping get it across the goal line. Thank you. Yeah, it was a challenge. I preached about it for a few years prior to that, too. I mean, it was something that I I knew it was a big problem and we needed to try and rectify it. So it's gonna add that transparency for those new buyers when they're shopping online, just to be able to get a realistic estimate of what they're gonna be facing instead of looking at that capped value that a seller might have been paying. I just talked to somebody two days ago and they're buying a property and he actually works in my office, so he knew better. And it said that the taxes were $100. Well, he was buying from 100% TMP vet, total and permanently disabled veteran. So the $100 was his non-ad valorem tax that he still has to pay for the vet. He's completely exempt from ad valorem. So obviously he knew it's not going to be that. In fact, it's closer to $10,000 in reality. Yeah, a little difference.

That's why I'm staying in my house.

All right, you guys might recognize that guy. I think he used to be a resident. So how do we get here? The biggest thing we hear, when we hear about people actually leaving the state of Florida or leaving our community, it's a bit about the property insurance issue as opposed to the taxes, unless they're a brand new buyer and they just were so caught off guard that they just didn't realize it And in many cases they don't necessarily leave the state. They might, they might move, change houses or change counties. Um, but that that's been the biggest issue that we have seen from our perspective in our office, the cap reset obviously is that big cold bucket of water on people when they don't know in advance and hopefully. legislation that just passed that i we just talked about will help that effort going forward so you won't have as many people that you know get misled at the at the um when they're signing the contract but um and then you know we have you've you saw that that graph i'll do it this way because that's the way it goes um And we've had 13 years of taxable value increases. And a lot of that time, different taxing authorities haven't necessarily moved millage rates, rolled back to offset that. And the legislature, the property tax exemption is something that's within their ability to work on and impact in an easier way than insurance legislation. There's private companies involved. There's things there that make it a bit more challenging for them. So a quick history on Homestead. So Homestead started back in 1934 in Florida at $5,000 of assessed value. Well, at that time, that was about the median value of a home. Now, service levels were likely a little bit different. More dirt roads, your fire suppression might have been your well in a bucket, and your law enforcement might have been your shotgun in many cases. So little different. In the 60s it doubled, and then in the 80s we got our first 25. We didn't get the second 25 that took us to 50 until 2008. That's also when portability kicked in. Because at that point in time, the Save Our Homes Amendment had started in the mid-90s. People were starting to build that differential and then realized they were kind of trapped in their homes. If they wanted to sell and move to another home, they were going to reset and they were going to start over. So it was starting to... There was pent-up... pent up demand in selling, people wanted to, they wanted to move, but they couldn't afford to really get out of their house. So portability came along and helped with that effort. And that's also when the 10% non-homestead cap came in. And then just in 25 was the first year that we've had the adjustment on the second band of, for CPI. All right, so, Like Barry said, we're really only a week out, right? So there's been a lot of quick digestion of all of this that's in HJR 1F, which was the version that actually passed. Remember, it did remove schools, so schools are currently now held harmless. They only face exemptions related to the first 25,000 of assessed value. The first year, the non-school taxes would be exempt up to 150, and then 250 in 2028, and then they could move at CPI in the future. It does have language in there that the legislature shall prescribe a uniform procedure to increase the amount of assessed value exempt from taxation up to the remaining assessed valuation, but it just stops there. The reference the governor dropped about 500,000, that's nowhere in the bill. There's nothing else with any numbers. So it really falls in the lap of the legislature from here on out. And I'm sure they didn't want to tie the hands of future legislatures on what they might be able to do. So today we haven't talked yet about the five-year Florida residency requirement. So... The way that's written in right now, if it passes, if you become a Florida resident by December 31st of 2026, and even if you're here for one day, you are considered a Florida resident by the terms of this bill. So you would be able to qualify for the 150 and the 250 as those rolled in. If you move in on the first, You are not. So now you have to wait five years, essentially. So it's gonna be interesting doing the residency qualification and I'm sure we're gonna get some interesting stories. And so we're gonna have to use a lot of different tools and resources to try and make sure we can validate those as best we can. So if you're under that, if you're a latecomer and you fall under that five-year residency requirement window starting in 2027, then you would be able to receive $50,000 homestead exemption, but it's not the same as the old $50,000 exemption. This goes zero to 50. Remember the other one was two bands, zero to 25, and then 50 to 75. There's no donut hole anymore. There's no donut hole between 25 and 50,000. So they get zero to 50. The first zero to 50,000 of assessed value would come off for non-schools. And then that can grow starting in year two at CPI. And then the other item, the non-homestead assessment cap, Barry did mention this, can go down, would adjust from 10% down to 5%. That probably won't have as big of an impact as a lot of people are thinking. For one, commercial market has softened, so we're not necessarily hitting the cap. on those recaptures, and then if it's a new purchase, it's generally not moving at 10% anyway. But another thing is you have to remember that any of those assessed value caps, they cap assessed value increases they do not cap tax increases so if millage rates change then that has that five or ten percent has no bearing on that it's you know it's a two very two variable equation assessed value times tax rate or millage rate equals taxes so if one of those you know if we're restricting this one but then this one cranks up then it's still gonna gonna raise the tax dollars We get that question all the time, how, you know, it'll be a 10% cap property, and it, especially when the school mill has just changed last year, and a lot of those properties, non-homestead properties went over 10% in an increase, and it was because it was the tax dollars. Those are your seven items that ad valorem is allowed to be used for, per the joint resolution. Barry already covered that. I do agree with you that number seven item is pretty broad. And I think that's being interpreted in a pretty broad fashion. And then we move into 4F, which was the concurrent policy bill. So they did take a couple of items out of there, which was DOR was supposed to stand up a tax savings calculator website that then we were supposed to, as property appraisers, we were all supposed to include a separate insert in our trim notices that were gonna go out to all taxpayers that would direct property owners, excuse me, to that calculator. via a website URL and a QR code. That was stripped from the bill by the legislature. What remained, the main focus is really on the adoption of millage rates and how max millage is determined before a vote is required. So basically the rollback rate in the new language becomes the new base instead of where you started the year prior. So it always starts with the rollback, requires two thirds to go up to 110% and increases greater than the 110 would require unanimous vote. And since this is not in the constitutional amendment, this actually once signed by the governor would take effect for this tax year. That's not a deferred thing. So that is for 26 or the 27th fiscal year. So another thing some people may not be thinking about there, too, is that So it says rollback, but the rollback rate in the next year, if you have a taxable value cut because of exemptions, so taxable value decreases, the rollback rate is actually a roll up rate. So that roll forward rate, is actually designed to balance to get you the same tax dollars that you were getting when the taxable value was at a different level, was at the prior year's level. So that's a weird scenario there because roll back will actually mean roll up in the next budget year. 28 or 27, which one? For the fiscal year 28 and 29. Well, so fiscal year 27, which is 26 and 27, right? That would be, this will take effect for that, but that'll be the rollback. So that'll be a rollback year. The next year, fiscal year 28, would technically be a roll up, roll forward.

It's sinking in. Well, because this year, taxable value rose. The next year, if the amendment passes, taxable value will be cut because of the exemptions.

So at that point, you would have to increase the millage to bring the tax dollars to the same level. So it's technically a roll-up rate at that point.

So for this one year, we're going to have the rollback rate will be our base. Yes. And we can, if that goes down 5% or whatever it is, and we're allowed up to 10% over that rollback rate. Right.

That's just the ballot summary. And I noticed this right away too, and I talked with our general counsel about it, last sentence where it says requires any person who establishes Florida residency after January one. So that kind of conflicts with what's in the statutory that says December 31 2026. So that that could add to some of the I mean, there's been discussion about some challenges to this ballot summary, so we'll have to see, but there's just a few inconsistencies, and that's another one of them. But they are deferring to the statutory language as that would be more informative, and that's the one that we would need to stand by. This is just breaking it down. This is assuming no other, So this is assuming millage rates don't increase, There aren't new non-ads. There aren't new fees. There aren't other ways of taxation. So this is just purely on ad valorem taxes. So you can see in year one that additional $98,589. So that's your difference between the $150,000 and the $51,411, which people are currently getting now. And there will actually be another year's growth on that second band, but we don't know what that's going to be yet. I took the aggregate average millage rate that DOR calculates, that's essentially countywide. I took the school millage out and then just ran it. So that would be at the aggregate average for the county. Some jurisdictions have a lower millage rate, some have a higher one. We have almost a 10 mil swing depending, you can be in a beach town that might be almost closer to 13 or 14 mils and then you might be in and in a more urbanized area with a 22 or 23 mil drink. So about a 10 mil swing. So that's kind of in the sweet spot. So that turns into about 12.2 mils. So $1,200 roughly if someone were to receive the full benefit in 27 and about $2,400 in the second year when it goes to 250. And then you can see all those assumptions below. So it's assuming a lot of things, stay status quo. So the way I look at this amendment, whenever you introduce exemptions, you're starting to potentially shift burdens and create some inequities. Obviously, the Save Our Homes cap has helped tons of people. Many of them are sitting in this room through the years. at the same time we all admit it it created some inequities right it pushed it pushed a shift of burden over onto newer home buyers and and non-homesteaders so i look at this the same way as far as it all depends on what shoes you're standing in and you may have a different perspective on on how you might look at the amendment if you're a first-time home buyer you're looking at a big cap reset, it's a lot of money, right? That property tax bill, I was just talking about somebody in my office looking at facing $10,000 tax bill. So it definitely would help them on their affordability and on their buying power and their loan qualification. It makes the numbers work better for them to get in a property. But now if you're a long time homesteader, it may lower or eliminate their non-school taxes, depending on where they are, because their taxable value may be down under that 200 mark or under 250, and it may wipe that portion out. Or they might be in a condo they've been in, and they might have a taxable value of about $50,000, so they're not going to get as big a benefit as somebody else, but they still may have their non-school taxes eliminated.

So, Mike, on home buying, like, Folks that are moving down here, they're thinking about moving down here. First time home buyers, lower non-school taxes will help affordability and buying power. I think on the loan qualification maybe, but I'm wondering how this starts to make Florida more attractive, driving prices back up again significantly. Well, that's one of those.

If nothing else changes, right? Right, right. And that's one of the things that could change. You could see demand spike, which could cause prices to rise, which may offset some or many of the savings.

They have no... Well, yeah, there's no sales tax. I mean, income tax, there's no property tax. It becomes even more of a demand, if you will, that's going to be created.

But if they're coming from out of state, if they don't establish residency before the end of this year, they would be under that five-year before they could get the bigger exemption. Right. You've got another example. So you have fully exempted individuals and entities. So your religious and charitable entities, they're not taxable now. They won't get a benefit from the exemption, obviously, because they're already fully exempt. But if new non-ads are created or things like that, those can shift over to them. Same with 100% TMP disabled vets as an example. And then you've got your non-homestead residential and commercial property owners. They're obviously not gonna get a benefit from that. We already talked about, just keep in mind that a reduction of the assessed value cap from 10% to 5% doesn't necessarily mean that that is a cap on taxes. And it could have, if it's a commercial property that's leased that is not currently passing through real estate taxes, and maybe it's a longer term lease, it could start to have an impact on their NOI, which could start to have an impact on their commercial property value. So it's all about how you're looking at it from all these different perspectives.

Commissioner Scott.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. How are the realtors feeling about this?

So the realtors that I've seen online are loving it because they see more home sales. Right.

Yeah, I'm going back in my mind to that, you know, one of those earlier slides where it showed demand versus supply, right? There's that big gap. And I'm wondering if you're going to see that, you know, people that have felt like they've been trapped in their homes, this is going to unlock some of that, right?

Yeah, I don't know that you're going to see more movement from homestead to another homestead as a result of it. I think it's going to unlock some first-time homebuyer. And then obviously you're going to get some influx from out of state just because of the national hoopla over it. You may see a little spike in Florida residents between November and December, potentially, if it were to pass. So just a lot of things. So I'm just a purveyor of information and provoking thought with this type of stuff. Our association is not taking a... position on this, we just want to try to bring the facts to the table that and present them to you all. And we'll have some FAQs that we're developing through our association. And we'll stand up and you'll probably see them on most of the property appraisers websites just to kind of point out a lot of the general breakdown to to try and clear up any misunderstanding and provide a bunch of different scenarios of what what it might mean for for different individuals.

It'd be interesting to see that effect on the demand versus your savings on the application side for a first time. We just hate that our first time buyers are hurt so badly within the current system. Whether this is the right move or not, the current system needed a little tweaking and fixing to help those first time buyers. But now there'll be a net effect, I'm not sure what it'll be. A bigger demand will drive the mortgage value up or the loan value that you need to gap on the equity you have, but then you'll have less property taxes and it'll be interesting to- Right.

So more room for the insurance to increase. That was a bad joke. So we'll continue to educate and try and answer questions on this stuff. We'll be doing a session in August on August 27th in our South County office and also online. That'll be our annual session. notice of proposed property tax session that we do in understanding the trim notice, but obviously we're gonna get a lot of questions about this topic at that time, so we'll be addressing this then. We may have another session even before this one in August. This is just the one that we have on the books so far. And then we're gonna be pushing out some stuff in our e-newsletters and also through our social media. So if anybody wants to follow along, they can check in with us there. We'll be pushing out an article for this month that'll kind of just break down the facts of the amendment, just so people truly understand what actually passed, because a lot of... A lot of what I'm seeing online is people still hanging on to things that were talked about over the last year and a half. Oh, if my home's paid off or if I'm 65 plus or I don't have to pay school taxes anymore, all those things are fallacies. So we'll have the straight facts out there where people can come and look at that. And that's all I've got for slides for you guys today.

Well, I think we hit you with questions throughout your presentation. It's the best way. And obviously, as we absorb more of this and we move towards our July-August conversations, we might. ask you to be around for some of those technical questions along with Chris and your budget.

And commissioners, the information that we had upon our slides, we, in a very quick period of time, got that information from Mike and his office. And so we really do want to appreciate, he's been very, very helpful and really helped us frame out the impacts of all of this in a really quick period of time. So I just want to thank him publicly for his assistance. We're going to be passing that information out to you at a break. We have the best property appraiser in the state.

We do. We do. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it.

A lot of folks refer to him throughout the state. They refer to the office. They do.

I mean, it's just true. I really do appreciate what you did getting that state law. So people will know what their tax bill is going to be before they move into their house. Because that shocker, I have met so many people that's devastated. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they can't pay you. Wow.

I feel like if we could have got that in year one, we might not be sitting here today talking about property tax reduction, because there would have been that much more transparency.

Well, it's going to come in big time handy in 28 when people are moving to town thinking they could just buy a house. That's right. And the tax bill's going to be super low, and you can tell them no.

And if it passes, our tax estimators are going to change dramatically because you're going to have, well, what type of resident are you? Did you qualify? Were you here before the end of 26? Or are you qualifying for the other exemption? Because it's going to be a drastic difference.

Well, it's going to save a lot of heartache, so good job on that. Any rationale behind the five years that they picked?

I don't know why.

Okay.

Five years. And it's technically not even five years because you get to qualify for it on the 5th, January 1. Right. So it's really more like four years. but you had to have homestead first. So you have to qualify for homestead, then you have to wait five years, but that wait is really four years. So it's a little wonky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. Any other questions for Mike? Thank you, Mike. You're welcome. Appreciate it. And I know we're doing budget too, so I don't know if it's in the same...

Thank you, though. Appreciate it. So, no, his staff's been great, just truly. Great. So up on the screen here in just a minute, you'll see the BIS presentation documents for the property appraiser's budget. They are one of the ones that has built-in raises into their budget, and so that's one we're going to keep an eye on, whereas county administrative departments have not. property appraiser is one of the ones that has, so we'll watch that as we go. I'm just watching for it to get up on the screen.

You know, just so I can caveat that, I don't want anybody to read into that. We're going to get to the budget when we get to August. This is the normal way we have done that in past histories. They have to submit their budget to the Department of Revenue, so they have to have those things built in, okay? Yeah, we have a June 1 deadline. We'll still come back and have a consistent approach and everything like that, but we'll do that in August.

So a couple of the budget drivers for the property appraiser are personnel services is going down $8,000, less than, right around a tenth of a percent, just due to normal staff turnover. Their FTE count, full-time equivalent account, has dropped by two over the last five fiscal years, and this year from 26 to 27 remains flat at 127 positions. Operating increase has gone up, it will be going up in 27, $171,000 due to the implementation of their new software system. And you can see the rest of it there, but those are the big highlights for their budget drivers.

Do you have a technical glitch?

It would appear so, yes. We'll get the PDF up as soon as we can. I guess I could tell you, there's no decision packages that they have requested, and as well, it's a pretty flat budget, frankly.

So even without the implementation cost of the software, if they didn't have that, it would be a complete, A reduction. Yes.

Yes, sir.

Yeah. I mean, it's close enough anyway, but.

That was my question.

Yes.

When I saw the 1% for the $163,000 for your software.

Right. And we're having to, you know, as technology is changing, we're continuing to vet and test new tools to try and get more efficient. And also, you know, our biggest piece of, software in our office is our camera system and that is a very robust complex database with a lot of tools in it well to replace that in today's dollars would be about three to four million dollars so we've really tried to work around around keeping the same system that we have not have not having to come to you all and saying you know this is a a one-time big number that we need. So we've been really good at using other county resource tools. We're heavy with heavy users of Power BI, which that's part of our Microsoft subscription through the county with BTS. And we use it for all sorts of things that's really increased the efficiency in our office. And this new tool is a modeling tool that we're testing out that could really help us in the future going forward. So those are things that are adding a little bit of cost, but not the type of cost of replacing a canvas system. So we're trying to essentially keep the legs on that and find ways to, because it's a good solid database, just the UI is a little out of date, but we're building new UIs with different tools that help us work efficiently.

Mike, or excuse me, Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mike, how about, are you able to use AI at all to help like root out homestead fraud?

Yeah, so we're kicking the tires on some AI tools out there and we'll probably develop some of our own. We're trying to move very slowly and cautiously just because of, yes. You know, we wanna keep AI in a cage At this point, we don't want things running reckless with internet connectivity when it comes to AI, but we know there's gonna be some efficiency gains, and queries that we have to do now that, we've already evolved a lot, so just to kind of give you a little, used to be if I wanted data out of my system, I had to find somebody that knew how to write a pretty complex query to get that data back out, which was very frustrating for me, because I was like, I just want that information out. When we built our latest website, we put a lot of advanced search tools in where I'll use that a lot just to get data out of my system. I can get it out of there quicker than I could having to find somebody and go three iterations on developing a query. So then we started putting Power BI in. That's essentially a query dashboard. So we could build those for pre-canned queries and do selections and export that data. And so now AI is the next evolution of that to where you won't have to really build dashboards. You're just going to be able to ask questions. And it's going to give you exactly what you want.

And Mike volunteered to be on our AI steering committee that we're forming with all the constitutionals and us. I did? OK.

I must have missed that meeting. So anything else, Mike? Pretty straightforward. It's pretty straightforward. The bulk of our, 90% of our budget is personnel. So our operational side is about as trim as it can be.

Okay, any other questions for Mike on the budget?

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.

Thank you all. Now we'll bring up our smallest budget. Good morning, Sheriff. Good morning.

Welcome. Ouch. Somebody's got the PowerPoint up there, if they could get that up.

Oh, there it is, okay.

All right, good morning. Just run through this. So starting places, where are we from a performance standpoint? We want people to be safe and feel safe, and Elks County remains a safe place to live and for our residents and visitors.

Just a second, Sheriff. Pete, we need that on all four screens again. If he would just get up all four screens again, that'd be great. Thank you.

I think there we go. Anybody who's been around for a long time remembers the days when back, especially back in the 80s, when the state of Florida and many places in Florida didn't have a reputation for being safe. And given that tourism is our number one economic driver in the state of Florida, it's important that people around the country know that they can come here and not face any peril and that they know what we're doing to keep crime down. In our service area, over a 10-year period, we reduced the rate of serious crime by 62.5%. So serious crimes measured under uniform crime reporting, those are the things that people care the most about. That's the rapes, the robberies, the murders, the burglaries, and those serious crimes that affect quality of life. And so I can sit here and tell you about all the arrests we make, and we do solve a lot of cases and make great arrests, and our case closure rates and all those numbers are high. But the problem with measuring your success by those numbers is it means that something bad has already happened. There's already victims of crime. Something has already occurred. So really the best metric is that what are you doing to keep it from happening to begin with? What are you doing to prevent it? So, if you look at the number of rapes and robberies and murders and burglaries and all those things that really matter to people, that means that we've reduced the numbers where they didn't happen at all over the period of 2014 to 2025 by 62.5%. Just between 2024 and 2025 alone, we reduced the number by 13.5%. So again, that's very impactful. because it means that people were not victimized and Pinellas County remained safe. We've also, at the same time, want to make sure that we are delivering services in the most economical way that we can. And one way of measuring it is, is how do we compare to others at the number of cops that we have on the street? So in Florida, the number of average officers per 1,000 residents is 2.4. Just using that flat number that we have, we have 1.8 deputies per 1,000 residents. But it's actually lower than that because the number that we use is the number we report to the state, which is the number of sworn law enforcement officers. And that includes those law enforcement officers that are in our Judicial Operations Bureau and Court Security and really are performing a very important function, but they're not out there on the street answering calls and reporting. driving that crime rate down. So if you look at it that way, our number is probably more like about 1.5 or 1.6 per 1,000 residents compared to the average in Florida, which is 2.4. As far as hiring goes, we're in good shape. We have about 50 open deputy positions. And last year, and right now, we have about 47. It fluctuates on a weekly basis, but we're in good shape. And the reason why is that because of the aggressive hiring we've done and being competitive, we want to make sure that we can attract the best and retain the best people. And in order to do that, we have to be market competitive. Because there's a lot of competition out there for law enforcement officers. It is not, and we've talked about this many times in the past, it's not the way it used to be. There's not people just knocking at the door and waiting to get in. So we have to recruit and aggressively recruit, and we have to be market competitive so we don't lose ground. We know that when we lose ground, it's very painful because then you come back in subsequent years and those numbers are very, very high to recoup and you just can't get where you get in the hole and you get way behind. I'll talk more about that in a minute as far as where we are. But to give you the FY27 budget overview, our current year, our adopted budget, $476 million. The budget for FY27 is $507 million. We generate non-general fund revenue of $54.6 million, so the net request for the general fund comes down to $452,633. We've seen over many years a steady increase in that non-general fund revenue. The bulk of that comes from are contract cities and from housing federal inmates to the jail, and then a number of other sources. But that's the overview of the non-general fund revenue over the last few years. You'll see in here that, again, the 26th, the current year non-general fund revenue is $54 million. But for FY27, it's projected to not have a steep increase. The increase is only $139,000. And I'll talk about it here in a second. So our average revenue increase over five years is $13 million. The reason why we don't see a big increase this year is we had to negotiate our contract with US Marshal Service to house the federal inmates of the jail. And what you gain in one direction, you lose another. It was a very painful negotiation process because they were only paying us under the contract $118 a day per inmate. We had hoped and had all the indications that we were going to get between $155 and $160 a day. That didn't materialize after a year's worth of negotiations. This is the point where the negotiations were breaking down. We really had to elevate it to some very high levels within the Department of Justice. We finally got them to agree to $140 a day. We went from $118 to $140, but when we went from $118 to $140, they decreased the number of inmates that they gave us in the jail. It was a painful process. Against the backdrop, the county administrator and I had a lot of discussions about this because we could have taken a hardcore approach with it, but we generate about $18 million in non-general fund revenue by housing these inmates. If we eliminated the contract and just said we're not going to do that anymore, the savings would be nowhere near the $18 million because for the number of inmates that we house, and right now we're only housing about 250 inmates, so even if I could close one or two housing areas, it would be a minuscule savings compared to the 17 plus $18 million in non-general fund revenue. That's why we see the decrease, if you will, or the very slight increase is because right now they've reduced the number of inmates that they're giving us. I'm told it's because we increased the daily rate. That's what happened.

Put that in context, about $2 million?

Yes, it's about $2 million. About $2 million was the impact of that. We're still generating a significant amount of non-general fund revenue. And I say this rhetorically, we don't want to have that discussion because if you lose $17 million on top of everything else you've heard here this morning, that's not good. You'd be in a bad place. So in the overall scheme of things, it's one of those where it is what it is. We did the best we could as far as negotiating that. And it was at a point where either we took the 140 or we canceled the contract. And after a year of negotiation, that's where it was. So as far as the cities go, as we know, 24 cities in Pinellas County, 13 of them don't have police departments. They contract with us. We also provide policing services at the St. Pete Clearwater International Airport for the housing authority properties and with you all for the environmental lands. Our budget increase this year is about 6% and we're increasing all those contracts commensurate with the budget increase so that that cost is passed on to those that contract with us. So about a 6% increase for all the municipalities and they've been informed of that. Most of our increase, like it always is, is with salary and benefits. We have to, as I said, we have to remain market competitive. We have a contract with the PBA, a collective bargaining agreement for the union, and those negotiations about pay for 2027 are ongoing. We have to negotiate that every year. What we propose and where we think we're going to land is But again, it's asterisked because it's subject to collective bargaining with the union. It is a 3% increase, again, to stay market competitive. Our current starting pay is, as it says up there, $68,960. And with the 3%, that'll go up to $71,029. The current top pay is 97 to 98. And with that 3% increase, it would make the top pay 100,000 to 17. Now compare us to St. Pete is right now. So we're starting at 68. St. Pete is starting at 71. We go to 97 and St. Pete goes to 117. So we're always chasing it to be market competitive. Tampa's high, Hillsborough's high, St. Pete, other agencies. It's not like it was a few years ago when I was here and I appreciate the help that you all gave us to, fix this because we were in the hole and we were down at one point we were down 70 deputies of the jail we had a similar amount on the law enforcement side because we weren't and as i told you before and you know and when you had some small municipalities in pinellas county like largo and some others that were paying more than we were paying we just couldn't it's not sustainable so we had to fix it we have fixed it but this is why we have to remain uh market competitive I've said this a thousand times and I'll say it for a thousand and one. We do not, and I have never taken the position that we need to be, should be, or that we will be the highest paid law enforcement agency in the county or the region. We just have to be competitive. And, you know, with this increase and where we are now, we are not the highest paid, but we're competitive. And that's the important part is, is that we have to take care of our people. We have to make sure that they're fairly compensated. And this is another reason why these pay increases, which I really think a three percent pay increase is about the minimum you can do. It's nominal. I wholeheartedly agree with what Commissioner Scott said earlier, is that you got to take care of your people. And you don't have this without the people. And if you don't take care of the people, you don't have that. You don't have a 62.5% reduction in crime without people who are working hard every day, who are giving it their all. And the combination for that is the people and leveraging technology. That's not by accident. That happens by design. It happens by the strategies we have in place, by the people doing what they need to do and getting the job done. So we've got to take care of them. And a 3% increase... again i think it's just the it's the bare bones it's what allows them to pay their bills and uh live life and do what they need to do and if we don't have that then we're gonna be we're gonna have a problem um for the same thing for the non-sworn uh the what's baked into this is three percent of midpoint uh the total wage increase with that three percent for the sworn and the non-sworn is uh 7.2 million uh it's 5.2 million for the sworn personnel and 2 million for the non-sworn personnel And getting into some of the drivers of the personal services, our FRS contribution will be, for FY27, will be $73.4 million. That's just the FRS contribution. Remember, unlike you all, is that the big part of ours is special risk, and the contribution rate now for special risk is about 35%. So it's a big number, and that's why our contribution rate is... so high, or our contribution amount is so high. And that includes, for FY27, a $5.6 million increase. And as the administrator said a little bit ago when he was giving his presentation, $4.6 million of that is due to the reinstatement of the cost of living adjustment for the retirees in special risk. That adjustment for the retirees in special risk is just for them. That's not for everybody else. That's what's in there and that's what's the law and that's what we got to pay. Just give you a breakdown so you can see what it looks like. 83% of our budget's personal services, personnel costs. That's the breakdown. 229 million is regular salaries. That $10 million in overtime doesn't cover it. We're on track this year, and as we have for the last couple years, to spend about $15 million a year in overtime. As we have the open positions, it's pay out of the left hand or pay out of the right hand. We are as lean as we can be. We've looked at this Over and over up and down and scrubbed it. There's no if there were positions to cut or there were posts to cut especially at the jail I would have cut them but you can't so you have to have the people in there to staff our average daily population to the jail stays about 3,000 inmates and It's a big place, a big operation, and you've got to have deputies on the street to respond to the calls. There's days where we don't have float cars and squads. We just have the individual zones that are filled. We're not fat. We're lean, and as you can see by those stats in the previous slides, the average is 2.4 per 1,000, and we're realistically more like 1.5, 1.6 officers per 1,000. So when... people aren't there because of open positions, et cetera, then you've got to fill it with overtime. And we're on track this year to spend about $15 million. This budget does not even pay for all of the overtime. We use lapse funds from those open positions, et cetera, to do that. Another big driver is holiday pay, $5.6 million. Social Security is almost $19 million. Health insurance is $80 million. I already talked about the FRS contribution. So that gives us a personal services budget of the total of $426 million. I'm sorry, $421.6 million. So that's that 6% increase in personal services. Some of the operating and capital cost increases, they're listed there. $400,000 for jail medical, body-worn camera contract, $650,000 fleet. We have this come up every couple years. The 12-year helicopter overhauls, $600,000. We have a camera for the helicopter that is a 10-year replacement. It's got to be replaced, $600,000 in technology costs. Those are the drivers, the big-ticket drivers. There's a lot of smaller stuff that adds up, but those are the individual big-ticket drivers in the operating and capital increases. The total budget increase is $30.7 million, which is obviously a problem because what You all had, as far as new money goes, somewhere probably, if you included the 3% for your employees, because you had 18 and you do the math on it, it comes out to about 23 million bucks of, I'm sorry, it was about 23 million in new money. And a deficit, this overall deficit comes up to about 23 million. You know thirty point seven million dollar increase its personal services twenty six point two operating is two point six and the equipment is one point nine so This is over the new money that you'll have And that's the overview. And just a little bit more of not so good news is that with that FRS COLA, we had told you, Chris, that we wouldn't need any money for the fourth quarter for FRS contributions because we thought we were in good shape and didn't need it. But when that happened two weeks ago, so for the first quarter of the state's fiscal year, which July 1st, when that's due, the fourth quarter of our year, which we don't have any money in the budget for is $800,000. So we'll need $800,000 for paying the FRS bill for the fourth quarter of our fiscal year. That's the good news. Well, thank you, Sheriff.

I'm going to drink my coffee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Bob, thanks for being here. I just want to say, if I got a couple questions, but anytime I have interaction with your deputies, they're awesome. Extremely professional, well-trained, and I just want to thank you for that. They do a great job. They really do. Thanks. Unfortunately, I have to call them out periodically for the short-term rental down the street from me, but they're always great, and I appreciate them. I remember last year, the last year or the year before, probably both, that health insurance was really driving a lot of your costs. and I see that this year it's a 9% increase. How did that compare with previous years, and where do you kind of see that trend going?

Well, it's down considerably. I mean, last year, we were in the 13%, 14% range last year, so it's down considerably. The drivers, unfortunately, are claims to a degree, but it's prescription drug costs. That's one of the biggest drivers in it. So thankfully, we are down quite a bit, and it's moving in the right direction. We do everything we can to contain those costs and to... work with our consultants on this and look at plan design, looking at all the various options. So I think that right now with what they call trend is that we're in line, we're not high. So with the health insurance trend, it's right there. We're in line with the national trend in the local and regional trend on health insurance costs. So we're in much better shape than we were last year and the year before.

So it's moving in the right direction.

Okay, cool.

And then just thinking ahead to a new county campus, assuming that still happens, if this amendment goes through or not, and you may or may not know the answer to this question, but in a new county campus with that justice judicial area there, would that reduce the need for the number of deputies? Do you know the answer to that question or? No, no, no, it's not going to.

We're working through everything now, but the answer is no, it's not going to. It's because it's just moving. It's really consolidating. And because of the county side and the judicial side and just all the needs and making that a secure facility. So unfortunately, the answer is no. All right, thank you.

Anybody else? Commissioner Flowers. I just want to say, first of all, I completely agree. I've had interactions with officers on a variety of occasions and really appreciate the service that they provide. Some of you may or may not know, we had some concerns at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council office and we decided that we needed to have security there. I reached out to the sheriff and it wasn't even a hesitation. We pay for it, of course. Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council pays for it. But an officer is there with us. And so I want to publicly share that and let you know that each officer that's been there has been impeccable. And I really appreciate that. I also want to publicly thank you for what has been occurring, unfortunately, with these teen pop-ups that have just absolutely, positively gotten out of control. I want to thank you for... partnering with the City of Clearwater, and I think some other departments, both in Wesley Chapel, City Center, they've just recently had their issues, but they kind of followed the format as it relates to a heavy presence, which tampered down some of the the temperature before it got out of hand and got out of control. So thank you for your leadership on that. So I'm going to ask this question. I'm not saying that I'm just going to ask this question because again, Barry already said that it's not like raises are out for staff period. We just are going to see where we fall. But if you should happen to come down to it, would there be any consideration for like a 2%? Well, it's gotta be a 3%.

You know, of course, we have to have the discussion, and having robust discussion and dialogue and discourse, you know, I don't see it. I think it's very detrimental to do that, because the amount I would look at You know, some other things. You know, again, Commissioner Scott brought it up. I mean, you know, with social action funding and some of these other things within our budget, one of the things that, you know, I would look at before I did that is that, you know, nobody's going to like what I'm going to say on this, or a lot of you aren't going to like what I'm going to say on this. But, you know, Safe Harbor is an example. We spend $2.8 million a year on Safe Harbor. Why is that my job? I've been saying that since we opened the place in 2011. But I do it, and we run it, and we staff it, and we have people there. But somebody said earlier, well, you're squeezing the balloon, and other people may end up in the emergency room. Okay, well, if it's a choice between taking care of my people and we're going to give them the pay raise that they need, and this isn't a big pay raise. This is just so that they can continue to pay their bills and maintain the status quo. I'll shut Safe Harbor down before I do that. And it's fair, Commissioner. And I'm not pushing back. I don't take it that way. And these are all things that may be some hard decisions that we have to make and just the realities of it. But, you know, again, it is so important to me that we take care of our people and that we continue on this trend of reducing crime. Because what we do affects people. so much more in the community and the economic drivers, et cetera. So I'll work with you as I always have and work with you the best I can. But there are certain lines for me and making sure that we take care of the people is a line for me.

Yeah, I don't take it as a pushback. Like you said, I just take it as a conversation. And I'm probably gonna ask different questions of each department. And I will say at the big C, you shared even at the big C with the various cities there, the increase. and your cost for services that you were passing along to those municipalities. So we're not absent of that. So don't take it that way. I'm good.

I'm fine. And we're probably in this process. And if this were to pass, and my position on it is that we have to be aware and can't put our head in the sand on it. But we don't know whether this is going to pass or not. And we're a long way off. We'll have plenty of time. And another big driver in this is going to be the implementing bill that the legislature passes. And that could be very detrimental. It could be very positive. We don't know. And we'll have all the way until October of 2027 to get a plan on this. And so my perspective is on it. I'm not, you know, of course I'm worried about it, but I'm not overly concerned about it. You know, we have a representative democracy, the legislature spoke, they did what they did, and now the people are going to get to speak. And whatever they decide, we'll figure this thing out. I'm more worried about 26, 27, and when we got, you know, a $30 million increase that I have there, and you all have about $23 million in new money. That, you know, that's first and foremost for me. And then, you know, even though it's not, for me to worry about is for you is making sure that you guys have enough to take care of your people too, and that you have enough for wage increases. So I'm really focused on 26, 27, not what's gonna happen with this property tax thing. And that doesn't mean I'm not aware of it, not engaged in discussions about it, but I'm not that concerned about it because We will figure it out. We will get this figured out, and if we have to make some hard choices, maybe like things like Safe Harbor or some of the other social action funding, that's a 27-28 discussion. For me, that's down the road, but... We'll get there and we'll probably have a lot of robust discussion over time. So I welcome that, you know, the hard questions and the discussion about it.

And Commissioner, we're kind of starting round two. I'm meeting with all the constitutionals tomorrow night. And so we're going to, you know, kick off these discussions. We do need to be consistent and we need to have a thoughtful approach as we get towards this year's budget. And, you know, and that's part of those discussions.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think Commissioner Peters mentioned about unintended consequences. As we go through this whole process, not just talking about the sheriff's budget, but any of them, when we start thinking about changes and what that really means, we need to keep a list of that so that we're telling the story. I mean, these are tough decisions that are going to be made and along the way. I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the Sheriff on we're just going to worry about this coming year. We can't determine the outcome of the vote, obviously, in November, and I understand that perspective. I just don't know how we make that change if it does pass, if we don't start looking at it. But I don't know. I guess that's what we'll figure out in the next couple of months for sure.

I think my budget recommendation to you, we'll have options. And so we'll have that discussion. We just need more time to be able to build what those options are.

Sheriff, thank you. Appreciate your time. Anybody else? Commissioner Shearer?

Yeah, thank you, Chair. Sheriff, thanks for coming in. I appreciate you keeping us safe and making us feel safe. My business and my livelihood is dependent on my customers being safe and feeling safe. So thank you very much for that. Your deputies do a great job. I just had a quick question for you. I have a feeling you're gonna become very popular with some cities that might want you to contract for them. I didn't know if you'd see that coming. And how would you, how do you determine what the contract rate is for a city, just out of curiosity?

So we use a formula, and the formula was developed probably 20, 25 years ago now. The county, there's always been discussion about what we charge and how we charge it. The county at that time commissioned a study through GSG, Government Services Group, and looked at the totality and came up with a formula. So we still use that formula because nothing's, come forward that's been better than that over time. So it's really taking the total costs using some divisors and coming up with a contract rate per deputy, plus we charge them for equipment and backroom services and a whole lot of allocated indirect costs. So I guess the shorter answer is there's a formula we use and they get a, per deputy cost, plus they pay for equipment and other allocated and direct costs. So that's how it works. And when we get the requests from the cities, we do a staffing analysis as to what it would take for us to staff those cities. And I can tell you, hands down, 100% of the time, it's always cheaper. And they're always going to get as good or better services than they have now. But those are not always the drivers. We've had, you know, over time, I've had many of the small municipalities in Pinellas County ask us for quotes. And the savings would be astronomical savings, but they make their decisions for other reasons. Of course, that's up to that individual city, council, commission, whatever that legislative body is for that municipality to make that choice for themselves. I give them the information, they make the decision.

Are you happy with the formula that you're using? Is it something that we need to look at for you?

No, I do think it's probably the best formula. I am happy with it. I don't think there's anything better. There's no perfect on it. So I do think it works, and I do think it's a good formula. If I thought that there was a reason to change it, I would have changed it. I don't have any better formula to use. It works. It does work.

Thank you.

Sheriff, not to get into a lot of the weeds, but technology, drones, and that kind of thing, as it relates to some of this increasing harassment that's going on by kids on bikes, e-bikes, et cetera, with our seniors in parks and trails and all of that, just a comment on your observation on how we are managing that. How could we do anything differently or better? Or are we using drones? How are we managing that process? Which just seems to be growing a little bit each week or each month. We're getting more and more reports about it. You're talking about the e-bike problem?

Yeah. So there's no question there was a huge problem and that the law has not kept pace with the technology. You have the class one, two, three, and then you have the electric motorcycles now, I guess they're class four, but they're not even covered by the law. So there was a law passed this legislative session that created a statewide work group. There were a couple of substantive law changes that do help a little bit. One is that when somebody is passing someone on an e-bike, they have to slow down and they have to use an audible signal. So it does give us some tools there. But the problem is that what was being proposed didn't work universally across the state. Miami-Dade County is different than Madison and Broward is different than So you have to have something that works. And so they needed to slow it down. The good news is this work group, a lot of times when the legislature and panels work groups or convenes a study is it takes a long time, but we made sure that that wasn't the case. They have to have a report in by January for the March legislative session, and they got the right players on this. So it's the Department of Highway Safety Motor Vehicles, the Department of Transportation, industry representatives, law enforcement, police chiefs, sheriffs, et cetera, to come up with. So I think that in the meantime, we're going to focus on what we have been, and that is individual conduct. It gets very complicated. The e-bikes are bicycles under the law. They're not motor vehicles, but they come under the bicycles, which are vehicles, but not motor vehicles. So they have to obey the traffic laws. So we have details that are out there regularly on the trail and in various places throughout the county. And so we are focusing on individual conduct and trying to take care of it that way until we do get some substantive law changes that will address the devices themselves. So that's kind of where it is. It is a complaint we get all the time. We're well aware of it and doing the best we can to deter the bad conduct. Yeah, I mean, it's one thing that what you're doing out out there with with.

with those kids. I've experienced it now twice. It's nasty. And it's bad. And I'm just wondering if there's a different approach to it, whether it's with schools, with, you know, some more education, more getting parents to the schools to understand what's going on because it, again, it doesn't take too many of those threats with our, with our seniors out in the parks that it's just unacceptable. And I don't, I'm just not sure how we address it. And I don't think it's just your guys and gals out on the streets. Cause that's a, that's a whole different dynamic and difficulty, you know, chasing kids. You're not going to chase kids on a, on a bike unless they've committed a felony or something.

So, you know, it's, I don't know how, how do we, how do we, well, I'd say a lot of it is young people, and a lot of the complaints emanate from the conduct of young people. So just like Commissioner Fowler referenced, some of these other things we're dealing with on the beaches with these pop-up events is where are the parents? They give these kids these bikes, and they're running all over the place, and they are engaging in misconduct. They are running people off the road. They are scary to the people who are on foot and these pedestrians. And then the kids are... their conduct isn't right. Again, we're just focusing on that and trying to deal with it. Write them tickets, take them home, deal with it. The parents should probably not let them do it to begin with, but they do. Okay, thank you.

Anybody else? Commissioner Peters.

Do you think that this is similar to when the kids were stealing cars, that it's more about street creds than...

Which one? On the e-bikes or the pop-ups?

All of it.

Well, we always see, you know, this time of year, and I think I said this when I was over at Clearwater Police Department a week ago when we did a press conference on this, is that as soon as school gets out, we see an uptick in property crime caused by juveniles. We see an uptick on car break-ins. We see an uptick on auto thefts. We see because the mischievous conduct begins because a lot of it, unfortunately, because they don't have anything to do, so idle hands, and that's what they engage in. So the difference this year is that the new thing is to engage in these takeover events. So a lot of it is the time of the year, coupled with social media. That's another big problem. Social media is a driver in this. There's no question about it. Because as opposed to four or five kids deciding they're going to go out and break into some cars, now you've got 50, 60, or hundreds of kids, or whatever it may be, that decide that they're going to meet someplace and just do what they shouldn't be doing. And so we're going to have probably some media stuff on it this week. We're trying to push the message out. And just be clear with everybody is that no. I can't say it more strongly than that. It is that no. That weekend this happened was the first weekend of summer break. And it is the last weekend that nonsense is happening. And, you know, they say, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And they're going to win stupid prizes because they're going to go to jail. And, you know, and the parents need to realize, you know, just don't. And a lot of these kids here, here's the other problem that's frustrating with a lot of that is a lot of these kids that are doing that here in Pinellas aren't Pinellas kids. is that the whole thing at Clearwater Beach, the 16-year-old who shot the 17-year-old, i.e. why 16-year-olds shouldn't have guns, was from Polk County. But when I called Sheriff Judd and said, you know, you think you could take your people and... They had the shooter in custody by 5 o'clock that night, though, because they got on it and they found a guy over there in Haines City. So it... It's a combination of things, but it is young people driven is what we're seeing with it.

Do we have drones that we are using in any of this stuff?

Even the stuff local on the e-bikes, do we have any of that? We can't use the drones for enforcement because they're vehicles and you can't use the drones for traffic enforcement. We're limited by state law with what we can use the drones for.

I'm just thinking I'd love to follow them home and find out the connection with their parents that draw that connection because you lose them. I'm telling you, the two that I ran into, they just ran through red lights and flipping off people and threatening people. And, you know, I stopped my car fast and I'm saying, you know, Where's Bob's guy or gal when I need it? And then I started to move on, and they followed me down the street on the sidewalk. It's dangerous stuff. I mean, they're the ones that are probably going to get hurt at some point. It's not like you hope that by any means.

It's a big deal and it's getting bigger. I know. We're doing the best we can with it and trying to deter it and send a message. We'll keep at it.

Thanks. Commissioner Nowicki.

Thank you, Sheriff. Great presentation as always. On a lighter note, could we maybe deputize our chair here and then he could enforce the e-bikes himself? We could deputize you and then you could enforce... Write some tickets. Well, thank you, Sheriff. Yeah, you're welcome. Commissioner Scott.

Go ahead. Go ahead, Commissioner Flowers.

I'm a member of the School Safety Transportation Committee as a result of being appointed, and we had the deputy come out and speak to us about the e-bikes and gave a full explanation of the different A, B, or C level and what's required. He did share that several officers have stopped the kids and called their parents and had their parents come to wherever they were as it relates to the infraction and had a conversation right there in front of them. I do have pamphlets in my car that I got from him that I'm gonna share with you guys. So I'll step out real quickly when we take a break and get them. But it's the information pamphlet Now that the sheriff's office is giving out regarding e-bikes, the difference between e-bikes and the things that look more like dirt bikes that you need a license for and all of that, you know, just all of that. And, you know, from the SST committee, it's like if the parents are buying them, the parents should be held responsible because the parents are the ones buying them. But we want to make sure we educate them first on the rules before they let them jump on.

Well, it's the bikes themselves, but it's more the attitude that the kids have, and they're using the bikes to deliver the attitude, whatever that is.

Commissioner Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So just for your information, Sheriff, we've talked here about potentially a local ordinance addressing e-bikes. So we've asked staff before Pinellas to kind of put a white paper together on that and probably have some discussion or presentation sometime this summer. So definitely want to get your input on that. And then I'm just curious, what did Sheriff Judd say? What's that? What did Sheriff Judd say when you called him?

He said they'd have him in custody by sundown, and they did. So he said, we got it. And they helped out, and they had him in custody. So it was a good thing. You know, that was just awful. That guy's facing an attempted murder charge, as he should be. You know, at 16 years old. And, you know, there are unfortunately, you know, there's a lot of kids out on the beaches that are carrying guns. And not a lot. I mean, I don't say a lot. I don't want to overstate it. But there's too many. But it's that time of year right now. And so, you know, the best thing we can do is to have a real heavy presence, which we are. send the message and then do what we say we're going to do. And we are. And, you know, again, I just hope that, you know, anybody that hears this or is aware of it and sees it in the media. And again, we're going to do some media stuff this week is to realize that. don't be doing it and you're not gonna like the outcome of it. And again, it goes back to, it is very concerning to me, again, that people not only are safe, but they feel safe and that we have a reputation because we don't want people up in Ohio and Michigan or Canada or any place else seeing this and thinking that, I'm not going there because of this stuff that's happening. We have to have zero tolerance for that. And I've had discussions with the police chiefs throughout the county. I think we're all in agreement. And I tell you that we're going to jump on it fast and hard and make a statement. And I mean, what was happening out there is that you have to balance it. People have a right to... go and be, but there's a line and they can't cross that line. What's happening out there, those aren't the people that are doing what they were doing is not good for the environment.

Thank you.

Anybody else?

All right. Thanks.

Thanks, Sheriff. Appreciate it. So, Commissioner, if we're running a quarter till, but we thought we were running ahead of schedule, so we asked the clerk, and I appreciate him coming over quickly, so if we can get them up before we take a break for lunch.

Sounds good. I'm sure he'll be about five minutes long. I'm kidding. Take your time, and welcome. Good to have you here.

I know it's all settled first. Okay.

Chris, did you want to introduce the folks that are

Certainly, Mr. Chair. Thank you. So Diana Caro is the budget analyst for the clerk's office, but our constitutional officers normally present themselves. We're just here for questions.

But still, it's nice of an introduction, so we'll see these. We don't get to see the folks very often, so it's great to see you. Thanks for being here.

She's a first-year analyst here in our office, so this is her first time. Great.

Mr Burke floor is yours. It's good to be with you, sir. It's good to be with all the commissioners and Diana. Thank you for your help this year. Diane and I work when she was at the juvenile welfare board together. So it's good to see her. I want to say when I came in, I sat back here and I looked up up here and I saw Barry Burton socks. and they're pretty outrageous. And I looked at Brian Scott's socks, and boy. Yeah, some socks, folks. Yeah, that's good, I appreciate that. Just so y'all know, and I know some of you know this already, but I'll just remind you that we have 517 employees in the clerk's office. Today, I'm coming to you for funding for 132 of those employees, okay? You fund the ones who work for the finance division, the board records, the board management, and some of our, obviously, me, the partial part of my salary, that type of thing. But it's spread out into different funds. We have... four different funds which fund employees, of which you fund 132 of the 517 employees. So I want to point that out. We're requesting a budget which is fairly conservative. It's $19,802,130. There are some expenditures in there as far as increase in the increases in operating expenses. Most of them come with our technology needs that we have in the clerk's office. And those include things like Payment Works, which is a vendor security system. Spending in the Sunshine, which I'm very proud of. And OnBase, which is a, we've gone from app extender to OnBase. And OnBase is something that we fund for not only the clerk's office, but for the throughout county government. The supervisor of election and the sheriff are big users of that, but we're the funders of that. We have- And also our VAB software, which I know a few of you are on this VAB, that's 75,000. So that's all included in that 300 and some thousand of additional money that we're asking for. The other thing I want to point out to you is the ERP. That's not part of our budget, but it's something which is extremely important. We just had a meeting last week on that. Brian, who's heading it up for us, really said he's pained to say everything's going ahead of schedule and doing extremely well, which is really good to hear. So that's something, and I know with the tax amendment, it's something that you're looking at and considering. But folks, we did this back in 2008, 2012. We cut monies, which we shouldn't have, and Oracle never has been done properly. I see the head shaking. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate that. We need to do this ERP correctly and properly backfill the positions. When I say backfill, this is taking people out of the clerk's office. They'll be working on the implementation and we need to hire people to do their job while they're working on implementation. It's such a, and we've been working with Chris on this. This is something where as we use money, we'll use it. And if not, it'll go back into the fund and be used for future years. But that's something that we are, have put it as a request for our budget. Basically, the only other thing I really want to talk to you about, and this is going to be a short presentation, sir, except for your questions. We have 298 people coming into the new campus. And as I wrote you, and I wrote you all a letter, I'm very disappointed with the new campus. It is something which we're very concerned about. All the offices are smaller, except for the judges. You know, the offices are small. The technology, the setup of it is not very good. I know we're looking at that. But I hope all of you really take a look at that letter and read it. Commissioner Schreier, I certainly appreciate your phone call and your concerns. Commissioner Nowicki, I appreciate your concerns and talking to me about it. But I would appreciate a conversation with each of you and I'll try to get in touch with each of you in the next few.

I know you're busy with budget, but to talk about this also.

So that's where I am as far as our budget's concerned and be glad to answer any questions you all may have.

Any questions for the clerk? I was kidding. I was really kidding about the five minutes.

It's a fairly stable budget. I want to thank Ashley for taking minutes here at our meeting today. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

That's all we have. I think the, well, we do have Wade here, so we can either move Wade up or we can take a break for lunch at your pleasure.

What is the preference here? All right, let's just take a break and we'll start back. What time, Barry? 12, 12.20? Half hour? Everybody will be back at 12.20 to start back.

I'm going to miss you, Kim.

Thank you.

Thank you.

you Thank you. Thank you.

Boring means voters know where they're supposed to go. It means that ballots went out on time. It means that the equipment all worked. It means that poll workers knew what they were doing. It means that our results were timely. And I know that there is a lot that goes into elections, but when elections are conducted well, most voters experience something simple. And that is not accidental. It's about planning, experience, redundancies, testing, reliable infrastructure, and people who know exactly what they are doing. My proposed fiscal 27 budget supports three core areas. Conducting elections runs about 8.8 million. Voter registration about 1.7 mil and voter education at 1.1. This is not a budget around expansion. This is a budget built around continuity. Our fiscal 27 budget will allow for our office to conduct year round work that's required by law, both federal and state. BUDGET SUPPORTS ONE COUNTY-WIDE ELECTION, FOUR FIRE DISTRICT ELECTIONS, TWO COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DISTRICTS, AND ALTHOUGH MUNICIPALITIES CONDUCT, I'M SORRY, THEY FUND THEIR OWN ELECTIONS, WE CONDUCT THEM BY CONTRACT, AND WE'LL BE APPROXIMATELY CONDUCTING 19 ELECTIONS IN FISCAL 27. THE BUDGET'S GOING TO PROVIDE FOR MALE VALLET VOTING, SEVEN EARLY VOTING SITES, AND 163 POLLING PLACES ON ELECTION DAY. This budget maintains approximately 605,000 active registered voter registration records, also any kind of ineligibility address list maintenance activities. It supports about 38,000 new voter registration applications and about 55,000 updates to registration. My budget also includes voter education and registration programs for Pinellas County citizens, including conducting mock elections, outreach for schools, senior citizens, minority communities and voters with disabilities. We also are supporting our cyber and physical security systems and operations with our proposed budget. My budget also supports the staff who carries out this work every single day. This year, our budget includes decision packages that are focused on operational continuity and infrastructure replacement. They are not flashy. They're not about adding new programs. They are about maintaining the systems that allow elections to operate smoothly. We are asking for a ballot inserter at one point, just under 1.6 mil, a Canon printer for 55,000, and transporters to securely transport our equipment for 200,000. Together, these requests support the same objective, reliable, secure, and repeatable election operations. The ballot inserter is one of those pieces of election infrastructure no one sees, but it directly affects whether mail ballots are assembled accurately, efficiently, and on time. The existing inserter has reached end of life. Replacing it is necessary to maintain continuity in high volume mail ballot production. This system assembles ballot kits and integrates automated postage processing. It reduces manual handling, strengthens quality control, improves turnaround time, and supports compliance with the statutory guidelines that govern ballot mailing and processing. My second request is for a secondary production grade Canon printer. Again, this is about redundancy. The current printing environment that we have lacks reliable backup capacity. So during a normal operation, this is a mere inconvenience. But when you are in the middle of an election cycle and you have deadlines required by law, it increases obviously risk and potential lawsuits. This printer would allow for us to have a backup system for supporting our ballots to be mailed, and also to include in-house material printing, including inserts for mail ballot kits, manuals, test decks, and also instructional materials. It also provides color capability, which improves the clarity and usability of voter-facing materials. But the main point of this printer is continuity. A modern elections office cannot rely on a single production pathway for time sensitive materials. When equipment fails, when workloads surge, or when deadlines are compressed, redundancy gives us options. Options are what prevent small problems from becoming operational disruptions. And our final request is for a secure equipment transporter It's like a system, it's a concept. I can't get into quite detail about it because it is part of our physical security. The request supports the secure movement and storage of election equipment and mission critical materials. They provide sensitive and costly assets from damage, prevent, I'm sorry, let's try that again. They protect sensitive and costly assets from damage, tampering, and environmental exposure while supporting standardized handling and chain of custody procedures. The goal of this budget, like it is with every budget I propose, is to help ensure that elections are secure and can be trusted, and that voters' experience goes smoothly. When poll workers understand the process, they are most likely to execute it correctly. When staff has experience with a process, they are more likely to anticipate problems before voters feel them. And when the voters recognize the process, they are most likely going to trust the process and participate in it. We do not do this work alone. The county has been a partner in building the infrastructure that Pinellas County's residents, citizens, our voters have come to rely on. That partnership has helped us modernize equipment, improve security, support polling place operations, strengthen legal compliance, and maintain continuity between election cycles. I would like to thank the County Administrator Barry Burton, County Attorney Jewel White, BTS Director Jeff Wars and their teams, Facilities, human resources, and the many county employees who helped support our elections over the years. I would also like to thank Sheriff Gualteri. He helps tremendously with our sheriff's deputies during our canvassing board meetings and also transporting equipment and supplies. Clerk Ken Burke, who helps us as board reporters for all of our meetings. Property appraiser Mike Twitty for helping with mapping and many different things with Aegis, so on and so forth. and the tax collector, Adam Ross, who helps us with registering voters at his locations and also with our ballot drop-off locations. And to each of you who have diligently worked on the canvassing board and who have seen firsthand the level of detail, care, and legal responsibility involved in what we do. I began with this bag because it says something simple about what we do. I love boring elections. As an election administrator, I do not have a stake in the process. I only care that voters have access to it and that the election is conducted fairly and with integrity and it was done securely. And to me, that is the best part of the process. And this budget that I'm proposing supports that. In fiscal 27, we are asking for the resources needed to keep the plan together, to keep the infrastructure stable, and to keep elections boring in the best way possible. I thank you for your time and for your partnership, and I, please, happy to answer any questions you may have.

Yes, Commissioner Flowers.

Not a question, but a comment. I know that we are up against a wall and we're all thinking, but for me, I believe that for the SOE office, that's one of the areas where I would extremely hesitate to to scale back anything. We have had very secure elections. There are a number of communities that look towards our SOE office for the way in which we conduct our elections and are able to get the races called and up on the board quickly. Um, and then, you know, provisionals are handled later, but. Persons know very quickly what's going on and then the community accessibility. Going out, educating the community, showing up at different things that they're asked to attend to, um. Make sure that they're informing the public on any changes. Thank you so much for the new map. Also regarding the precincts and the redistricting so people know ahead of time their precinct may have possibly changed and to start looking at that now. So I appreciate your presentation. I also love boring elections because right after the presidential recount, I was on council in St. Pete. And we had the St. Petersburg recount right after. So I know what it's like to hand count ballots with pregnant dimples, chips and chads. And that was not a fun experience. So just wanted to share that with you and thank you and your staff for what you guys do. I really appreciate it. And like I said, I know we may be looking at something, but this is one of the areas where I support whatever is needed to make sure that the elections continue to be safe, secure and are completed in a timely manner with no issues or concerns.

Thank you.

Anybody else? And your and your budget, as you said, does not include the pay adjustments. Even with that, your budget this coming year is lower than the current year.

And commissioners, that's cyclical based upon the types of elections.

Say it again? Yeah. That's cyclical.

I understand.

And it fluctuates a little bit, but 24 obviously was a big year, and then 25, 6, and 7 have been decreasing each year. Okay, thank you. Any other questions for Julie? Yeah, keep up the great work, and here's to boring elections.

Here's to boring elections. Yes. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

So, Commissioner, so we can, Adam Ross is on his way. We can either move human resources up or we could do general, the general government.

Let's do human resources.

All right. Wade, you're on.

Mr. Chair, while they get settled, may I? So I have Veronica Edel here next to me. Since Wade is not an elected official, our budget analyst is going to go first. And then we will pass the baton over to Wade. So thank you for your patience. And Belinda Amundson was sitting next to me for the elections supervisor's budget. She is the budget analyst for that. So I'm going to stall for just one more second while Veronica gets ready. and we'll get going.

Welcome, Wade. Good to have you here today. Yeah, thank you very much. Pleased to be here.

Good afternoon, everyone. Commissioners, thank you for having us here today. I have the two budgets to present.

Get that close to you. Yeah, I want to make sure we hear you.

Okay. Is that a little bit better? Yeah. Okay. So I have two presentations here. Human resources handles the employee health benefits fund as well. So first we'll go through the human resources general fund budget and Wade will talk about that and then we'll go into the employee health benefits fund as well. So starting with the human resources budget, this budget increases $29,000 overall, 0.6% to $5.146 million. All appropriation for human resources is from the general fund. Okay, so personnel services decreases by 61,000 and that's due to the elimination of one vacant part-time position that's vacant now and another position during the middle of next year which will happen after the enterprise resource software is implemented. Human resources is the first department that's doing that implementation. The operating expenses increased by 90,000. So overall the department didn't go up much because they did reduce their personnel budget. But then the next year is the biennial employee survey. So every other year we do that survey. And that is at a cost of $100,000. So overall, they increased a little bit, but they came down in personnel. And then that expense will be gone cyclical, similar to the way we have the supervisor just discussed her budget. um so the top of page two on there's one decision package and it's it's actually not something substantial but it's something that requires specifically by law requires board approval so it's to increase the compensation of the unified personnel board members when they have the meetings and it's built into the budget already we just need to draw attention to it Then we have the next next down a summary of proposed changes to user fees. The point here is that there is no user fee from human resources to the public. They are an internal service fund. They provide services to all of us, obviously, inside the inside the county. And so the general fund pays for that. And then that is recovered from the enterprises and other departments. And I'm going to skip, there are no CIP projects. And we'll go over employee health benefits in just a few minutes. So I'm going to hand it over to Wade right now to be able to talk about his human resources and the general fund, his accomplishments.

All right, thank you. I'm Wade Childress, Chief Human Resources Officer. Very pleased to be here today. I'm excited about the budget. We have, as Veronica states, about $29,000 increase, but that's due to a $100,000 every other year survey. So if you think about that, we've been able to cut $71,000 of that $100,000 out of the budget to offset that. So it's not an increase there. We are cutting 1.4 FTEs out of the budget. I only have 37 FTEs in the budget, so that's about a 5% reduction for that. As Veronica said, one of those FTEs is coming later in the year after retirement. We're not doing any layoffs. We have a vacant position. We're going to wait for somebody to retire. And those will be the two changes that we make. And that will be concurrent with the implementation of the ERP. The other piece is the decision package for the Unified Personnel Board. So in the Personnel Act that was created in 1975, this board is supposed to be a compensated board. The compensation has not changed in 23 years. So we're asking for a bit of just a small increase in compensation for them from $100 to $200 a meeting. I can tell you in July, we will have a meeting that will be eight hours long. It will be an appeal for a termination. So they do put in a lot of time and a lot of effort for this. But I think it's been 23 years since the change has been made in their compensation. And I was able to make reductions in the HR budget so that that is flat. There is no additional cost to HR. I was able to reduce in other areas to offset that increase for the Unified Personnel Board. So over and all, I'm very pleased with the HR budget and would be happy to take any questions. Any questions for Wade?

Okay, go ahead.

Oh, I'm sorry, Brian.

My question actually relates to health insurance. That's the next budget, yep. Got it, okay.

Yep, that's where I was going too, Commissioner. I thought there'd be a few questions about that.

Okay, so now we're gonna walk through the summary document for employee health benefits. This is the fund, it's a separate fund. It accounts for expenditures associated with our medical benefits, dental benefits, and the wellness program for county employees. To start, I'm gonna go past the summary table to the budget drivers and start there in the middle of page one. So excluding reserves and transfers, the 27 budget request is $75.8 million. It increases $840,000 or just about 1% over the FY26 amended budget. And this is the important distinction here as you read through this. So the medical claims over the last, it is a $6 million increase over the 26 adopted, but only an $800,000 increase over the amended. And I'm going to explain that a little bit now so you see the dynamic. I think you all probably remember that we just had the budget amendments in May. And one of those amendments was $6 million to the Employee Health Benefits Fund. And that's basically three years worth of accumulated cost increases going from FY23 up to now in FY26. So we had three years of flat budget that could not meet the costs that we were seeing in our medical claims primarily. And as was said earlier with the sheriff, a lot of that is the pharmaceuticals. But then there's other medical inflationary increases as well. So at any rate, the medical claims costs have gone up 11% over the last three years. Our budget did not go up 11% over the last three years. So during this budget year, last year you added $3 million to the budget, but that was not built into the base budget for 26. So this year that 3 million plus another 3 million is $6 million. to meet our costs, that's the costs that we're having, not costs that we're projecting. So that's this year's budget. So the $6 million is now in this requested budget built into the base for going into FY27. And that keeps us even with where we're at right now with our medical care costs.

And Commissioner, we'll turn it over to Wade, but we are looking at some plan design issues that we're still having internal discussions on, so there'll be more before we get to the actual budget recommendation.

Okay, and so that is the most important thing, so I'm going to let Wade take over and share more about that.

If you could just remind me again, because I've forgotten from last year that reserve number that, you know, and maybe I missed out on that, but it was a big, obviously a, an operational adjustment or change or something.

Yes. Last year with the reserves, we had the $1.7 million a year transfer for the next 10 years was built into the budget. $1.7 million came out of reserves last year. Then it was just over $4 million that we transferred to the general fund to help pay for INCREASES IN THE SHERIFF'S INSURANCE COSTS FOR LAST YEAR. I'M SORRY, FOR THIS YEAR. IT WAS IN THE BUDGET FOR 26 AND WE'RE DOING THAT TRANSFER THIS YEAR. SO THE RESERVES HAVE GONE DOWN IN PART FOR THAT. ALSO, BECAUSE WE HAD THESE BUDGET AMENDMENTS, RESERVES HAVE GONE DOWN AS WELL. So the reserves are going down. The costs we do expect to continue to go up. We're looking at at least five to six percent medical increases each year. That's compared to the sheriff was talking about. They're lucky they'll have they're hoping they'll have nine percent or less on theirs. It's just that's the reality that we're at with our health system. And a lot of it, and Wade will talk about this a little bit more, some of that has to do with prescription drugs, the GLP-1s, and the higher cost medications that are out there that we're having to pay for. So where we're at is we're basically resetting where the budget is right now, where our costs are right now for FY27 to start fresh. And in doing that, that's just where we're at at this moment. So you'll see if we go to page two, or not, I'm sorry, is it a page two of the decision? Yeah, decision packages on page two. One of those decision packages is for $3.9 million to add to the 27 budget based on our projections for next year, based on about 6% medical inflationary factor. And we are working closely with Wade's staff and the health benefits consultants, sorry. And I will let him talk about that more. But we are basically, we're resetting where we're at now. We're asking for additional money. That's not something that the county administrator has recommended. It's just information that we're bringing forward for you all to consider. And with that, I'm gonna let Wade take over and talk about this in context more.

Yeah, thank you very much. So basically, as Veronica was saying, if you take a flat budget from this current fiscal year and move that into the next fiscal year, we're asking for a decision package of $3.9 million for what we think will be the additional amount of claims. That's only about 5% of the budget. Trend for us, actually has been Pinellas County trend for fiscal year 26 is about 9% medical and 11% pharmacy. But we have a couple of things that are in place that we're able to reduce those amounts. And so I'll talk about those in just a minute. But in general, what we're looking at is taking the current year costs, adding $3.9 million, that's about a 5% or 6% trend. The way that we can keep this below national trend and below where the sheriff's is, primarily there's two pieces of the puzzle. One is we've renegotiated our pharmacy benefits management contract for another five years. In so doing, we've saved $10 million over that five years, about $2 million a year. Because of the way the fiscal year intersects with the calendar year, savings for this first fiscal year is about $1.7, $1.8 million. And that reduces the increase. So again, if I'm talking about health insurance, The costs are going up. I'm never going to be able to get you to a negative place with health insurance. But if I can mitigate the increases or keep them lower, that's always my goal. So that's the one piece of the puzzle. The second is a decision package for concierge and advocacy services. And this is a unique service that we're able to do because we're self-insured, where we outsource the responses for our employees to an outside external company. They have a claims feed. They review all the claims. They review the needs of the employees. They get the employees to the right doctor more quickly. And by doing so, they're able to give better quality of healthcare to the employees. And we're able to save money because it's a more efficient operation. The net savings that we expect from that is a $1 million net savings. That is net of the fees that are in there. So the fees that we have in there, total contract cost is $858,000 per year. That is offset because we're moving that service over from UMR to this other organization. And so the UMR currently charges us $340,000, so that's 500 and something thousand dollars net. But net of all of that, that will decrease our claims expenditures. And in this case for the first fiscal year, a conservative decrease would be $1 million. We expect that ROI to rise over the several years of the contract. So those are probably my three main points, but I'm sure there's some conversations that you all would like to have, so I'd be glad to take any questions.

Any questions? So Barry, again, I'm trying to remember from last year why there was a change in the system here where we talked about reserves jumping. a crazy number last year. So what was that all about?

So, well, there was a couple of changes. One, the way we budgeted conservatively, trying to get a trend, a better trend line. And then there was the proposed change that you had on that drawdown using reserves over that 10 year period. Okay, and that was a proposal you made. And so we were behind by 3 million, our claims came in higher. So we're making that adjustment in this budget. and so it's in essence right-sizing that budget. Our claims came in over budget for this year. That's where we were trying to get the trend line. If you recall, just a couple of years ago, our broker, which we no longer have that broker, proposed a 30% increase. We said, no way, no how, and so we budgeted a 10% increase, and it came in about 12. So it was very hard to get a trend line, and we didn't really understand why we were seeing... high claim individuals increasing the numbers because it's a large organization that should be fairly steady. So we're trying to get a better trend line. But because we had that reserve, well, then we had time to recover. Well, this is part of that recovery and trying to make our ongoing expenses equal our budget. And so those are the changes that are reflected in this number. Chris, if you want to clarify anything on that that I missed?

Everything you said is correct. As well, we transferred one time in the current year, fiscal year 26, for sheriff's health benefits, $4.7 million. That was a one-time thing because he was seeing so much go up. That's not continued in the 27 budget. The 1.7 million is, though. It is continued.

So that's where he had a spike, and we solved that, and so his budget now is right-sized back to his ongoing cost.

So, Chair, first of all, what was our expenses, total expenses for health care? Total expense for health care?

Yeah. Veronica, we're right around total. I think we're on $76 million right now.

I'm sorry, if you look at just the medical claims, which is most of it, it's about $63 million at this point for FY26. And that's what the base amount we have built in for FY27. So that's where I was saying earlier, we've gone from about $57 million five years ago, and now we're at $63 million in FY26.

So we think 26 is going to come in around 76, maybe?

With everything else, I mean, you have to pay for the administration of the plan, but the bulk of it is in the medical claims, and right now we're at $63 million for that.

So we, and Commissioner, to answer your question, you know, also, before we get to the budget recommendation, we're going to be looking at our plan. That's where I need to go back and work with constitutional officers and the other appointing authorities. We have some thoughts and ideas and any adjustments to that we'll make as part of our budget recommendation.

I remember this conversation very well last year, and we were discussing the fact that we had reserves in the healthcare that were over two times what the yearly expenses were, so we reduced it a little bit. Are we still talking about continuing the reduction to reserves?

The reserves would be about flat, maybe a little bit down. And that is a challenge. I mean, we've kind of said that we could reduce it. There's no question we could reduce this reserve level down. Now, all of the money that goes in there is not general fund. It's airport, it's utilities, it's other funds that's out there. So we have to be careful in terms of, from an audit trail standpoint. But it's still, the reserves are very, very healthy, okay? We kind of see that as when we decide to bring that money down, of using that for a one-time purpose. Because once it's gone, you still need ongoing expense, ongoing revenue to your budget. So it's a fair conversation that we've kind of watched over that. We still need a reserve level, but this is too high.

Sorry, can you explain to me again the rationale in going from UMR to Quantum?

Yeah, sure. So UMR, we're staying with UMR, right? So they are continuing to manage our claims. What we're moving away from UMR, since we're self-insured, we can have a pallet of services. We're moving away the telephone handling. And generally, that's not one of their best areas. So we're moving that telephone handling away from UMR, and then the utilization management away from UMR, and we're moving that over to Quantum. But the claims will all still be processed by UMR. The physician network is all still UMR. All the main pieces of the puzzle are still UMR. That's our insurance company.

I'm just looking at the increase in the dollar amount to move those services. That's number one. And number two, I was not on the winning end, but I did share my concerns based on my experience with UMR in the past. And you are correct. Their phone handling may not be the very best. but that's why I was expressing my concerns last time because there was a number of complaints and I had done business with them in another round, but we had given them two opportunities and service hadn't gotten better. So yeah, that's, and then the net increase of 512 and then a recurring increase.

So let me be very clear about that though. That's a net increase of five. That's a gross increase of 512. The net will bring us a, Million dollar decrease.

Okay, overall decrease.

Overall decrease. Okay. Because what's going to happen is they're going to be able to help us manage the claims better. They're going to be more proactive in managing the claims. They're also going to be able to provide better customer service for our employees. And they've got proven ROI. They say two to one ROI. We're doing conservative calculation at a 1.5 to one ROI. So net of those fees, we will save a million dollars. And that's a guarantee, right? Yes, it is guaranteed.

And I appreciate the return on investment, but I just want to make sure it's not going to be at the cost of claims being denied. I'm not saying that's what they would do.

No, no, they are not doing the claims. UMR still does the claims. Okay. Yeah, so the claims handling, the claims processing, all the network is still done by UMR. They do the customer service piece and the utilization management.

Okay.

So for example, if you need to get a prior authorization for a surgery or something like that, that will go to Quantum. They will integrate with UMR. They work very closely with UMR to get that done. They'll do it much faster as well. It will be much better service.

Okay, I'll keep my eye on it and see. All right, thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. Before we move on, I want to say, you know, I actually, I don't know who set up the Teladoc program, but it's great. I love not needing to go to the hospital. I love it that I don't have to go to an appointment just to talk to my doctor and get a test scheduled. It's really good. I don't know if you... That's fabulous. It's new for me. I've never had it before. What's that?

That would be True Kelly Martin, our benefits director. She's sitting right behind you. We had it originally coming in, but just for mental health, she expanded it to be a much fuller service so that you can use it even as your primary care physician.

Yeah, it's great.

I talk to them on my phone.

You get the video chat going on.

We think it's a great service for our employees.

It really is. One other question, and I hate to bring it up because it should be a strategy. Do we have a part-time to full-time program in the county? A lot of successful big companies, you work for the company part-time for two to five years before you can actually be selected to be a full-time employee, and then you get the health benefits and the pension benefits and all that. Moving forward, it might be because we're going to have tight budgets coming up.

We do have part-time positions. It depends on the department. It depends on the type of function, and benefits are adjusted accordingly.

Okay.

I didn't know if we had that or not.

We have internships. We have, yeah, summer interns as well. They count. Okay. Just a question. Thanks.

Any other questions? Okay.

All right.

Thank you all very much. Thank you.

Adam's not in the room. Yep.

So commissioners, Jim Abernathy is my deputy actually, he's deputy budget director, and he will be presenting general government and the general fund. You'll know that general government is all those charges that don't fit conveniently into a particular department. They're things like memberships in the Florida Association of Counties for the whole county, the things that just don't fit naturally anywhere specifically. It is administered in the Office of Management and Budget. It's not a separate department, but you do get a separate presentation on it each year in the budget information sessions. And then Jim will also go into the general fund. He's going to give a presentation on the whole of the general fund, which is very, very similar to the introduction that we did earlier today, but it gives you a more in-depth dive into the general fund itself. So with that, Deputy Director Jim Abernathy.

Good afternoon, Commissioners. I'm here for the presentation of the FY27 budget for the General Government. General Government is a non-department category which aggregates and allocates countywide funding needs that benefit all departments and agencies, as well as unincorporated areas, MSTUs, expenditures. Major grant programs such as FEMA and the ARPA grant are included in General Government. FY27 expenditures in general government decreased $3.4 million to $144.2 million. Operating expenses decreased $6.1 million to $44.5 million. This change is due to the reduction of storm-related expenses that we currently have in FY26. The majority of operating expenses are for intergovernmental charges for technology, fleet operations, and risk. These three charges account for about 83% of the 44.5 million in operating expenses. Other expenditures included in general government include payments to municipalities for TIF districts throughout the county at 33.8 million, an increase of 1.1 million, and memberships, as Chris said, to organizations such as the Florida Association of Counties and the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council. ALSO INCLUDED IN THE FY27 GENERAL GOVERNMENT BUDGET IS A TRANSFER OF $45.6 MILLION FROM THE THREE DEDICATED MILLAGES TO THE TRANSPORTATION TRUST FUND. AS MENTIONED ALREADY, THE TOTAL GENERAL GOVERNMENT BUDGET ALSO INCLUDES THE ARPA GRANT. EXPENDITURES DECREASE BY ABOUT $12 MILLION TO 2.8 MILLION. As of right now, all ARPA projects are fully obligated and on schedule to be completed by December 31st of 2026. The total ARPA amount remains at $189 million. That's the presentation for general government.

Any questions?

The general fund includes the primary governmental functions of the government that are not completely supported by dedicated resources. The activities include that are not limited to the sheriff's law enforcement, detention and corrections services, human services, emergency management, communications, parks, the board of county commissioners, the county attorney, and all of the other constitutional officers. The general fund includes operations for both countywide functions as well as the unincorporated areas. Recurring funding comes from four main external revenue sources. Property taxes, state shared half cent sales tax, state revenue sharing, and the communication services tax. In FY27, these revenues account for 82.4% of all general fund revenues. The general fund also receives non-recurring revenue, which in certain years can be significant. As an example would be FEMA reimbursements for various storms. Total revenues in the FY27 budget request increased $3.9 million to $943.3 million compared to the FY26 budget. Ad valorem revenues, which make up approximately 74% of the total general fund revenue, increase 25.3 million to 694.8 million. This is driven entirely by the 4.22% growth in taxable values as reported by the property appraiser on May 29th. The taxable values will be updated on July 1st, the final update before the budget is adopted in September. State revenue sharing revenues decrease 174,000 to 27.2 million. Also compared to FY26, the local half cent sales tax revenue decreases 6.6 million to 48.2 million. This decrease is due to the elimination of sales tax on business leases, which went into effect on October 1st of 2025. We are also projecting a $4.6 million shortfall in this half cent sales tax due to this law. Another large source of external revenues, if taken as a group, is the sheriff-generated revenues. The sheriff collects revenues from various sources, including the many municipalities who can contract with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office for law enforcement services, such as Dunedin, Madeira Beach, St. Pete, and others, St. Pete Beach, along with the US Marshals Service. These revenues, along with grants, help offset the need for ad valorem revenue to fund the sheriff's annual budget, In FY27, these revenues increased $139,000 to $54.6 million. FY27 budget requests for expenditures increased $14.9 million compared to FY26 to $961.8 million. You've already heard from the constitutional officers on their budget request. Over the next three days, you will hear from the other departments and appointing authorities as they present their individual budget requests. Personnel service, which includes salaries, benefits, FRS and payroll taxes, decreased 2.6 million compared to FY26 to 104.5 million. For departments reporting to the county administrator, a general increase was not included in this request. And also we were able to keep health insurance premiums paid by the county flat in FY27. Operating expenses decreased 9.5 million compared to FY26 to 163.5 million. The biggest decrease is due to storm related expenditures as we get through those projects. It is anticipated that many of these costs over the last couple of years will be recovered through FEMA and state reimbursements over the next several years. Grants and aids increased $2.6 million to $46 million. The largest piece of this are payments to the CRAs, which makes up 83% of the total expenditures and increased $2.7 million. These increases are tied to changes in taxable values in each of the individual districts. Transfers to constitutional officers including the sheriff, the clerk, the property appraiser, tax collector, and supervisor of elections increased $23.4 million to $581 million. That's a 4.2% increase from FY26. These expenditures account for 60.4% of the total general fund operating budget. Transfer to the sheriff's office increased 26.2 million to 505 million. The sheriff's budget request comprises 52.5% of total general fund operating budget. Accounting for the sheriff's generated revenues, this is equivalent to a millage of 3.065 mills based on the taxable values reported on May 29th. Based on the current FY26 millage rate, this is 67.5% of the millage for countywide services. FY27 reserves decrease $5 million to $160 million, 17% of the FY27 revenue, which is below the general fund reserve policy. As you know, the reserve, We reduced the reserves by over $78 million in FY25 to provide funding for storm-related expenses. We will continue to rebuilding the general fund reserves up to the policy level over the next couple of years as we receive reimbursements from the state and FEMA. That is the end of general fund presentation.

Chris, any updates on... I'm not sure what the right word is, but standards for reserve levels may change. I remember we had this discussion a couple of years ago when I was arguing for 16.7%, because that's kind of what the standard is in the industry. And we went with 20.8. We were near water and all of that. So is there any changes or adjustments that you've seen in those?

There is no additional guidance, Mr. Chair.

So you're still getting that 16% to 17%? Yes, sir. And then an adjustment if you are in harm's way, not on a regular basis, but like where we are on the water.

Everything you're remembering is correct, and it is still the same. It has not changed.

Thank you. Any questions? That was a whole bunch of numbers. That's all I can tell you. And I was trying my best after lunch to follow all of them.

I try to throw out as many as we can. What's that? I try to throw out as many numbers as we can.

Yeah.

All right. Chair. Yeah. Just want to say on general government, I went over it extensively last year. I expect to do it again this year. This is the expenses.

Some of them are big, you know, and they got a lot of,

Groupings, like professional services, 37 million. Contractual services, 21. Some of them are not very detailed, so I'm gonna ask you to help me out with that. Aids to other government agencies, 38 million. So maybe there's a couple million in here we can find. Maybe we can work on not going flat on salaries this year. Maybe we can find that one or 2% that we need.

To address the aid of other government agencies, the $38 million, that is the payments to the CRAs. So as their property values increase, our payments to them increase proportionally. So that is, I don't want to say... I guarantee about it.

I believe it. This is something I'm going to give a lot of love to.

And the general fund details that I provided is the roll-up of all the departments that will be reporting to you over the next three days.

So everybody else will be... Just like the sheriff was included in that? Yeah. So this is a roll-up.

Yeah, so this is like public works is included in this, human services. These expenses aren't... It's not one.

Because I thought this was...

what's not assigned to other departments. The general government part is, and that's the 100, well, it's...

Correct. There's two different pieces, general government and general fund. General fund is the roll-up. That includes all the general fund. General government is the things that don't belong out in a departmental type activity.

Yeah, and one of the things that is in general government is the $38 million payment for the CRA, so that's a big piece in there. We have... Charges for intergovernmental, which would be like charges to be from BTS for fleet and also for risk that are not paid for by the department. Certain departments don't pay for those. and they're paid for out of general government. So you do have two attachments, or you should have two attachments.

And one- And commissioners, I've got, I think, like, I don't know, 13, 14 binders. I mean, binders, okay, of detail on the budget. If you have questions and want to sit down and go through those details to where the numbers add up at your budget, staff would be happy to meet with you at your leisure and to go through that type of detail to where when we get to August and September, you have the information you need to make a good decision. So, you know, we don't have to pull those out if you want to go through additional detail. But we'd be happy to go through that and provide that type of detail explanation until you have that.

One other question, Chris, on the general fund revenues. If Public Works charges the penny for overhead and supervision and things like that, would it show up on the general fund revenues?

So you're referring to contract charges. I'm still looking for the contract charges.

I don't know where they go.

Okay. And the contract charges are actually a reduction of expense. We're moving the expense to the proper final destination of that expense. So they won't show on your revenue side. But just as the administrator said, we'd be happy to go over that with you as well.

And we have Drew here, okay, with us. And so you had asked that question. So we'd be happy to meet after and go through that detailed where you can see how those contra charges are actually expensed and where and how we're treating those.

Okay, great. Thank you. Anything else?

Okay. All right. Now. I think I saw a tax collector moseying around here, but he's behind this post, I think. There he is. Welcome.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. It's good to see everybody. Chair and the rest of the commission, Mary and all staff could see everybody. Well, I'll just cut right to it. I think it's kind of shortened to the point. We were asked to come with a flat budget and we actually went with a 6.83% decrease. So make it kind of easy. So I want to take this time to give you guys an update. I know last year I was talking about, we were doing a review of all of our business processes and vendor contracts. Starting October 1st, of this year, so next budget year, we will be going live with a new cashiering and tax system. With this change, for just my budget alone, is in the ballpark of a million dollars a year in savings. Not to mention it's got lower processing fees for the taxpayers, anybody doing their registration, driver's license, or paying their taxes online, or e-check. e-check, you don't have any fees, but if you use a credit card, you'll actually be saving money. We were fortunate to negotiate a more reasonable service charge and cut out all e-check fees, and that's where the majority of the savings come from. I have some exciting news. As you know, my previous budget and finance director left us for a new employment, but we stole somebody from the city of Dunedin, Tanya Duffy. And with that, I'll open anything up for questions anybody might have.

Any questions for the tax collector?

And I know last year, Commissioner Flowers, you asked about kiosks. We actually just implemented three more at Publix's, and I'm always looking to expand that as much as possible.

I get back such positive comments about persons being able to go to the kiosk to get their tag, you know, if that's all they need to do, rather than, you know, going down and having to wait in line or make an appointment or whatever. I use it as well. I go to the Publix on 54 South. And usually, you know, if someone's standing in line, it's maybe one or two people. But other than that, it's in and out in less than five minutes. So it's a wonderful resource. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Wow, that's all? No other tough question? Thank you.

Everybody's excited about the 6%, I guess.

Yeah, thank you, Adam, for coming in. Appreciate it. Of course. I'm always available. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Okay. See you tomorrow. Barry, anything else for the day? No.

See you tomorrow.

Got the list of budgets for tomorrow. And so, again, we'll start off and kind of go through the detail. You know, we hit on a lot of different things today. And you can see there's some things that are just a work in progress. And so those have come out in the final budget recommendations, such as we talked about on the health fund and things like that. Same thing with employees. And I've heard a couple of different things. One of the things we always do though, is we try to keep all of the appointing authorities. So everybody under the unified personnel system be consistent in terms of raises. And I don't want the tax collector and the clerk and the county administrator, the departments report to you doing things differently. Because our employees see that, all our employees. And so we need to be consistent. And same thing with the sheriff. We really need to be consistent. We value our employees. I value our employees. I know you do too. And so those are things that we need to work through. And so that gives us time between now and when we make our budget recommendation here in August to be able to work those things out. And like I said, I'm starting that tomorrow night with meeting with the constitutional officers.

And the constitutionals each seem to deal with that 3% raise in the budget numbers differently.

Well, it's a little bit different, and there's two reasons. Mike Twitty and Adam Ross, they need to submit their budgets to the Department of Revenue for approval. So they have to bake that in in order to be able to submit it and have it back in time to go through our budget process. So there's a reason for that. And then the sheriff, considering it's half our general fund, he bakes that in as just a placeholder. And if we make changes to that, it's reflected in those final budget recommendations. So, you know, and we've done that in the past. He's put a placeholder in. We discussed something else. And then I put that into my final budget recommendations on whatever that adjustment is.

Okay, well, then we will. Anything else for the good of the chapter? Then we'll see you tomorrow morning at 9.30.